A former forty-niner, Bradshaw knew that the northern gold mines were rapidly becoming exhausted and that the flood of refugees from the area would need a more direct trail from the south across the desert to the new strike at La Paz.

Bradshaw and his party traveled southeast through Agua Caliente, now Palm Springs, and then South to a village where the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation is now located.

Leaving Dos Palmas, the men continued through the pass eastward between the Orocopia and Chocolate mountain ranges, briefly skirting the southern end of the Chuckwalla range, crossed through a gap in the Mule Mountains and reaching the Palo Verde Valley two miles southwest of the modern community of Ripley.

Between 1862 and 1877, the Bradshaw Trail was the main stagecoach and wagon route between Southern California and the gold fields of La Paz and other places in western Arizona.

From 1870 the trail ended and connected with the toll road to Wickenburg at Ehrenberg as La Paz, became a ghost town when its mines played out.

The remaining fragment mostly crosses public land save for the extreme eastern end of the trail at Ripley, where it intersects 30th Avenue, 2 miles (3.2 km) west of SR 78.