The trek to Oregon in 1845 dwarfed all that had gone before. An informal count at Fort Laramie revealed that 5,000 people and 500 ox-drawn wagons were on the march. The charms of Scotts Bluff, and the tragic tale of its namesake, were not lost on the many diarists, among them Joel Palmer, who credits “Scott’s Bluffs” with a good spring and an abundance of wood and grass. Below the bluffs, says Palmer, We met a company of mountaineers from Fort Laramie, who had started for the settlements early in the season, with flat-boats loaded with buffalo robes, and other articles of Indian traffic. The river became so low, that they were obliged to lay by; part of the company had returned to the fort for teams; others were at the boat landing, while fifteen of the party were footing their way to the States. They were a jolly set of fellows.... In this same big year the United States Government sent its first military expedition up the Platte. Guided by Fitzpatrick, Col. S. W. Kearny led five companies of the First Dragoons to South Pass. A few days ahead of the Oregon Trek, on June 11 they encamped “below Scotts Bluffs, and directly opposite a large village of Dacotah [Sioux] Indians.” ... that immense and celebrated pile, called “Scott’s Bluffs,” advances across the plain nearly to the water’s edge. If one could increase the size of the Alhambra of Grenada, or the Castle of Heidelberg, which Professor Longfellow has so poetically and so graphically described,—twenty fold in every way but in height,—he could form some idea of the magnitude and splendor of this chef d’oeuvre of Nature at Palace-Building. [Illustration: _Emigrants fording the Platte._ Original sketch in Oregon Trail Museum.] _Years of Decision, 1846-48_ In 1846, the Oregon Territory, long in dispute with Great Britain, was finally acquired by peaceful compromise. The emigrant families who had passed Scotts Bluff had ensured this outcome by tipping the scales of population! Meanwhile, in May 1846, the United States had declared war on Mexico and, in the name of “manifest destiny,” set about adding California and the Southwest to its territory. The emigration of 1846 was lighter than that of the preceding year. One company, the Donner party, met appalling disaster in the early autumn snows of the Sierra Nevadas. Edward Bryant, a future Governor of California, and J. Quinn Thornton both wrote the most extravagant and fanciful descriptions of Scotts Bluff and nearby hills. They imagined “the ruins of some ancient vast city,” complete with domes, towers, temples, minarets, amphitheaters, frowning parapets, and even “a royal bath,” a fittingly picturesque backdrop for the lingering death of “the unhappy trapper” who crawled here after being abandoned by “inhuman companions.”