In 1857, Congress funded construction of the Fort Kearney-South Pass-Honey Lakes Wagon Road, later known as the Lander Road, as the government's first road-building effort to encourage western emigration and advance Manifest Destiny. During the summer of 1857, Frederick W. Lander's engineering team surveyed 3,000 miles of possible routes in 90 days and chose a more northerly line with ample grass, water, and timber and fewer stream crossings than the existing Oregon and California trails. Laborers, engineers, and surveyors built nearly 230 miles the next summer, and the road was completed in 1859. As many as 13,000 emigrants used it that year. Born in 1822, Lander became a respected engineer by his early thirties and oversaw construction of this section of the Pacific Wagon Road; Mount Lander and the town of Lander, Wyoming, bear his name. Travel on the road demanded careful planning and endurance as emigrants carried their possessions for weeks over dusty roads, across rivers, through storms and sickness, and amid the deaths of loved ones, while forming mobile societies that continued daily life despite hardship. Accounts from travelers recalled choking dust, dangerous river crossings, and the route's valued supplies of water and grass. Beneath the route lay a natural gas field later identified in the Pinedale Anticline, where the first well was drilled in 1939 and fuller development began in the 1990s. Because energy development affected the historic setting, the New Fork River Crossing Historical Park was created in August 2010 as mitigation, with funding from Shell, Ultra Resources, and PacifiCorp, and it is now managed by the Sublette County Historical Society.