Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 19, Number 1-4, 1951

THE SALT LAKE CUTOFF J.N T H E PERSPECTIVE of history, a road north around Great Salt Lake became inevitable from the hour of Mormon entrance into the valley of the Great Salt Lake. The development of population concentrations in Oregon and Utah sooner or later must have required a road to connect them by the most direct possible route.

US 30S, the so-called "Snowville Cutoff," reflects in our own day the historical pressures that began to build up in 1847.

In the beginning, however, the pioneering of what became known as the "Salt Lake Cutoff," the "Salt Lake Road," and the "Deep Creek Cutoff" owed nothing to the existence of Oregon.

Islanded as they were in the immense distances of the Far West, the Utah and Oregon communities did not for many years begin to exert any real gravitational attraction upon each other. The wagon road north around the lake came into existence, rather, as a direct consequence of the shortcomings of the Hastings Cutoff as a means of access to the California Trail from the valley of the Great Salt Lake.

The valleys which open out upon the northern shores of the salt lake had reechoed to the sound of horses' hoofs from the time the mountain men first penetrated to this area. Peter Skene Ogden, after his discovery of the Humboldt River in the winter of 1828-29, came east as far as the Bear and Portneuf rivers, and, following Indian trails through the snow, very largely anticipated the subsequent cutoff. Somewhat more to the south, the Bartleson party a dozen years later took wagons around the lake, but although their route in good time commended itself in part to railroad builders, it never appealed to other California immigrants. At the time the Hastings Cutoff was tried and found wanting, the potentialities of the country north of Great Salt Lake for a wagon road were an exciting unknown.

By one of the ironies history occasionally permits itself, the slim biography of the man who made the effective discovery of the Salt Lake Cutoff as a route for overland travel is innocent of any reference to the feat. And Utah has repaid its debt to him shabbily by corrupting his very name as it stands upon the map. A poor