Another Way West

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 26, 1958, No. 3

ANOTHER WAY WEST

By Jack Goodman

Scarcely a century has passed since flesh-and-blood men and women were living the stuff of which history was made here in Utah. However, engineers rather than historians or antiquarians have laid out the region's modern highways. So it is that in only a few cases, the trails blazed by trappers and wagon trains can be followed without "leaving the pavement" of today's American road.

East of the Utah line, serious-minded sightseers entering our region find that U.S. 30 strays far from fabled South Pass. The other major artery to north central Utah, transcontinental U.S. 40, enters the Salt Lake Valley by spurning the Emigration Canyon-Little Mountain route of the Mormon trek for a later, easier gradient surveyed by Parley P. Pratt. Someday completion of a Henefer-Salt Lake City memorial highway will put rubber tires and asphalt atop the rocky ridges scoured by the wagons of the Donners and Brigham Young's initial band.

Until then, the visitor willing to swap a few extra hours and miles for bright nuggets of western history plus splendid scenery can do so most readily in northern Utah. Like the parched pioneers of emigranttrain days, he can gape at the sudden flashing views of Bear Lake on the Utah-Idaho border, sparkling like a near-mirage between semiarid mountains. From there he can retrace, on good two-lane pavement, one of the first and most scenic routes across the seemingly impassable Wasatch. Following U.S. 89 today's tourist can descend, as Jim Bridger did in 1824, into the Cache Valley, the well-protected "winter quarters" of the men who trapped for beaver pelts.

Present-day voyageurs, searching out historic routes and scenery in the region west of the Continental Divide, reach the Bear via U.S. 30N from Kemmerer to Sage, Wyoming. Next, State Route 89 leads across the border and on between the Bear River Range and the first flanks of the Wasatch into Utah where State Route 3, following the route of the old Oregon Trail, leads up to Bear Lake.

Thirty miles long and more than six miles wide, the cool blue-green lake was the first sizeable body of fresh water encountered by the slowrolling wagon trains on the heartbreaking trip to the Pacific Coast. Here both humans and beasts of burden, haggard after toiling across the Great Plains and through the Wind River country, found water enough at last. Even in today's West the sight of so much fresh water and foilage is a welcome one. The deep cool lake and irrigated farmlands around it give promise of green fields to the north and west. From this point the Oregon Trail of yesterday and today is rarely out of sight of streams, small and large — the Snake, the Lemhi, the Clearwater, and the Columbia. Bear Lake must have seemed an oasis, indeed the first promise of a promised land, to overland travelers a century ago.

Today, lying half in Utah and half in Idaho, the lake provides a fine overnight stopping place for wayfaring strangers and is a favorite swimming-boating-fishing center for residents of nearby range towns and cities. East of the lake there are new riches — mines where phosphate for farm fertilizer is being hacked from deposits laid down in the Phosphoria Sea aeons and aeons earlier.

To the west of the lake, U.S. 89 climbs toward the skies through pasturelands, patriarchal cottonwoods, groves of aspen, and finally on through pine forests upward to timberline. Here the wayfarer confronts the Wasatch Range, final spine of the Rockies which once barred the pioneers from direct entry into the Great Basin.

A Utah State Historical Marker on the shores of Bear Lake testifies that the Oregon Trail turned north at this point. But the mountain men, not handicapped by wagons or carts, crossed the Wasatch at will. At first Bridger and his fellows followed the convolutions of the roily Bear River to reach their cache, known to them as Willow Valley. Today's highway, beautifully engineered, follows the shorter trail the trappers took when they were hurried — over the 7,900 foot summit and down the canyon of the Logan River to the west. If Bridger and his comrades sought scenery as well as beaver, they chose well.

Climbing some 3,000 feet in elevation in a span of eleven miles after leaving Bear Lake, the highway broadens at View Point where historyminded travelers can rest for minutes or hours, mentally tracing the path of the emigrant trains through fifty miles of Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho valleys and desert ranges. Perhaps no other panorama in all the West encompasses quite so much history as this view from the lee of Beaver Summit; perhaps no other region along the pioneer trails is as little changed as the expanse between shimmering Bear Lake and the Cache Valley.

From the 7,900 foot pass the highroad loops and winds on another thirty miles to Logan, a valley town 4,500 feet above the sea. In its descent, the route leads through a land of natural "parks," woods, and woodlands little changed since beaver-trapping days. There are dozens of beauty spots "on the Cache" — locations favored by Utah campers and hikers. Passable forest trails lead to Beaver Mountain, where the descendants of animals once harassed by the mountain men now build their dams under the protection of federal foresters. Tony Grove Lake and White Pine Lake are twin glacial tarns that Jim Bridger must have glimpsed.

Ricks Springs, a cool pool bubbling icy sweet water in a sizeable grotto, was visited by local Indian tribes as well as thirsty trappers. A few miles to the east is Logan Cave, a cavern 700 yards long, known to have sheltered both whites and redmen from high-country blizzards in the mid-nineteenth century.

Twenty-five miles from Bear Lake a steep forest trail leads upcanyon to history of another sort — the Jardine Juniper. Forest Service naturalists believe this twisted forty-foot-high tree is the world's biggest and oldest red juniper. Twenty-six feet around, anchored in the rimrock of the Wasatch, the gnarled giant is estimated to be fully three thousand years old, although the usual life span of its species is five hundred years.

Below the Juniper Trail the paved highway follows the white water of the Logan River, a famous fishing stream in its day — and not entirely devoid of browns, natives, and rainbows in our own.

The gorge cut by the Logan is deep and narrow, shadowed by firs, pines, and peaks for a dozen miles — a canyon typical of scores throughout the West down which toiling emigrant trains and freighters worked their way as the region was opened.

Suddenly, forty miles west of Bear Lake, the road breaks from the canyon mouth, crosses a terrace of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, and gives wayfaring strangers their first startled glimpse of the level valley which served as the winter cache for the beaver trappers. Today Logan, a thriving, thrifty college community, nestles in the valley. Farms, a campus, checkerboarded streets, and a Latter-day Saints temple all testify to typical Mormon country history. U.S. 89 leads on — to Sardine Canyon, to Brigham City, to Ogden and to a broader, flatter valley which was a magnet, first for a multitude of wagon trains, then for the Iron Horse, not long after the mountain men first showed the Saints and the Argonauts the new way west.

Weathered by the winds and storms and glaring sun of the upland desert, neglected by a state to which it properly should mean much, the "Golden Spike Monument," long the sole marker to the joining of the nation's first transcontinental rails, has at last been set aside by the Department of the Interior as a National Historical Site.

The precise spot where the cowcatchers of the Central Pacific Railroad's "Jupiter" and the Union Pacific's No. 119 touched on May 10, 1869, lies fifty-two miles from Ogden and the present transcontinental rail route. Nowadays not even the sound of a locomotive whistle breaks the silence of the barren surrounding hills. A seven-acre tract bisected by a cinder-sprinkled abandoned roadbed, the site of the meeting of the rails is bounded by a few stands of wheat. A tottering ranch windmill and an empty, forlorn railroad station add to the gaunt spectral quality of the setting.

The monument itself suffered considerable neglect in bygone years. Helpful sheepmen and a few visitors placed cairns of brick and stone around the monument base, propped up its tottering pipe-rail fence, and enshrined the empty-eyed skull of a steer on the monument step. Recently, however, the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads erected a new fence, polished the simple stone pyramid, and rechiseled its terse inscription. Now visitors can readily read the lines:

Last Spike Completing First Transcontinental Railroad Driven at This Point, May 10, 1869.

To make it easier for sightseers and a new generation of railroad builders to journey this way, the Utah State Highway Commission has graded, graveled, and hard-topped the twenty miles of road which lead to Promontory from the east. Beyond rugged hills to the south and west — on the shores of the lonely saline lake — new railroading history is being written by Morrison-Knudsen construction crews pushing a twelve-mile-long, forty-million-dollar rockfill across the Great Salt Lake, replacing the timber trestle of the Lucin Cutoff.

But there is no sight or sound of the mammoth Lucin construction project visible at Promontory. Here, north and west of Ogden and Salt Lake City, in a land once swarming with Irish and Chinese gandydancers, with mule skinners, bewhiskered surveyors, military guards, and card-sharpers, nothing remains of pioneer builders except memories — memories fed by our own recollections of dim paragraphs and brave photographs in schoolroom history books and on classroom walls.

The redolent sagebrush, the desolate ranges skirting the Great Salt Lake, the great sweep of high-country sky, these remain as they were before the West's first rails were laid, used, and abandoned. Here is one of those singular spots where a significant sector of American history can be readily relived, where the visitor can appreciate the labors with which his grandparents or great-grandparents enriched a rugged land.

North of Ogden, against the flank of the Wasatch in the country surrounding Brigham City, the outlander finds startling resemblance to distant Pennsylvania or Upper New York State. But dairy farms, trim homes, and factories are left behind at tiny Corinne, the "sinful city" to pious Mormons of the railbuilding era. Beyond this near-ghost town irrigated orchards and fields dwindle and disappear. For the remaining twenty-three miles to Promontory, Utah State Route 83 swings almost due west, alongside the rail-less embankment of the now abandoned pioneer line.

Beginning in 1869 and continuing for thirty-two years, this was the route of diamond-stacked, high-wheeled, wood-burning locomotives hauling passenger-car loads of emigrants to the mushrooming West. However, this single track to the scene of the Golden Spike ceremony lost its main-line status in 1903 with the building of the $8,300,000 cutoff across the Great Salt Lake, the trestle route which will itself be replaced by the now half-finished "fill" or causeway.

The line across the lake sliced forty-four miles and a dozen steep grades from the initial transcontinental run. But from 1903 until 1942 the older route through Promontory was maintained as a Southern Pacific branch. Then rails were ripped up and sent to war, while local souvenir hunters scoured the abandoned roadbed for timeworn spikes which could be polished into paperweights.

Today's highway traveler, paralleling the historic rail route, can perhaps appreciate the woes of the thousand or more tracklayers who blasted and shoveled their way west at a rate of ten miles per day. Toiling across quicksand, salt flats, and the 5,000-foot-high shoulders of the Promontory Range, laborers rounded each successive ridge to find more quicksand, sage, salt, and another ridge.

But the desolate region between Corinne and Promontory contains beauty as well as history, a unique stark beauty fitted to time and clime. Curlews, wild ducks, and herons soar from roadside marshes in season, winging southward to the nearby Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Even in this day and age an occasional band of wild horses gallops downwind, away from passing cars and trucks. Now and again a sheepherder trails a flock to or from the winter range.

Road and rail-line roadbed dip down to Promontory after topping a low ridge which gives a fine panoramic view of the saline lake and the high country, forty miles west. This is a land of shimmering mirages, a land in which truncated mountains float atop the lake, a land where heat and light play strange tricks. But the visitor who in approaching the Golden Spike marker tries to conjure up the scene as it was in 1869 needs all manner of mental tricks.

Here, to a land then as now devoid of any permanent resident, a crowd of fifteen hundred streamed on that great tenth of May, 1869. Infantrymen, two bands of Salt Lake City musicians, railroad engineers, laborers far from China and Ireland, gamblers from Corinne, Mormons from Brigham City — less recently from Nauvoo — workers, and regional dignitaries all gathered to watch California's Governor Leland Stanford swing at the $400 golden spike, and miss.

Ties and rails are gone now, but a branch-line wire remains to remind visitors that Telegrapher W. N. Shilling of Ogden simulated Stanford's blows with his key, tapping to the world the historic message: "The last rail is laid. The last spike is driven. The Pacific Railroad is completed. The point of junction is 1,086 miles west of die Missouri River, and 690 miles east of Sacramento City."

Today the laurel tie that held the golden spike is gone. It was removed to San Francisco immediately after the 1869 ceremony, and destroyed in the great earthquake and fire of 1906. The golden spike remains, but not in Utah. Inscribed with the date January 8,1863, marking the breaking of ground for the nation-spanning route, plus the completion date of nearly six years later, it bears also the words: "May God continue the unity of our country as this railroad unites the two great oceans of the world."

The property of Stanford University, the spike may be viewed by scholars who can persuade university trustees to open the vault of the Wells Fargo Bank and Union Trust Company of San Francisco, in which the relic is housed.

However, desolate Promontory near the spot where crews laid a record ten miles of rail in a day, placed 25,000 ties, drove 55,000 spikes, and fastened 14,000 bolts just before the ceremony of the golden spike — this pinprick on the map of the West — seems best suited to recall the event now faded into the past.

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