01Summary
A broad, gentle saddle through the Rocky Mountains, so wide that many emigrants didn't realize they had crossed the Continental Divide.
02History
South Pass is a 20-mile-wide saddle on the Continental Divide in present-day Fremont County, Wyoming, at 7,412 feet elevation. Its grade is so gentle, about 100 feet per mile, that emigrants often crossed it without realising. Many wrote of asking guides to point out where the divide actually was.
Robert Stuart's small Astorian party found it on 22 October 1812 on their return east from Fort Astoria, and their journal fixed the route for everyone who came after. Mountain men used it through the 1820s, the first wagons crossed it in 1832, and from 1841 onward it became the eastern half of every wagon-emigrant route to the Pacific.
South Pass City, a placer-gold boom town nearby, emerged in 1867, by which time the trail era was almost over.
03Today
South Pass is a designated National Historic Landmark, and a roadside pull-off on Wyoming Highway 28 marks the divide. South Pass City State Historic Site preserves about 30 surviving buildings of the 1860s mining town a few miles south.
04People connected here
05Stops nearby
The Oregon Trail ran roughly 2,170 miles from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City. The stops immediately before and after this one are linked below; show South Pass on the interactive map for the full route.