About 1865, Mormon settlers of Bear Lake Valley followed a Native American Indian trail over Beaver Divide to haul salt from the salt springs on Crow Creek. In 1868, Apostle Charles C Rich of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent Edward Homer and company to explore a possible wagon route down Crow Creek to the Salt River. Encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862 and Homer’s favorable report, settlement and freight traffic expanded. In July 1879, William Henry Harrison Heap led the first wagon train of 14 wagons and livestock over Beaver Divide and down lower Crow Creek to the Salt River Valley. His party of 27 men, women, and children then traveled north to Tin Cup Creek below the Cariboo Mountain Mining District and established the first settlement in what was later called Star Valley, Wyoming. By November, Heap’s company had made three additional supply trips to Montpelier, Idaho, but when the last wagons became stuck in the mud of Beaver Canyon two miles south, the freighters continued to Tin Cup without their winter food. Before spring, Albert Rolph, Jay Rolph, John Hill, and William Heap snowshoed 75 miles to Beaver Canyon and back with flour from the stranded wagons, helping save the starving settlement. Over the next 50 years, the Crow Creek Freight Road was improved largely by the freighters and businesses that depended on it, and the prosperity of Bear Lake Valley and Star Valley relied on this route across the divide. Travel there was steep and hazardous, with winter snow as deep as six feet on the summit, spring snowpack turning into a three-foot-high rail of ice, mud in Beaver Canyon, and alternate passage over Hogs Back and the Devils Dive sometimes used to avoid the worst conditions.