The Mormon-Carson Pass: How Returning Battalion Veterans Blazed the California Gold Rush Trail (Summer 1848)

When the Mormon Battalion was discharged in California in July 1847, many men chose to stay for a time to earn wages, and eventually found themselves at Sutter's Mill — where gold was discovered on January 24, 1848.

By the summer of 1848, most of the remaining ex-Battalion men wanted to go home — to reunite with families they had not seen in two years, to bring their wages to the struggling settlements at Winter Quarters and Salt Lake City, and to live the life they had signed up for the Church, not the Army.

The Sierra Nevada Mountains stood between them and home. The established route (now known as the Truckee Pass) was dangerous, known, and crowded. Instead, a group of ex-Battalion members — including Azariah Smith, Henry Bigler, and others — chose to blaze a new path over the mountains through Carson Pass.

They had no clear map and no guarantee it would work. What they had was determination to get home, and the faith that had sustained them through 2,000 miles of desert.

The route they blazed became the Mormon-Carson Pass Emigrant Trail. Within one year, more than six thousand forty-niners would pour through it on their way to the California gold fields. The following decade, tens of thousands more would use it. The irony was perfect: men who had just participated in discovering the gold, who were indifferent to it, who simply wanted to go home to their families and their faith, blazed the very road by which the rest of America would come rushing toward it.

The Mormon-Carson Pass is one of many quiet moments in Battalion history where the men's faithful choices — made with no idea of their historical consequence — shaped the landscape of the American West far beyond anything they could have imagined.