The route was first trekked by migratory foragers of western arid land, themselves burdened and aided by packed and travois-trailing dogs. Later, from agrarian regions to the eastward, came Stone Age artisans to mine hematite (for paint colors) and quarry flint (for implements) in the famous “Spanish Diggings” of the Hartville Uplift, which here forms the valley’s northern flank.

At the dawn of historic times and attributable to acquisition of the horse, here developed and flourished migratory tribes whose common culture has been designated Plains Indian. Then, fully recorded by history, came civilized man: first, like the foragers, weary pedestrians, second, like Plains Indians, mounted; and third, a new scene for the Platte, riding in wagons. Later, they drove cattle, laid rails, dug pipelines and built super highways. To the right and left, signs and siting devices point out landmarks relating to man’s activities in the valley.

D. J. Olinger, Wyoming Highway Department engineer and amateur historian.

Fort Laramie
This sighting device points to the crest of a ridge separating the North Platte and Laramie Rivers. directly down the opposite slope, on the banks of the Laramie about a mile above the confluence of the streams, stands Fort Laramie. it is about eight miles from here as the crow flies, but twelve miles by road.

Founded in 1834 by fur traders William Sublette and Robert Campbell, who named their log structure Fort William, the post was acquired by the American Fur Company in 1841. That company built an adobe-walled complex nearby which they named Fort John, but the mountain men called it Fort Laramie. This latter name stemmed from the river on which it was located and which, in its own turn, got its name from the trapper Jacques LaRamie, who is believed to have trapped and died in the area in the early 1800s.

The government purchased Fort Laramie in 1849. In the next forty years it became the most famous military post protecting the Oregon Trail and served as a forward base for many campaigns of the Indian Wars. The fort was deactivated in 1890, the land sold into private ownership and the buildings sold at auction or abandoned and allowed to fall into ruins. In 1937 the State of Wyoming purchased the property—land and building ruins—from private owners and gave it back to the federal government. by presidential proclamation in 1938 Fort Laramie National Historic Site became a unit of the National Park System.

Mexican Hill
Spotted through the right-hand sight is Mexican Hill. at Mexican Hill the covered wagon emigrants, having turned into the fort on the Laramie River for information, supplies or repairs, cut over the intervening ridge to regain the Platte River route. There, wagon ruts worn into bedded rock attest to the volume of westward traffic traversing the Oregon Trail during the years 1840 to 1870.

Coming down Mexican Hill’s steep slope, drivers roughlocked wheels to keep wagons from running into their own backward-holding though forward-moving teams. here, besides the animals iron-shod hooves, it was their singular stiff-legged, sliding step—adapted to hold against the forward thrust of heavily loaded wagons—which, together with the locked and sliding, steel-rimmed wheels, contributed to the extraordinary depth of the ruts.

In 1841 Mexican artisans were engaged by the American Fur company to build the adobe trading post later known as Fort Laramie. This hill took its name from the craftsmen who settled permanently in the vicinity and constructed an irrigation system at the foot of the hill to water their extensive gardens. They sold the produce to fur traders, soldiers and passing emigrants for whom it was a welcome supplement to diets otherwise lacking any fresh foods other than meat.

North Platte River
In 1739 the brothers Pierre and Paul mallet, earliest explorers along this river’s lower course, named it after the French word for flat. although the sighting tube aims at a wide, strong flowing current, the North Platte is not navigable.

It is unlikely that prehistoric foragers, habituated to arid environs, would have attempted a journey on water. But flint quarriers and hematite miners, accustomed to cruising midwestern rivers and burdened with the products of their labors, might have tried the Platte. In 1812 Robert Stuart’s party of eastbound Astorians, recorded discoverers of this ancient, transmontane route of aborigines, wintered a short distance downstream. They fashioned dugout canoes and embarked on the spring floods of 1813, but their craft soon stranded on sandbars and they finished their journey on foot. Eleven years later Tom Fitzpatrick and other trappers again put a boat in the Platte. They encountered wild waters between canyon walls, and though experienced voyageurs, lost a part of Ashley’s valuable furs. Thereafter, mountain men stuck to their horses.

The Platte’s chief historical significance, other than as a natural route for transcontinental travel and commerce, relates to the “arid-lands culture theory” of John Wesley Powell, 19th century explorer, ethnologist, engineer and statesman. An agency created through his instigation, the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation, constructed along the Platte one of the west’s first great irrigation systems. The prosperity resulting from the regulated spreading of North Platte waters over formerly arid lands is visible for hundreds of miles along the river’s course.

The Burlington-Northern Railroad
Pointed out by the sight, Burlington-Northern tracks are in close view. That railroad’s forerunner, the Burlington and Missouri, laid rails up the North Platte Valley in 1900. With a view to eventually reaching the Pacific, the company surveyed beyond immediate construction goals—on through South Pass.

Primarily laid down as a supplement to existing feeder lines in Iowa and Nebraska, this branch line was intended for moving Wyoming range livestock to midwestern feedlots and, following fattening, on to metropolitan packing plants. Further considerations were developing possibilities for transporting Platte Valley iron ore, petroleum products and irrigated field crops to established centers of processing and distribution.

Subsequent consolidations have made the Burlington and Missouri a part of a vast railroad network. Therein, one of the most profitable sectors connects gulf coast ports—via the Platte Valley here and the Yellowstone Valley in Montana—with the Pacific Northwest. Thus the Burlington finally reached the western ocean, but not throng the easy grades via South pass as originally projected.

Though gradual grades were as important to railroad engineer as to wagon train mater, the more abundant timber for ties and coal for fuel found south and north of the famous pass met the railroader’s needs better than the wildlife, grass and water which were essential to the emigrant wagoners following the Oregon Trail through central Wyoming.

Guernsey Pipeline Station
This site points to the Guernsey Pipeline Station, jointly owned by the Platte Pipeline Company, the American Oil company and the continental Oil Company. Most of the structures under view were built in 1952 although, owing to the river’s favorable grade and southeasterly course, the first pipeline through this vicinity was delivering Platte Valley petroleum wealth to Midwestern urban centers as early as 1918. Technologically, this station is capable of interchanging crude oil among several carrier lines and moving it south to Cheyenne and Denver or east to mid-continent refineries.

Aborigines, from the early foraging societies through the heyday of the Plains Tribes, exploited the North Platte Valley both as a route of travel and commerce and for its own natural wealth. But fur traders, conducting most of their operations further west in the mountains, were chiefly interested in the North Platte as a route of commerce; for covered wagon emigrants, the North Platte was only a necessarily traveled route lying between their past and their future; for Pony Express, stage and telegraph enterprises it was a pathway between the inhabited regions wherein they provided a connecting link; livestock men did exploit the valley’s riches but preferred that someone else provide transportational services; railroaders found some local business but that was incidental to their basic operation—the transcontinental haul.

Petroleum concerns, however, like the aborigines before them, have existed on both the valley’s natural wealth and its transportational potentials. They have exploited its availability as a route for commerce to increase the value of its products through delivery to areas of maximum demand.

Register cliff
Register Cliff stands in plain view after it is singled out by the sighting device. This natural landmark, enrolled in the national Register of Historic Places, is a developed area with parking and rest facilities, foot trails and informative signs. A fence protects the earliest names registered on the cliff face. Also fenced is a little cemetery originated by covered wagon emigrants.

The Cliff’s historic significance stems from the large number of emigrants names and dates carved in the sandstone-limestone formation. However, it also bears names of early fur traders, Indian Wars participants and names and dates of pioneer ranchers. Some early names have been obliterated by more recent carving, and this made it necessary to fence a portion of the cliff where signatures are most concentrated.

Register Cliff can be reached by a paved and well-marked country road extending three miles southeast from Guernsey.

Sand Point
A monument marking Sand Point appears as a white dot in the center of the sight. Sand deposits caused by currents at a bend in the river evidently gave the site its name. The surrounding meadows have been favorite campsites since prehistoric time.

Seth Ward and William Guerrier established an Indian trade post at Sand Point in 1852. It was an ideal location for trading in hides and furs as well as for supplying Oregon Trail travelers who camped nearby. In 1852 a lady diarist wrote, “We are now encamped directly on the bank of the river, under two fine trees. The station, about a mile below, is in a handsome bend of the stream and consists of two or three log buildings, with a large one of stone, about half erected.”

In 1855, Ward and Guerrier moved to Fort Laramie, where Ward soon became post sutler—a position leading to accumulation of a great fortune. Until his death in 1858, Guerrier handled the Fort’s Indian trade. Thereafter, B.B. Mills and Antoine Janis managed that trade, moving its headquarters back to Sand point. later, under Jules Coffey, the post became a stage station and, in 1860 and 1861, it was a Pony Express Station. By 1822, Sand Point was a ranch homestead, and Charles Guernsey acquired the property in 1891.

The country road from Guernsey to Register Cliff passes by Sand Point.

Guernsey-Frederick Ranch
The sight centers on the headquarters buildings of the Guernsey-Frederck Ranch. That these buildings stand almost in the shadow of Register Cliff is symbolic of the valley’s heritage. Here, history emphasizes the Oregon Trail; such other epochs as the storied Cattleman’s Frontier are subordinated by memories and the visual landmarks of that nationally famous emigrant road.

Since the days of “open range” and “free grass” the Guernsey-Frederick Ranch has been representative of Wyoming’s always important livestock industry. The place is, however, also significant in its own right. it brings together two pioneer ranching family names which also relate to such other facets of state history as frontier military life, political activity, governmental organization and the development of railroads, mines, irrigated lands, schools, churches and banks.

Favorably located and progressively operated, the ranch is as significant in modern times as ever it was in the past.

Oregon Trail Ruts
Although the sight aims at the general location, the Oregon Trail Ruts National Historic Landmark cannot be seen from here. Like Register Cliff, it is a developed historic site, accessible by a good country road.

The terrain here forced travelers to follow a single set of tracks along a relatively soft sand rock formation. over the years, the volume of emigrant wagon traffic cut ruts so deep as to leave marks of turning wheel-hubs which extend over a length of several hundred feet.

The ruts are reached by a country road out of Guernsey. It is the same road leading to Register cliff but, just beyond a bridge over the North Platte, a sign directs the visitor to a side road which brings him, at the end of half a mile, to the parking area. From there, a short foot trail leads to the ruts.

Laramie Peak
The sight points to Laramie Peak, altitude 10,247 feet, the highest elevation in the Laramie Range. These mountains were originally called the Black Hills, a name deriving from the dark appearance of their evergreen forests as noted from far to the eastward by westward journeying mountain men. Only the northern end of the range, in northeastern Wyoming and western South Dakota, is now known as the Black Hills.

Although the name of that more legendary than historic figure, Jacques Laramie, has been given to numerous features of Wyoming geography, apparently this mountain was the first to be so designated. Looming on a distant horizon, that major natural landmark won historic significance through being cited time and again—in the journals, diaries and letters of Oregon Trail travelers—as first evidence of a successful high plains crossing and impending entry into the rocky Mountains.

One who so recorded a sighting of Laramie Peak, and whose transit triangulations would later make the mountain an important cartographic reference point, was famed Dr. Francis V. Hayden of the U.S. Geological Survey. He wrote, in 1869: “From our camp on the Laramie we enjoyed one of the beautiful sunsets which are not uncommon in this western country. But this was a rare occasion, for the sun passed directly behind the summit of Laramie Peak. The whole range was gilded with golden light, and the haziness of the atmosphere gave to the whole a deeper beauty. Such a scene as this could occur but once in a lifetime.”