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This website is a collection of the DRAFT data collected for the 2011 nomination of 6 high potential route segments of the Old Spanish National Historical Trail in a contract administered by the Old Spanish Trail Association on behalf of the NPS, BLM, and USFS. SHPOs and THPOs in 6 states, as well as over 100 volunteers and stakeholders participated in this project, which included historical, ethnographic, geographic, and field research conducted by Mark Henderson and Rachel Preston Prinz. The drafts were written by Mark Henderson and edited by Rachel Prinz. This data will be submitted to the National Register once OSTA's consultant (not us) completes the MPDF. We are providing this data as a service to the OSTA membership, to the various stakeholders, and on behalf of the American people... to whom this amazing trail belongs.
Please fell free to contact us, and/or use these documents in your own research, with appropriate citation.

CA - Emigrant Pass Route Segment: Significance

 By Mark Henderson and Rachel Preston Prinz


The Emigrant Pass route segment constitutes a verifiable landscape through which a mule and horse pack trail (later known as the “Spanish Trail”) passed and can be historically linked with the trade in commercial products between the Mexican Territories of Alta, California and Nuevo Mexico in the period of 1829-1848.  This conclusion is based on evidence of the trail passing over this area as described in the journals and maps created by John C Frémont   in 1844 as well as the published journal of George Douglas Brewerton, who passed through the area with Kit Carson in 1847.  Documents made by emigrant wagon train travelers on the “Spanish Trail” in 1849 immediately after the trade in woolen fabrics woven in New Mexico and packed by mule to California and traded for draught animals for the eastern territories ceased, confirm “Emigrant Pass” as the known transportation corridor during the last decade of Mexican jurisdiction of the trade and territory and beyond.  The Emigrant Pass route segment is a historic site eligible at the State Level for listing to the National Register under Criteria A for its association with the Old Spanish Trail and events between 1829 – 1848 that have made an important contribution to the history of the region between New Mexico and California. Also eligible under criterion D the site has the potential to yield information important to understanding the commerce/trade network that developed from 1829-1848 between New Mexico and California. This site is nominated under the Multiple Property Documentation Form, Old Spanish Trail  AD 1821-1848, and is representative of (include historic contexts from MPDF) and areas of significance: commerce, economics, exploration/settlement, social history, and transportation. 

The Emigrant Pass route segment of the Old Spanish Trail is representative of the following historic contexts as defined in the Multiple Property Documentation Form Old Spanish Trail AD 1821-1848. This historic site is eligible for listing under Criterion A as a property associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of history during the Mexican and Territorial Periods of under these areas of significance: commerce, economics, exploration/settlement, social history, and transportation.


The significance of the Emigrant Pass route segment is inseperable from John C. Frémont’s “Second Expedition” to the west intended to scout routes to the Pacific to expand the US dominion westward.   Frémont   in this expedition named the established route he followed “the Spanish Trail.”  Prior to Frémont   it was probably just known as the “camino al California” to the Nuevo Mexicanos and the“camino al Nuevo Mexico” to the “Californios.”

Were it not for the incursions of “Americano”, or more-accurately, ex-patriot American and French-Canadian traders and trappers  on the New Mexican frontier, and encouragement and incentives offered by the newly independent nation of Mexico, a commercial pack trail route would not have been established departing from Abiquiu on the New Mexico frontier, fording the Colorado River (near present Green River, Utah) and passing through territory with Ute and Paiute marauders on the Colorado Plateau, southern Great Basin and Mojave Desert.   Frémont  ’s account and maps published in 1848 document not only the route of the trail between Cajon Pass and Great Salt Lake in detail, but also give specifics of the established trail condition and use by the Mexicano and Americano entrepeneurs. 

Equally important to this expedition is a report by Frémont describing events of travel and interaction between travelers and the Indians. Frémont reports an incident at “Archilette” Spring, which he renamed “Hendandez” Spring and is known today as Resting Springs – an oasis of trees located in the west viewshed from the Emigrant Pass summit which forms the western end of the Stump Spring to Resting Spring Old Spanish Trail route segment or “jornada.”  Frémont describes the killing of four of six travelers on the “Spanish Trail” at Archilette Springs, who were apparently getting a head start with about thirty head of horses back to New Mexico.   Among those killed by Indians, presumed to be Paiutes, were the wife of Andreas Fuentes (who survived the attack) and Santiago Giacombe. Also killed were the mother and father of an eleven year old boy named Pablo Hernandez, who escaped with Andreas Fuentes.  The two escapees, Andreas Fuentes and Pablo Hernandez stumbled into Frémont’s camp on the Mojave River several days after the attack. Kit Carson, Alexis Godey and Andreas Fuentes determined to recapture the lost horses and set off. Godey and Carson returned to the Frémont caravan two days later, in the vicinity of the Amargosa River, with the scalps of two Indians from the encampment that Carson and Godey had attacked.  Frémont a day later describes the scene of the killed Mexicans at Resting Spring.  This incident of the exploits of Kit Carson, recorded by Frémont is often repeated (i.e. Brewerton 1993) as part of the Spanish Trail history. The boy, Pablo Hernandez, completed the expedition as Frémont’s charge, though there is uncertainty about what ultimately happened to him (Spence and Jackson 1970:724, 725n). 

There are no purposely constructed trail structures know from historical accounts that can be associated with the Mexican period commercial use (1829-1848) of this or any portion of the “Old Spanish Trail,” except perhaps some enhanced steps carved into the Arizona and Utah slickrock Canyon Country on the Armijo route. However, the Emigrant Pass Route Segment does inform about aspects of transportation related to packtrail and livestock driveway functions of the Mexican period commercial use of the Old Spanish Trail network that left so little imprint on the landscape that alignments surviving from the Mexican period are only discernable because of subsequent packtrail, livestock driveway (including cattle, sheep and goats) and particularly freight and emigrant wagon use of the treadway.  These surviving alignments, though altered by subsequent use of the landscape, reflect distinctive considerations of the expedition “captain,” “guides” (Marcy 1859), packers (arrieros) and drovers.  Though there are few period accounts of the “Old Spanish Trail,” these and later account indicate that daily travel objectives and routes were a result of coordination between journeymen specialists and their apprentices, depending on previous experience, expert guides, and daily and seasonal weather and encounters with indigenous societies.  Adjustments of the trail alignment could be radical - based on changing conditions, seasonal variation, and experience of the specialists in the caravan.  The resulting braided and eroded routes in the corridor reflect these decisions much like a constructed transportation structure (with embankments, ditches, bridges and retaining walls), related to inferences in how the travelers “read the landscape.”  The major features resulting from these decisions in the Emigrant Pass segment are the “pinch point” nature of the alignments in the rocky hard surfaces of Emigrant Pass.  Unlike the braided nature of the corridor and alignments in broad valleys with lose erodible soils where pack trails would quickly cause down-cutting and trace formation, the rocky soils and calcium carbonate-hardenedsurfaces at Emigrant Pass do not appear to have allowed physical traces of trail structures which have not been altered and obliterated by subsequent use.

D- Property has yielded, or is likely to yield, information important in prehistory or history.
The Emigrant Pass route segment, because of the relatively unaltered nature of the landscape presents opportunities to yield archeological evidence of packtrail and livestock driveway activities in the two decades of 1829-1848.  To date, intact, substantially unaltered archeological features, structures and objects dating to the 1829-1848 period of significance have not been substantiated on the Emigrant Pass route segment, or elsewhere on the designated Old Spanish National Historic Trail. Therefore significance based on intact buildings, structures and objects that can be directly tied to the period 1829-1848 cannot be verified on the Emigrant Pass segment or elsewhere on the Old Spanish National Historic Trail.  Locating and identifying archeological evidence of an unaltered pack trail from 1848 or earlier with current available theory and technology is unlikely. Archeological techniques such as soil chemistry, metal detection, ground penetrating radar, as well as traditional archeological techniques such as fine grained mapping and excavations will not be feasible unless alignments are protected from further erosion and foot and vehicular traffic is channeled and monitored to preserve the landscape and site resources.

However, opportunities to yield information important in the history of the Old Spanish Trail trading network do exist at Emigrant Pass for fine grained botanical and topographical mapping to detect use patterns of travelways over the Pass.  Further archeological survey and documentary historical research may be able to resolve the pack trail alignment following the rocky slope in a north northeasterly direction or the visible wagon road alignment that heads almost due east until it reaches a broad wash bottom headed north easterly.