The Applegate Trail ~Southern Route to Oregon~ - Oregon Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

Marker Text:

In 1846, Jesse Applegate and fourteen others from near Dallas, Oregon, established a trail south from the Willamette Valley and east to Fort Hall. This route offered emigrants an alternative to the perilous “last leg” of the Oregon Trail down the treacherous Columbia River.

The first emigrants to trek the new “Southern Road” left with the trailblazers from Fort Hall in early August 1846. With Levi Scott acting as guide, while Jesse Applegate traveled ahead to mark the route, the hardy emigrants blazed a wagon trail through nearly 500 miles of wilderness arriving in the upper Willamette Valley in November. Emigrant travel continued along the Applegate Trail in later years and contributed greatly to the settlement of southern Oregon and the Willamette Valley.

Emigrant Trails

The Applegate Trail spit into two routes in the northern Umpqua Valley. The eastern route, established in 1846 by Jesse Applegate, Levi Scott, Moses “Black” Harris and twelve others from Polk County, Passed through Cottage Grove, Creswell, Eugene, and Junction City-It is approximated today by River Road and Highway 99. The western route, an ancient Kalapuya Indian trace and a Hudson’s Bay Company “trapper’s trail” until the 1840s, was most widely used alternate route, Known also as the “California Trail,” it became a wagon road in the late 1840s. Today, Territorial Road closely follows this historic trail.

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