In 1843 the Pathfinder, General John C. Fremont, began to spy out the military ways across the West, and the same year the Oregon pioneers took the first wagons westward to the Pacific.
The trail that began with the journey of these Oregon pioneers was widened and deepened by the wheels of the Mormons in 1847; and when the herald of the first California Golden Age sent forth a trumpet call in ’Forty-nine, heard around the world, the trail was finished from Great Salt Lake across the mountains to the sea.
That era had its great men, for great men make eras. Ben Holladay, William N. Russell, and Edward Creighton gave to the trail the Overland Stage Line and the Pony Express and the telegraph.
Dating the beginning of transcontinental wagon travel from the days of ’Forty-nine, it was twenty years before the railway reached California. The period was one of great out-of-doors men and women—the last of American pioneers. When the old trail was in full tide of life, it was filled with gold-seekers from the Missouri to the Pacific. A hundred thousand souls passed over it yearly. Towns, stirring and turbulent, some now gone from the map and some grown to be cities, flourished as the green bay tree. Omaha, Salt Lake, and San Francisco, and such lesser places as Julesburg, Cheyenne, Laramie, Carson, Elko, and Virginia City were picturesquely lively. Hardly was there a stage station without its stirring story of swift life and sudden death, and long and short haired characters with fighting reputations were to be found anywhere from St. Joseph to San Francisco.
[Illustration: HANSCOMB PARK, OMAHA, IS PLEASANT WITH SHADY TREES AND SPARKLING WATERS]
The traffic of the old trail was of long wagon trains of emigrants; of great ox outfits laden with freight for the mines; of Holladay’s coaches, six teams in full gallop, station to station; of the fast riders of the Pony Express, and of all other manner of moving men and beasts that might join the line of the westward march. Outlaws lived along the trail and as opportunity offered, plundered its followers; the protesting savages having no place upon it, but perceiving in it an instrument to alienate their dominion, burned its wagon trains and destroyed its stages as opportunity offered. At times great herds of buffalo obliterated sections of the trail. Yet it held its own until the golden spike was driven, and passed away as a wagon road only when the need for it passed. But the railway lines that took up the burden of stage coach and Pony Express and ox team, have marked the way of the trail upon the map of the West so that it shall endure as long as the West endures.