Point of Rocks: Where the Stage Stopped and the Railroad Killed It

Standing in the Bitter Creek Valley of southwestern Wyoming, the sandstone building you can spot from the highway is one of the most intact overland stage stations in the American West. It was built around eighteen sixty-two as a home station on the Overland Stage Line, a designation that meant more than a simple horse change. Home stations offered passengers a meal, a cot, and shelter from the punishing high-desert weather. The Salt Wells and Black Buttes stations lay twenty-eight miles apart, and Point of Rocks sat about halfway between them. Point of Rocks was the lifeline between them.

The station was constructed of native sandstone cut from the surrounding bluffs, a practical choice that also gave it a permanence most stage stops never achieved. It was an L-shaped main building with four rooms, plus a stable and corral.

The Overland Stage Line ended its run through this corridor in eighteen sixty-eight, when the Union Pacific Railroad reached Point of Rocks and made horse-drawn stage travel obsolete almost overnight. But the station did not die immediately. It found a second life as a freight depot, serving the mining camps at Atlantic City and South Pass, to the north. When the freight business thinned, it became a private residence. The state of Wyoming acquired it in nineteen forty-seven.

Today it is a state historic site, rarely crowded, sitting beside the interstate much as it sat beside the wagon road a hundred and sixty years ago. The sandstone walls that sheltered exhausted passengers crossing this desert are still standing, the bones of a transportation system that transformed a continent and then was instantly replaced by the next one.