During the great westward expansion of the mid-Nineteenth Century, many hundreds of Overland Trail emigrants died while crossing the continent and were buried in unmarked graves beside the trails, but Nancy Ann Allen's grave is one of the very few marked at the time of death on local stone and still known today. Her gravestone reads, "Nancy Ann Allen Age 25 years Died Sept. 27, 1857." No further biographical information about her has been found, although on June 23, 1865, Major Gorham Kimball, while driving sheep from California to Idaho, recorded in his journal that he found the grave of Mrs. Nancy Allen and identified her as a poor emigrant woman on her way to California. The grave was marked and fenced with iron pipe fencing in 1924, with a plate reading, "Restored by 'Women’s Study Club' of Westwood 1924," and in September 2000 the California/Nevada Chapter of the Oregon-California Trails Associations, with permission from the Fruit Growers Supply Company of Burney, California, replaced the deteriorated and vandalized pipe fencing with a wooden fence. The site stands along Nobles' Trail, an emigrant route opened in 1852 into Shasta City and the northern Sacramento Valley after William Nobles contracted with Shasta City merchants to guide representatives over the new road for $2000 if they were satisfied with it upon reaching the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountain. After receiving his fee and their thanks, Nobles continued east and helped establish the Honey Lake, South Pass, Fort Kearny Military Road, whose Honey-Lake-to-Humboldt-River section was the Nobles Trail. The route branched from the earlier Applegate-Lassen Trail in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and ran by way of Smoke Creek, Rush Creek, Honey Lake Valley Ridge (Susanville), Bridge Creek, Bogard Station, and Poison Lake, then turned west and south up Butte Creek to enter Lassen National Park at Butte Lake before turning west again to pass north of Cindercone and Mt. Lassen to Deer Flat, Shingletown, Fort Reading, and Shasta City. Later branches extended to Oroville via Lake Almanor and to Inskip via Fort Crook and the Old Military Road east of Mt. Shasta, and the route was heavily used in the 1850's and 1860's, especially for bringing large herds of stock into California.