West End of Hastings Cutoff

This is where a famous shortcut proved it was anything but. The Hastings Cutoff promised emigrants a faster route to California by swinging south of the Great Salt Lake, but it cost weeks instead of saving them—a brutal desert crossing and a long detour around the Ruby Mountains. The cutoff rejoined the main California Trail along the Humboldt about seven miles west of here. The Donner Party took it in 1846 and arrived a month behind, a delay that helped trap them in the Sierra snows. The route the wagons cursed is now roughly followed by Interstate 80.

What the plaque says

Across the Humboldt Valley southward from this point a deeply incised canyon is seen opening into the valley. Through that canyon along the South Fork of the Humboldt ran the disaster-laden route called the Hastings Cutoff. It joined the regular Fort Hall route running on both sides of the Humboldt here. The canyon was first traversed in 1841 by the Bartleson-Bidwell party, the earliest organized California emigrant group. In 1846 Lansford Hastings guided a party through this defile of the South fork and out along the Humboldt. The ill-fated Reed-Donner party followed later the same year. By 1850 the dangers of the cutoff route were recognized and it was abandoned.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• California Trail Interpretive Center — 0.8 mi
  A free, surprisingly ambitious BLM museum of the overland crossing — eight miles west of Elko, on the trail itself, where the California Trail met the Hastings Cutoff that doomed the Donner Party.
• Elko — 9.4 mi
  The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.
• Carlin & the Carlin Trend — 10 mi
  The small railroad town west of Elko that sits beside the largest gold complex on earth — and, because the gold is invisible, shows you almost none of it.
• Ruby Valley & Newe Sogobia — 32 mi
  The valley where the Western Shoshone signed an 1863 treaty that ceded no land — and the heart of Newe Sogobia, a homeland the Newe say was never for sale.

More markers nearby

• Carlin Canyon — 5.9 mi
• Oil From Shale — 8.4 mi
• Elko Airport — 8.5 mi
• Elko — 10 mi