The region comprising Bear Lake County has long been an important juncture for overland travel. From the 1800s onward, migrants on the Oregon and California trails traversed the area, relying on knowledge garnered by Native Americans, early explorers, and mountain men. Later, railroad systems largely followed these routes, then highways for automobile travel. The modern railroad, and US-30 to an even greater extent, closely follow the old emigrant trails. This westward route brought travelers through the mountains from Wyoming into the Bear Lake Valley, then northward toward Soda Springs and eventually to Fort Hall and the Snake River Plain. From the 1840s, the route was primarily an emigrant trail, with stage and freight traffic increasing over subsequent decades. After 1884, the availability of railroads to carry cargo along most of the route shifted the trails back to being used primarily by emigrants rather than supply caravans. Although the trails generally followed rivers when possible, they mostly avoided the marshes in the central valley, which later proved to be obstinate natural barriers to settlement of the valley itself. During nineteenth-century U.S. westward expansion, numerous trails were established, and the Mormon Trail followed the same general path as the eastern half of the Oregon and California trails before diverging toward Utah at Fort Bridger in Wyoming. In later transportation history, a Pegram truss railroad bridge stood near Georgetown from around 1894 to 1913 before being moved to Idaho, where it is now a national historic site visible from SH-36. In the modern highway era, US-30 became known as the Old Oregon Trail highway, US-89 was often called the National Park highway, and SH-36 passed through Emigration Canyon along the path of early settlers into the Bear Lake region.