The story of the Siskiyou Trail is really the story of California's fur trade starring trappers and traders known as mountain men.  These rugged individuals blazed a trail through 600 miles of uncharted wilderness from Fort Vancouver in southern Washington to San Francisco Bay in Northern California in the early 1800s.  This moccasin-pounded route became a horse trail for pack trains, then a road for wagons and finally a turnpike for stagecoaches before it was turned into a railway paralleling one of the continent's most important highways known as Interstate 5 that now stretches from Mexico to Canada.