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 two of a four-part series authored by Will Bagley.Photo: South Pass City today, Kathy Weiser, July, 2008.
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Silence might be the most striking feature of South Pass, the remote gap in the Rockies between Farson and Sweetwater Station, Wyoming, where streams bound for the Atlantic part ways with waters flowing to the Pacific Ocean. It is not dead silence—in the ten acres surrounded by a buck-and-rail fence marking the spot, where Ezra Meeker’s 103-year old stone tablet commemorates the place where Narcissa Whiman and Eliza Spalding did not cross the Rockies, you can almost always hear the wind either howl or whisper. And if the atmosphere is just right, you might hear the distant groan of a semi laboring up a grade on Highway 28 to the west. But South Pass is always quiet, very quiet.
Beyond a simple high spot in the topography, you can get up a good argument about where South Pass begins and ends and an even better one about what it means. The Shoshones, whose homeland surrounds the pass in all five directions and 36 compass points, never debated the point. South Pass is inevitably bound to the Sweetwater River, and conceptually the “Gateway to the West” began where the old wagon road to Oregon met the stream at Independence Rock, the great granite turtle lying on the plain not far from Devils Gate, where the Sweetwater slices through the Rattlesnake Mountains.
So historically, South Pass begins at Father De Smet’s “Great Register of the Desert.” Here between 1824 and 1914 almost a million westbound homeseekers began their 99-mile walk up the Sweetwater to the Continental Divide and beyond, to their private El Dorados in the promised lands of Oregon, Washington, Utah, California, Nevada, Idaho or Montana.
So historically, South Pass begins at Father De Smet’s “Great Register of the Desert.” Here between 1824 and 1914 almost a million westbound homeseekers began their 99-mile walk up the Sweetwater to the Continental Divide and beyond, to their private El Dorados in the promised lands of Oregon, Washington, Utah, California, Nevada, Idaho or Montana.
But where does South Pass end? For these sojourners, it ended when they reached the deserts west of the divide, often when they crossed the Big Sandy River and entered the kingdom of sage and rabbitbrush, grouse and greasewood, coyote and cactus, jackrabbit and juniper. To people who had grown up in the well-watered woods and greenery of the American East or the Old Country, the arid lands looked like hell incarnate.
For those of us who treasure the past, and find comfort and trouble in its study, South Pass is a history-haunted place. The ghosts of South Pass, and the creaking and screeching of their wagons carried in the wind, may be imaginary, but to us they as real as the BLM markers and posts that line the overland road or the 10,000 graves that commemorate their passage.
Timelessness is a trait South Pass shares with similarly blessed spots scattered throughout the American West. Virtually all this enormous country, a vast landscape that stretches northwest from the summits of the Wind River Mountains to the distant peaks on the ragged western horizon of the Wyoming Range, to the heights of the Antelope Hills and the jutting prow of Pacific Butte looming above the southern edge of the pass, the country looks much as it did when Robert Stewart found it in October 1812 or Jedediah Smith saw it covered in snow a dozen years later.
It’s hard to miss the high-voltage PacifiCorp powerline that now traverses the pass, and an experienced eye can pick out fence lines and the occasional highway cut, but such intrusions almost disappear in the huge and turbulent lands surrounding South Pass. Even the trench of the irrigation ditch dug and abandoned in a failed attempt to divert the flow of the Sweetwater across the Great Divide to Pacific Springs is subsiding into the derelict bed of the railroad that once hauled iron ore over the pass.
For those of us who treasure the past, and find comfort and trouble in its study, South Pass is a history-haunted place. The ghosts of South Pass, and the creaking and screeching of their wagons carried in the wind, may be imaginary, but to us they as real as the BLM markers and posts that line the overland road or the 10,000 graves that commemorate their passage.
Timelessness is a trait South Pass shares with similarly blessed spots scattered throughout the American West. Virtually all this enormous country, a vast landscape that stretches northwest from the summits of the Wind River Mountains to the distant peaks on the ragged western horizon of the Wyoming Range, to the heights of the Antelope Hills and the jutting prow of Pacific Butte looming above the southern edge of the pass, the country looks much as it did when Robert Stewart found it in October 1812 or Jedediah Smith saw it covered in snow a dozen years later.
It’s hard to miss the high-voltage PacifiCorp powerline that now traverses the pass, and an experienced eye can pick out fence lines and the occasional highway cut, but such intrusions almost disappear in the huge and turbulent lands surrounding South Pass. Even the trench of the irrigation ditch dug and abandoned in a failed attempt to divert the flow of the Sweetwater across the Great Divide to Pacific Springs is subsiding into the derelict bed of the railroad that once hauled iron ore over the pass.
In 1869, with the coming of the transcontinental railroad some 60 miles to the south, the path of progress turned aside from the great gate that opened the West to white settlement and civilization. Thanks to generations of ranchers who preserved and protected this remote, historic and hardscrabble place, it looks much like the terrain a dozen of my ancestors crossed 150 years ago. It is a living part of our heritage, an American treasure. All of this -- the silence, the imaginings it sparks, the memories it holds, the heritage it keeps, the stories it tells -- make us owe it to our grandchildren and their children to keep it as it is, so that they too can see and feel South Pass's magnificent legacy. We simply cannot afford to squander or waste this majestic and timeless place.
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.
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.
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