Flutterby™! : Oregon Trail Shortcuts

Atlas Obscura: The Deadly Temptation of the Oregon Trail Shortcut

To encourage settlers, Hastings penned a guidebook called The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California. It touted the American West as a virtual Garden of Eden, and claimed his cutoff to be the “most direct route” to the San Francisco Bay Area. But the one thing he didn’t do? Test the cutoff himself before making the claim. Existing trails followed centuries-old paths established by animals and maintained by the local Shoshone people. The cutoff, though faster in theory, was new and full of treachery.