Utah’s transcontinental contribution.
“Lawyers, jewelers, merchants, clerks, printers, musicians, bankers, and real estate salesmen vied with the day laborer to see who could do the most good, and many a soft palm bears blisters to bear testimony of zeal for the trail.”
This quote from the Carbon County News, dated July 17, 1913, describes the physicality, sense of duty, and pride in community that helped blaze a path through Price Canyon for a new automobile route — the Midland Trail — Utah’s portion of the first transcontinental highway.
To celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, a world’s fair called the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, was set to take place in San Francisco in 1915. An expedition in 1911, sponsored by the Midland Motor Company of Illinois, set out to establish a road that would provide travel through Denver, Grand Junction, Price, and Salt Lake City, thus completing a transcontinental route.
The group arrived in Price, Utah on July 5, declaring to residents that “2,000 or more cars would follow the Midland to Frisco for the Panama exposition.” The Midland Pathfinder 40 was the name of the automobile manufactured by the Midland Motor Company. After leaving Price, the slow but sturdy vehicle made its way over Soldier Summit, although not by the current, more direct route through Price Canyon. The detour through Willow Creek to the summit was nearly 60 miles longer, and it wasn’t revealed until later that the car had to be shipped by rail at least once.
The following year, Price Canyon was tackled head-on when the famous trailblazer, A.L. Westgard, known as the “Daniel Boone of the Gasoline Age,” was hired to find a way through. Westgard would later write of his adventures in a 1920 book entitled, Tales of a Pathfinder.
Westgard scouted out a route on foot through the canyon and made a rough sketch of a road accessible by automobile. He arrived in Salt Lake City for a celebration on November 9, 1912. His expedition put the Midland Trail on the map.
The 1913 Indiana Automobile Manufacturers Group, nicknamed The Hoosiers, would be the first expedition to open the road with their Indiana-Pacific Tour. The pilot car, driven by Ray McNamara, had the distinction of being the first car to cover the entire length of the Midland Trail from Grand Junction to Salt Lake City. This success would not have been possible without the 219 men that heeded the call “for every able-bodied man in Carbon County to donate a day’s work to the trail.” Using only picks and shovels, they carved a path just days before the arrival of the Hoosiers.
Beyond the imposing obstacles of Price Canyon, the entirety of the route across the state posed formidable challenges for the early roadbuilders. Westgard had faced severe difficulties while traversing eastern Utah on his 1912 trip, getting bogged down in mud numerous times due to flash flooding and the need to criss-cross the same stream beds repeatedly.
The western half of the state beyond Eureka was and is a vast desert. Lack of water and extreme heat were harrowing environmental factors, with isolation and dehydration posing extreme dangers. Early road maps labeled these hazards with warnings such as “No Water Available.” It wasn’t until 1952 that the final stretch of pavement was completed west of Delta, Utah.
On September 21, a New York Times article commemorated the event noting that, “thirty three and one-half miles of arrow-straight asphalt pavement running from a point just beyond Hinckley, about six miles west of here, to Skull Rock Pass in the Little Drum Mountain” was paved in 100-degree weather.
In its October 11, 1952 edition, Business Week commented that Highway 6 “was designated a transcontinental highway in 1937. Technically it was. You could get from Provincetown (Massachusetts) to Long Beach (California) on it if you chose to. But from Delta, about 80 miles east of the Utah-Nevada state line, to Ely, some 80 miles west of the border, you ran into trouble. Much of this stretch of the road was nothing but a wagon trail, rutted and filled with dust. It was one of the worst chunks of federal roads in the country.”
Its completion was a momentous occasion for Delta residents. Locals staged parades, ate barbecued beef, and listened to speeches. The same Business Week article noted, “In a final burst of enthusiasm, they closed off four blocks of US 6 and ran a 1,500-man square dance.” Highway 6 was now modern.
A Midland Trail Guide from 1916 described the descent into Helper, Utah — this time-traveling west to east along Highway 6, as one would from Salt Lake City to Moab — is the same scene a modern traveler finds today: “It (Helper) occupies a commanding location … at the eastern base of the Wasatch Mountain Range, and at the northern terminal of the famous Castle Valley of Eastern Utah. It lies in a beautiful valley at the foot of Price River Canyon.”
The 1916 Midland Trail guide stated that “No town in Utah is supplied with better hotel facilities,” and the first hotel mentioned was the Hotel Helper which was built in 1913, the year the Midland Trail was opened. The building now houses The Helper Museum, where a new exhibition about the creation of Highway 6 is under construction. The exhibition is open to visitors prior to its completion, with a grand opening planned for the spring of 2026.
Feature Image: Art print is by John Clark depicting the early travel though Price Canyon. Images Courtesy of Jason Huntzinger.
