HIKING INTO THE PAST

What I remember most is the heat: the wind scouring my skin like a hair dryer turned up high, every breath warming me from inside, not that I needed to be warmed. Underfoot, the desiccated earth cracked into a hardpan mosaic the color of bleached driftwood. Toward the horizon, undulating light fractured and danced like something Monet would have painted, if he had lived in the desert and painted air instead of water.

I was walking along the Sweetwater River toward the Continental Divide in southern Wyoming. The land is empty now, all sage and brown scrub stretching endlessly in every direction. One hundred seventy years ago, the view would have looked very different, filled from one horizon to the other by so many people, cattle, and conveyances that I wouldn’t have been able to see through the dust clouds scuffed up by hooves, wheels, and boots. Occasional trail markers told me that the path I was following had once been used as four distinct historic travel ways: the Mormon Pioneers Trail, the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the Pony Express Trail. Today, these four trails are among 19 designated by Congress to commemorate seminal movements in American history. Covering 37,000 miles in 42 states and the District of Columbia, the national historic trails encompass footpaths, roads, waterways, museums, monuments, interpretive programs, markers, battlefields, and grave sites that give us a connection between landscapes, stories, cultures — and each other.

The four trails I found myself following commemorate separate historic events, but they are contiguous for some 700 miles. No matter who you were — a Mormon trekking to Salt Lake City on faith and a prayer, a New Yorker seduced by the lure of Californian gold fields, an Appalachian family seeking