Learning this, Hastings undertook to divert emigrants to California. In 1846 he backtracked Frémont's course to intercept the thousands he knew would be on the Oregon Trail. Missing the path at present Salt Lake City, he crossed the Wasatch Range via Emigration Canyon and Big Mountain to Echo Canyon, thus happening upon the shortest feasible route to Fort Bridger.

He persuaded four companies to take his shortcut, guiding one himself. Three descended Weber Canyon, where the streambed was clear of brush and trees, but boulders and deep water proved hard on animals and wagons. Hastings advised the fourth company, the Donner-Reed party, to cut a road through Emigration Canyon. Having crossed the salt desert on horseback, he did not foresee difficulties in the soft surface; however, the heavier wagon trains encountered problems there.

The mountain portion of the cutoff became the Mormon road into the Salt Lake Valley. After the Donner-Reed party's experience, the desert crossing lay virtually unused until the automobile road was built across the desert in 1924.

See: Charles Kelley, Salt Desert Trails: A History of the Hastings Cutoff (1930, 1969); and Dale L. Morgan, ed., Overland in 1846 (1963).

Dale Beecher