I want to add my congratulations to Wendell Huffman for his work on Lassen's trip in 1847-48. It is useful to have documented that Lassen did know of the gold rush when he journeyed back to his ranch in 1848. I would also like to advance the thread on Lassen by one year, to the Lassen cutoff. I used the Lassen cutoff as a case study in my research about how the participants of the gold rush in 1849 and 1850-I call them goldrushers-obtained, assessed, and acted upon information.

The general outlines of the story of the cutoff are fairly clear, just as Will Bagley summarized them in his post of November 11. The main characters in terms of information were Milton McGee, who led the first train to take the cutoff, about August 11, 1849, and John Meyers, who, along with Benoni Hudspeth, led a train over the cutoff about August 20. At least McGee and Meyers had traveled both the Applegate and the California sides of the cutoff. Meyers had even tried to get the army to hire him to lead companies over this route. But there are a few issues important to the study of the assessment and use of information on this cutoff that are not clear to me. Perhaps members of the list can help.

First, about Lassen in 1849. Did he have anything to do with goldrushers knowing about or taking the cutoff? When did his name become associated with the cutoff? In two of the best known books about the trail, John Unruh and George Stewart give quite different stories. Unruh stated that Lassen had a hand in directing the migration over the route to his ranch and that Lassen took advantage of the by then desperate goldrushers by price gouging. Stewart barely mentioned Lassen in his description of the cutoff and emphasizes the role of McGee. Did either McGee or Meyers mention Lassen with regard to the cutoff? I doubt it because Lassen's name was not mentioned in many of the diaries of groups that took the cutoff in August. For example, Delano wrote about the cutoff beginning on August 10 (he reached Lassens' meadow-without naming it-August 16). Charles Grey and the Newark Co. reached the meadow August 18 and wrote about taking "the cutoff to the north" but did not mention Lassen's name. Israel Hale reached the meadow August 20; Hale knew all about the Applegate part of the trail, but he did not mention Lassen. The Buckeye Rovers reached the meadow August 25, and John Banks described the "cutoff leading to the Feather River" (which they did not take) but did not mention Lassen's name. The first mention I have of Lassen is William Swain's diary on September 14, spelling it Lawson's. Goldsborough Bruff knew all about it and even had a copy of Meyers's letter to the war office extolling the route. But his Washington company was some three weeks behind and did not reach the meadow until September 19. It almost seems as if some information arrived on the trail about early September that connected Lassen's name to the route. Could this be the mysterious "agents" that Unruh mentioned but did not document?

Second, where did the estimate of 110-150 miles come from? There were many rumors and signs at the fork of the trail at "Lassen's" meadow that gave the estimate of about 150 miles to the gold fields (see for example, Gray's dairy of August 18 or Elza Armstrong of the Buckeye Rovers on September 3). Meyers must have known this was silly. Irene Paden tries to explain the number by saying that Applegate's waybill listed the Sacramento River as being 20 miles beyond Goose Lake, where the California travelers parted from the Applegate trail. But Applegate's waybill as printed in the Oregon Spectator shows 160 miles from the Humboldt to Goose Lake, and then gets very confusing by continuing to Canion Creek, Shallow Lake, and "Sacramento River" 80 miles from Goose Lake. When Israel Hale copied the waybill in the back of his dairy (the manuscript at the Soc. for California Pioneers), he seemed to think Applegate was describing the route south from Goose Lake. But the waybill shows the way north from Goose Lake, not south (I don't know where the "Sacramento River" came from in the waybill). Also, is there evidence that Applegate knew about the route south? The only way I can make sense of the 150 mile figure is that it came from a misinterpretation of the Applegate waybill, as Paden suggests, or that people assumed that Goose Lake was near the gold fields. If either of those surmises is right, McGee and Meyers were the goat of the story because they had been there and should have known better.

Third, was there a "middle route." I was very intrigued by Will Bagley's comment that Lassen claimed, in 1857, that he found Noble's Cutoff. When was he supposed to have found it? The reason this is important is that Swain wrote on September 17 from Lassen's meadow, about a "middle passage" that would take them over the mountains in a week. On Sept. 22, about three days onto the Applegate trail, Swain wrote that he expected to be traveling west instead of north: "We found no left-hand [middle] rout, although we were twenty-five miles past the point where we expected to find one." Holiday wrote that McGee and Meyers also expected a "middle passage" but he gave no documentation. There was, in fact, such a pass, Nobles Pass, but it was supposedly not discovered for three more years. If there was such a rumor, or at least vague information about such a pass, it would be about 150 miles from the meadow to the gold fields on the upper Feather River. Is there, perhaps, another twist to the story here? That Lassen, trying to profiteer from the goldrushers, either made up or knew something about, a pass through the Sierras directly west of Black Rock, and somehow communicated this to the migration by mid September.

All these details of the Lassen Cutoff story are of more than antiquarian interest (not that that isn't sufficient to make it interesting). It is part of the timeless story of how information is obtained, assessed and used to make decisions under uncertainty. The gold rush was an historical situation in which information was desperately needed quickly and conflicting information had to be assessed, with the result at times being a matter of life or death. Only the battlefield is a more pressing example of the importance of quickly assessing scarce and conflicting information. Perhaps members will forgive me if I give a little plug for my book, Spreading the News: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush, coming out from the University of Nebraska Press next year. In the book, I give full credit and a plug to this listserve from which I have learned a great deal.