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Show 21 to use the overland trail to California. They followed closely the steps of the Walker party, except they used Sonora Pass to cross the Sierra Nevada Range. Over the next few years, the route was refined somewhat. The most notable variation was the use of Dormer Pass beginning with the Murphy company in 1844. Lansford W. Hastings published his Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California in 1845 which attempted to divert the California traffic south of the Great Salt Lake and rejoin the Humboldt River trail further west in present eastern Nevada. Hastings was partially successful in this endeavor. The gold-seekers of a few years later would use both trails. The other prominent corridor to California through the Great Basin was the Old Spanish Trail which led down the western slopes of the Wasatch and across the Mojave to southern California. The groundwork for this trail had been laid by Escalante, Garces, and Jedediah Smith, but the route was not traveled in its entirety until the William Wolfskill-George C. Yount expedition in the winter of 1830-31. Although the trail went through a long metamorphasis through many years, it was basically a trail leading from Santa Fe to Los Angeles-the same that the Dominguez-Escalante expedition had failed to accomplish in 1776. The eastern segment was pioneered by Escalante and the traders who followed. The Arze-Garcia party of 1813 shortened the route considerably between the Green and Sevier Rivers. Jedediah Smith forged the trail from Utah Lake to the Virgin River, and Fransisco Garces did the groundwork in the difficult Mojave region. In 1830 a party of traders from Santa Fe under the command of Antonia Annijo found a direct route across the Mojave from the Virgin River greatly shortening Smith's trail which went by way of the Needles. The Spanish Trail becage the highway for the lucrative Santa Fe trade and the Indian slave trade which was replacing the fur trade in importance during the 1830s and 40s. By 1849 the trail was shaping up as |
