The old wagon road between Utah and Montana passed near this area and was first used in the 1840s and 1850s as a route from Mormon settlements in Utah to the Deer Lodge Valley and Saint Mary's Mission in the Bitterroot Valley. After gold was discovered on Grasshopper Creek in 1862 and Alder Gulch in 1863, it became the main supply and passenger route to southwestern Montana until the Utah and Northern Railroad reached Butte in 1881. Most supplies for the Montana gold camps came by freight wagons pulled by oxen, with three linked wagons in a set carrying as much as nine tons and drawn by up to 24 oxen. Teamsters known as bullwhackers, remembered as rough men skilled with bullwhips and profanity, drove the teams along a road marked by bad water, bad food, bad weather, lice, and occasional road agents. Oxen traveled about 10 to 15 miles a day, and a round trip to Virginia City took about three months, while mules or horses pulled smaller wagons when perishable goods had to arrive more quickly. By the early 1860s, stagecoaches also regularly carried passengers between southwestern Montana and Utah, making the trip in three days and nights with stops at stations along the road. Lima became Montana's first railroad town when it was established as a division point on the Utah and Northern Railroad in 1880, with a depot, roundhouse, machine shop, hotels, restaurants, stores, saloons, and two churches. In 1889 the Utah and Northern and Oregon Short Line railroads merged, the Union Pacific absorbed the railroad in 1935, and Lima later also held an important place on U.S. Highway 91 in the twentieth century as motels and service stations joined older railroad-era businesses.