A Route for the Overland Stage

Utah State University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................viForeword............................................................vii1 Introduction......................................................12 The Journey Begins: Camp Floyd to Faust Creek.....................83 Faust Creek to Pleasant Valley....................................184 Pleasant Valley to Roberts Creek..................................385 Roberts Creek to Middlegate.......................................646 Middlegate to Genoa...............................................937 Genoa to Smith Creek Valley.......................................1208 Smith Creek Valley to Steptoe Valley..............................1429 Steptoe Valley to Swasey Mountain.................................16410 Swasey Mountain to Triple Peaks..................................18711 Triple Peaks to Camp Floyd.......................................19812 After the Return.................................................217Appendix: Geographic Coordinates....................................224Notes...............................................................231Bibliography........................................................237Index...............................................................240

Chapter One

DURING THE SUMMER of 1859, Captain James Simpson of the US Army's Corps of Topographical Engineers led an expedition of exploration from Camp Floyd to Genoa. Camp Floyd was an army post in Cedar Valley, about forty miles southwest of Great Salt Lake City. Genoa was a small settlement located at the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The mission of the expedition was to find a practical route for wagons through the central part of Utah and Nevada. If such a route could be found, it was believed that it would shorten the distance between Salt Lake City and California by as much as two hundred miles. The members of the Simpson expedition were not the first to travel through this region of the American West. During the preceding three decades, a number of fur trappers, explorers, and emigrants had made their way across some sections of this area. Jedediah Smith, Joseph R. Walker, John Charles Frmont and Kit Carson, the Bidwell-Bartleson party, Lansford Hastings and James Clyman, the Donner-Reed party, Capt. E. G. Beckwith, O. B. Huntington, George Washington Bean, Orrin Porter Rockwell, and Howard Egan had all traveled through different sections of this territory. These travelers had cut across various portions of the region, traveling in various directions, but none of them had taken the shortest possible route from east-to-west or west-to-east, and it appears that Lansford Hastings was the only one who had taken any meaningful action toward the establishment of a wagon road through this central region.

Before the Simpson expedition, most of the travelers who intended to make the journey from Salt Lake City to California followed a route that went around the northern end of the Great Salt Lake and joined the California Trail near City of Rocks, near the Utah-Idaho border. A smaller number of California-bound travelers headed south by way of the Mormon Corridor, now the route of Interstate 15, and got onto the Old Spanish Trail near present-day Cedar City. It is true that the relatively few travelers who followed the Hastings Road did take a more central route, but about a quarter of the way across present-day Nevada, near the southern tip of the Ruby Mountains, this road turned to the north along Huntington Creek and the South Fork of the Humboldt River, and joined the California Trail not far from the city of Elko. None of these wagon routes traveled through the area that the Simpson expedition intended to explore.

It had always been apparent that a road through this central area could save many miles and perhaps a great deal of time, but until this time, no one had attempted to take wagons across the entire distance. In 1854, Col. Edward Steptoe of the US Army had given it some serious consideration. Steptoe was in the Salt Lake City area with a force of about three hundred soldiers, and wanted to find the best way to get them to California. In an effort to locate a new and shorter route, he engaged two different groups of men to make scouting trips into the desert. Oliver B. Huntington was in charge of the first group, which included himself, his nephew, an Indian named Natsab, John Reese (whose home at the time was in Carson Valley and who would later become Simpson's guide), and two of Reese's friends. Somewhere between Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake they were joined by eleven soldiers who had recently deserted from Steptoe's command. Huntington's party traveled all the way to Carson Valley, most of the time following a trail that had been made earlier that year by Captain E. G. Beckwith of the army's Topographical Corps, who was engaged in a railroad survey. When Huntington and his nephew returned to Salt Lake City, they reported to Steptoe, telling him they had found a practical route that would save about two hundred miles, and they would be willing to act as guides. However, when the time came to leave for California, Huntington became evasive and Steptoe decided he was not to be trusted. After Steptoe became convinced that he could not depend on Huntington's help, he obtained the services of a second group, the leader of which was Orrin Porter Rockwell. Another member of this group was George Washington Bean, who later acted as Capt. Simpson's guide during a relatively short trip into Utah's West Desert in late 1858. The Rockwell-Bean group traveled about eighty miles into the desert and when they returned, they told Steptoe that the country was not fit for wagon travel. At this, Steptoe gave up on any further attempts to find a central route and marched his troops to California by way of the north-of-the-lake and Humboldt River route.

In 1855, a noted Mormon explorer named Howard Egan, and a few companions mounted on mules, made a speedy trip across this central area. Leaving from Salt Lake City, they made it to Sacramento in ten days. But like the Huntington party, they followed the Beckwith Trail to the Humboldt River near Lassen Meadows, then followed the California Trail to Sacramento. Captain Simpson first became involved in the concept of a central route in the fall of 1858, when he received orders from his commanding officer, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, to lead an expedition of a few days' duration into Utah's western desert. As a result of this short trip, Simpson became interested in further exploration of this area, and in January 1859, he submitted a proposal to the War Department, requesting permission to make a much more extensive expedition. Johnston endorsed this proposal and forwarded it up the chain of command. In April, orders came down from army headquarters, assigning Simpson to lead an expedition that would travel from Camp Floyd to Genoa. The expedition would turn around when it reached Genoa, because of the existence of serviceable roads between there and San Francisco.

Throughout the expedition that followed, Simpson kept a daily journal, and from this he compiled an extensive report to Congress. The title of this document was Report of Explorations across the Great Basin of the Territory of Utah for a Direct Wagon Route from...