The Mormon Emigrant Trail

The following describes the difficulty of blazing this trail:

Saturday, July 22, Rock Creek. The climb was even steeper now. The wagons continue to break down and are in need of constant repair. Fifteen men worked the road to the top of the mountain.

       July 29, Summit Camp. Cliff with sharp drop, very hard going.

July 31. Impossible to build a road through this canyon. We had no hammers nor drills with which we could do anything with the stone. It seemed almost an impossibility to go farther. Finally someone suggested we build a fire on the rock. When the fire had died down we found as far as the heat had penetrated, the rocks were all broken in small pieces which were soon removed with pick and shovel. Another fire was built with the same result. After three or four fires, we found the rocks were not much in our way and we soon had a good wagon road right over them. (Norma Ricketts, Melissa’s Journey with the Mormon Battalion, 93)

It took five days to cut a wagon road through the seven-mile-long canyon not far from present day Grover’s Hot Springs. The canyon they worked diligently to render passable was tight and narrow, just wide enough for their wagons. Latter emigrants would never know of the exertions made by the hearty Mormons who blazed the trail before them. For the next 16 years, thousands of gold and land seekers, wagons, and livestock came into California over the Mormon Trail, following these battalion tracks. The company also blazed an estimated 170 miles of wagon road across trackless terrain in 40 days.

Most of the pioneers who wrote in diaries made mention of “The Back Bone.” It would later be dubbed “The Elephant Back” because of its apparent similarities to a pachyderm. Today it is known as the Carson Pass which reaches a grand height of 8,575 feet. The diarist of the Holmes-Thompson group who blazed this trail recorded it took another ten days to cross the Sierra Nevada. Today it is a 30-mile stretch that can be traversed by four-wheel drive between Highway 50 near Placerville, California, and Highway 88.

Henry Bigler, one of the battalion diarists wrote, “Sat. 5^th of Aug. . . .campt on Carson River though at the time we had no name for it only the one we gave it that was ‘Pilot River.’ Sun. 6^th. Continued down Carson River past a hot spring. Campt in the bend of the River. . .”( Journal of Henry William Bigler, Mormon Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.)