When the two superintendents met in Washington, D.C. (Bad feeling continued between them, however. This replacement assured the national road was completed, because management of the project was transferred from a struggling drunkard to a highly competent and motivated captain. Lander was appointed in Magraw’s place in 1858. The move became known as the Utah War, and followed years of tension between the Mormons and the federal government over questions of sovereignty, polygamy, land rights, water rights and the authority of courts. But in 1857, Magraw unexpectedly joined Albert Sidney Johnston’s expedition to re-establish federal authority in Utah Territory and to install federally appointed territorial officers. That honor had gone to William Miller Finney Magraw. He was not the first man to be selected as superintendent, however. This experience made him an obvious choice to oversee construction of the new national road, with its planned route west of South Pass to City-of-Rocks in what’s now southeast Idaho. A few years earlier, he had scouted the South Pass of the Rockies in what’s now Wyoming as a potential railroad route. Lander started as chief engineer on the proposed national wagon road, spending long days on horseback surveying potential routes. He was an able frontiersman and was reportedly rough on horses, with a hot temper and a reputation as a duelist. In those capacities, he had explored the foothills and passes of the Rocky Mountains, trailed the Souris River into Canada, trekked along the Columbia and Cowlitz rivers and mastered the passes of the Cascade Mountains. Something had to be done.īy 1857, Frederick William Lander was an accomplished railroad engineer and explorer. At the same time, each new route seemed likely to open new wounds with the original inhabitants of the plains, mountains and deserts, creating new difficulties for the government to manage. The military struggled to guard a road system that sprouted new routes as the author of the latest trail guide or some entrepreneur touted an easier, safer and shorter trip to given destinations. The result was starvation, death and cannibalism-an extreme example of the negative side of a transportation system based more on political and entrepreneurial whims than on sound engineering. In 1846-1847, the ill-prepared Donner Party, for example, took bad advice from a commercially motivated, inaccurate guidebook and west of Fort Bridger in what’s now southwest Wyoming followed the Hastings Cutoff, named for the guidebook’s author. The resulting spiderweb of cutoffs and supposed shortcuts created difficulties in the smooth flow of westward migration. However, the thousands of miles of emigrant trails that opened the vast expanses of the West had developed organically. government had a long history of helping create transportation infrastructure for the fledgling nation. A segment of the first such national wagon road to be built in the West, now known as the Lander Trail, the Lander Road or Lander Cutoff, was named after the man in charge of its construction.īy the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S. In 1857, with passage of the Pacific Wagon Road Act, Congress appropriated funds to survey and construct wagon roads.
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