City of Rocks Historic Resources Study

Between 1841 and 1860, the various overland roads funneled as many as 200,000 men, women, and children through the City of Rocks. [59] Historian John Unruh argues persuasively against "the language of typicality" in describing their journey:

it seems axiomatic to distinguish between abnormally wet and abnormally dry years. . . . The inexorable growth of supportive facilities.. further negates the usefulness of a 'typical year' approach. . . . Similarly revolutionizing the nature of the overland journey were the diverse traveler-oriented activities of the federal government: exploration, survey, road construction, postal services, the establishment of forts, the dispatching of punitive military expeditions, the allocation of protective escorts for emigrat caravans, the negotiation of Indian treaties designed to insure the safely of emigrant travel.... The California gold rush accelerated the amount of eastbound trail traffic.... Trail improvements contributed to significant reductions in the amount of time required to travel the overland route. [60]

Between 1841 and 1848, the journey from Missouri to California consumed an average of 157 days; add the years 1849-1860, and the average drops by over a month, to 121 days. After the great Mormon migration of 1847, those whose provisions, wagons, stock, or resolve had failed had the option of detouring to Salt Lake City. Prior to 1849, emigrants were primarily families of farmers, hopeful of settling — of staying — in California and Oregon. After the 1849 discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, the wagon trains were joined by single men, unencumbered with heavy loads and hopeful of leaving California once they had struck it rich in the placer deposits of the Sacramento Valley; by 1850, both those who were successful and those who failed added a stream of east-bound traffic to the migration. [61] By 1852, the gold fever had waned and "families seeking new homes" once again replaced the fortune hunters. For those traveling between 1851 and 1862, when the threat of death from hostile Indians kept pace with the threat from cholera or accident, the journey west of South Pass was significantly more dangerous than for those who had preceded and those who would follow. [62]

Yet there were the constants of daily life — irrespective of the year, men and beasts needed food, water, and protection. Seven thousand five hundred mules, 31,000 oxen, 23,999 horses, and 5,000 cows accompanied the 9,000 California-bound wagons counted in Fort Laramie in 1852 — the peak year of emigrant traffic. Cut the numbers in half, for more "typical" years, and they remain impressive. These animals needed water when they "nooned" and again at the end of the day. The drain on the semi-arid West's water and browse resources was significant, necessitating that camp sites be varied and numerous and that the trail be spread over a many-mile radius, except in those areas where passage was limited to a narrow defile. [63]

At the northeast entrance to the City of Rocks, the trail constricted over Echo Gap (also called Echo Pass), and led to the Circle Creek basin. It constricted again at Pinnacle "Pass" east of Twin Sisters, and again at the head of Emigrant Canyon south of Twin Sisters, where the Salt Lake Alternate joined the main trail. Camp sites were available near "Register Rock" and "Camp Rock" where a number of springs provided water, along Circle Creek, and at the Emigrant Canyon spring. However, grazing resources at these sites would have been quickly exhausted in the late summer months when most emigrants arrived, suggesting that the Raft River Valley (east of City of Rocks), Big Cove (2 miles east of the City of Rocks, near Almo), and Junction Valley (2 miles southwest of the City of Rocks) would have been most often used as camping sites, particularly in the years of heaviest traffic and least rain. [64]

These camps provided not only an afternoon's or a night's rest, but also served as final havens of water and grass as migrants approached the long trek along the Humboldt River and the "Forty Mile Desert" past the Humboldt Sink. This was "the dreaded part of California travel, made more tragic by the weakened condition of so many emigrants and the death of so much of their livestock." [65] To avoid similar fates, trains would sacrifice precious days in the Raft River and Goose Creek regions to allow their stock to rest and feed.

Perhaps taking advantage of the brief interruption, and certainly in response to the approaching Granite Pass descent and Humboldt Desert travail, emigrants lightened their loads, jettisoning all but the essentials of continued travel: "at a fine spring and good grass we took dinner. Here the old Fort Hall road and the Salt Lake City road come together. . . . Here we overtook a company who were abandoning their wagons, and like us, packing." [66] As late as the 1970s, scattered remains of the wagons and abandoned personal effects remained within the City of Rocks. That they were only scattered attests not only to the passage of time, but to the extent to which subsequent emigrants salvaged and reused what others had left behind, especially the axles and wagon tongues used to make wagon repairs. And, as the Mormons struggled to forge a city in the wilderness, their salvage parties ranged in a wide arc north and east of Salt Lake: "especially welcome" were the tons of iron from abandoned wagons they brought back into the valley. [67]

After the establishment of Salt Lake City, life along the trail was not limited to those in transit. In 1849, J. Goldsborough Bruff encountered "2 Mormon young men....trading for broken-down cattle... They of course were from Salt Lake Valley." By the 1850s, Mormon entrepreneurs had established seasonal blacksmith shops in the Raft River Valley. Others traveled north from Salt Lake at regular intervals, to sell cheese, butter, eggs, and other perishables to the emigrants. [68]