For certain, we know, the covered wagons came in ’44. Old Caleb Greenwood and hawk-nosed Elisha Stevens guided those emigrants down the Humboldt River. At the sink they found a Pai-ute chief whom they called Truckee. Squatting, he drew them a map in the sand. So they crossed the desert, and went up along the swift river which they called Truckee for the map-drawer. They met the snow at the lake, and with the snow they fought panic. Some went to the south, but others forced their way onward through the snow and over the Pass above the lake.

Next year, following the wheel marks, came William Ide, and rigged a windlass at the granite crest to pull up his wagons. In ’46 came a great wave of emigrants—five hundred wagons. Last of all that autumn came the Donners; the snow caught them; they starved through the winter; the horror of their story imprinted their name upon both lake and pass, and broods still over peak and canyon like a legend of Greek tragedy.

In ’49 the wagons swung round a little to the south through an easier gap. So it went through the fifties, and one might have said that the great days of the Pass were over, that it would lie in the future like a thousand other Sierran gaps—untrodden snow or wind-clean granite. In the sixties the main road followed the double-summited route by Lake Tahoe. There in fiction Hank Monk drove Horace Greeley to Placerville on time, and there in reality passed the stages and the great freighting-wagons to and from the Nevada mines. There galloped the pony-express riders, and there stood the poles of the first transcontinental telegraph.

But railroad-crazy Theodore Judah craftily shunned the double summit, and changed everything. For after Judah’s surveyors came Charlie Crocker and his coolie gangs digging like ants. The railroad reached Auburn and Illinoistown; it rounded “Cape Horn” and came to Dutch Flat. There it paused, but a wagon-road was laid out ahead. Once more Donner Pass woke to life, and echoed back the sound of cracking whips and teamsters’ bawling. But the rails came on again. In ’67 the coolies were camping at the summit where Ide had set up his windlass. (There, even yet, you can dig up fragments of cheap Chinese bowls.) Then in ’69 the Gold Spike was driven, and the trains went through.

With routes as with people, success breeds success. The new wagon-road preceded the railroad; the telegraph came with it. In their due time, each supporting the other, came the transcontinental telephone, the all-year automobile highway, the electric transmission-line, and the air-lane. Because Judah chose that crossing for his railroad, the pass of the ill-omened name is now a main channel of world communication.