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. The first emigrants left Fort Hall with the trailblazers in early August 1846, and with Levi Scott guiding while Jesse Applegate rode 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 on the Applegate Trail continued in later years and contributed greatly to the settlement of southern Oregon and the Willamette Valley. In the northern Umpqua Valley and in Lane County, the trail developed into eastern and western routes: the eastern route, established in 1846 by Jesse Applegate, Levi Scott, Moses “Black” Harris, Cornelius Gilliam, and others from Polk County, carried the first emigrants through what are now Cottage Grove, Creswell, Eugene, and Junction City after the explorers left the old trappers’ trail and found a new route across the Calapooya Mountains into the Umpqua Watershed; the western route, an ancient Kalapuya Indian trace and Hudson’s Bay Company trappers’ trail that followed the Long Tom River, became the most widely used and preferred route and was also known as the California Trail.

Eugene, Oregon · United States