Thousands of Oregon Trail emigrants passed this way toward new lives in what Abigail Scot, an emigrant of 1852, called the "Garden of the World." The Willamette Valley was nearly 2,000 miles from Missouri, and after more than 1,800 miles of travel emigrants reached the last major obstacle on the river route to the Oregon Trail, the great Columbia River Cascades. In the 1840's, families reaching The Dalles often separated: women, children, and disassembled wagons boarded rafts and, with help from local Indians, floated down the river, while men and boys drove livestock along the banks. Those traveling by water had to portage around the dangerous cascades across the river from this site. By the 1850's, this portage had been improved by what Lydia Rudd, an emigrant of 1852, called "an excuse here of a railroad," though it was at first little more than a mule-pulled car on a rough plank road. Elizabeth Dixon Smith's account of November 18, 1847, tells of carrying her baby and another child through snow, mud, and water nearly to her knees over 5 miles around the falls, while wagons struggled, oxen were unharnessed to carry exhausted children, and the family reached camp after dark cold, numb, soaked, and exhausted.