Mitchell Pass: The Door Through the Bluffs

For the first seven years of the Oregon Trail's heavy use, emigrants could not go through Scotts Bluff. They had to go around it. The terrain through what would become Mitchell Pass was too rough and too narrow for wagons, so pioneers were forced south into Robidoux Pass, adding eight miles and a full day of travel to a journey that was already testing the limits of human endurance.

In eighteen fifty, that changed. Workers excavated the most treacherous segments of the gap between Scotts Bluff and the smaller South Bluff, grading a road through what had been called Devil's Gap. The following year, emigrant William Lobenstine wrote in his journal: the passage through here was only made possible in eighteen fifty-one and is now preferred by nearly all emigrants, cutting off a piece of eight miles from the old road.

The pass was named for Brigadier General Robert B. Mitchell, who commanded the District of Nebraska during the Civil War era and oversaw military operations along the emigrant road. After eighteen fifty, Mitchell Pass became the principal route for westbound wagons on the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the Mormon Trail. Pony Express riders galloped through beginning in eighteen sixty, changing horses at the Scotts Bluff station near old Fort Mitchell. The transcontinental telegraph line followed the same corridor.

The result of two hundred fifty thousand emigrants moving through a narrow gap is still visible in the earth. The original wagon ruts pressed into the soft volcanic soil have survived more than a hundred and fifty years. A short trail from the visitor center leads out to a stretch of preserved ruts, shallow parallel depressions in the prairie that are quiet but unmistakable, as if the ground still remembers the weight it carried and the direction those people were going.