The Applegate Trail

After Jesse and Lindsay Applegate, members of the first wave of Oregon Trail emigrants, watched their ten-year-old sons drown in the Columbia River when a boat overturned in the rapids near The Dalles in 1843, they vowed, once their families were settled, to find a route into the Willamette Valley that avoided the river. In June 1846, Jesse and Lindsay Applegate and thirteen other men set out to explore a new route blazed from west to east that intersected the California Trail at the Humboldt River in Nevada. Historically linked to the Oregon Trail as an alternate route into Oregon, the new path provided a passageway not under British control and avoided the obstacles and dangers of Burnt River Canyon, the Blue Mountains, and the Snake and Columbia Rivers. On October 19, 1846, emigrants on the Applegate Trail coming from the East camped in this general area and buried Martha Leland Crowley, who had died of typhoid fever, near Grave Creek.

Oregon · United States