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Last week, it was renovations on Mormon Row in Wyoming. Now the seasonal road officially named Mormon Emigrant Trail is in the news.
The smoke from California wildfires is choking much of the United States. The plumes now stretch more than halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. Some of that smoke comes from the Caldor Fire east of Sacramento, California.
On Tuesday, the fire jumped Mormon Emigrant Trail, now a paved road with an incredible history of fueling the 1849 gold rush and the future of California.
The trail was blazed through the wilderness by members of the Mormon Battalion. In the spring of 1848 they were building John Sutter’s sawmill and mining for gold in what today is Sacramento when Brigham Young called them home. With Sutter’s Mill complete but the snow too deep for passage through the Sierra Nevada, the Latter-day Saint group carved a new, 170-mile road out of the wilderness in 30 days.
The trail became a summer thoroughfare for forty-niners rushing to the gold fields. The road was snow-free just 90 days a year because it passed through elevations as high as 9,550 feet. In fact, the paved Mormon Emigrant Trail still closes annually during the winter.
The original trail choked with traffic every year during those 90 summer days.
More than 50,000 wagons and 200,000 forty-niners used the trail from 1849-1854, traveling with tens of thousands of head of cattle, horses and sheep, according to CaliforniaPioneer.com.
Two notes from journal entries shared by the website describe the traffic:
- Some said the wagon trains stretched so long that a person could wait hours before a break wide enough to cross the trail.
- Others reported that up to 250 wagons would line up waiting to be lowered by block and tackle and rope down the steep slope called Devil’s Ladder.
One other interesting note ties the trail to Latter-day Saint history. For years, it was known as “Mormon Carson Emigrant Trail,” because it passed through (Kit) Carson Pass. Four years before the Mormon Battalion used the pass, the famous frontiersman had used it with the explorer John C. Frémont.
Frémont’s narratives and maps about that trip and one the following year each included parts of modern-day Utah which “had a profound impact” on Latter-day Saint leaders in Nauvoo, Illinois, according to a BYU Religious Studies Center article by Alexander Baugh.
Of course, the first Latter-day Saint pioneers set out for the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.
Today, people living near the paved road known as Mormon Emigrant Trail, which in some areas takes a different course than the original trail blazed by the Mormon Battalion party, are under evacuation orders due to the Caldor Fire.
My recent stories
BYU urges return to masks on campus (Aug. 16)
First Presidency urges vaccination, says vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ in battle with COVID-19 (Aug. 12)
What I’m reading
Take a virtual tour of the new Mesa Temple Visitors’ Center. Learn more about why it was designed for youth and young adults.
The Latter-day Saint who is the lead singer for the band The Killers took time during the press tour for the band’s new album to look back on a 2012 television appearance in which he defended the church and faith in God in a spontaneous debate against the atheist Richard Dawkins.
The New York Times published an article about the beard ban at BYU. Its thesis that a new Change.org petition to overturn the ban takes a novel position is inaccurate. The same argument has been made for at least half a century.
Utah is the fastest-growing and youngest state in the country, which The Associated Press attributed in part to influence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Someone just paid $6.6 million for a baseball card. Here’s a tip for sounding smart: The player on the card is Honus Wagner. Honus was an early-1900s Americanization of Johannes. So to pronounce it correctly, say it like the second half of Johannes: HAH-nuhs. Today about 60 Wagner cards remain in existence from the T206 set released between 1909-11. The old record for the sale of one of these rare cards was $3.75 million, set in May. A different Wagner card of similar quality sold in 2015 for $1.32 million.
In case you didn’t know, wealthy investors diversifying their portfolios have been pouring millions of dollars into the sports card market since the start of the pandemic, with prices raising dramatically. The Athletic (paywall) calls the market “white hot”: “Vintage and rare cards have emerged as a safe alternative asset for monied collectors and for wealthy people seeking to diversify beyond stocks, bonds, real estate, fine art and wines, and rare watches and cars.”
This fall, the NFL season will expand from 16 games to 17. That puts all single-season records in jeopardy. One writer explored the path to a quarterback throwing for 6,000 yards this year.
The girls softball team I coach just joined a league with a rule that allows batters to run to first if the catcher doesn’t catch the third strike before it hits the ground. So I looked up the 1800s origins of the rule. It’s fascinating. Here’s a piece on the history from the Society of American Baseball Research. It’s a little thick, but if you like baseball and history, you may like it.
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