Chimney Rock

About twenty miles east of Scotts Bluff, a single spire rises from the plains in a shape so improbable it looks like a mistake. Chimney Rock climbs roughly three hundred feet above the valley floor south of the North Platte River, a needle of volcanic ash and sandstone balanced on a cone-shaped mound, and for the emigrants on the Oregon Trail it was the most talked-about landmark on the entire two-thousand-mile journey.

Historians have counted the emigrant diaries and journals from the trail years, and Chimney Rock appears in a great many of them, and it was among the most mentioned landmarks on the trail. Part of the reason was simply that it was extraordinary to look at. Emigrants from Indiana and Missouri and Ohio had never seen anything like it. They sketched it, painted it, argued about its height, tried to calculate how tall it really was.

But Chimney Rock also meant something beyond spectacle. It appeared after several hundred miles of flat or gently rolling plains, and it signaled a change in the landscape. The pioneers understood that once they saw Chimney Rock, they were nearing the end of the Great Plains and the beginning of the broken badlands and eventually the mountain passes. The worst terrain lay ahead, but Chimney Rock was proof they had covered the first great stretch of the journey.

The rock had a reliable water supply nearby, making it a popular camping spot. Tens of thousands of emigrants rested here, looking up at the same impossible spire, writing letters home that described it in terms that veered from matter-of-fact to reverent. Chimney Rock was designated a National Historic Site in nineteen fifty-six and is managed by History Nebraska. The formation continues to erode. Photographs from the eighteen eighties show it noticeably taller than it is today.