Devil's Gate
Devil’s Gate is the name of a deep gorge cut by the Sweetwater River in southern Natrona County, Wyoming, about five miles southwest of Independence Rock. The gorge is “about 370 feet deep and 1,500 feet long. The cleft is 30 feet wide at the base but nearly 300 feet wide at its top.”[1]
The gorge is too narrow for wagons to pass through alongside the river, and the Mormon pioneers and other travelers along the Oregon and Mormon trails generally passed south of it.
In 1847, Brigham Young’s group camped near the gorge on June 21. By the early 1850s, trading posts had been erected by Devil’s Gate and by Independence Rock. The last family to run the post at Devil’s Gate left in the summer of 1856, so when the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies arrived in the late fall, the post was abandoned. In fact, Martin’s company used part of the structure of the post to burn for warmth.[2]
Among the group of rescuers who came from Salt Lake City to find the beleaguered companies, “twenty men, under the leadership of Daniel W. Jones, remained for the winter at nearby Fort Seminoe to guard freight unloaded there by the Hodgetts and Hunt wagon companies, in part to make room for exhausted members of the Martin company. Daniel W. Jones and his men suffered misery and starvation at Devil’s Gate, at one point being reduced to eating boiled rawhide until friendly Indians gave them some buffalo meat.”[3]
