Laurel Hill was Oregon Trail’s ‘final boss battle’

By Finn J.D. John
May 1, 2024

THE OREGON TRAIL has been called the world’s longest graveyard. It’s a 2,000-mile road that averages one buried body every 80 yards. Out of the 350,000 emigrants that traveled along it, one out of every 10 died along the way.

Most likely, if you’re a young-ish Oregonian, you already knew that. The legendary Oregon Trail video game has made the deadliness of the Trail common knowledge, and “You have died of dysentery” has become a well-known pop-culture reference.

But there were lots of ways to kick the bucket on the Trail. Blood poisoning was a popular way to go — in those pre-antibiotic days, a minor scratch from a wagon fastener or prick from a thornbush could quickly go septic. And accidents — people getting run over by a wagon wheel, stepped on by an ox, or falling off the wagon and landing badly — were also common.

So it’s actually pretty ironic that the worst part of the whole trail was, in terms of body count, relatively benign compared with the rest.

That hasn’t prevented some great ghost stories from developing around it, though.

I’m talking about the dreaded half mile of 60-degree slope on southwest side of Mount Hood known as Laurel Hill.

LAUREL HILL WAS the last great obstacle most emigrants had to face, and if the Oregon Trail really had been a videogame, Laurel Hill would have been the final “boss battle.” Once it was conquered, an emigrant had basically won, and could simply drive on down to Oregon City and start looking for a land claim.

But it was quite a boss.

It was part of a crude wagon road officially called the Mount Hood Toll Road but unofficially known as the Barlow Road.

The Barlow Road was blazed in 1845, just a few years after the Oregon Trail had started flowing. At that time, the Trail basically ended at The Dalles, and from there the emigrants had to book passage on the Columbia River to have their wagons basically floated down through the rapids. This was very expensive and highly dangerous, and it formed a bottleneck on the Trail. Soon The Dalles was full of emigrants waiting for passage, burning through their food stocks and boiling with frustration.

That’s exactly the situation Sam Barlow, a 53-year-old wagon train leader, found when he arrived in The Dalles in the early autumn of 1845. Figuring there had to be another way, and realizing that if he didn’t do something his party would be stuck in The Dalles all winter, he set out with his train of prairie schooners to see if an Indian trail across the southern slopes of Mount Hood could be made passable to wagons.

Now, this wasn’t as likely an idea as it might seem to modern travelers. The kind of wagons used on the Oregon Trail were typically farm wagons with canvas covers added for weather protection. These were not the huge Conestoga wagons one sees in Western pictures, which is why they were called “prairie schooners” — back in the age of sail, schooners were among the smallest commercial freight ships.

Prairie schooners were roughly the size of an extra-long full-size pickup truck bed: 9 to 12 feet long, a little over 4 feet wide, with sides in the 18 to 36 inch range. The wheels were roughly 4 feet in diameter, and the cargo box sat on top of the axles, so with a full load of cargo piled up the wagon’s center of gravity sat about six feet up in the air over a four- or five-foot footprint. It would not take much in the way of sidehill action to tip one over.

So when an Oregon Trail wagon approached mountainous terrain, there could be no switchbacks. Dynamite would not be invented for another 20 years, so blasting away rocky outcroppings to do the cut-and-fill thing could only really be done with gunpowder, which was too bulky and expensive to be practicable in a place like frontier Oregon.

No, the wagons would have to either go straight up the slope — with double or triple teams of draft animals straining to pull them along — or straight down the slope, with ropes wrapped around tree trunks or with 100-foot-tall fir trees dragging behind to slow them down.

This, then, was what Barlow was looking for as he scouted ahead of his wagons: A path that could be cleared with fire, ax and saw and driven over just as it lay, with no more than 10 or 12 degrees of side slope at all times.

It was excruciatingly slow going, even after another wagon train, led by Joel Palmer, joined them, swelling the ranks of trail builders. The snowy season caught them just short of what today is known as Barlow Pass. They unhitched the wagons and, leaving a few members of the party behind to guard them over the winter, pressed on with just what the animals could carry in packs, to Oregon City. Even so, it was a near thing, and a rescue party had to be dispatched to meet them at the Sandy River with supplies.

As soon as they arrived, Barlow went to Oregon’s provisional legislature, which was then in session, to ask for a charter to develop the road he’d blazed. The Legislature approved the plan, so Barlow got financial backing from businessman Philip Foster and plunged back into the woods with 40 men early the following year.

They cleared the right-of-way with axes, saws, and fire. They didn’t use shovels and they didn’t have blasting powder, so the grades were left just as they were.

They burned through the $4,000 well before it was finished, and the workers completed the job on credit. The road never did make money, or at least not very much; it barely paid back Foster’s initial investment after several years of operation.

The road was a one-way affair. You could travel along it from The Dalles to Oregon City; but you could not go the other way, at least not with a wagon. And the reason for that was Laurel Hill.

IF SAM BARLOW had ended up a murder victim, it would have been because of Laurel Hill. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of emigrants would have cheerfully done the deed if he’d been handy when they were descending this terrifying grade. They’d paid $5 per wagon, plus 25 cents per head of livestock, for the privilege of risking their lives tumbling down a mountain. Barlow, they grumbled, was “charging the dead” since he collected the toll at the beginning of the road so that he’d get his money whether a traveler died on the way or not.

The river passage was far harder, far more expensive, and much deadlier; but it was pretty easy for most folks, standing at the top of Laurel Hill and contemplating all the grisly death scenarios it conjured up, to forget about that.

And deadly as the rest of the Oregon Trail had proven, death never seemed quite so close and threatening as it did during the last stretch of Sam Barlow’s wagon road, when it got to Laurel Hill.

The hill was so steep that ropes had to be used to lower the wagons for at least part of the descent. The ropes would be wrapped around a stump or tree, or “snubbed,” so that the friction would slow the wagon’s descent. Until fairly recently one could still find rope burns around trees by the hill.

As more and more wagons slid down the hill with brakes locked on and sometimes a tree slung underneath as a drag anchor, the hill quickly lost its topsoil and became more and more eroded until the roadbed was a narrow trench seven feet deep and lined with rock. This, of course, made the tree-brakes less effective, so eventually someone would start a new path down the hill. Eventually there were a good half dozen of these “chutes” for emigrants to choose from.

On more than one occasion ropes snapped under the stress of snubbing, sending wagons hurtling down the hill to ruin. Emigrants crowded close to the livestock by the walls of the chute got their feet stepped on or run over by wagon wheels. On one occasion, a “grandma” who had decided to ride down the hill in the wagon tumbled over the front and landed on her head. The source claims she was unhurt, but she has to have at least been badly bruised. But, certainly she was more lucky than not on that day.

At the bottom of the hill was a more-or-less permanent camp, where the emigrants would stop, nurse their wounds, catch their breath — and, for the unlucky among them, bury their dead.

Today, the site of that camp is near the unincorporated community of Rhododendron (the “laurels” of Laurel Hill were actually rhodies). Over the years the Barlow Road was in use, the camp developed into something much more substantial, like a large logging camp with bunkhouses and a cook shack, which the Cascade Geographic Society has been working for several decades to restore to its 1890s splendor. They call it the “Living History Village.”

And the word is, the place is haunted. There are persistent rumors of strange glowing “orbs” appearing in the old bunkhouses, and people have reported the buildings shaking mysteriously as if under ghostly footfalls.

Volunteers in 2001 found a pair of rock-covered graves — a pioneer grave and a Native American grave — near the mess hall. There is also a more famous grave nearby, the Pioneer Woman’s Grave, the final resting place for someone who either died on Laurel Hill or not far from it.

All of this may be true evidence of pioneer ghosts, or it may be the fruit of overheated imaginations of people all too aware that they’re standing on the site of one of the great graveyards of the Oregon Trail. Either way, the legends add spice to one of the most dramatic places in Oregon’s history.

ONCE THE BOTTOM of the brutal chute was reached, there was the “Devil’s Backbone” to traverse — a long, narrow ridge, barely wide enough for a single wagon, between two deep creek canyons. This was a little nerve-wracking, but nowhere near as dangerous or terrifying as Laurel Hill.

And a few miles later, the exhausted travelers would arrive at Philip Foster’s farm, more or less at the end of the road in what today is Eagle Creek. In their writings, Oregon Trail travelers describe that farm as a pastoral Eden … and, well, compared with what they’d just been through, it surely was!

(Sources: “Mt. Hood or Bust: The Old Road,” an article by Ivan M. Woolley published in the March 1959 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; “Barlow Road,” an article by Nathan Pederson published Aug. 8, 2023, at oregonencyclopedia.org; “The Barlow Road on the Oregon Trail,” an un-by-lined article published on the National Park Service Website March 21, 2024; “Discovering Laurel Hill,” a visitor guide created by Jim Tompkins published in 1996 by Sons and Daughters of Oregon Pioneers)

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