A quick stop here at the crossing of the California Trail portion of the Emigrant Trail.
For people who were settling the United States during the middle part of the 1800s, there were two major wagon networks, one based typically out of Missouri and the other out of Santa Fe. Three of the Missouri based routes were collectively known as the Emigrant Trails, the Oregon, Mormon, and California Trails. Historians have estimated at least 500,000 emigrants used these three trails from 1843–1869, and despite growing competition from transcontinental railroads, some use continued into the early twentieth-century. The trip was arduous, fraught with risks from infectious diseases, dehydration, injury, malnutrition, and harsh weather, with up to one-tenth dying along the way, usually due to disease.