South Pass and the Great Emigrant Road

In the summer of eighteen forty-three, somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand people set out from Independence, Missouri, in a wagon train bound for Oregon. They were not the first, but they were the first large organized migration on what would become the most-traveled overland road in American history. By the time the emigrant era ended, roughly half a million people had crossed Wyoming on foot, on horseback, or behind a team of oxen.

The key to everything was South Pass. Sitting at around seven thousand, four hundred feet in the southern end of the Wind River Range, South Pass is not a pass in the mountain sense, not a narrow canyon or a dramatic notch. It is more like a wide, gentle slope, a twenty-mile saddle of sagebrush and grass that allows a loaded wagon to cross the Continental Divide without undue hardship.

The Shoshone had used it for generations. Fur trappers in the eighteen twenties confirmed it as a viable wagon route. John C.

Fremont surveyed it in eighteen forty-two and his report drew thousands westward. Three trails converged on South Pass. The Oregon Trail led northwest toward the Columbia River.

The California Trail branched southwest toward the Sierra Nevada. The Mormon Trail, running parallel to the Oregon in some stretches, led to the valley of the Great Salt Lake. The trails are still visible in places, the ruts cut so deep by iron wheel rims and hooves that two centuries of rain and wind have not erased them.

The emigrants who crossed here were not tourists. They were making a decision from which there was no practical return. Historian John Unruh estimated that at least twenty thousand emigrants died along the overland trails between eighteen forty and eighteen sixty, most from disease, a smaller number from accidents, violence, and starvation.

The ruts in Wyoming's earth are a kind of monument to what they chose and what it cost.