Glen Helen: Mormon Pioneers at the Cajon Pass
California
The park spread out before you sits at one of the most consequential geographical bottlenecks in western American history. This is Glen Helen, hard against the foot of the Cajon Pass, and it preserves a grove of sycamores where, in June of eighteen fifty-one, the first organized party of Mormon pioneers to reach Southern California made camp after crossing the Mojave Desert.
The Cajon Pass cuts through the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains at roughly four thousand feet, and for thousands of years it was the gateway that Mojave and Serrano peoples used to move between the high desert and the coastal valleys. Spanish missionaries knew it. Mountain men working the Old Spanish Trail knew it. When America gained California after the Mexican-American War, the pass became the essential overland corridor linking Salt Lake City to the Pacific coast.
In eighteen fifty-one Captain Jefferson Hunt led an expedition that included Amasa Lyman and Charles Rich, two senior figures in the early Latter-day Saint church. Their goal was to scout land for what would become the San Bernardino colony, the westernmost outpost of the early Mormon settlement network. The party camped at this shaded grove along the Cajon Creek, noting the reliable water and feed for animals. The grove became known as Sycamore Grove, and in nineteen fifty-seven California officially designated it Historical Landmark number five hundred seventy-three.
San Bernardino was incorporated in eighteen fifty-three and served as a major way station for emigrants and freight wagons crossing to Los Angeles until eighteen fifty-seven, when Brigham Young recalled his settlers back to Utah during the Utah War. But the trail through the Cajon Pass endured, and the Santa Fe Railway later cut through the same gap, the same route you followed to get here.
Today the park is best known for its amphitheater and recreation areas, but the sycamore grove in its interior still stands. Those trees watched the wagons come through, and they are still watching.
