A road to remember

“July 4, Thursday…Gave the expedition a holiday to commemorate the day. Issued to working parties extra issues of molasses, ham, whisky, flour, pickles for a 4th of July dinner … Day spent pleasantly and harmoniously in camp, which was six and a half miles east of Wolf’s Lodge prairie …” – John Mullan, 1861

FOURTH OF JULY PASS, Idaho – Thousands of RVs will lumber to the top of Fourth of July Pass this weekend, but few will stop to salute Lt. John Mullan.

His monument is tucked away, hidden from Interstate 90 in a woodsy glen. Hemlock and cedars line a remnant of the original Mullan Road, a 624-mile military supply route that linked Walla Walla and Fort Benton, Mont. Near the monument, the site of Mullan’s July 4, 1861, camp, the interstate is an unseen but audible presence; the growl of compression brakes competes with the liquid notes of a robin.

Mullan would have appreciated the sound. The 30-year-old lieutenant slept under the stars in this narrow canyon, dreaming of the day his road would become a major transportation route.

Construction of the Mullan Road is a feat still admired today. Thirteen thousand vehicles travel over Fourth of July Pass daily on I-90, which follows part of the original road.

“I hold him in high esteem for what he did at the time he did it,” said Bob Dunsmore, a retired Idaho Transportation Department engineer. “He built 624 miles of road for $230,000. We couldn’t build a quarter of a mile of road for that today.”

The Mullan Road was the first engineered road west of the Mississippi, connecting the Great Plains to the Northwest.

More than a road, it represents a clear line in history.

“It marks the end of the Native American era and the beginning of the modern one,” said Cort Sims, a Forest Service archaeologist who successfully nominated remaining portions of the Mullan Road in Idaho for inclusion in the National Historic Register.

The road was built as part of federal transportation policy, Sims said. Indian unrest prompted citizen outcry for better military support. But the trail was used only briefly for military purposes. It became the route of prospectors, settlers and pack mules.

Mullan was 29 when he set out from Fort Walla Walla in 1859 with a military escort, survey team and road crew totaling 230 men. The West Point graduate had come to the Inland Northwest several years earlier, fought in an Indian battle, and worked on a railroad survey team with Isaac Stevens, Washington’s first territorial governor. Stevens recommended Mullan for the road appointment.

“He had a lot of knowledge of the area,” Dunsmore said.

Mullan was a short man, 5-foot-5, or 5-foot-6. In photos, he wears elaborate side whiskers and an unnerving stare.

“If you put your hand over his mouth and nose, he looks like a homicidal maniac,” said Kay Strombo, curator of the Mineral County Museum in Superior, Mont., which specializes in the Mullan Road. “He was very intense. … A Lt. Valentine Krantz, upon meeting him in Fort Benton, described him as ‘monomaniacal.’ You were either for him and his road, or you were against him.”

In later letters, Mullan described his yearning for recognition. Many engineers came west to establish careers. “They were a huge pioneering presence,” said Katherine Aiken, the associate dean of the University of Idaho’s College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences.

Unlike today’s stereotypes, engineers of the time had a “swashbuckling” image, she said. The work was intensely physical, and often dangerous.

“(Mullan) always strikes me as a typical engineer, though … really into the process,” Aiken added. “He went right through what turned out to be one of the world’s greatest silver deposits, and he missed it because he never got off the road.”

In his notes, Mullan wrote about quartz outcroppings and finding “color” in streams. He actively discouraged prospecting among his crew, however. He didn’t want them stampeding off in search of gold.

Mullan built the road in stages, underestimating the cost and difficulty of each section. The initial appropriation of $30,000 swelled to $230,000 by the time the road was finished, representing nearly $5 million in today’s dollars.

The road, Mullan wrote, required “120 miles of difficult timber cutting…and 30 measured miles of excavation … The remainder was through open timber country or open, rolling prairie.”

Mullan and his crew used the stars to compute their location. They laid logs side-by-side across boggy sections, creating a “corduroy” surface to travel on.

The Mullan Road originally went around the southern end of Lake Coeur d’Alene. After flooding along the St. Joe River, Mullan decided to reroute the road over the Fourth of July Pass. It was one of the most difficult stretches of the trail. By the time Mullan and his men stopped to celebrate Independence Day, they were hacking their way through swamps populated with giant cedars.

The party left a memento in the campsite – a blaze in the trunk of a 250-year-old white pine, and the carving “MR July 4, 1861.” “MR” stands for Military Road. The date became the name of the pass.

A windstorm later blew off the top of the tree. The remaining trunk was crumbling with rot by 1988 when Sims, the archaeologist, took a chain saw to it. “My claim to fame is that I cut down the Mullan Tree,” he said.

A preserved section – with the writing faintly visible – is on display in the Museum of North Idaho.

The road fell into disrepair after it was finished, but it still got lots of use during the 1860s, Sims said. Walla Walla was the starting point for miners, merchants and settlers heading to North Idaho, Montana and Canada.

Business interests, lobbying the Washington territorial legislature for money for road repairs, estimated that “20,000 persons have passed over the Mullan road to and from Montana during the past season; $1,000,000 in treasure has passed through Walla Walla … during the same period.”

Later, parts of the road became U.S. Highway 10, the forerunner of I-90.

After the expedition, Mullan published a guide to the trail. Ever ambitious, he also lobbied unsuccessfully for the post of Idaho’s first territorial governor; ran a stage and freight company; and worked as an attorney in San Francisco. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1909.

He’d be gratified to know that the Mineral County Museum in Superior celebrates “Mullan Day” every second Saturday in May. The annual event draws 30 to 40 engineers, cartographers, historians and others. “They’ve ‘discovered’ the Mullan Trail, and found it very interesting,” Strombo said.

She thinks of Mullan every time that her ‘94 Saturn station wagon crests 4th of July Pass, elevation 3081 feet.

“His legacy is this major highway,” Strombo said. “When I travel it, I think, ‘Oh God, I’m glad I’m doing it now, and not then.’ “