Emigrant Trails

The panel is gone. By July 2025 only its empty frame stood at the Coldwater rest area, beside a separate sign crediting W. E. Barkdull and Sons with giving the site to the Transportation Department, and its words survive in a 2018 photograph. The man it names, Frederick W. Lander, had opened the federal road across western Wyoming that still carries his name in 1858, and his crews spent 1859 improving the emigrant route farther west. The ruts and the graded cut climbing the bluff below the viewpoint are still there.

What the plaque says

Emigrant Trails Early California and Oregon Trail ruts--left by thousands of emigrant wagons as they ascended this bluff--still are visible below this viewpoint. In 1859 F.W. Lander's wagon road builders dug an improved grade that shows more clearly. California traffic, for which Lander constructed a better road, diverged from this Snake River route to Oregon just beyond Raft River, 6 miles west of here. When they got up this grade, emigrants were thankful that they had passed 20 miles of bad road, and that a less demanding trail lay ahead. 339 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Massacre Rocks State Park — 9.3 mi
  Named for emigrant deaths that happened somewhere else, five months before a massacre that was called a battle.

More markers nearby

• Oregon Trail — 11 mi
• American Falls Power Plants — 17 mi
• American Falls — 19 mi
• Idahome — 19 mi