Preserving South Pass: Part four 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 four of a four-part series authored by Will Bagley.

Photo: Historic South Pass City, legendsofamerica.com

Get Rich Quick at South Pass
Will Bagley

South Pass, the remote gateway where the Sweetwater River cuts through the Rockies between Farson and Sweetwater Station, Wyoming, has always been a hard place to get rich—and a terrible place to get rich quick. A few of the first adventurers to see the pass made fortunes trapping beaver in the Green River Basin, revolutionizing the American fur trade in the process, and a handful of the miners who joined the gold rush to South Pass City in 1867 did well, but for every person who hit the big time, a hundred went bust, lost everything they owned or loved on earth, or died young.

Not every Americans went west in the 19th century with dreams of getting rich, but nobody went without hoping they could build a better life in a new world offering such extraordinary opportunities. With their enormous capacity for hard work and an astonishing ability to endure suffering and hardship, many found that life, including some of the homesteaders who proved up 160-acre claims along the Sweetwater and its tributaries. The toughest of them coaxed enough cattle through the brutal winters to buy out their less resilient neighbors and build viable ranches. These men and women and their incredible families created and protected the landscape that makes South Pass so remarkable today.

A handful of speculators—the fur-trade barons who traded pelts for supplies at a dime on the dollar and the Mormon merchants and ferry owners who started the 1867 gold rush—did get rich promoting South Pass, but the families that survived and prospered at South Pass did not get rich quick. And since nothing changes under the sun, the situation remains the same: the only fortunes being made at South Pass are founded on economic principles as noble as the financial derivatives that over the last decade fabricated enough toxic assets to make a few scoundrels fabulously wealthy while drowning the world’s economy.

Current schemes to get rich at South Pass are based on American free-market strategies as old as P. T. Barnum and Mel Brooks. As Barnum realized, there’s a sucker born every minute, and as Brooks outlined in a Broadway hit, the path to great wealth is seldom straight and narrow. In The Producers, two speculators plan to get rich producing a bomb—a musical called “Springtime for Hitler”—and pocket the 585% of the profits they’ve sold to investors—see Barnum’s “suckers.” Their clever plan goes awry when the show becomes a hit—a fate that gas-patch lore overtook a Texas oilman, scion of a prominent bush-league political dynasty, not far west of South Pass. He and his fellow crooks oversold shares in a Pinedale gas field, banking on not finding any gas. When they hit a bonanza, they solved the problem by pouring concrete down the problematic prospect hole.

Such speculations are still making fortunes at South Pass. Not far west of the pass, a wildcat oil company drilled the world’s deepest dry hole. A couple of summers ago, the Fremont Gold Corporation, the American dummy for Canadian speculators, dug 200 test pits five miles southeast of the pass for a proposed placer gold mine. Placer mining—or “gold washing” as it was known, hasn’t worked at South Pass since the first prospectors cleaned out the creeks and demolished a few hillsides with hydraulic “monitors.” But if you think the Fremont Gold Corporation lost money at South Pass, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you.

The latest get-rich-quick South Pass scam is built of nothing more than air—moving air, what we call wind. A place as windy and remote as South Pass must be an ideal spot for a wind farm, right? Wrong: they are actually industrial wind power plants, benignly called “farms,” which they are not. The impractical wind schemes being pitched for South Pass would require backup coal-fired plants to take over when the wind stopped or roared. Most of the juice generated in Wyoming would disappear on its way to California. The scam only makes economic sense as part of carbon-credit shell game that would actually promote burning more coal.

“The wind in the Pass is usually moderate and silent,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, but “it is an avalanche down the eastern gulches of the range.” Generating power profitably from moving air requires constant and steady zephyrs, not the temperamental winds ranging from gusts to gales that whisper or roar over South Pass. The arctic hurricanes that blast through the great gap every winter might make it less than an ideal location to maintain a stand of ungainly wind turbines—but you can bet your bottom-dollar a few hardy entrepreneurs already have schemes that will get you in on the ground floor of Wyoming’s wind boom. Bank on it: there’s one born every minute.

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.

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.

Preserving South Pass: Part two 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 two of a four-part series authored by Will Bagley.

Photo: South Pass City today, Kathy Weiser, July, 2008.
legendsofamerica.com

Why Protect South Pass?
Will Bagley

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.

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.

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.

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.