The Parting of the Ways is a historic site in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, United States, where the Oregon and California Trails fork from the original route to Fort Bridger to an alternative route, the Sublette-Greenwood Cutoff, across the Little Colorado Desert. Many wagon trains parted company, some preferring the shorter cutoff route, which involved fifty waterless miles, to the longer but better-watered main route.
The junction is marked by a small sandstone boulder about high, placed by L.C. Bishop and Paul Henderson and inscribed with a left-pointing arrow with "F. Bridger" and a right-pointing arrow with "S. Cut Off." The route was not established by Sublette, but rather a mountain man named Greenwood. The error in attribution arose when Joseph E. Ware's Emigrant's Guide to California (1849) listed the alternate path as the "Sublette Cutoff."
References
External links
photographs at the National Park Service's NRHP database (WYOHistory.Org) by Wyoming Historical Society Parting of the Ways at the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office