Where Three States Meet

At this spot the corners of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska all touch. Setting it took three different surveyors over four years. In eighteen sixty-nine Oliver Chaffee surveyed Nebraska's western boundary but missed the baseline, planting his limestone monument hundreds of feet too far south.

In eighteen seventy-two John Majors ran the line between Kansas and Colorado, beginning at Chaffee's stone. Finally, in eighteen seventy-three, Edwin Burwell intersected the baseline with the state line and fixed the true corner of Nebraska and Kansas on the Colorado boundary. Surveying the open plains by chain and compass was brutal, exacting work, and small errors could shift a border by hundreds of feet.

Later the Bureau of Land Management re-monumented the tri-state corner with a brass disc, and a plaque was dedicated to honor those early surveyors and the hardships they endured out here.