Big Hill

The truth is that the past fades quickly.  I find that my current self bears almost no physical, psychological or intellectual resemblance to the child I was over 60 years ago.  The same is true for the California-Oregon trail.  All things change.

So, it's a rare treat to see something that looks pretty much as it did 167 years ago, in 1849.  Even better, it happens to be one of the handful of spots that I can be pretty confident my gold rush ancestors actually had the misfortune to experience.  Several years later a detour around "Big Hill" was found.

In 1843 Theodore Talbot wrote that Big Hill "is the greatest impediment on the whole route from the United States to Fort Hall."  It wasn't so much the steep ascent but rather the long, torturous descent into Bear River Valley, some 40 miles west of present day Montpellier, Idaho:

"...at the summit we had to unhitch the teams and let the wagons down over a steep, smooth sliding rock by ropes wound around trees by the side of the road.  Some trees are nearly cut through by ropes."  Eliza Ann McAuley, July 15, 1852

Last resort: lowering wagons by means of ropes

"Superlatives are vain and language weak in an effort to describe the badness of this road; hilly, rocky, sideling, and precipitous.  We let the wagons down the rocks some sixty feet in one place; other places we kept the cattle on but attached ropes to ease the wagons down." John Edwin Banks, 1849
Another emigrant, James Wilkins, undertook the Overland trek in 1849 specifically to document the experience in writings and drawings.  Here is his illustration of Big Hill:

Big Hill by James Wilkins, 1849

Here it is today:

Big Hill, 2017