The Oregon Trail

The cart began as Henry Spalding's light Dearborn wagon. An axle broke a day short of Fort Hall, and Narcissa Whitman wrote that she and Eliza Spalding rejoiced, hoping the men would finally leave it; instead they made a cart of the back wheels and lashed the front pair on top. They gave up at Fort Boise and left it there, the first wheeled vehicle taken so far west. The first wagons actually driven on from Fort Boise to the Columbia came four years later, in 1840, and they were down to their running gear by the end.

What the plaque says

The Oregon Trail Is still clearly visible coming off the rimrock across the river. Here the west bound emigrants after 1840 came gratefully down into this green valley. The first cart passed here with Spalding and Whitman, pioneer missionaries, in 1836. By the middle 1840's, thousands of emigrant wagons had cut a broad track, later the Overland Road. The tide of travel went down when the railroad was completed in 1884, but the tracks of the wagons and stages can still be followed for miles east in the desert. 151 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Idaho Penitentiary — 4.7 mi
  A territorial prison that ran for 101 years on conditions that barely changed, and closed the year its prisoners burned it.
• Basque Block — 6.7 mi
  A merchant's 1864 brick house became the boardinghouse where herders from the Basque Country found beds, meals and their own language.
• Idaho State Capitol — 6.8 mi
  Walls hauled from the prison quarry, heat pumped from 3,000 feet down, and its newest rooms built underground.
• World Center for Birds of Prey — 8.2 mi
  The hilltop where the peregrine falcon was bred back from DDT, and where condors for the Grand Canyon country still hatch.

More markers nearby

• Beaver Dick's Ferry — steps away
• Diversion Dam — 0.9 mi
• Basque Country — 5.0 mi
• Oregon Trail — 5.1 mi