Several years after the pioneer trail was built, sheep camps were established on two of the lush meadows through which it passed. They were known as Westfall’s and Ostrander’s. The rough shelters existing here were frequently used by tired travelers who preferred to make an overnight stop on the trail rather than exhaust themselves in completing the saddle trip to the valley in one day. Usually, however, Westfall’s or Ostrander’s were convenient lunch stops for the saddle parties.
In 1869, Charles Peregoy built a hotel, “The Mountain View House,” at what had been known as Westfall Meadow and with the help of his wife operated a much-praised hospice every summer until 1875, when the coming of the stage road between Wawona and Yosemite Valley did away with the greater part of the travel on the trail.
The Mann Brothers’ Trail, which was some fifty miles in length, was purchased by Mariposa County and made available to public use without charge before construction of the stage road from Mariposa had been completed.
In 1856, the year that witnessed the completion of the Mariposa-Yosemite Valley Trail, L. H. Bunnell, George W. Coulter, and others united in the construction of the “Coulterville Free Trail.” Very little, if any, of this route followed existing Indian trails. The Coulterville Trail started at Bull Creek, to which point a wagon road already had been constructed, and passed through Deer Flat, Hazel Green, Crane Flat, and Tamarack Flat to the point now known as Gentry, and thence to the valley. Its total length was forty-eight miles, of which seventeen miles could be traveled in a carriage.
A second pioneer horse trail on the north side of the Merced began at the village of Big Oak Flat, six miles north of Coulterville, and followed a route north of the Coulterville Free Trail through Garrote to Harden’s Ranch on the South Fork of the Tuolumne River, thence to its junction with the Coulterville Trail between Crane Flat and Tamarack Flat.
Sections of all of these early routes passed over high terrain where deep snow persisted well into the spring. Early fall snow storms in these vicinities sometimes contributed to the hazards of travel. The trails found use during a relatively short season. The Merced Canyon offered opportunity to establish a route at lower elevation, but the difficulties of construction in the narrow gorge deterred all would-be builders until a short time prior to the wagon-road era. The Hite’s Cove route, which came into use in the early ’seventies, partly answered the need for a snow-free canyon trail. Hite’s Cove, where the John Hite Mine was located in 1861, is on the South Fork of the Merced some distance above its confluence with the Merced River. A wagon road eighteen miles in length made it accessible from Mariposa. Tourists using this route stopped overnight in Hite’s Cove and then traveled twenty miles in the saddle up the Merced Canyon to the valley.
Another means of reaching the valley on horseback via the Merced Canyon was developed soon after wagon roads had been built. Some Yosemite visitors, perhaps because of the poor condition of the roads at certain seasons, elected to leave the Coulterville stage route at Dudley’s, from where they went to Jenkins Hill on the rim of the steep walls of the Merced gorge. Here a horse trail enabled them to descend to the bottom of the canyon, thence up the Merced to the valley. This thirty-mile saddle trip involved an overnight stop at Hennesey’s, situated a short distance below the present El Portal.
Travel in the saddle, of course, was regarded by the California pioneer with few qualms. Likewise, the conveyance of freight on the backs of mules was looked upon as commonplace, and the success attained by those early packers is, in this day and age, wonderful to contemplate. In Hutchings’ California Magazine for December, 1859, appears a most interesting essay on the business of packing as then practiced among the mountaineers of the gold camps.
Pack animals and packers have not yet passed from the Yosemite scene, for much of the back country is, and always will be, we hope, accessible by trail only. Government trail gangs are dependent for weeks at a time upon the supplies brought to them upon the backs of mules. Likewise, those who avail themselves of High Sierra Camp facilities are served by pack trains. Present-day packing differs in no essential way from the mode of the ’fifties, except that it is often done by Indians instead of the old-time Mexican mulatero.
What one visitor of the pre-wagon days thought of the saddle trip into Yosemite Valley may be gathered from J. H. Beadle in his Undeveloped West. Beadle visited the Sierra in 1871 and approached the valley from the north.