by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Several years ago, the William G. Pomeroy Foundation launched the National Historic Marker Day project to bring attention to some 157,000 of these physical representations of aspects of American history and the Homestead offered posts in 2022 and 2024 for the Workman House/El Campo Santo state historic landmark plaques and the markers at La Casa Nueva from the City of Industry identifying the restoration of the Homestead as its contribution to the nation’s bicentennial (this year is the 250th anniversary) and by Walter P. Temple dedicating the house to his late wife, Laura González.
Our biennial post for this year as part of what is now the National Historic Marker Weekend, lasting from today through Sunday, highlights the recently installed site identification sign at the Homestead provided by the National Park Service signifying that the Museum is a featured site of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail.
With this latest addition to our roster of historic markers, this seemed like an opportune time to look at local media representations of the Old Spanish Trail, including the different uses of that term over our interpretive period, which ends at 1930, because, strikingly, the fall 1841 migration of the Workman family on that route from Santa Fé, New Mexico to Los Angeles, when it was mentioned in the press, was never, so far as could be determined, referred to as using the Old Spanish Trail, which was primarily a commercial route, with some immigrant use, from 1829 to 1848.
The earliest local newspaper reference was in the Los Angeles Star of 17 August 1861 during a time of intense interest in mining in the region, such as Holcomb Valley, situated north of Bear Valley and what later became Big Bear Lake when a dam and reservoir was established there. The paper reported on the transport of a boiler for a quartz mining operation by Los Angeles figures, Francis Mellus, and that William T.B. Sanford, handling delivery for the firm owned by his brother-in-law Phineas Banning and partner Augustus F. Hinchman, used a turnpike road for which “the old Spanish trail, [was] made into a good wagon road.” This appears to have meant access from Cajon Pass and then an eastward route through the San Bernardino Mountains, where state highways 138 and 18 wend through the range.
In its 20 March 1876 edition, the Los Angeles Express cited a Kansas City newspaper’s report on a planned route for the Utah Southern Railroad from Salt Lake City to San Diego, which was not accomplished, but there was a remark that “the route through Southern Utah follows, through much of the way, the old Spanish trail from Los Angeles, in California, to Abiqua [Abiquiu], in New Mexico.”
In fact, after 1848 and with the outbreak the following year of the Gold Rush, many migrants reaching Salt Lake decided to take a southwest course to our area, believing it to be safer than crossing the often snow-bound Sierra Nevada Mountains despite the much greater distance, a good deal of which did incorporate the trail. Moreover, the account remarked that “it was on this route that the sheep were driven from New Mexico to California,” which was the case, along with woolen goods, while the return generally involved the transport of horses and mules.
The Gold Rush migrations furnished most of subsequent references to the trail, including one in the Los Angeles Times of 21 December 1886, which related the “ghastly story” of the “Death Valley ’49ers,” a group of migrants who were woefully unprepared for the awful conditions of that blisteringly hot location in eastern California, as well as others in Utah and Nevada.
The Rev. James W. Brier, who presided over the first Protestant services in the Angel City, related his recollections of the terrible trip through the Valley, during which he observed that when the group of some 500 persons in a train of 105 wagons left Salt Lake City, there was a point an encampment at a large spring at which a decision had to be made about what route to take.
He wrote, “the Old Spanish Trail (to Santa Fé) turned to the left and Walker’s Cut-Off to the right,” but when there was a split among the group, both parties ended up suffering greatly from ignorance of the unforgiving terrain and other factors and the result was virtually unmitigated suffering. Notably, Brier’s wife, Juliet, who lived nearly a century, was credited with remarkable bravery and fortitude for his untiring efforts during the ordeal.
A Times article from 13 October 1890 retailed some of the exploits of Christopher “Kit” Carson, a former apprentice of David Workman, brother of Homestead founder William, in Missouri and who gained fame for his scouting throughout large swaths of the American West. Mentioned was how Carson served as a guide for John C. Frémont during his renowned expeditions in the 1840s, including a return from the Pacific Coast via the Old Spanish Trail to the east. During the Mexican-American War, moreover, Carson traveled on the Trail to deliver dispatches being sent to Washington, D.C.
The 15 February 1895 number of the paper featured the recollection of W. Thomson called “On The Old Spanish Trail,” in which he mentioned traveling on two occasions, each involving a few days, with Carson during an 1850 trip to California as well as “striking the old Spanish trail” during the trek. Again, this would be the route from Salt Lake City that was often called the Mormon Trail and was used, for example, to send Latter Day Saints to southern California to establish a colony at San Bernardino (though most were recalled to Utah in 1857 as fears of a war with American troops mounted.)
The Los Angeles Herald of 3 March published a lengthy remembrance of an 1849-1850 migration by Walter Van Dyke, a Los Angele County Superior Court judge and later an associate of the California Supreme Court. Van Dyke was a newly minted attorney in Cleveland when he decided to try his hand at mining during the Gold Rush and, when he came to the part of his story where he and his compatriots were in Utah, he wrote,
At the southern end of the Utah Lake [south of Provo where Spanish Fork is now] we struck the old Spanish trail, the northern route traveled by the Spaniards between the Pueblo of Los Angeles and Santa Fe . . . [arriving at Mountain Meadows, the site of a horrific 1857 massacre of migrants by Mormons, Van Dyke noted that] it was a famous camping place on the line of the old Spanish trail.
The Spanish Fork location was not related to the Old Spanish Trail, which got no further north than Castle Dale, which is close to 100 miles to the south, but, rather, to the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition of 1776. Still, it is interesting to read Van Dyke’s recollection of traveling along that portion of the Trail that included reaching the Santa Clara and Virgin rivers and the “famous camping ground” of Las Vegas.
He added that after reaching the Mojave River near modern Barstow,
We continued along the same old Spanish trail that we had been following up that river and across to the northern end of the Cajon Pass, where we arrived quite late the last day of January [1850]. Our provisions being exhausted, and there being a moon, we concluded to venture through the pass that night instead of remaining over till morning. From my notes I quote:
“I never shall forget this night’s adventure in this wild mountain pass . . . If we had not been in a famished and exhausted condition we might have appreciated with pleasure the agreeable change in the country. Even yesterday we were traveling in a dry and barren desert; today we are treading on beds of beautiful flowers and wild clover, and the morning breeze is laden with their perfume.”
Van Dyke’s description of descending Cajon Pass into what we now call the Inland Empire was universally shared because of that dramatic transformation in the landscape. After a stop for a few days at the Rancho Cucamonga, the next location visited was the Chino Ranch, the owner of which, Isaac Williams, was widely known for his assistance and hospitality to immigrants.
In fact, Williams provided Van Dyke a horse and a guide for the ride into Los Angeles, though another visit ensued as he related, “we stopped at the Rowlands on the Puente [Ranch], and were treated in the same hospitable manner characteristic of all ranch owners here.” On arrival in Los Angeles, Van Dyke recalled meeting Abel Stearns, Benjamin D. Wilson (who came on the Old Spanish Trail with the Rowland and Workman Expedition) and another new settler, Benjamin Hayes, who asked Van Dyke to join him in a law partnership and went on to 12 years as a district court judge. The latter, however, elected to go north and remained there for over 30 years before returning to settle in Los Angeles, though he lived subsequently in Oakland.
There was at least one fictional representation of the Old Spanish Trail, published in the Times on 13 July 1896 as Leonard Fowler’s “Black Dan Vignette” called “The Evolution of an Outlaw” included the trail, but stating that it ran from Santa Fé to Salt Lake City. Apparently, Fowler, like Van Dyke, confused the Dominguez-Escalante Route with the later trail.
As the 20th century dawned and it was over a half-century since the Gold Rush, it is notable to see such references as in the Times of 31 January 1903 that a group of Kansas migrants, known as the “Jayhawkers of ’49,” gathered in Lodi, in central California, to mark the anniversary of the trek across the Plains, though some of them were actually from Illinois and came later than that year.
In any case, it was stated that, because of the later arrival at Salt Lake as winter approached, the group, heeding the lesson of the Donner Party of 1846-1847, in which exceptional snowfall stranded those migrants, many of whom died and some were eaten by starving surviving fellow travelers, “chose the old Spanish trail from Salt Lake to Los Angeles as the safer route and started in that direction.”
In October 1904, reported the Times of the 26th, 93-year-old Jerome Alrich, who was one of those who traveled with Brier and was described as “one of the survivors of the ill-fated Death Valley party, which lost its way trying to find a short cut to Sacramento from the old Spanish trail to California,” died at the San Bernardino County Hospital.
A rare mention of the Old Spanish Trail as it was utilized before 1848 appeared in the 15 May 1910 edition of the paper, though the title of the article was “TRAIL THROUGH CAJON PASS FROM UTAH TO SAN PEDRO.” The piece observed that “the word ‘trail’ has a fascination for every true American” for many reasons, including the fact that “it awakens memories of the men—and the women—who braved the mystery and the danger of unknown trails and prepared the way for today.”
Going back as far as Spanish exploration, including the Anza Expedition of the mid-1770s, that of Dominguez and Escalante and then the Jedediah Smith party of about a half-century later, the piece also mentioned the “Wolfskill Party,” informing readers that the “next through passengers” on record was that “the party headed by William Wolfskill, which left Taos, N.M., for California in September 1830 and reached Los Angeles in February 1831.” The piece went on,
Wolfskill as a sturdy son of Kentucky, who had been trapping and hunting in the Southwest for several years . . . This party included several Americans who became permanent residents of California. William Wolfskill became one of the most prominent residents of “El Pueblo de Los Angeles,” and was the father of the orange industry, having planted the first orchard for commercial purposes.
By 1910, new forms of transportation were being identified in reference to the Old Spanish Trail, though, again, not to the entirety of the route from New Mexico. For example, the Covina Argus of 29 September 1902 commented that “the early explorers and pioneers of the western part of the United States made the paths that are now the great railway highways of commerce.
A new example was the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, which went north from the port of Los Angeles to the Angel City and then east where the line is just south of the Homestead on its way to Utah, with a majority of the rails laid roughly along that oft-described portion of the Old Spanish Trail used by the Mormons and others.
With the rapid rise in the use of the automobile, moreover, and a growing movement for transcontinental auto roads as the heir to rail lines, an Old Spanish Trail Association was formed to advocate for a very ambitious plan to have a highway from Jacksonville, Florida to San Diego. The thinking was because all of the states in that path were at one time part of Spain, even though that trail name was specific to the route from Santa Fé to Los Angeles, the term “Old Spanish Trail” made sense.
The effort began in the mid-Teens, with the Los Angeles Tribune of 9 January 1916 observing that a cross-country route could be completed in about two years “is the startling prediction made in the magazine published by the Automobile Club of Southern California, Touring Topics.” The Club stated that the climate and landforms of the route were such that “the Old Spanish trail should come into favor with motor tourists and be especially popular during the winter months.”
The paper published an early proposed map of the route in February 1917, but much work had to be done to finalize pathways and garner support, but only after the end of the First World War, which America joined a couple of months later. By late 1920s, the route was refined and the effort gathered steam as the Roaring Twenties powered forward and automobile use skyrocketed, including long-distance trips by tourists.
At mid-decade it was reported that the Trail route involved expenditures of $10 million, while, by 1927, close to 95% of it was completed, though much of it was unpaved and subject to washouts during rainstorms. In March 1926, the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News reported that the Trail was to be known, as a national highway system was being implemented, as “Federal Route 80,” or U.S. 80. Later in 1926, Route 66 was designated and the Homestead is looking at a program to mark the centennial of that famous national highway.
It was in 1929 that the Old Spanish Trail auto route was considered completed and the 6 October edition of the Long Beach Press-Telegram reported that a caravan of some 100 autos was making its way across the entirety of the route, which was said to have been developed to the tune of $70 million and which was considered a landmark in the development of the transcontinental highway system. Later in the month, however, came the crash of the stock market in New York City and the onset of The Great Depression.
There were, however, road projects embracing portions of the actual Old Spanish Trail. The 11 January 1914 issue of the Tribune reported on an Auto Club plan for a highway from Durango, Colorado, in that state’s southern extremity, through Arizona and to Los Angeles. Commercial purposes and tourism were cited as excellent reasons for the route and it was added that “the Old Spanish Trail association is proposing to improve the road” through areas in Colorado, while interested parties in California were looking at running it from Arizona to Los Angeles, possibly along Valley Boulevard just north of the Homestead, and along or near portions of the Old Spanish Trail from New Mexico.
The Express of 12 July 1922 published a map showing three considered auto roads though the Mojave Desert from Barstow or Daggett, to the east, up to areas leading towards Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, including the second, or middle, option that “is part of [the] Old Spanish trail.” Two years later, the Venice Vanguard reported that “fifty or more years ago, much freight was transported from San Pedro to Salt Lake City over what was known as the ‘Old Spanish Trail.'” It was added that, while sparsely used, autos were plying a similar path.
When the National Old Trails Road project was in the works in 1927, the Monrovia News commented on it, stating that it was to be “a continuation from east to west of the famous old pioneer paths of progress across the United States.” It was to include the route of the Santa Fé Trail to that city from Missouri—which William Workman used in 1825 when he settled in New Mexico—and from there “it picks up the old Spanish trail from Santa Fe, to Los Angeles,” though exactly how was not stated.
These selected references are significant in reflecting the revolutionary development of travel including means as well as routes and, with our interpretive period of 1830 to 1930, we can easily place the Old Spanish Trail as part of a context with respect to the evolution from walking and riding animals to railroads to automobiles—allowing, of course, for the appropriation of “Old Spanish Trail” by those building that southern transcontinental highway during the Twenties.
As we mark National Historic Marker Weekend and commemorate the recent installation of the Old Spanish National Historic Trail signs, we remember that part the Workman family played in that history 185 years ago and we’ll look to offer a trail-related program this fall. Keep an eye out for that in coming months!