The Mormon-Carson Pass Emigrant Trail, a heavily traveled gateway to California gold fields, was blazed in 1848 by discharged members of the Mormon Battalion traveling east to join their families. Five hundred Mormon volunteers recruited in Iowa served one year in the Army of the West under the command of Col. P. St. George Cooke during the war with Mexico. After their discharge in Los Angeles in July 1847, about 100 men worked in the Sacramento area for John Sutter over the winter to obtain needed supplies. When that work was completed, 45 men and one woman, the wife of Sgt. William Coray, turned away from the newly discovered gold fields and headed east for Great Salt Lake Valley. With 17 wagons, 2 cannons, 150 horses and mules, and 150 cattle, the organized party left Pleasant Valley on July 3, 1848, following the drainage divide between the American River and streams to the south. On July 19 they found the common grave of three murdered comrades at a place they named Tragedy Spring, half a mile west of here. Following the ridge south of Silver Lake and Squaw Ridge to the east, they crossed West Pass at the foot of Melissa Coray Peak, 9763 feet high, on July 24. From West Pass, 9550 feet, the 1848 route drops abruptly northward to Caples Lake, then eastward to Carson Pass, 8550 feet. In 40 days, the party blazed 170 miles of wagon road across trackless terrain before joining the established California emigrant trail and heading east along the Humboldt River. Beginning in August 1848, thousands of westbound travelers followed these Battalion tracks on their crossing of the Sierra Nevada. Melissa Coray, an 18-year-old bride, walked beside her husband to California, and the naming of Melissa Coray Peak honors both her party's pioneering efforts and the thousands of emigrant women who endured similar hardships in settling the West.