Applegate Lassen Emigrant Trail Cutoff
Pershing County, Pershing County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Applegate Lassen Emigrant Trail Cutoff. Jesse and Lindsay Applegate headed south from Willamette Valley, Oregon, June 29, 1846, seeking a less hazardous route to that region from the east. On July 21, they came to a large meadow on the Humboldt River, which is now the nearby Rye Patch Reservoir. Thus, they established the Applegate Trail.During the remainder of 1846 and for the next two years, Oregon emigrants successfully traveled this trail.In 1848, Peter Lassen, hoping to bring emigrants to his ranch, acted as a guide to a party of ten to twelve wagons bound for California. He followed a route from here to Goose Lake where he turned southward over terrain that was barely passable. The emigrants suffered great hardships including the loss of many lives and livestock. It became known as the “Death Route.”
Erected by Dail E. Turney
The Story
In the summer of 1846, brothers Jesse and Lindsay Applegate led a party south from Oregon's Willamette Valley seeking a safer eastern route, reaching a broad Humboldt River meadow—now Rye Patch Reservoir—and blazing the Applegate Trail. Oregon-bound emigrants used it successfully over the next two years. But in 1848, Peter Lassen guided a small wagon train toward his California ranch along a barely passable extension, and the emigrants suffered such loss of life and livestock that it earned the grim name "Death Route." The two branches shared this desert junction.
Why it matters
The trail's story shows both the promise and peril of frontier route-finding, where a hopeful shortcut could turn into one of the emigrant era's deadliest passages.
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Related people
- · Jesse Applegate
- · Lindsay Applegate
- · Peter Lassen
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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This lush valley — the Big Meadows — was a vital rest stop on the Humboldt Trail, the route that carried some 165,000 emigrants west in the 1840s and 1850s. Travelers gathered water and grass here before facing the dreaded Forty Mile Desert, the trail's cruelest stretch. Mining began in the 1850s, merchant-rancher George Lovelock lent his name to the county seat, and the railroad's arrival in 1869 brought fresh growth; Pershing County itself was carved from Humboldt County in 1919.
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