Point of Rocks Stage Station

About twenty miles east of Rock Springs on the Bitter Creek corridor, a small sandstone ruin rises from the sagebrush flat beside the old highway. This is the Point of Rocks stage station, one of the best-preserved remnants of the Overland Trail in Wyoming.

The station was built around eighteen sixty-two to service the Overland Stage line, which Ben Holladay had taken over and was running coaches three times a week between Missouri and California. It was a waystation: horses were changed here, passengers could eat and rest for a few hours, and mail was sorted and handed off. The building is a simple two-room structure of local sandstone, built low against the desert floor in a style that suggests the builders expected trouble and wanted walls that would stop a bullet.

When Union Pacific laid tracks along the same corridor a few years later, the stage business collapsed almost overnight. The railroad was faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The stage line ended there in eighteen sixty-eight, and the building was later used as a freight depot and then a home. It has been standing in the high desert wind ever since, slowly returning to the stone it was built from, one of the few physical remnants of the brief era when coaches and horses were the fastest thing crossing Wyoming.