History Pages: 8 - The Wagon Trains
For a table of contents, see History pages.
The frontiersmen came to California on foot and/or on horseback. Many of the earliest were hunters/trappers, but others were explorers like Lewis & Clark, Jedediah Smith, and Benjamin Bonneville, who mapped their routes so that others could follow. By 1840, wagon trains began to follow those routes all the way to the West Coast - to the north of California, so the main route became known as the Oregon Trail. Some, after reaching the western Columbia River settlements, turned south to California. The Vardamon Bennett family came by that route in 1843, and some family members ended up in what is now Santa Cruz County.
Others sought shorter routes and, in 1841, the Bartleson-Bidwell party] became the first wagon train to cross the Sierra Nevada into California's Central Valley. Dozens of other wagon trains followed over the next ten years or so, over a number of different routes. The most famous of these was the ill-fated Donner Party, which didn't make it over the pass before winter set in. Martha Reed Lewis, nine-years old at the time, survived to become a Santa Cruz and Capitola resident.
Other routes were found to be equally dangerous, but for different reasons. The John Arcan family narrowly survived a trip through the heat of Death Valley. They may have been part of a party whose survivors' descendants now call themselves the "Death Valley '49ers".
