Located just off Hwy 66 in a parking area as part of Topsy Reservoir are two interpretive displays that highlight the historic Applegate Trail that passed through this area. This placard reads:
The Applegate Trail
Southern Route to Oregon
1n 1846, Jesse Applegate and fourteen others from near Dallas, Oregon, established a trail south from the Willamette Valley and east to Fort Hall. This route offered emigrants an alternative to the perilous "last leg" of the Oregon Trail down the treacherous Columbia River. The trail also offered a potential escape route, free from Hudson's Bay Company control, should Britain and the United States begin warring over control of Oregon.
The first emigrants to trek the new "South Road" left with the trailblazers from Fort Hall in early August 1846. With Levi Scott acting as guide, while Jesse Applegate traveled ahead to mark the route, the hardy emigrants blazed a wagon trail through nearly 500 miles of wilderness arriving in the upper Willamette Valley in November. Emigrant travel continued along the Applegate Trail in later years and contributed greatly to the settlement of southern Oregon and the Willamette Valley.
Rocky and Deep
Applegate Trail emigrants crossed the Klamath River after months of weary travel. With Siskiyou Mountains looming ahead, emigrants forded the Klamath River near this site at what Tolbert Carter, an emigrant of 1846, call "one of the worst crossings that wagons ever made."
The ford was rocky and deep, with swift current, and I, by the advice of someone, crawled on the back of Bill, my big near ox, and rode across the river. I did that for the reason that the current might catch the light wagon and turn it over.
George Riddle, Recollection of 1851
The Klamath River is much deeper now than it was in the mid-1850s, due to the dams along Klamath River that have created Topsy Reservoir here.