01Biography
Stephen Meek, the older brother of the mountain man Joe Meek, trapped in the Rockies in the 1830s and went to California with Joseph Walker's party in 1833 and 1834. In 1842 Lansford Hastings's wagon company hired him at the Green River as their guide, and he went on to Oregon.
In May 1845 a large emigrant company elected him its pilot. He had offered to take them through for $250. That August, near Fort Boise, he led the families of about 200 wagons off the main trail on a shortcut he said would save about 150 miles. They lost their way in the dry high desert of central Oregon. Water ran short and fever spread, and many people died before the train reached The Dalles in October. Some of the angry emigrants threatened his life.
02Why they matter
Led the first wagon train over the Meek Cutoff in 1845, a shortcut across Oregon's high desert that went badly wrong.
03How they died
After the gold rush he settled in Siskiyou County, California, where he mined and in later years guided hunting parties in the mountains around Scott Valley. He died at Etna, California, on January 8, 1889, in his early eighties.
04Legacy
The route still carries his name. He told his own story in a short autobiography printed in 1885 in The Golden Era, a San Francisco weekly, and the lost train of 1845 inspired the 2010 film Meek's Cutoff.