Amelia Hadley

Near Lander, Wyoming
Photo credit: Clint Gardner

This passage jumped out at me not because it’s intrinsically interesting, but because I have been making the very same assumption as the author. Many of the diaries describe the difficulties of crossing the western mountains: double teaming, chaining wagon wheels, and hoisting and lowering the wagons with ropes. And when I read the phrase “mountain pass,” the picture in my mind is always of a narrow slit in towering rocks, not a 15 mile wide expanse of rolling mountaintop prairie.

Sunday June 21 [1851]

Travelled 17½ miles camp on Pacific Spring which is the first camp after you get through south pass. There we saw the far famed south pass, but did not see it until we had passed it for I was all the time looking for some narrow place that would almost take your breath away to get through but was disappointed. It is a body of table land rooling but not mountainous and is 15 miles wide being the pleasantest place I have yet seen. The altitude here is 7 thousand & 30 ft. We have been on a gradual accend since we left Larimi and now we shall decend the same to the pacific at Pacific Spring the water begins to run to the pacific verry cold to day Water standing the night of the 20 froze a quarter of inch thick on a pail in sight of snow all the time from 5 to 8 ft deep side the road in some places north side mountain.

Hadley, Amelia, 1825-1866, Diary of Amelia Hadley, June, 1851, in Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, vol. 3: 1851. Holmes, Kenneth L., ed. & comp. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.