Death Valley '49ers - The Start

The Start

One of the supply points along the trail was Salt Lake City, where pioneers prepared for the long journey across the Great Basin desert before climbing over the High Sierra Mountains to the gold fields of California. It was important to leave Salt Lake City and cross the desert before snow began to fall on the Sierra Mountains, making them impassable.

Only a couple of years before, a group of pioneers called the Donner Party left late out of the Salt Lake area and was trapped by a storm, an event that became one of the greatest human disasters of that day and age. The stories of the Donner Party were still fresh on everyone's mind when a group of wagons arrived at Salt Lake City in October 1849. This was much too late to try to cross the mountains safely and the appeared the group would have to wait out the winter in Salt Lake City. Hearing about the Old Spanish Trail, a route that went around the south end of the Sierras and was safe to travel in the winter but which no pioneer wagon trains had ever tried to follow it, they found a guide who knew the route and would agree to lead them. These individuals would become part of a story of human suffering in a place which they named Death Valley.

The first two weeks of travel on the Old Spanish Trail were easy, but the going was slower than most of the travelers wanted. The leader of the group, Captain Jefferson Hunt, would only go as fast as the slowest wagon in the group. Just as the people were about to voice their dissent, a young man rode into camp and showed some of the people a map made by John Fremont on one of his exploratory trips through the area.