mormon road – Notes

Corridor Identification

A) The Mojave River spine (Colorado River → eastern Mojave springs → Mojave River corridor → Cajon Pass → San Bernardino/LA)

Mojave Indian Trail; Mojave River Trail; Mojave Road; Old Spanish Trail (where it drops into/uses Mojave River and related desert crossings); Beale’s Wagon Road (in its CA desert segment); Brown’s Toll Road (as the Cajon gateway upgrade); plus the generic “Wagon Roads” label when you’re talking about the 19th-century wagonable evolution of the same line.

The idea is simple: reliable water spacing and a workable pass dictated the alignment. The Mohave Trail conceptually underlies the later Mojave Road, and the NPS explicitly treats the Mojave Road through Mojave National Preserve as a branch of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail. Beale’s route description also ties his Mojave Desert segment to the Mojave Trail/Old Spanish Trail network, then notes the junction with the Mormon Road at the Mojave River. Brown’s Toll Road is best understood as “the Cajon Pass switch” that made the desert–coast connection more serviceable (toll/improvement era), not a whole new long-distance corridor by itself.

B) The LA ↔ Salt Lake “southern route” family (good-roads era branding laid over older travel)

Salt Lake Road; Old Spanish Trail (northern route pieces); Arrowhead Trails Highway; and again “Wagon Roads” as the pre-auto baseline.

This is the family that turns into the famous LA–Las Vegas–Salt Lake motor corridor in the auto-trails era. The BLM’s Arrowhead Trails Highway page is blunt about the lineage: the proposed/marketed auto route followed the late-19th-century “Old Mormon Road” and the earlier Old Spanish Trail. The Arrowhead Trail’s “association/branding layer” starts in 1916 (organized/incorporated that year) and is essentially a named-trail wrapper on that corridor.

C) “Good Roads” transcontinental overlays (names that often ride on top of existing roads, then feed into numbered highways)

National Old Trails; Midland Trail; Route 66 (as the numbered successor in the Southwest); and sometimes Arrowhead Trails Highway where it shares pavement with the NOTR in Southern California.

The key point: these aren’t necessarily new alignments end-to-end; they’re promotional/organizational systems that sign and improve what counties and states already had. FHWA and other summaries describe the National Old Trails Road Association as one of the early major named-trail movements (founded 1912). In the West, big stretches of the NOTR were later folded into US 66, which was established/commissioned in 1926 (signing followed). The Midland Trail is another early signed transcontinental auto trail (signed by 1913) that overlaps conceptually with the named-trails era rather than replacing everything on the ground.

D) The Sierra/Eastern Sierra north–south family (LA ↔ Mojave ↔ Owens Valley and beyond)

Sierra Highway / El Camino Sierra.

This one is its own long corridor family, and it intersects the desert east–west systems at junction towns rather than duplicating them. It’s commonly framed as an early 20th-century promoted route (established/advertised early, with later highway rebuilds) connecting Los Angeles into the Eastern Sierra.

E) The Tejon/Tehachapi gateway family (LA Basin ↔ San Joaquin Valley crossings)

Fort Tejon Road; Ridge Route.

Think “northbound exit from the LA Basin” rather than “Mojave crossing.” The Los Angeles–Fort Tejon Road is described as a successful wagon road solution over/near the Tehachapi barrier, completed in 1855. The Ridge Route is the early engineered state highway-era answer (opened 1915) that finally made that link paved and direct in the automobile age.

F) San Bernardino/San Gabriel mountain connectors (coast ↔ mountain communities, not trans-desert corridors)

Rim of the World Drive; Angeles Crest Scenic Drive (Angeles Crest Highway); Van Dusen Road.

These are “mountain access projects” more than “interregional desert crossings.” Rim of the World Drive is documented as opening in 1915 to connect San Bernardino with Big Bear through the range. Angeles Crest Highway construction begins in 1929 and the completed through-route opens much later (mid-20th century). Van Dusen Road sits here as an earlier wagon-road era Big Bear/Holcomb access line tied to the 1860–61 gold rush logistics (often described as a wagon road built in 1861).

G) Death Valley–Panamint access network (mining roads, toll-road tourism era, park-era backroads)

West Side Road (Death Valley); Road to Panamint; Eichbaum’s Toll Road (same as “Eichbaum Toll Road”).

This family is its own ecosystem: borax-era freight roads, mining camp supply lines, then purpose-built access to resorts/tourism. NPS frames the borax era as transport over “primitive roads” (1883–1889). The Eichbaum Toll Road is well-documented as a 1925–26 build from near Darwin to Stovepipe Wells (i.e., a deliberate west-side entry improvement). “Road to Panamint” is best treated as the umbrella for the Panamint Valley/Skidoo/Rhyolite road-pushing phase in the 1906–1907 window and its successors; NPS history material and HAER/other documentation talk explicitly about wagon-road development and the Rhyolite–Skidoo road beginning in 1906 and being in use by 1907. West Side Road is the park backroad line on the valley floor’s west side (modern status aside), squarely in the “Death Valley internal access” bucket.

Other Roads

Mormon Hogback, Sanford Pass

In the early 1850s, long wagon trains of Mormon pioneers crept down from the high desert into the mouth of Cajon Pass, hoping to reach the fertile San Bernardino Valley beyond. They soon found themselves at a natural choke point – a narrow ravine called Coyote Canyon, now known as Crowder Canyon – where sheer rock walls and a jumbled creek bed made passage nearly impossible. The first wagons through had to be disassembled: wheels removed and rolled by hand, cargo shifted onto a mule’s back, and wagon beds dragged piece by piece over the worst boulders. Early travelers remembered this grueling process, and the Mormon settlers who followed in 1851 likely endured the same ordeal to get their covered wagons through the upper Cajon Pass.

But adversity often sparks ingenuity. Not long after, some enterprising pioneers scouted a detour a few miles to the west of the treacherous canyon. There, a high spine of land offered a way around the worst narrows. This route ran along a slender ridge – a true hogback that rose above the canyon – and though it added a few extra miles, it spared travelers from having to lug their wagons through Coyote Canyon’s rock-strewn gauntlet. The Mormon colonists heading to Southern California in those years eagerly embraced this alternate path. In fact, by the early 1850s, they had established a wagon trail atop that ridge, which would later be known as the Mormon Hogback in honor of the many Latter-day Saint families who had blazed it.

In 1850, a veteran freighter named William T. B. Sanford took it upon himself to hack a rough wagon road along this western Cajon route. Sanford’s road departed the old Spanish Trail near present-day Victorville, climbed onto the flanks of Baldy Mesa, and then edged down through the West Cajon Valley, eventually descending toward a cluster of towering sandstone outcrops. Those pale rocks marked a kind of gateway at the foot of the hogback trail. They would later be known as the Mormon Rocks – named for the Mormon pioneers who camped beneath them after braving the ridge and finally emerging into the open Cajon wash.

Traveling the Mormon Hogback was still a heart-pounding adventure. The ridge was narrow and the drop-offs unforgiving; in places, the trail was scarcely wider than a wagon itself. The ascent to the summit was so steep that teams often had to “double up,” hitching multiple teams of oxen or mules to a single wagon. One contemporary account describes wagons needing as many as 32 mules in harness to tug a heavy load up the incline. On the way back down, drivers would lock their wagon wheels and skid the first several yards, the wooden rims dragging like sleds to slow the descent. The air filled with the shouts of teamsters and the groan of brake chains as each wagon inched along the hogback’s crest. It was perilous, yes, but for a time, this high road was the only practical way for settlers and supply wagons to get through Cajon Pass intact.

Despite these dangers, the ridge route quickly became the preferred wagon road. Sanford and others made further upgrades over the years. In 1855, workers even cut into the mountainside to create a new alignment about a mile and a half west of the original track. This was known as the Sanford Cutoff, which bypassed the most challenging section of the hogback. The grades were gentler than before, though still outrageously steep – some stretches tilted at a 30% incline, straining both beast and brake. Nevertheless, from the mid-1850s up until 1861, virtually every wagon train bound to or from Southern California chose to tackle the Mormon Hogback via Sanford’s route rather than risk the old rocky canyon. For the Mormon settlers in particular, this ridge road was a vital lifeline, allowing them to bring wagons loaded with families, lumber, and provisions into their new settlements without having to unload and reassemble everything at Cajon Pass.

The reign of the Mormon Hogback came to an end in the 1860s. In 1861, a local pioneer named John Brown Sr. partnered with two associates to finally tame the original canyon route itself. Capitalizing on a surge of travelers during a nearby gold rush, Brown’s company widened and improved the old trail through Crowder (Coyote) Canyon, smoothing out the worst boulders and drop-offs. They built a proper wagon road right through Cajon Pass’s eastern narrows and set up toll gates to collect fees from anyone using this new shortcut. Travelers gladly paid a few dollars rather than face the old hogback or haul their wagons apart again. With the opening of John Brown’s toll road – shorter and far less harrowing – the Mormon Hogback’s importance swiftly faded. The new turnpike through the canyon became the main gateway between the desert and the coast. Before long, even stagecoaches and mail wagons were rumbling through Crowder Canyon instead of teetering along the ridge.

Although the wagon ruts along the Mormon Hogback have long since faded into the brush, its legacy remains etched in the landscape and lore of Cajon Pass. The very name “Mormon Rocks” for those sandstone sentinels is a reminder of the emigrants who passed that way in the 1850s. Modern highways and railroads now carry traffic through Cajon Pass, roughly tracing the corridors that pioneers like the Mormons and John Brown once opened up. In fact, the historic Mormon wagon trail itself wound through the same valley of curious rock formations that visitors see today. Next time you drive north from San Bernardino and glimpse the weathered cliffs and crags of Cajon Pass, imagine a line of canvas-topped wagons winding down a dusty mountain ridge. That was the Mormon Hogback – a vital, if temporary, wagon road born of necessity and determination, now a nearly forgotten chapter of the westward migration to Southern California.