The salt flats did, however, yield scientific information to the expeditions of Captain Howard Stansbury in 1849 and of Captain J. The tragedy of the Donner-Reed Party inhibited extensive use of the Hastings Cutoff as an overland migration trail. Abandoned wagon parts from the party were present on the flats well into the 1930s, and the wheel tracks of their wagons were still visible in 1986 when archaeologists examined several sites associated with the party. A factor contributing to the Donner-Reed tragedy in the Sierra Nevadas was the delay the party experienced on the salt flats when their wagons became mired in the mud found just below the thin salt crust. The Cutoff, promoted by Lansford Hastings as a faster and easier route to California, proved to be just the opposite for the ill-fated Donner-Reed party of 1846. In the following year, Fremont’s route across the flats would come to be known as the Hastings Cutoff. Fremont and his expedition crossed through the very heart of the salt flats in an effort to find a shorter overland route to the Pacific. It is from Benjamin Bonneville that the salt flats and prehistoric lake derive their name, although it is unlikely that Bonneville himself ever saw the flats.

Six years later, Joseph Reddeford Walker, another trapper, mapped and explored the areas around the Great Salt Lake and crossed the northern perimeter of the flats while in the employ of Captain Benjamin L. In 1827, trapper, trader, explorer, and frontiersman Jedediah Smith was perhaps the first white man to cross the salt flats in 1827 while returning from his first expedition to California. The flats are composed mainly of potash salts ranging in thickness from less than one inch to six feet.

The salt flats are actually the bed of that once massive lake which rivaled in size present Lake Michigan. The Bonneville Salt Flats of the western Great Salt Lake Desert were formed through the evaporation of the Pleistocene-era Lake Bonneville.

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