In 1846, Jesse Applegate and fourteen others from near Dallas, Oregon, established a trail running south from the Willamette Valley and east to Fort Hall, giving emigrants an alternative to the perilous final stretch of the Oregon Trail down the Columbia River. The first emigrants to follow this “Southern Road” left Fort Hall in early August 1846 with the trailblazers; Levi Scott guided them while Jesse Applegate went ahead to mark the route, and they cut a wagon trail through nearly 500 miles of wilderness before reaching the upper Willamette Valley in November. In later years, travel along the Applegate Trail continued and contributed greatly to settlement in southern Oregon and the Willamette Valley. Native Americans and fur trappers had traveled through this region long before emigrant settlers. Between 1846 and 1853, Applegate Trail emigrants passed nearby along a route that followed Coyote Creek for a mile and then crossed a divide to upper Wolf Creek. In 1853, Major Benjamin Alvord and Jesse Applegate surveyed a military road from Myrtle Creek in Douglas County through the site of present-day Wolf Creek and on to Camp Stuart in Jackson County, and construction began at once, with a wagon road soon replacing the Applegate Trail in this area. On June 19, 1844, fur trapper James Clyman recorded traveling down a handsome brook later known as Wolf Creek, crossing it, climbing a steep rugged brushy mountain ridge with snow drifts still visible near its summit just south of the trail, descending, crossing a small brook later known as Coyote Creek, ascending another mountain made very difficult by logs and undergrowth, then partly descending into a small cove and mounting a third high ridge above a small valley of handsome prairie on Grave Creek where his party camped.