The Overland Route to the Road of a Thousand Wonders / The Route of the Union Pacific & The Southern Pacific Railroads from Omaha to San Francisco, a Journey of Eighteen Hundred Miles Where Once the Bison & the Indian Reigned

by Union Pacific Railroad Company. Passenger Department; Southern Pacific Company. Passenger Department

DEFENDING THE WORK TRAIN. THERE WAS AN INDIAN ARROW SHOT FOR EVERY SPIKE DRIVEN IN THE IRON TRAIL OF THE OVERLAND ROUTE. ENCOUNTERS WERE NUMEROUS AND OFTEN FATAL.

THE OVERLAND ROUTE

THE BUFFALO—CORONADO’S HUMP BACKED OXEN—PASSED WHEN THE WAGON TRAIL GAVE WAY TO THE RAILROAD

The memory of the Overland Trail will not soon pass away. Traces of it are left here and there in the West, but the winds and rain and the erosion of civilization have nearly rubbed it out. Yet in its time it was the greatest wagon way. All in all, from the Council Bluffs crossing of the Missouri to the Golden Gate of the Pacific, it was two thousand miles long.

Vague are legend and story, prior to the nineteenth century, of the country it was to traverse. One legend indicates that Coronado visited the land of the “humpbacked oxen” in the sixteenth century; a tale of like uncertainty credits Baron La Honton with a visit to Great Salt Lake in the century following. The Franciscan friars, Escalante and Dominguez, saw Utah Lake in 1776, and carried home strange stories of a sea of salt farther north.

The Lewis and Clark expedition to the mouth of the Columbia, starting from St. Louis in 1804, is the beginning of the history of the Overland Trail. Soon after came the Astor party, which in 1811 founded Astoria. Thirteen years later, a most adventurous spirit, a daring hunter and pioneer, Jim Bridger, began his picturesque career in the West. Caring for no neighbors in the wilderness, at home in the high mountains, on the treeless plains or in the desert, this fearless and intelligent man sent out much accurate information and guided the Mormon “First Company” to its future home.

In 1843 the Pathfinder, General John C. Fremont, began to spy out the military ways across the West, and the same year the Oregon pioneers took the first wagons westward to the Pacific.