City of Rocks Historic Resources Study

Fort Hall, established in 1833 by Nathanial Wyeth of the Columbia River Fishing and Trading Company and operated by the Hudson's Bay Company since 1837, was a critical point of decision for the early travelers along the overland trail. The fort was located on the south bank of the Snake River, three and one-half months travel and 1200 miles from Missouri and almost three months and 600 miles from the Sacramento Valley. The fort was the third and last trading station on the overland trail and here travelers made final preparations for the most difficult stage of their journey and final decisions on their ultimate destination.

Beginning in 1843, former mountain man Caleb Greenwood, hired by California trader, cattleman, and pioneer John Sutter to lure and guide the Oregon bound to California (and willingly granted a pulpit at the British-operated fort), proselytized to the exhausted and confused on California's greater virtues and easier access. [48] Bud Guthrie immortalized Greenwood in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Way West:

[From Fort Hall to Boise] there's the Snake to ford twice. . . . The Snake ain't no piss-piddle of a river even if you might think so, seein' it from here, but you'll get over, most o' you, and maybe some wagons. . . . Damn me fer a liar if fer days you don't roll along her rim and no drink for man or brute, and there she flows, so goddam far and steep below. . .

Californy way is too by-jusus tame. Nothin' the whole length of her to test a man. Nothin' to remember 'cept easy goin'. . . . [They raise] nothin' cept what's sot in the ground and whatever chews on grass. She's a soft country, she is, and so goddam sunny a ma wonders ain't there ever no weather there. It ain't like Oregon thataway. [49]

After the 1849 discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, Greenwood's services were no longer required. Gold proved a powerful incentive against which the promised virtues of Oregon paled.

Two days past Fort Hall, the trail split, right to Oregon, left to California. Jacob Hayden, traveling in 1852, described the decision thusly:

We arose this morning with a full determination of going to Oregon, but when we reached the junction of the road, the team stopped. Part of us, after everything was taken into consideration, concluded to try our fortunes in California; the remainder gave in and we concluded to let the oxen decide our destiny. We started them and awaited the issue with great anxiety; they turned to the left, leaving the Oregon road to the right. [50]

Those firm in their commitment to Oregon also faced a decision at the crossing of the Raft River: to proceed on the main trail along the Snake River or along alternate routes that took them south through the City of Rocks. The direct route was damned both with insufficient water for man and stock and too much water at the deadly fords. Oregon's Blue Mountains also presented a formidable front, as did the toll road around Mount Hood. For those who could not or chose not to pay the toll, the road ended at The Dalles on the Columbia, at which point emigrants proceeded downriver, in a dangerous conclusion to their journey. In 1846, the Applegate brothers scouted an alternative to this main Oregon road. Those choosing the Applegate Trail followed the California Trail through the City of Rocks, across Granite Pass, to a point near Winnemucca, Nevada, "thence northwest over Black Rock desert and the Cascade Range into the Rogue River Valley, and thence north to Salem, Oregon." [51] As with all of the alternatives, there were tradeoffs: travelers avoided crossing the Snake and the Columbia Dalles, yet faced "appalling difficulties" in Nevada's High Rock Canyon. [52]

After the 1862 Boise Basin gold strike, wagons traveling north from Salt Lake City forged a road from the Salt Lake Alternate to "Junction Valley," where they broke north off the California Trail, following the bench above Birch Creek past the present town of Oakley, and rejoining the Oregon Trail near Rock Creek. [53]