The area near Wagonhound Rest Area has served western transportation since the earliest human activity in the Rocky Mountain West, providing Wyoming's earliest inhabitants, explorers, westbound settlers, and modern travelers with a viable route around Elk Mountain and the Medicine Bow Range. Numerous teepee rings nearby show that Native Americans used the area for thousands of years while living and traveling through southern Wyoming. With the westward expansion of the United States, Wagonhound became an important southern transportation corridor. During the 1850s, Captain Howard Stansbury led an expedition near the area to document and survey potential routes for the future Union Pacific Railroad, located about 30 miles north. In 1862, stagecoach operator Ben Holladay shifted his transcontinental operations from the Oregon Trail to the shorter and safer Overland Trail, which crossed Rock Creek at Arlington to the east and passed Elk Mountain through Rattlesnake Pass on the mountain's north flank. In the early twentieth century, use of the area increased with construction of the Lincoln Highway in 1913, the nation's first transcontinental automobile road. In the 1960s, surveyors for the Interstate Highway System returned to Wagonhound to route Interstate 80, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Highway. In recent years, the region has also become a favorable location for wind power generation, and travelers along I-80 can see one of the largest wind farms in the West, where more than one hundred turbine windmills generate more than 91.4 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply 23,764 homes for a year.