The Oregon Trail crossed LaPrele Creek about one mile downstream from Natural Bridge, but before a modern road entered the gorge, the bridge was difficult to reach and only rarely visited by covered wagon emigrants. Native Americans were probably well aware of it, but the earliest recorded visits came from New Orleans newspaperman Matthew Field and Baltimore doctor Steadman Tighman, traveling with Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart on his final western trip in 1843. On July 12, Field wrote of riding ahead with Stewart to a remarkable mountain gorge where a natural bridge of solid rock spanned a rapid torrent, with an arch 30 feet from base to ceiling and 50 feet to the top, while cliffs 300 feet high rose around them and they made a dangerous descent through heavy brush and the streambed below. Tighman called the Natural Bridge one of the greatest curiosities of their expedition, at the end of a valley formed by an immense chasm with rocky slides and a perpendicular height of 300 feet through which a clear stream flowed. In 1846, James Frazier Reed of the Donner Party noted in his diary that there was a natural bridge 1 1/2 miles above camp. During the California Gold Rush, some Forty-niners also visited it. In a July 4, 1849 letter from Deer Creek, Cephas Arms of the Fayette Rovers described a perfect arch of solid stone one hundred feet long and eighteen feet high over the river where they had camped, with perpendicular rocks rising one hundred and fifty feet on either side and a gorge cutting through a mountain three or four hundred feet above the plain; he wrote that the party named it Welch's Bridge for Adonijah S. Welch of Jonesville, Michigan, who later became the first president of Iowa State University. On June 26, 1850, Isaac R. Starr wrote that near the high cliffs an arch of solid stone spanned the river, and that he rode beneath it and viewed with delight the grand works of nature.