Day 82 - Wednesday, August 18
Thanks to Chris for another great pic for cover of this post - I upload his photos daily to Chris’s Pix section if interested.
One of the things I love about traveling cross country is the unpredictability of any given moment and the wonderful new experiences that come with that. Last night after Chris and I left the only bar, restaurant or anything around us after using the internet - there was no cell service - we came back to our camp which is called The Reef Fly Shop in Alcova. A well designed pre-fab metal structure with Patagonia merchandise and top of the line fly fisherman equipment was where a number of cars were parked with boats in tow. A young energetic group of around 9 men and a woman in scrubs sat on Adirondack chairs drinking beer and talking about the days adventures. I joined them for a beer and learned about the fishing guide lifestyle. These hard working folks start daily at 7am and finish up at 4pm earning $450 per trip + tips. There is such demand they are working 7 days a week during the season. One guide, Dragon, lives in a tent which was right next to us and he travels the world moving from season to season. Another guide, Chase, lives in a van fixed up nicely and since fitness is important, he has pull up bar, kettle bells, rings and other equipment. Mason just graduated college, Christine loves fishing but is the only non-guide there as she is doing a residency at the hospital. I loved their spirit, energy, hard work, play hard attitude. Maybe in another life time I’ll do that instead of going to work right out of college! I asked them about Liz Cheney and they told me she is going to get primaried - no hesitation. I shot a quick video of the fun everyone was having around who could do a handstand for longer…Chase or Christine.
I broke camp with Lucky at 3:15am and climbed from 5,300’ to 6,500’ right out of the gate. Once at that altitude, I was on the high plains desert which was a flat expanse. I continued to follow in the footsteps of the pioneers and more specifically where we are, Brigham Young and the Mormons.
The first major historical marker was Independence Rock. Pioneers oriented to this landmark from the top of the climb as a major waypoint. A lot of history on this that I included in a photo below.
Next up was Devils Gap with some history on that.
Finally the Mormon Handcart Historical Site.
Chris found a dirt road off Route 220 - the main road - and drove a few miles into the middle of the desert where we just stopped, put down the stabilizers and popped all the gear out. We are literally in the middle of the desert with weather coming at us for the night and tomorrow - 20mph+ Winds, rain, hail and temps in the 40-50’s. Tomorrow is going to be an adventure in this weather…
Thank you for your support -
Cheers,
David.
Alcova Post Office at 3:15am
Sunrise on the high plains desert
Wyoming has great roads and in the middle of this remote area they were redoing the road
Lucky always noticing the herds of Antelopes
Independence Rock today…
William Henry Jackson, who first passed Independence Rock in 1866, painted this watercolor of the Rock, with Devil's Gate in the background, from memory in 1936.
Fifty million years ago, the peaks of the Granite Range rose in today's central Wyoming and began the long geologic processes of exfoliation. Over time, the vast weight of the mountains caused them to sag into the earth's crust, and about 15 million years ago, wind-blown sand smoothed and rounded their summits. Wind and weather eventually exposed an ancient peak, creating one of America's great landmarks.
Independence Rock and Sweetwater River. Tom Rea photo.The tribes that ranged the central Rocky Mountains — Arapaho, Arikara, Bannock, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, Lakota, Pawnee, Shoshone, and Ute — visited the spot, and left carvings on the red-granite monolith they came to call Timpe Nabor, the Painted Rock.
The Sweetwater Valley became the main trail to the heart of the continent when American fur hunters headed west in the 1820s. As the fur trade declined, thousands of pioneers followed the roads that Indians and mountain men had blazed to the West Coast. M. K. Hugh carved the oldest recorded inscription (now weathered away) into the ancient landmark in 1824. Some say legendary mountain man Thomas "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick named "Rock Independence" that year when he passed by on the Fourth of July. The best evidence indicates that William L. Sublette, on his way to Wind River with 81 men and 10 wagons, christened the rock in 1830, "having kept the 4th of July in due style."
Like a great stone turtle, Independence Rock sprawls over 27 acres next to the meandering Sweetwater River. More than a mile in circumference, the rock is 700 feet wide and 1,900 feet long. Its highest point, 136 feet above the rolling prairie, stands as tall as a twelve-story building.
When the pioneer priest, Pierre-Jean De Smet, saw the rock in 1841, he found "the hieroglyphics of Indian warriors" and "the names of all the travelers who have passed by are there to be read, written in coarse characters." Other sojourners called it the backbone of the universe, but De Smet dubbed the rock "the great register of the desert."
Over three decades, almost half a million Americans passed Independence Rock on their way to new homes on the frontier, and thousands of them added their names to Father De Smet's great register. Located at the approximate mid-point between the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast, Independence Rock became a milestone for travelers on the Oregon Trail. The natural wagon road up the Platte and Sweetwater rivers to South Pass became the Oregon, California, Mormon, and Pony Express roads. Wyoming lay at the heart of each of these ways to the West.
Although much of the trail has disappeared beneath modern cities and highways, hundreds of miles of nearly pristine ruts and swales still mark its course over the plains and mountains of Wyoming. Visitors at Deep Rut Hill at Guernsey, Devil's Gate, South Pass, and the Parting of the Ways can still see a landscape closely resembling the views that greeted the first sojourners. This national treasure is part of the historic legacy belonging to all Americans, and few places evoke that heritage as powerfully as Independence Rock.
William Henry Jackson, who first passed Independence Rock in 1866, painted this watercolor of the Rock, with Devil's Gate in the background, from memory in 1936.The singular appearance of the formation evoked a host of descriptions. In 1832, John Ball thought the rock looked "like a big bowl turned upside down," and estimated that its size was "about equal to two meeting houses of the old New England Style." Lydia Milner Waters thought that "Independence Rock was like an island of rock on the grassy plain," while Civil War soldier Hervey Johnson reported that it looked "like a big elephant [up] to his sides In the mud."
At a distance, J. Goldsborough Bruff said the rock "looks like a huge whale." Like other goldrushers, Bruff found it "painted & marked in every way, all over, with names, dates, initials." To George Harter, Independence Rock was shaped "much like an apple cut in the middle and one half laid flat side down."
"Thousands of names are engraved, & painted by all colors of paint," wrote Daniel Budd after chiseling his name. "1 can compare it to nothing so [much] as an Irregular loaf of bread raised very light & cracked & creesed in all ways."
"Many ambitious mortals have immortalized themselves in tar & stone & paint," Charles Grey wrote in 1849. Personal glory motivated some inscribers, and topographical engineer Capt. Howard Stansbury concluded that many hoped, "judging from the size of their inscriptions, that they would go down to posterity in all their fair proportions." Amasa Morgan noted that such glory could be fleeting: "Col. Fremont's name is among the highest, but a little boy put his a little higher than the Colonel's."
"After breakfast, myself, with some other young men, had the pleasure of waiting on five or six young ladies to pay a visit to Independence Rock," one young man wrote in July 1843. He painted Mary Zachary's and Jane Mills's names high on a southeast point, but saved the best spot for himself. "Facing the road, in all splendor of gun powder, tar and buffalo greese, may be seen the name of J. W Nesmith, from Maine, with an anchor."
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Except in caves and sheltered alcoves, most of the paint and tar signatures have worn away, leaving only names engraved deep in the hard granite.
Pioneers believed that the rock marked the eastern border of the Rocky Mountains. They felt well on their way if they could reach Independence Rock by the Fourth of July. Those who did often celebrated America's birthday.
Martha Hecox camped in the landmark's shadow on July 3, and "concluded to lay by and celebrate the day. The children had no fireworks, but we all joined in singing patriotic songs and shared in a picnic lunch." Polly Coon found a multitude gathered around Rock Independence on July 6, 1852. "Some one had put up a banner the 4th & it still fluttered in the breeze a happy heart cheering symbol of 'American Freedom' to the many weary toiling emigrants."
Devil’s Gap today…
Devil's Gate in the late 1830s, in a romantic view by Alfred Jacob Miller, painter of the fur trade. Walters Art Museum
Here, the Sweetwater River has carved a narrow cleft in the granite Sweetwater Rocks that is about 370 feet deep and 1,500 feet long. The cleft is 30 feet wide at the base but nearly 300 feet wide at its top.
Millions of years ago, sediments from eroding mountains and ash from volcanoes filled the basins between the mountains. Rivers cut indiscriminately though softer sediment and harder rock. One such cut, once the sediment again eroded away, has left Devil’s Gate.
Devil's Gate in the late 1830s, in a romantic view by Alfred Jacob Miller, painter of the fur trade. Walters Art Museum.
Although the cleft was too narrow for wagons to pass through alongside the river, emigrants frequently stopped to hike around these rocks and carve their names. Often they noticed bighorn sheep climbing the hills. “The chasm is one of the wonders of the world,” emigrant Charles E. Boyle wrote in 1849. “The water rushes roaring and raving into the gorge, and the noise it makes as it comes in contact with the huge fragments of rock lying in its course is almost deafening.”
It is thought that as many as 20 emigrants are buried near here, though only the nearby 1847 grave of Frederick Fulkerson is positively known. The occurrence of several murders in this region led some emigrants to believe this truly was a bedeviled site.
One so-called legend about the origin of Devil's Gate was relayed by New Orleans newspaperman Matthew Field, who traveled up the Sweetwater in 1843. Field attributes the tale to a mixed-blood Delaware hunter, traveling with his party. The story tells of an evil beast with enormous tusks that once roamed the valley, preventing the Indians from hunting and camping. Eventually, the Indians became disgusted and decided to kill the beast. From the passes and ravines, the warriors shot the beast with a multitude of arrows. The beast, enraged, tore the cleft in the mountains with his large tusks and escaped.
By the early 1850s, trading families were running a post at Devil’s Gate and another at nearby Independence Rock. Mostly these were French-speaking men with Shoshone wives and families. Best known among them was Charles Lajeunesse, also called Simono, Seminoe or Cimoneau; the nearby Seminoe Mountains and Seminoe Reservoir are named for him. Other traders were surnamed Archambault, Perat, Papin and Mosseau. They would have traded hardware and supplies for cash or worn-out animals with the emigrants, and tools, guns and other manufactured items for buffalo robes with the tribes.
At its greatest extent, the trading post at Devil’s Gate included as many as 14 different hewn-log buildings built on three sides of a square. The structures had good floors, windows and board-and-dirt roofs. The post lay about half a mile south of where the river enters the canyon of the gate, where there was good grass for livestock and protection from the wind. Business was good—tens of thousands of emigrants were traveling the trail each year—and briefly the trading families prospered.
The Archambaults were last to run the post. They left in the summer of 1856. That fall, when two late-starting, desperate companies of Mormon handcart emigrants arrived during a terrible snowstorm, they found the post abandoned. The later company, led by Edward Martin, stopped at the post and burned part of it for warmth. Some took shelter for about a week at a cove in the rocks a mile or so upstream. Much later the cove became known as Martin’s Cove.
By 1872, a French Canadian who had anglicized his name to Tom Sun had established a hunting camp at Devil’s Gate, and by the early 1880s he and his family and cowboys were running thousands of head of cattle. The Sun family expanded the ranch steadily for more than 100 years. In the 1990s, they sold the historic core of the operation to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—who established a visitor center to tell the story of the stricken handcarters of 1856. The visitor center includes a reconstruction of Fort Seminoe, the 1850s trading post.
Before the cross-country railroad was operational, about 70,000 Mormons traveled the Mormon Trail with almost 6,000 dying along the way. In November 1856, about 600 members of The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints(LDS Church) emigrating in the Martin Handcart Companywere halted for five days in the Cove by snow and cold while on their way to Salt Lake City. The Martin Handcart company had begun its journey on July 28, 1856 which was dangerously late in the season and would ultimately lead to the disaster. Although the number who died in the Cove is unknown, more than 145 members of the Martin Company died before reaching Salt Lake City.A few days prior to their arrival at Martin's Cove, the company was met by a small rescue party with food, supplies, and wagons that Brigham Young, the church president,had sent from Salt Lake City, Utah. On November 4 the company and rescuers forded the bitterly cold Sweetwater River and sought shelter in the cove. That evening a powerful north wind blew the tents to the ground. The tents were set up again, but a blizzard brought heavy snow. The company remained in the camp for five days, unable to proceed due to the snow and cold. A number of the company's cattle died there and were preserved in a frozen state. When the weather warmed, on November 9, the company was able to move on toward Utah. With assistance from the original rescue party and from additional rescue parties that met them along the way, the survivors finally reached Salt Lake City on November 30.
Later many other emigrants would pass by the Cove on their way to Utah, California and Oregon along with the Pony Express Riders. During the 1870s, Tom Sun, a French-Canadian frontiersman, purchased the area around the Cove and established
Southerly view from the parked RV
Northerly view