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There
are many aspects of history that can be researched from the
comfort of a library or study, but to see how people moved
from one place to another, it is necessary to put on a pair of
strong shoes and pick up a camera and GPS and head for the
fields. There are many types of roads left by the people in
the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some roads connected one
homestead to another homestead or small community. Then there
are the roads that connect communities to communities or
centers of transportation such as Kelton and Corrine, Utah.
These two towns were the beginning points for freighters going
north to the gold fields in Montana and central Idaho. And
finally, there are the trails that run east and west and
brought the pioneers to Utah, Washington, California and other
western states. These trails have been fairly well marked and
recorded by others.
I
first became interested in these trails while working for the
Forest Service and observing the Hudspeth Trail near Twin
Springs just north of Holbrook. Then I noticed that there were
branches to this trail and that there were also trails running
north and south that were not marked or recorded. I spent a
morning with the late Frank Hill of Holbrook, Idaho and he
showed me a trail through the Grasslands that he was told was
a freight trail from Kelton, Utah to Butte, Montana. Freight
went north and raw ore came south for about the first 12 years
of mining near Butte. This information really caught my
interest and so I looked at the trails north of Kelton, Utah
and there are many old trails in the valley north of Kelton
west of the Wildcat Mountains. Laird Naylor, of the BLM office
in Utah, and I spent many warm afternoons hiking the area.
With the aid of GLO maps made when this country was first
surveyed, and aerial photos of the same country, many of the
early wagon roads have been located. Some of the roads are
still used but my main interest are those which are grass and
sagebrush covered. One of the older trails is one shown on
John Fremont’s maps and it details a trail he established
northward to Fort Hall through the Daniels area and later was
used to go from Salt Lake to Fort Hall. When bridges over the
many rivers and marsh areas in the Marsh Valley region were
built, this road was not used as much. No, his road was not
the Turkey Trail which is a graded road. In order to get a
rough idea of the age of these trails,
I look for old bottle and tin can fragments and stain
marks left by the iron wheels on rocks. The construction of
the side seams of can fragments changed about 1887 so this is
a good way to help date the trail.
One
winter I attended an archaeological curation project for the
Forest Service in Boise. At the end I committed to map some of
the water ditches used to bring water out of the mountains to
the gold bearing gravels near Idaho City. During the summers
of 2003 and 2004 I spent two weeks there having a very
interesting time. The large ones were six to seven feet deep
and twelve to fourteen feet wide at the top. In the summer of
2003 I also spent a week mapping trails in Yellowstone just
south of the Mammoth Hot Springs area.
If
you have any information about roads used to haul freight/ore
through this region, please contact me. I appreciate all
contacts and will answer your interests.
Byron
Knutsen
bknutsen@atcnet.net
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