The Oregon Trail is still clearly visible coming off the rimrock across the river. After 1840, westbound emigrants came gratefully down into this green valley. The first cart passed here with Spalding and Whitman, pioneer missionaries, in 1836. By the middle 1840's, thousands of emigrant wagons had cut a broad track that later became the Overland Road. Travel declined when the railroad was completed in 1884, but the tracks of wagons and stages can still be followed for miles east in the desert.