Between 1841 and 1869, up to 250,000 emigrants followed the California Trail along the Humboldt River to California. In 1846, the Donner Party traveled this trail, and teamster John Snyder was killed in a dispute with wagon master James Reed east of Winnemucca. Reed was banished from the wagon train, but he and his companion crossed the Sierra and led several rescue efforts for surviving family members and others stranded at Donner Lake. The Applegate Trail was established in 1846, turning off the main California Trail at present-day Rye Patch Reservoir and heading west across the Black Rock Desert toward Oregon and California. The Nobles Route split from the Applegate Trail in 1852 and was later amended in 1854. Emigrants usually left Missouri River towns in late April or early May and reached the Humboldt River in the blazing heat of mid-July and August, often low on provisions, with weary and undernourished animals and river grass already grazed out by earlier traffic. Many animals perished, their corpses littering the trail and decomposing in the river, and emigrants were often forced to abandon wagons, discard belongings, and carry only bare necessities on their backs or animals. Emigrants complained in their diaries about the Humboldt River, which differed greatly from the productive river Native Americans had known before the arrival of Euro-Americans. East of present-day Winnemucca, emigrants found vast grasslands called The Island and camped at Upper Meadows, where whiskey, ginger beer, and beef were traded as early as 1852. By 1863, a small settlement called Frenchman's Ford stood near the confluence of the Humboldt and Little Humboldt Rivers, and emigrants forded the river there and elsewhere in the area to reach better grass. In the 1860s, the California Trail and its related routes and cutoffs also carried freight to regional mines, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 ended most cross-country use of the trail, though parts of it continued as wagon roads.