Old Highway 395, Part 18: The Cajon Pass/Interstate 15 (Cajon Boulevard, Mojave Fwy) and Modern US Highway 395

At last we reach the end, or as every cliché goes, the beginning of something else: our final part of Old Highway 395 as we approach the beginning of modern US 395 in Hesperia. In this final Part, we look at the final leg of the old highway and take a little preview of the modern highway as an introduction to the main exhibit. (If you'd like to skip forward, you can jump to Part 1 now.)

The centrepiece of the final leg is US 66/US 91/US 395's ascent through the 4,190' (NB)/4,260' (SB) Cajon Pass, the major gateway between the San Bernardino Mountains and the San Gabriel Mountains from Southern California into the Mojave Desert and points north. The pass gets its name from the Spanish word for box, aptly describing its relatively sharp boundaries and confining mountainous course. Not only is the Cajon Pass massively traveled daily today by truck and passenger car traffic, but it is also a primary transit point for both the Union Pacific Railroad and Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad (for a brief history of these railroads in the Inland Empire, see Part 15). When the automotive age dawned, the Cajon Pass was rapidly incorporated into the nascent national highway system, first as part of US 66, then adding US 395 and finally US 91; this scene is shown on the March-April 1954 cover of the great California Highways and Public Works magazine, the former regular magazine of the Division of Highways. Now traversed by Interstate 15 as the Mojave Freeway/Barstow Freeway, this section having been built in 1969, it continues to maintain its preeminence for the hundreds of travelers it services daily just as it did for the historical travelers who discovered and traversed it. Since this portion of Old Highway 395 is without a doubt probably its most historically compelling, we will spend particular time in this exhibit talking about its history, its genesis, its discoverers and its evolution over time.

Geologically, the Cajon Pass was one more geographic consequence of California's infamous San Andreas Fault, discovered in 1895 and running 800 miles between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates from San Francisco to near the Salton Sea, near El Centro. In the southern Mojave segment, it passes through the Cajon Pass directly and then curves around to become the northern border to the San Gabriels north of Los Angeles. Owing to its height and location the Pass remains a frequent spot for turbulent winds and snowstorms which sometimes can even close the Interstate today. In its bottom runs the Cajon Creek, a tributary of the Santa Ana River, which enters the main river in San Bernardino with what little water runs through it now.

In antiquity the Cajon Pass was known to and used by the Mojave Indians for points south, but little traversed by early white settlers and almost certainly only by accident. The Spaniards did not have a significant presence in the area until around 1772 when Governor Pedro Fages led a detachment through the Cajon Pass to modern Phelan and into the Antelope and San Joaquin Valleys in search of runaways, and use of the route expanded when Fr Francisco Garces used the Pass as a return route from what is now the Victor Valley from his 1776 missionary trek up along the Colorado River into the desert. The close proximity of the strange Mojave River made its location even more favourable to these early wanderers, and after Mexico achieved independence in 1821 the Pass was incorporated into the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe, NM to Los Angeles, routing the Trail far north into Utah to avoid Indian interference and using the Cajon Pass to re-enter southern California from the northern desert.

Even before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ceded much of the southwest to the United States, a background American settler presence existed in what was then Alta California. It is widely believed that the first American to cross the Cajon Pass was the great mountainman Jedediah Smith in 1826, who learned the route from the Indians. Naturally he was promptly jailed by the Mexicans as soon as he was detected, but Smith was only the first of a wave of later American invaders. In 1834, Joseph Walker (more about him in the main exhibit, Part 9) brought the first immigrant wagon train into California using a previously undiscovered route and a critical pass somewhere in central California, and other explorers started looking at other ways in. In 1844 the famous explorer and surveyor John C. Fremont effused to his superiors that not only had he found Walker Pass, but that it was exceptionally wide and would be an excellent route for the railroad. Fremont was right that the pass he had stumbled onto would indeed be excellent for the railroad, but he was about a half-degree south of Walker Pass (which today is traversed by CA 178) and although his error makes it impossible to figure out exactly where he did go, some estimates do place him as far south as the Tehachapi Pass and the modern Cajon Pass. The width of the claimed pass, however, makes the Cajon Pass more likely in my estimation, and in fact Fremont didn't actually traverse the real Walker Pass until 1854 after Lt. Robert Williamson had correctly identified the major southern crossings in his own later railroad survey.

In 1851, a new type of settler emerged in the region. As part of the expansion into what they believed was their promised land, one group of Mormon pioneers left Salt Lake City, UT for the West and descended through the Cajon Pass to settle in the valley south of it. They were led by two church apostles, Amasa Mason Lyman and Charles Rich, who with Captains David Seely, Jefferson Hunt (who as part of the Mormon Batallion [Part 10 of the main exhibit] had guarded the entrance to the Cajon Pass during the Mexican-American War) and Andrew Lytle commanded nearly 500 settlers and some 150 wagons. Purchasing land from Don Antonio Maria Lugo, who received a land grant from the Governor in 1839 and retained ownership of Rancho San Bernardino after the Treaty, the Mormons built a fort at what is now the county courthouse and gradually expanded out into the valley and nearby Rancho Muscupiabe (a corruption of the Serrano Indian amuscupiabit "place of little pines"). The rest of the story of San Bernardino is in Part 15. As a marker of their trek, the Mormon Rocks in the Pass were named for them, which we will see from the Interstate.

The Old Spanish Trail remained in major use for pack trains, but its use for wagons, Mormon immigration notwithstanding, was considered extremely difficult. In 1850, Phineas Banning and W. T. B. Sanford built a new wagon road about six miles west of the Trail, which was less rough but steeper and longer, and Sanford reduced the grade with a new summit even further west in 1855. Even this road was not enough, and contemporary travelers complained about the precipitous heights in some sections and grades that exceeded 30 percent, virtually mandating wagons be disassembled and lowered down treacherous sections such as the notorious eastern Narrows. With the gold rush in Holcomb Valley (Part 15), blacksmith Jed Van Dusen constructed a new road in 1861 from the Pass into Belleville, and the state authorized construction of a toll road through the Pass to a partnership led by John Brown the same year. The new turnpike started near Devore and went up the canyon through modern Blue Cut, where the toll house at right stood in 1870 (the rock face remains a well known landmark on old US 66/US 395 which we also will go past), to Crowder Canyon and down into the Victor Valley. The construction was expensive and the toll was as steep as the terrain -- $1 per wagon and team, and a quarter for a man and horse -- but the road was proven when Banning dragged a 4-ton boiler over the mountains to Holcomb Valley after the road was completed. Nevertheless, the road was often flooded out by heavy rains, the tollbooths were targets for Indian attack, and Brown was successfully sued in 1875 over how he positioned the booths and the general later disrepair of the route. In 1882, the charter for the turnpike expired, and the route became public.

By this time, the railroad was moving in. The Southern Pacific Railroad, then the de facto monopoly in California, had already started operations in the state using their newly constructed Tehachapi Loop (1876), the Tehachapi Pass, part of the western Cajon Pass and the San Gorgonio Pass to access Los Angeles. Their operation piggybacked on the failed Los Angeles and Independence Railroad (Independence is in the main exhibit, Part 5), which literally fought the SPRR off with gunfire on the western part of the Cajon until they went bankrupt and the SP bought them out. Other operations wanted in on the action, and after waging a "frog war" in Colton in 1883 to cross the SP tracks (Part 15), the California Southern Railroad and its backers in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe continued on and through the eastern Cajon Pass in 1885 to Barstow, where it connected to the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad.

With the dawn of the 20th century and the automobile, the Cajon Pass road continued to remain in service as now a macadam-surfaced road maintained and slowly improved by the county of San Bernardino. In 1915, the Cajon Pass was adopted as a state highway by the State Highway Commission and designating it as part of Legislative Route Number 31 after the Second Bond Act was approved by voters in 1916. The route was paved that same year, opening the Pass for general automotive traffic, and it was adopted as part of the new national US Highway 66, an original US highway, in 1926. The paved route was then expanded into a new two-lane Cajon Pass route in 1932 and was co-signed with the extended US Highway 395 after 1934 and US Highway 91 in 1947. The 1932 road persists today as the southbound lanes of northern Cajon Boulevard, the remnant of US 66/US 91/US 395 before the construction of the Mojave Fwy.

By the late 1940s, traffic on the one-lane-per-direction highway was rapidly exceeding design capacity and operations started on an expansion to expressway status. Part of that plan is shown on the 1954 planning map at right, which you have seen in prior Parts and is reproduced here for your reference. In 1953 new northbound lanes were constructed from Devore up to the Gish Underpass parallel to the 1932 alignment, now repurposed as the southbound lanes, at a cost of $2.1 million. The Gish Underpass was a well-known point where the railroad tracks crossed the highway on a grade-separated overpass, which survives today east of the Interstate but with only dirt road beneath now, and I-15 uses the later Gish Overhead to cross the tracks today at PM 22.04. From 1954 to 1956 the expressway was extended north from the Gish up to Palmdale Rd, our old friend CA 18, in Victorville at a cost of $1.86 million, and with the designation of Interstate 15 in 1957 the expressway became US 66, US 91, US 395 and I-15 simultaneously.