Surely some did. I’m sure the desert was threatening with de-hydration, but what about the area between the mountains and the desert?
Exactly where are you suggesting? The Pacific Coast Ranges stretch from Alaska to Mexico.
And that’s without leaving the US… there are mountains all the way down from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. The red areas are high altitude.
Likewise, the Rockies go from Northern British Columbia to the Rio Grande River in New Mexico (or Mexico, on the other side.).
Seriously dnooman --it’s like God’s Own Stone Wall.
There are lower-altitude areas out there. There’s a huge altitude & ruggedness difference between going roughly along present day I-40 from Amarillo to Albuquerque to Los Angeles versus roughly along I-70 from Kansas City to Denver to Salt Lake City and then I-80 to San Francisco.
And some folks did take the southern route. Had they not, all those desert Southwest towns would never have been founded.
BUT … In the days of horse drawn wagons, lack of water for great distances was a bigger obstacle than rough terrain. Rough terrain with water & forage available slows you down. As cold as it gets in the US high country is truly miserable, but not often killingly cold for much of the year.
OTOH, deserts with neither food nor water for man nor beast kills you outright in just a few days.
This has pretty well been answered, but I am curious to know where you thought a North-South running mountain range ended short of a desert.
it is very difficult to have a wagon train stay orderly and wait at the border crossing.
Unless the OP is talking about the earlier settling of the mid-west.
Most settlement went across the Appalachians rather than go south around them (which was possible). They did this because the Appalachians are relatively easy to cross, routing around them would have significantly extended the length of the trip, and the climate south of the Appalachians was a hazard in its own right. So overall, it seemed preferable to go over the Appalachians rather than around them.
Well said LSLGuy. People and horses need water (and food)
I live up in the Colorado Rockies, and often wonder what a hell of a task it would be to cut through some of these passes. At least in ‘summer’ though you are sure to find water everywhere, and wood for heat and shelter. Wildlife would be abundant.
Like Liitte Nemo: said, people went over the Appalachians, and thought many times they could just “go over” the Rocky Mountains. Yeah, on a map now you can see, its much more rugged. But that map didn’t get drawn, published and studied by school children everywhere the weekend after the first person went over.
Crossing the Great Plains isn’t trivial either. The great expanse of flat land gives cyclones a chance to form. People hadn’t heard of them, didn’t understand them, and when told just went, “Yeah, yeah, we get storms in New England too.” And they were simply wrong.
At some point, our culture shifted … actually planning and using the best information possible became what’s expected of an adult. I don’t really know what the pioneer spirit was built on, it seems like, banding together, and following the group was more important than questioning hearsay.
It should be noted that there actually was a well-used trail (or series of trails) along the southern U.S. border. Portions of it were called the Southern Emigrant trial, the Gila trail, the Texas-California Trial, as well as portions of the Butterfield Overland Stage line trail and portions of the Goodnight-Loving Trail.
However, to answer the OP’s question regarding why t was not used ore often: it combined the problems both of crossing mountains (since they continued well into Mexico) as well as crossing at least two deserts. It also began rather far away from the majority of westward emigrants who actually lived much farther North. It was much shorter for people from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois, to cross Iowa or Missouri to take the Northern routes than it was for them to travel to Texas or to take the Santa Fe Trail to pick up the various southern routes. The North was more populous than the South, so more people heading West originated in those states.
If you look at the Oregon Trail route on a topographic map, it’s remarkable how they did manage to avoid most of the mountains. Following through the high plains of southern Wyoming they avoid all of the high southern Rockies, crossing the continental divide at the remarkably gentle South Pass. After that, it follows the huge flat Snake River plain that the Yellowstone hotspot conveniently blasted through the western Rockies, leaving only some rough country in northeast Oregon before reaching the Columbia River which cuts a low gap through the Cascades.
On the California Trail, I think the OP sort of has a point in that if you turned south before the Sierras, you could go down along the eastern side of the mountains (through Bishop and Lone Pine) and go around the south end of the mountains and back up the Central Valley. The east side of the Sierras is arid, but not outright desert. The only real desert you’d have to traverse is the small section by the city of Mojave as you rounded the south end of the mountains. But that’s a pretty massive detour if you’re trying to get to San Francisco and remember “rush” is the operative word in a gold rush. Also, even though you’d be avoiding most of the major mountain ranges, the route through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada is still high country with frigid winters. Even though it would usually be passable in winter, it wouldn’t be pleasant and the weather would certainly occasionally turn life threatening.
Some folks made it from St. Louis MO to California in less time than it took theHole in the Rock Pioneersto go from Salt Lake City to Bluff UT.
Look more closely. The mountain ranges of the western US generally aren’t contiguous with the mountain ranges of Mexico. There’s a large gap through southern Arizona and New Mexico that’s essentially a clear shot from the plains to the coast. Not coincidentally, this was the piece of land the US bought during the Gadsden Purchase on behalf of the railroads that wanted an easy southern transcontinental route.
Nobody knows of I-10? Fl to CA, southern route.
Unless it has changed since I drove it in 1991…
It also makes the idea of using a twin-engined airplane to cross the mountains unnecessary.
Glenn - next time, start a day or two before and don’t try to thread your little bullet through the Rockies - that “Pass” you found was a box canyon. Too bad your bullet was going too fast to turn around.
I was wondering the same thing today while staring at the frozen Hudson River this morning…Why did so many people stay in the northern area of the US? While I’m not arguing that there is an abundance of resources in this area and it probably resembled the lands they had left behind, I’d guess that two or three horrible winters would have provoked many more to make a trip southward more quickly.
Until the invention of air conditioning, it was much easier to stay warm in the winter than stay cool in the summer.
Modern day highway 62 to the 10 in California illustrates kind of what I was thinking. No extreme elevation, but yeah, it is a desert.
It’s a desert, though. That’s a problem if your transportation is powered by horses or oxen (which need to eat and drink regularly), less of a problem for a railroad or a traveler in a modern car.
That route also meant you had to travel through Apache and Comanche territory. The Apaches and Comanches were notorious for capturing people trespassing into their territory, and treating their captives horribly. The risk of torture, enslavement, and rape might make the mountains seem not so bad by comparison.