California Trail Back Country Byway

On Wilkins-Montello Road, Elko County Route 765, about 3.7 miles east of U.S. 93, an information kiosk stands with display panels for the California Trail Back Country Byway. A California Trail Auto Tour Route sign stands a tenth of a mile farther on. The byway begins near the turnoff to Thousand Springs, which the Bureau of Land Management calls “a favorite watering hole” of the emigrants. From there it runs 96 miles alongside a portion of the California National Historic Trail. The Wells Field Office of the BLM manages it, there is no fee, and the agency says to allow three hours or more. Wagon wheel ruts left by the emigrants can still be traced along the way, along with the remains of historic structures.

The BLM rates the byway Type I. That is its class for paved or all-weather roads with grades an ordinary touring car can manage, “usually narrow, slow speed, secondary roads.” The same agency warns that many of Nevada’s back country roads “can become completely impassable when wet.” The land on either side is public, and visitors may camp in primitive sites, hike, backpack, and ride mountain bikes there.

Markers on Route 765 and Rock Springs Road

Trail markers stand along the county roads of this corner of the state. On Route 765, a California Trail – Thousand Springs Creek marker sits about 14.7 miles east of U.S. 93, and a Thousand Springs Valley marker about 21.2 miles east. Rock Springs Road, Elko County Route 763, runs north from Wilkins-Montello Road. At 11.4 miles it reaches a California Trail – Rock Springs marker in Rock Springs. At 17.2 miles there is a River and Lake Divide marker, posted beside a sign reading “Please Don’t Erase The Traces Of America’s Past.” Faint tracks of the trail cross the road at about 21.7 miles. Farther north, Goose Creek Road, Elko County Route 762, meets the old trail again about 17 miles east of Little Goose Creek, then crosses out of Nevada where Utah’s Box Elder County meets Idaho’s Cassia County.

This was the run of country the wagons came through on their way southwest. A state historical marker in Wells lists the stages: up Raft River, past the City of Rocks, across the Goose Creek Range, and down Thousand Springs Valley.

Down to the Humboldt Wells

Thousand Springs Valley led to a cluster of springs that state Marker Number 45 describes as “marshy spots and small ponds of water in the meadows.” These were the Humboldt Wells. The marker stands where Old U.S. 40 meets the Union Pacific overpass in Wells. It records that from 1845 to 1870, “hundreds of covered wagons each year rested and refitted” here before the 300-mile trek along the Humboldt Valley. Ruts of the emigrant trail can still be seen winding down to the springs on the slopes above them and to the northwest.

The Humboldt River rises near Wells. It then runs about 300 miles to the Humboldt Sink southwest of Lovelock, dropping roughly 1,675 feet on the way. Because it meanders so much, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study estimated that in one valley 130 miles long the river flows 380 miles. Its course cuts straight through Nevada’s north-south mountain ranges. For that reason it served as the main route of the California Emigrant Trail across Nevada from the early 1840s into the early 1870s.

Mary’s River, renamed

The river had many names before its present one. A National Park Service guide lists what nineteenth-century trappers and emigrants called it: the Unknown, the Swampy, the Barren, Paul’s, and Ogden’s River. It was best known as Mary’s River until 1845, when John C. Frémont renamed it for the German geographer Alexander von Humboldt. Frémont also named the surrounding region the Great Basin, a country whose streams never reach the sea. To the Shoshones and Paiutes who lived along it, the river supplied water, waterfowl, fish, food plants, and willows for baskets and dwellings. To the emigrants it was something else. “Meanest and muddiest, filthiest / Stream, most cordially I hate you,” wrote Dr. Horace Belknap in 1850. The historian Dale Morgan called it “the most necessary river of America, and the most hated.”

The first wagon party to try for California reached it in 1841. The Bidwell-Bartleson party had set out from near Independence, Missouri, in May. By mid-September, 32 men, one woman, and a child were lost near today’s Utah-Nevada line, with no provisions left. The sources place the loss of their wagons differently. The National Park Service’s overview says they abandoned them in eastern Nevada. A BLM page puts it in the desert west of the Great Salt Lake near Wendover. The Park Service’s auto tour guide gives more detail. Ben and Nancy Kelsey left their two wagons near present-day Lucin, Utah, on September 12, and the others gave up theirs four days later near Oasis, Nevada.

The guide tells what happened at Oasis. While the men made packsaddles, an old Indian man, likely Goshute, walked into camp and signed that he had dreamt of their coming. The emigrants gave him whatever they could not carry. Nicholas Dawson later wrote: “We signed to our aged host that the wagons and everything abandoned were his, all his, and left him circumscribing the heavens—the happiest, richest, most religious man I ever saw.” The packing went badly. “It was but a few minutes before the packs began to turn,” John Bidwell recalled; “horses became scared, mules kicked, oxen jumped and bellowed, and articles were scattered in all directions.” The party went over the Ruby Mountains at Harrison Pass and struck the South Fork of the river on September 24. A week later they came out about eight miles west of present-day Elko onto the main stream. Starving and nearly naked, they reached California’s Central Valley in November.

Others followed. The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party came down the Humboldt three years later, and the Donner-Reed party crossed western Nevada in 1846. The discovery of gold in January 1848 sent tens of thousands west. After 1852, traffic on the California Trail subsided. In all, the Park Service counts more than 250,000 emigrants on the trail during the 1840s and 1850s.

A water stop and a marker

The railroad ended the wagon era. The Central Pacific established a water stop called Humboldt Wells in September 1869, the year the transcontinental line was finished. The settlement took the springs’ name and shortened it to Wells in 1873. The route down the Humboldt became a major east-west rail line and, through stages of highway building, Interstate 80.

In 1995, Trails West Inc. set its marker C-29, “California Trail – Humboldt Wells Route,” near Wells Avenue and Eighth Street, about 1.6 miles from the state marker. It carries one line from an emigrant, Byron McKinstry, dated August 10, 1850: “We had to descend a bad hill to get down to the creek, where we nooned near some well springs.”