 Pioneers traveling in wagon trains on the Oregon Trail in the 1850s and 1860s followed an alternative route in the area that used old Indian trails that skirted the lava flows . This alternative route was later named Goodale 's Cutoff and part of it is in the northern part of the monument . The cutoff was created to reduce the possibility of ambush by Shoshone warriors along the Snake River such as the one that occurred at Massacre Rocks , which today is memorialized in Idaho 's Massacre Rocks State Park . 
