The Overland Trail

Photographs: The North Platte River, the Sand Hills, where the wagons came over the Sand Hills, wagon ruts over the hills.

When I left Omaha last Wednesday, I had intended to head west by way of the Elkhorn River crossing (part of the Mormon Trail), but that was flooded from the storm the day before. Instead, I headed southwest on the interstate highway and picked up the Mormon Trail again at Grand Island, Nebraska.

A note about guidebooks: I cannot say enough in praise of the series of guidebooks published (free) by the National Park Service entitled National Historic Trails: Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide. There are currently three booklets in this series: "The Mormon Pioneer Trail Across Iowa in 1846", "Nebraska and Northeastern Colorado" and "Across Wyoming". These guides include historic background material, detailed directions to and descriptions of trail markers and interesting locations to stop and see, and also maps that coordinate with the printed information. Though local guide books and Internet sites give some of this information, there are places I would never have known about without these specific guides. I also used a little booklet I bought from the DUP called "Landmarks and Events Along the Historic Mormon Trail" that was very useful. The NPS guide books were available at many stops along the way, but I ordered my by phone from the National Historic Trails office in Salt Lake before leaving on my trip.

The Mormon Trail differs from the Oregon and California Trails specifically in that it stays (mostly) on the north side of the Platte and North Platte Rivers across Nebraska and into Wyoming, while the other trails stay on the south side of the Platte. There were several reasons for this, principally to keep the Saints away from other people (especially Missourians) on the other trails and thus avoid trouble and persecution. It was also healthier for the Saints to travel a different road because the other route became so busy and the campgrounds so overused, that there was more incidence of disease in the other camps due to poor sanitation. Staying to the north also gave the Mormons less competition for fresh water and grazing land for the animals. However, in some places the Mormon route was more difficult and took a little longer. Nevertheless, there were hardships on both routes and eventually, at Fort Laramie and Casper, the routes all came together to head west over South Pass (the only place to get wagons through the Rocky Mountains). After South Pass (in western Wyoming) the routes again separated, with the Mormon Trail heading southwest to the Salt Lake Valley.

It was very interesting to follow the trails west through Nebraska and Wyoming. Though the Mormons forged some new wagon roads on their way, most of the trail roads followed old Indian trails. In 1842, a man named Fremont traveled the West and made extensive detailed maps of the terrain, which were extremely valuable to others who followed (including the Mormons).

Eastern and central Nebraska are flat, and though there are now miles and miles of corn fields, at the time of the pioneer migration there were miles and miles of prairie grass. This initial part of the trip was the easier part, which was a good thing because it gave the people and animals a chance to get to used to the rigors of daily travel. As you drive west you gradually rise in elevation, the air gets dryer and by the time you get into the western third of Nebraska the terrain becomes hilly with rock outcroppings and then large rock formations that were very strange sites to the pioneers. These rock formations also served as trail markers and are mentioned in many of the pioneer diaries (both Mormon and non-Mormon).

One particularly interesting thing to see along the trail is evidence of wagon travel in the form of ruts. When they had to get down a hill, they would lock the wheels of the wagons and carts so as to not go too fast and hurt the animals. Thus the wagons and carts caused deep ruts in the earth that in many places (especially where there was sandstone close to the surface) are still visible today. I saw only a couple of these places because the others require short hikes and I didn't feel comfortable going very far off the road on trails when I was alone. A week or two later in June and there would have been many more tourists, but last week I was pretty much the only person stopping at most of these sites. Should you ever be traveling this way, there are several places where the ruts can be seen.

I'm going to split up my posts on the Mormon Trail so I can put up some of the many pictures I took. I hope you can get a sense for the wildness of it all. Once you get to western Nebraska, it's very easy to imagine what it looked like to the pioneers, because it still looks much the same today.