The Oregon Trail Corridor includes the Oregon, Mormon Pioneer, California, and Pony Express Trails. This corridor of overland routes was created by more than 350,000 emigrants as they traveled west. The year 1843 is recognized as the start of the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri; the trail is marked with hundreds of sites emblematic of the courage and hope of the people who traveled it. The Oregon Trail crosses what are now the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho, and ends in Oregon City, Oregon. Wyoming contains the middle span of the 2,000-mile-long trail. The Mormon Pioneer Trail in 1847, and the California Trail in 1848, generally followed the Oregon Trail, with some deviations through Wyoming, to their respective endpoints in the Great Salt Valley, Utah, and Sacramento, California. The short-lived operation of the Pony Express followed this same corridor through Wyoming in 1860 and 1861. The trail corridor in Wyoming crosses a mixture of federal, state and private lands. Several of the important historic trail sites are located on BLM-administered public lands.

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