South Pass

South Pass was the key to the entire overland emigration. The easy grade of this pass through the Rocky Mountains and across the Continental Divide opened the West for settlement.

While the pass had certainly been used by Indians, the first known usage by white men occurred in 1812 when Robert Stuart and six companions crossed the mountains here on their return to the East from Astoria. In 1832, Captain Benjamin Bonneville and a caravan of 110 men and 20 wagons became the first group to take wagons over the pass.

Then, on July 3, 1836, missionary Marcus Whitman crossed over the pass with his wife, Narcissa, and their missionary companions, Henry Spalding and his wife, Eliza Hart Spalding. Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Hart Spalding thus became the first white women to cross the Continental Divide at South Pass. The next day, on July 4, 1836, the group stopped near Pacific Springs, kneeled down, and with Bible and the American flag in hand, claimed the Pacific coast for their native country. Henry Spalding recorded: "The moral and physical scene was grand and thrilling. Hope and joy beamed on the face of my dear wife, though pains racked her frame. She seemed to receive new strength. 'Is it reality or a dream,' she exclaimed, 'that after four months of hard and painful journeyings I am alive, and actually standing on the summit of the Rocky Mountains, where yet the foot of white woman has never trod?' "

Many of the emigrants found the slope so gradual and easy that they could scarcely believe they had actually crossed the backbone of the great Rocky Mountains.

Rev. Samuel Parker, Aug. 10, 1835

"The passage through these mountains is in a valley so gradual in the ascent and descent that I should not have known that we were passing them had it not been that as we advanced the atmosphere gradually became cooler. At length we saw the perpetual snows upon our right hand and on our left, elevated many thousand feet above us. . . .There would be no difficulty in the way of constructing a railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and probably the time may not be very far distant when trips may be made across the continent as they have been made to Niagara Falls to see Nature's wonders."

Theodore Talbot, Aug. 22, 1843:

"Today we set foot in Oregon Territory . . . . 'The land of promise' as yet only promises an increased supply of wormwood and sand."

James A. Pritchard, June 18, 1849

"About 4 p.m. we stood upon the Summit leavel of the Rocky Mountains...now upon the dividing Ridge or to use a more focible figure 'the Backbone of the North American Continent' -- And from which the waters flow into the Atlantic & Pacific Ocean.... The Platau of the South Pass is from 15 to 20 miles wide -- and as you approach the Summit level or the point of culmination it is gradually narrowed down."