Used for centuries by Shasta and other Native people, Siskiyou Pass is a low gap between the Rogue and Klamath watersheds that Peter Skene Ogden crossed on February 9, 1827, led by Shasta guides and accompanied by a mounted Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trapping party and their Native wives. After exploring southwestern Oregon, Ogden returned to the pass in April and continued south to the Klamath and east in search of beaver. Operating from Hudson’s Bay Company’s Ft. Vancouver in the 1820s, he led trapping brigades through southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, Utah, northern Nevada, and perhaps as far as the Gulf of California. Alexander Roderick McLoud led the second Hudson’s Bay Company trapping party across the pass in 1829, and his trappers gave it the name Siskiyou, from a Native word for a bob-tailed horse, after one of their horses died nearby in a winter storm. In 1837, retired American trapper Ewing Young drove hundreds of Mexican cattle north over the pass to Willamette Valley settlements. Although Ogden’s party was welcomed peacefully, later travelers bred distrust that led to unprovoked killings and atrocities by both Native and non-Native people, and by 1850 the route had become a wagon trail used by miners and settlers whose influx prompted Native resistance to defend their land. An attack on flour wagons bound for Yreka-area miners in 1855 helped lead to the final Rogue River War of 1855-56, ending in the forced removal of surviving Shasta, Takelma, and other Native people to distant reservations; less than thirty years after Ogden’s arrival, most Native people of the Rogue River Valley were gone. By 1860 regular stagecoach service between Sacramento and Portland crossed the pass, telegraph lines followed in 1863, and Tunnel 13, completed in December 1887 by Chinese workmen digging from both sides, formed the nearly mile-long final link in the Oregon-California railroad and in a rail system encircling the nation. Still in use, Tunnel 13 was also the site of the 1923 Siskiyou Massacre, when the three DeAutremont brothers tried to rob Southern Pacific’s Train No. 13, destroyed the mail car with excessive dynamite, killed a clerk and three trainmen, escaped without loot, and after eluding a massive manhunt were found in 1927 and sentenced to life in the Oregon penitentiary. Later, the paved Pacific Highway carried automobiles and trucks over the pass by World War I, and Interstate 5, built during the 1960s, made this 4,310-foot crossing the highest pass on the route between Mexico and Canada.