Preserving South Pass: Part three of four

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 three of a four-part series authored by Will Bagley.

Photo: Historical marker near South Pass City, from cdtrail.org

South Pass: Sublime and Solemn
Will Bagley

Between Marias Pass near the Canadian border and Guadalupe Pass not far from Mexico, South Pass is the only easy way to cross the massive cordillera of the Rocky Mountains. John C. Frémont called this fateful gap “the great gate” through which trade and travelers would pass between the valley of the Mississippi and the Pacific. Between 1840 and 1870, tens of thousands of wagons and hundreds of thousands of Americans wore a “broad smooth highway” between the Sweetwater and Green rivers. The West we know today is a legacy of their long and arduous journeys.

Several thousand letters, journals and recollections let us appreciate what these men, women and children saw and did 150 years ago. Twin sisters Cecelia and Parthenia McMillen kept a lively journal of their trek to Oregon in 1852, and it tells the simple but powerful story of their hike over what Margaret Frink called “the great backbone of the North American Continent.” It was not an easy road: “Sand very deep and dust very troublesome,” Cecelia noted at Independence Rock. She considered the granite monolith “a great curiosity but we were all so tired that we could not go to the top of it,” and she regretted that her chores kept her from visiting Devils Gate. The “cool mornings and evenings but warm and sultry” days the sisters described are familiar to anyone who has been in Wyoming’s high country in the summer, and so are the gooseberries (very sour indeed), huckleberries and strawberries to those who look hard.

As it climbs the Sweetwater Valley, today’s Highway 220 cuts a straighter line than the wandering old wagon road. But it passes the same landmarks—Split Rock, Castle Rock, the Three Crossings, Ice Spring, and Names Rock, probably the “very steep rock some 4 or 5 hundred feet high” the sisters climbed and “found a great many names,” but which left them “very tired indeed.” They met friendly Indians selling moccasins trimmed “very nicely with beads,” gathered wild sage that grew eight feet high for fuel, and did their laundry in the tumbling streams. Near Sweetwater Station, the modern highway leaves the old trail, not far from where Cecelia described “some very bad hills to climb” that led to the high country and three “Saluratus lakes,” today’s Lewiston Lakes, which Thomas Flint called the Soapsuds Lakes in 1853. “I have kept an account of the dead cattle we passed,” Cecelia wrote shortly after climbing Rocky Ridge. “The number to day is 35.” Between the Platte River and South Pass, she counted the graves of 29 men, women and children.

South Pass “ill comports with the ideas we had formed of a pass through the rocky Mountains, being merely a vast level sandy plain sloping a little each way from the summit and a few hills for we could not call them mountains on each side,” Parthenia complained. “Some few snowy peaks in the distance, and this is the South pass.” The road was “as level as you often find even in Illinois,” but she thought the mountain scenery back home in Buffalo, New York, was better: “Old Cataraugus beats it all hollow,” she wrote. Despite shortchanging the majestic Wind River Range that loomed to the north, Parthenia would encounter more than enough of the West’s “lofty rolling mountains” before finally reaching Oregon that fall.

“As a physical landmark,” a government study commented three decades ago, “there is nothing dramatic about South Pass,” noting that the spot could be “the most important landmark on the entire Oregon Trail.” South Pass was one of the first sites President Eisenhower nominated for his new national historic landmark program in December 1960, and for almost half a century South Pass has only grown more singular and significant.

“In the silence and solitude of this mountain retreat, with great peaks whose snow-white crests were hidden from view by clouds,” Jacob Pindell Prickett wrote fifty years after he crossed the South Pass in 1854, “it seemed that this was not the world – the busy, teeming world of commerce, and trade, and civilization – that I had been a part of but a few short months before, but a new world which had remained as it came from the Creator’s hand—a world of solitude, grandeur, and peace.” This remote spot is not a spectacle like Yellowstone Falls or the Grand Canyon, but it has a haunting, quiet beauty all its own that has escaped most of the ravages of progress. South Pass is one of the few places where my daughter and granddaughter could stand today and see what Cecelia and Parthenia McMillen saw in 1852—the view that overwhelmed Edwin Bryant in 1846 with its “sublime and solemn solitude and desolation.”

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.