The Legend of Hiram Scott

Every great landmark needs a story, and Scotts Bluff has one of the most haunting on the entire trail. Hiram Scott was a fur trader from Saint Charles County, Missouri, a tall, dark-complexioned man who worked for William Henry Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company in the eighteen twenties. He was well regarded in the trade, a man capable enough to operate in one of the harshest environments on the continent.

In eighteen twenty-eight, Scott was returning east from the summer rendezvous in the mountains, the annual gathering where trappers sold their furs and restocked their supplies. Somewhere along the North Platte, he fell gravely ill. What happened next was recorded only in rumor and in the bones that were found the following spring. His companions, facing their own survival in a country with no doctors and dwindling provisions, left him behind.

William Sublette led the next year's caravan west in eighteen twenty-nine and discovered Scott's skeleton near the bluffs along the North Platte, roughly sixty miles from where his companions said they had abandoned him. The question that haunted everyone who heard the story was simple and terrible: how did he get there? Some said he crawled. Some said he was carried by a companion who later died before reaching help. Others invented more dramatic endings, shot over stolen furs, mauled by a grizzly bear, betrayed.

Historian Jerry Lucas spent fifteen years researching Scott's fate and concluded that after eighteen twenty-eight, everything about Hiram Scott dissolves into myth. No firsthand account survived. What is certain is that within months of the discovery of his bones, the bluffs along the North Platte were being called Scotts Bluff on maps and in journals. A man's death became a landmark's name, and that name was then read by two hundred fifty thousand emigrants who looked up at the same stone and wondered about the man who died below it.