In 1846, Jesse Applegate and fourteen others from near Dallas, Oregon, established a trail running south from the Willamette Valley and east to Fort Hall, giving emigrants an alternative to the perilous final stretch of the Oregon Trail down the treacherous Columbia River and offering a possible route beyond Hudson’s Bay Company control if Britain and the United States went to war over Oregon. The first emigrants to take the new South Road left Fort Hall with the trailblazers in early August 1846, and with Levi Scott guiding while Jesse Applegate went ahead to mark the route, they cut a wagon trail through nearly 500 miles of wilderness and reached the upper Willamette Valley in November. Travel along the Applegate Trail continued in later years and contributed greatly to the settlement of southern Oregon and the Willamette Valley. In August 1855, Lt. Henry L. Abbot recorded a river about eighty feet wide and very deep, crossed by two parallel natural bridges of conglomerate sandstone ten to fifteen feet wide and about thirty-three feet apart, with water flowing over both and emigrants using them to cross with loaded wagons where no nearby ford existed.