Cholera outbreaks and pandemics
That year, cholera was transmitted along the California, Mormon and Oregon Trails as 6,000 to 12,000 are believed to have died on their way to the California Gold Rush, Utah and Oregon in the cholera years of 1849–1855. It is believed more than 150,000 Americans died during the two pandemics between 1832 and 1849.
Appalachian Trail
The first reported homicide on the trail was in 1974 in Georgia. In 1981, the issue of violence on the Appalachian Trail received national attention when Robert Mountford, Jr. and Laura Susan Ramsay, both social workers in Ellsworth, Maine, were murdered by Randall Lee Smith. Another homicide occurred in May 1996, when two women were abducted, bound and murdered near the trail in Shenandoah National Park. The primary suspect was later discovered harassing a female cyclist in the vicinity, but charges against him were dropped, and the case remains unsolved.