The Changing Trail to Oregon

The Changing Trail to Oregon. . The trail to Oregon was never a single set of wagon ruts etched from Missouri to the Willamette Valley. Wagons often traveled abreast through valleys and plains sometimes widening the trail several miles. In the mountains they constantly attempted shortcuts and looked for easier grades. Still, the development of two separate travel route in Lane County was a special case. , The western route through this region - an ancient Kalapuya Indian trace and a Hudson's Bay Company "trapper's trail" through the 1840s - crossed into the headwaters of the Siuslaw River and wended north to the Long Tom. An eastern route, blazed in 1846, followed the ridges from Scott Valley northeast entering the upper Willamette Valley east of Divide. By 1855 a middle route - outlined generally by today's Highway 99 and Interstate 5 - came north via Pass Creek to the Coast Fork of the Willamette, passing through Cottage Grove, Creswell, Eugene and Junction City. , Many of the travel routes traversed by Indian, trappers and emigrants remain the same today. , ...there being no wagon road across the mountains and falling in with several other wagons we left them at the foot of the mountain and all hands went to work to cut the road across, our old friend Mr. Scot(t) the pilot yet remaining and working like a good fellow, it was several days before we got to the summit but when we got the road opened up to it we returned and got out wagons and brought them to the summit then took our cattle down into the Willamette valley and now for the first time I placed my foot on the soil for which I had been so long traveling... -- Rev. A.E. Garrison, Recollection of 1846