Nugent's Pass was an early alternate route of the Southern Emigrant Trail, called variously the Tucson Cutoff or "Puerto del Dado" Trail (later Apache Pass Trail). Long traveled by Spanish and Mexican soldiers and other early explorers, its first American travelers were likely fur trappers. The route became known to westward-bound American emigrants after it was traveled by a party of Forty-Niners led by John Coffee Hays in 1849.
In the later 1850s, the stagecoach routes of the San Antonio-San Diego Mail Line and Butterfield Overland Mail diverted from the Nugent's Pass route at Dos Cabezas Spring to a shorter route south of Willcox Playa, through Dragoon Pass to the middle crossing of the San Pedro River (below the rail and highway bridges of modern Benson and south of Pomerene). However, Nugent's Pass remained in use as a wagon route between the San Pedro River and the Sulphur Springs Valley for many decades afterward.[6][7][8][9]
^Report of Captain A. A. Humphreys, Topographical Engineers, Upon the progress of the Pacific Railroad Expeditions and Surveys, Report of the Secretary of War, Dec. 1, 1856, Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the third session of the 34th Congress, 34th Congress, 3d Session, House of Representatives, Ex. Doc. No. 1, Vol. II, Cornelius Wendell, Washington, 1856, pp. 206–209
^John P. Wilson, Peoples of the Middle Gila: a Documentary History of the Pimas and Maricopas, 1500s–1945, Researched and Written for the Gila River Indian Community, Sacaton, Arizona, 1999, p. 111
^Robert Eccleston, Overland to California on the Southwestern Trail 1849, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1950, pp. 174–193
