History and Historic Sites of the Valley * Then and Now Photos * Lost Crescenta * Rockhaven * Membership and Donations
On Monday November 19, Art Cobery, historian for the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley, will narrate a slide presentation on the California Trail. Most Americans have read or heard about the great migration to Oregon in the 1840's; few however are familiar with the more used California Trail, which branched off from the Oregon Trail in southern Idaho and followed a long and arduous path through the barren deserts of Nevada and over the steep Sierra Nevada escarpment into the gold fields and the Great Central Valley. In 1849 only 460 traveled to Oregon while over 25,000 pushed on to California, including Benjamin Briggs, founder of La Crescenta. The population soon exceeded a hundred thousand allowing California to become a full-fledged state on September 9, 1850.Pictured above: Scotts Bluff, 596 mile mark on Oregon/California Trail. "One of the major landmarks on the trail and with Chimney Rock 35 miles east, it signaled that almost one third of the trail had been traveled"-located on the south side of the Platte River.