Midland Trail - Early Routing

Early Routing

The early routing of the Midland Trail, from east to west, began in either New York City or Washington, D.C. and continued through Richmond and Clifton Forge, Virginia to Charleston, West Virginia and passing on through the Midland Trail in West Virginia; through Morehead, KY to Lexington, Kentucky; Louisville, Kentucky; Vincennes, Indiana; Salem, Illinois; St. Louis, Missouri; Sedalia, Missouri; Kansas City, Missouri and Topeka, Kansas; to Limon, Colorado and then on to Denver, Colorado.

From Denver, the original routing split several ways to cross the rockies via Berthoud Pass, Tennessee Pass, Cochetopa Pass, and Monarch Pass. All routings converged in Grand Junction, Colorado and continued into Utah through Green River, Utah and Salt Lake City. Past Salt Lake City, the routing moved southward across the Salt Lake Desert on the same routing as the Lincoln Highway through Iosepa, Utah, Orr's Ranch, Fish Springs Ranch, and Ibapah, Utah.

This part of the route was never popular, the state favoring the Victory Highway routing to the north, which is the basic alignment later followed by Interstate 80, and is now largely inaccessible as it is part of the Dugway Proving Grounds. In central Nevada, the highway continued across the Great Basin Desert through Ely and Tonopah then turning south at Goldfield in the Amargosa Desert and then west into California at Lida and over the Inyo Mountains and White Mountains through Westgard Pass.

At the junction in Big Pine, California in the Owens Valley, the original routing then split into four options:

• The first through Mammoth Lakes, Mono Lake, Yosemite, and Stockton to San Francisco.
• The second second through Bridgeport, California, Lake Tahoe, and Placerville to Sacramento and then San Francisco.
• The third south through Independence and Mojave in the Mojave Desert, and then west through Tehachapi Pass to the San Joaquin Valley, and then northward through Merced and Modesto to San Francisco.
• The fourth continuing southward from Mojave through Willow Springs to Los Angeles. By the time the Automobile Club of Southern California prepared their 1917 map of the state, the fourth routing, through Mojave and Willow Springs to Los Angeles, had become the main routing for the Midland Trail in California.