Preserving South Pass: A four-part series

With dwindling state funds and the legislature gearing up for what could be a divisive budget session next year, author Will Bagley and the Alliance for Historic Wyoming remind readers of The Underground why preservation of Wyoming's history is important. This is part one of a four-part series authored by Will Bagley.

Photo: South Pass City, Wyoming in 1906.
From legendsofamerica.com

South Pass: A National Treasure
Will Bagley

Some say the Shoshone called South Pass ”the place where God ran out of mountains.” As chief historian of the National Park Service, the great western historian Robert Utley summarized the staggering significance of the place: it “made possible the opening of a practicable wagon road to the Pacific” and “extended the territorial claims of the United States.” For almost half a century, “the South Pass route was the way west.”

A long list of famous Americans crossed South Pass: Native leaders Washakie and Red Cloud, hunter-explorers Jedediah Smith, James Clyman and Thomas Fitzpatrick, religious leaders Marcus Whitman and Brigham Young, military commanders Stephan Watts Kearny and Albert Sidney Johnston, and Eliza Spalding and Narcissa Whitman, “the first white women,” wrote one trapper, “that had ever penetrated into these wild and rocky regions.” More importantly, more than 500,000 ordinary Americans crossed the Great Divide at South Pass between 1840 and 1870 on their way to new homes in the West, the largest peaceful migration in human history.

“Off the main road now, and not often visited, South Pass is one of the most deceptive and impressive places in the West,” Wallace Stegner wrote a generation ago. “Stop there and watch the cloud shadows go over, and see the white rumps of antelope move among the sage, and study the deep, braiding ruts that the wagons made as they fanned out and came down the long, even slope from Pacific Spring.” Stop there and shut off your engine, and you can “listen to the wind, which breathes history through dry grass and stiff sage,” and begin to understand something about the spirit of the people who moved America west.

Today, South Pass has escaped many of the disasters that have ravaged the rest of the West: the sweeping view from its summit is little changed since 1850. To the southwest, the sage-covered Antelope Hills fall away, terminating at Pacific Butte, which rises more than 400 feet above the pass. To the west, every creek and stream flows into Green River. Buttes—some ranchers call them “sky islands”—knobs, hills, dunes, and creeks fill the broad and broken expanse of the valley, and the Wyoming Range frames the western horizon. Two miles below the great divide, the green oasis of Pacific Springs is still “boiling up through the sod as cold as ice itself,” just as it did on August first in 1852 for Parthenia Blank.

In 2006, an estimated 7,487 visitors left the pavement of Wyoming State Highway 28 to cross three miles of gravel road to the see the trace of the Oregon, California, Mormon, and Pony Express National Historic Trails. They rattled across the cattle guard at the entrance to the buck-and-pole fence surrounding the ten acres the BLM has set aside to mark South Pass. In many of America’s most historic places, the past has an almost magical ability to disappear: a sprawling metropolis surrounds the Alamo, and Interstate 80 runs right over one of the Donner Party’s cabins. But beneath the looming majesty of Pacific Butte, South Pass endures. “Recovering the Lost Trail has a deeper meaning than merely gratifying a whim or satisfying a feeling of curiosity,” Ezra Meeker said in 1915, and it is still true.

J. Ross Browne predicted that Americans would make pilgrimages to South Pass. “I can stand on South Pass and close my eyes, and hear the hoofbeats of the Pony Express riders, the cracking of ox-team drivers’ whips, the creak of wagon wheels, the voices of women and children,” said Wyoming native Tom Bell, whose great-great-grandmother crossed South Pass during in the 1850s. For those who value its living connection with history, South Pass represents a national treasure that we can either squander or save for future generations. “South Pass is one of the few places where you can stand in 2006 and 1846 at the same time,” historian Terry Del Bene observed. “That’s pretty special. We’re running out of places like that.”

But South Pass, unless we make our voices heard, is at risk. The Greater South Pass Historic Landscape needs you to take a moment and write the BLM [BLM Lander Field Office, P.O. Box 589, Lander, WY 82520 and Wyoming BLM, P.O. Box 1828, Cheyenne, WY 82003) to let them know that you want to protect South Pass for your children and grandchildren to enjoy.

Author’s Biographical Note: Will Bagley’s dozen books cover the overland emigration, frontier violence, railroads, mining, and the Mormons. He is series editor of the documentary history, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier. His Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows won the Western History Association’s Caughey Book Prize. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he served as a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow. Bagley wrote this series in cooperation with the Alliance for Historic Wyoming.

To get involved with the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, visit http://historicwyoming.org.