The Emigrant Road: Fort Laramie to South Pass
About three hundred miles of the Oregon, California and Mormon trails across Wyoming, from the fort on the North Platte up the Sweetwater to the crest of the continent.
The Route at a Glance
This is the emigrant road across Wyoming as a driver can follow it now, about three hundred miles from Fort Laramie on the North Platte to South Pass on the Continental Divide. It ran through Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting country along the river and into Eastern Shoshone country toward the pass. Casper & the Oregon Trail tells the fort, the Guernsey ruts, Register Cliff, Independence Rock and the fight at the Platte bridge; this is the road that strings them together.
From the fort, US-26 runs west past Guernsey and joins I-25 north through Glendo and Douglas to Casper, keeping near the North Platte as the trains did. At Casper the drive leaves the river on WY-220, as the trail left it here. Twenty miles out, the wagons passed between two rocky hogbacks the emigrants called Rock Avenue, and beyond them came to an alkaline mire the Mormon diarist William Clayton counted among the foulest places he had ever seen. Willow Spring, about halfway to Independence Rock, gave them the first clear, cold water since the river.
A few miles past Independence Rock the Sweetwater cuts straight through a granite ridge at Devil's Gate, a slot no wagon could use; the trail went around it. In early November 1856 the Martin handcart company, about five hundred Latter-day Saint emigrants from the British Isles who had left Iowa City at the end of July, far too late in the year, reached it in deep snow with a rescue party sent from Salt Lake. On November 4 they forded the freezing river into a sheltered cove nearby and waited there five days for wagons to carry the weakest. Between 135 and 150 of the company died before it reached the valley on November 30, about a quarter of it. Martin's Cove is a church historic site now, its visitor center the old Sun ranch house.
At Muddy Gap the drive turns northwest on US-287 and follows the Sweetwater past Jeffrey City. The river wound so tightly that in one stretch the trail forded it three times in two miles, or took a slower detour through deep sand. Some thirty miles before the climb toward the pass, at Ice Slough, emigrants cut through the turf of a boggy tributary and dug out blocks of ice in midsummer. It still drains under the highway.
About forty miles east of the pass, on Rocky Ridge, a boulder-strewn grade off the highway, the Willie handcart company, which had been a hundred miles ahead of the Martins, climbed through a blizzard on October 23, 1856, and buried fifteen of its people before moving on two days later. WY-28 leaves US-287 a few miles south of Lander and climbs to South Pass. Just over the crest, Pacific Springs gave the trains their first water bound for the Pacific, and beyond it, on open sagebrush, they chose between Fort Bridger and California to the southwest and fifty waterless miles straight west toward Fort Hall and Oregon.
Winter wind and snow can close the Sweetwater highways and South Pass. Casper has full services; between there and Lander they are few and far apart.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
7 stops along the route, in driving order from Fort Laramie, Wyoming to South Pass, Wyoming.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let The Emigrant Road: Fort Laramie to South Pass do what it does best.
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