Wrong Turns That Killed People

In 1914, a chauffeur made a wrong turn in Sarajevo and twenty million people died in the war that followed. In 1846, eighty-seven pioneers trusted a shortcut through the Great Salt Lake Desert that a lawyer had described in one sentence but never actually traveled — forty-two of them starved in the Sierra Nevada. Three years later, another group of emigrants followed a hand-drawn map into a valley so desolate it earned its name from the experience: Death Valley. Then came GPS. A father in Oregon walked ten miles through frozen canyons trying to save his family after a road atlas sent them down an unplowed logging road. An eleven-year-old boy died of dehydration after his mother's GPS led them onto a sand track in the same Death Valley those pioneers had named. A Canadian man walked into the Nevada mountains with a GPS unit that died before he did. A father of two drove off a collapsed bridge in North Carolina that Google Maps still showed as a road — nine years after it fell into a creek. The technology changes every generation. The mistake doesn't. This is the history of wrong turns that killed people, from frontier guidebooks to smartphone navigation, and the one human flaw that connects all of them: we trust directions more than we trust our own eyes. Sources William Lewis Manly, Death Valley in '49 (San Jose: The Pacific Tree and Vine Co., 1894). Allen Yilun Lin, Kate Kuehl, Johannes Schöning, and Brent Hecht, "Understanding 'Death by GPS': A Systematic Study of Catastrophic Incidents Associated with Personal Navigation Technologies," Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM, 2017). Kevin Fagan, "Stranded Father's Heroic Last Hours," San Francisco Chronicle, December 8, 2006. Sarah Pruitt, "How a Wrong Turn Started World War I," HISTORY, updated June 30, 2025. "Hastings Cutoff," National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, updated June 2026. "Body of Missing B.C. Man Albert Chretien Found in Nevada," CBC News, October 9, 2012.