South Pass and the Continental Divide

Before we leave the Great Plains and the buffalo too far behind...

Uh, did you hear a discouraging word?

South Pass?  What is it south of?  Turns out it is south of whatever is north of it; the name was given by Indian tribes from the northern Rockies, a name that they shared, along with directions, with the first trappers who roamed the area in the 1820s.  What's in a name--that's where we're going...to the part of the country where you can see the bones of the earth exposed, as in this view over the road up to the pass, where you can look down and still see the tracks of the wagons etched in the terrain.



 The way the guide Broken Hand Fitzpatrick took the party of 1841, up the Platte, then the North Platte into Wyoming, up the Sweetwater and up to the Pass became the combined corridor for all the trails--California, Oregon, Mormon and Pony Express.  The Pass,  20 miles wide by 80 miles long looks much as it did when the wagons were pouring over it, with the emigrants nervous about its startling appearance, as a gray-green ocean of sage brush,  but heartened by the fact that the streams that they walked along were flowing west.
 

 The going was increasingly tough, bouncing over sage tufts and sandy soil, but they could still mostly hold to their 15-20 miles a day,  though the experience of being in a thunder storm 'caught between heaven and earth' was an experience never forgotten.  It was also near this point that the companies that came after 1841  were approaching a point of decision where they would have to choose this trail or that cutoff.  As more knowledge spread from emigrant parties that had gone before, more and more shortcuts or cutoffs began to be proposed, many of them more difficult than the main trail that they were trying to shorten.  But particularly in the Gold Rush, the emigrants were desperate for anything that would shave off a few miles and a few days, convinced that their fortune depended on it.

The early far West, where all the women were strong and all the men were good looking--weren't they?

Another pioneer out strolling the trail in the South Pass

Heading west out of South Pass and following the route taken by the Company of 1841, we dropped down near the Utah border before heading north toward southeastern Idaho, stopping in Soda Springs, where that same pesky old-timer turned up again at the naturally carbonated spring, one of the two for which the town is justly famous.  The pioneers learned to add flavorings to the water to make it even tastier--the Kool Aid of the California Trail.

It's him again

This happens every hour on the hour--you'd think they'd get it fixed

In 1841, they were approaching the point where the company was going to have to take leave of their guide, as he had contracted with the missionaries in the party to get them to the Oregon Territory, which made up the two modern states of Washington and Oregon.  The guide, Fitzpatrick, believed that they were foolish to tempt fate in the Great Basin deserts without any experience or maps.  He persuaded about half of them to give up their dreams of  California and follow the Snake and Columbia rivers to Oregon.  The others, including Joe B, were willing to disregard the advice and strike out on their own.  One of them later remembered, 'We were now thrown entirely upon our own resources.  All the country beyond was to us a veritable terra incognita, and we only knew that California lay to the west.'  They were going to pay a harsh price for their arrogance.