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Fatal missteps, Part 1: Freak Accidents on the Westering Trails

A river squeezes through a narrow passage between two sheer rock walls. — NPS Photo

Devil’s Gate, near Independence Rock in south-central Wyoming, is a deep, V-shaped cleft cut through a granite ridge by the Sweetwater River. The combined corridor of the Oregon, California, Pony Express and Mormon Pioneer Trail did not follow the river through the gap, but passed around it. Curious emigrants, including the younger brother of pioneer Ezra Meeker, made side-trips to explore the scenic feature. Ezra’s name may sound familiar because in the early 1900s, near the end of his life, he launched a one-man campaign to save and commemorate the Oregon Trail.

Jacob Pindell Prickett’s 1854 journal describes an encounter with Ezra, who anxiously inquired if Pricket’s party had seen his brother, Clark. The young man had gone exploring around the Gate and failed to return to camp. They answered him no and continued on their way.

We had not proceeded far when, in a little eddying basin formed by some rocks jutting into the river, we found the body of the young man washed up against the shore. We pulled the body from the water and…I clambered to the top of a rock from which I could see the brother far down the river….I took out my revolver and discharged it three times in quick succession, and the reports reverberating from side to side of the rocky walls, finally reached him, as they did the anxious ones waiting in camp at the head of the chasm.

As Ezra and other members of his family started back toward Prickett, someone found Clark’s revolver with one empty chamber.

It was conjectured that he had fired it simply to hear the report echo and re-echo down the chasm. That he had then attempted to cross the Sweetwater by stepping or jumping from rock to rock, and the surface of some being glassy in their smoothness, he had fallen and striking his head against the rock, had become unconscious and was drowned. A bruise of the head near the temple seemed to confirm the correctness of this conjecture.

“Probably never before nor since,” wrote Prickett, “has The Devil’s Gate echoed such wails of anguish and grief as were mingled with the ceaseless wailing of its waters on this occasion.”

Fifty-two years later, while retracing the Oregon Trail in 1906, grizzled old Ezra paused at the site to remember that day:

I longed to see this place, for here, somewhere under the sands, lies all that was mortal of a brother, Clark Meeker, drowned in the Sweetwater in 1854 while attempting to cross the Plains; would I be able to see and identify the grave? No.

Another account, likely apocryphal, describes a second death at Devil’s Gate under similar circumstances. This victim, it is said, was a teenaged young woman who climbed above the gorge and then fell some 300 feet to the river below. She was buried nearby, and (the story goes) the following words were carved into her grave marker:

Here likes the body of Caroline Todd
Whose soul has lately gone to God
’Ere redemption was too late,
She was redeemed at Devil’s Gate