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 to take this new Southern Road left Fort Hall in early August 1846 with the trailblazers; Levi Scott guided them while Jesse Applegate traveled ahead marking the route, and they blazed a wagon trail through nearly 500 miles of wilderness before reaching the upper Willamette Valley in November. Travel along 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, the trail split into two routes: the eastern route, established in 1846 by Jesse Applegate, Levi Scott, Moses Black Harris, and twelve others from Polk County, passed through Cottage Grove, Creswell, Eugene, and Junction City and is approximated today by River Road and Highway 99; the western route, an ancient Kalapuya Indian trace and a Hudson’s Bay Company trapper’s trail until the 1840s, became the most widely used alternate route, also known as the California Trail, and became a wagon road in the late 1840s, closely followed today by Territorial Road. Overland emigrants on this trail undertook a journey of six months or more and depended on campsites that provided firewood, water, and feed for livestock. At Long Tom, emigrants had to ferry their wagons across using two small Indian canoes with a pine log fastened between them, unloading wagon contents onto the frail craft and repeating the process until all had crossed. In Tolbert Carter’s recollection of 1846, while he was still a boy driving a widow woman’s team, she became sick the night before the crossing and gave birth to a baby girl; after others crossed, he remained with the mother and child, then later helped carry their bed across by its four corners to a prepared tent, and both survived, unlike another woman and child of the Crowley family who had died the night before under similar circumstances.