Bartleson–Bidwell Party

In 1841, the Bartleson–Bidwell Party, led by Captain John Bartleson and John Bidwell, became the first American emigrants to attempt a wagon crossing from Missouri to California.

The trail to California had been established not by the government, but by members of the "Emigrant Societies" formed in the 1840s. The efforts of three parties had established a passable wagon road over the two main obstacles: the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The result was a journey of 2,008 miles in a single summer and fall, by oxen or horse or mules at 15 miles a day, which meant a voyage of about five months.

In May 1841, the party assembled at Sapling Grove, near Westport, Missouri, under the organization of twenty-one-year-old John Bidwell. Numbering more than sixty, the group decided to travel together to John Marsh's Rancho Los Meganos at the foot of Mount Diablo in Mexican Alta California, in present-day Contra Costa County, California. Moving west, the immigrants traveled over the Oregon Trail with Father Pierre-Jean De Smet and a Jesuit party guided by mountain man Thomas "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick.

At Fort Hall, in present-day Caribou County, Idaho, a 19th-century military and trading outpost in the eastern Oregon Country, about half of the original party changed their plans and decided to take the easier road into Oregon. The remainder of the Bartleson-Bidwell party split off from the trappers' trail to Oregon and headed west along the north shore of the Great Salt Lake. Crossing the desert west of the lake, they were forced to abandon their wagons. Accompanied by their surviving animals, they eventually found the Mary's River (now the Humboldt) and followed it to its sink (near present Lovelock, Nevada). Crossing the desert to the south, they reached the Walker River, which they ascended over the Sierra Nevadas in the same region crossed by Jedediah Smith in 1827.

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