The Applegate Trail

In 1846, Jesse Applegate and fourteen others from near Dallas, Oregon, established a trail south from the Willamette Valley and east to Fort Hall as an alternative to the perilous last leg of the Oregon Trail down the Columbia River and as a potential escape route free from 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 in early August 1846 with the trailblazers, and with Levi Scott guiding while Jesse Applegate traveled 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. After months of weary travel, emigrants crossed the Klamath River near this site with the Siskiyou Mountains ahead at a rocky, deep ford with a swift current that Tolbert Carter, an emigrant of 1846, called one of the worst crossings that wagons ever made, and George Riddle later recalled riding across on the back of his big near ox, Bill, because the current might catch the light wagon and turn it over.

Oregon · United States