City of Rocks Historic Resources Study

We are creatures shaped by our experiences; we like what we know, more often than we know what we like. . . . Sagebrush is an acquired taste, as are raw earth and alkali flats. The erosional forms of the dry country strike the attention without ringing the bells of appreciation. It is almost pathetic to read the journals of people who came west up the Platte Valley in the 1840s and 1850s and tried to find words for Chimney Rock and Scott's Bluff and found and clung for dear life to the cliches of castles and silent sentinels. [73]

While descriptions of a typical trail experience, transcending the vagaries of route and year of travel, are a dangerous historical exercise the same is not necessarily true of generalizations about migrants' psychological response to their journey. Historian John Mack Faragher, in his comprehensive study Women and Men on the Overland Trail, argues that emigrant diaries reveal a striking similarity in their pattern of organization and in their emphasis. "Things they had done that day" form the third most common notation; reports on families' health, comfort, and safety, the second.

The most common notations, however, were of things they had seen that day: "the emigrants were startled and in some cases overawed by the imposing natural landscape and strange climate through which they passed. In terms of sheer preponderance, men and women emigrants mentioned the beauty of the setting more than any other single subject." [74]

Those who traveled through the City of Rocks described the city in poetic and awe-struck detail. [75] And, as Wallace Stegner would later note, their descriptions of the "weird" configuration are striking in their consistent retreat to castles and silent sentinels. Rather than pathetic, this retreat may be a simple reality of language: they used the words they knew to describe what they had never seen. Yet their cliched adjectives do not disguise the wonderment with which they viewed the city or their extreme gratitude for the geographic diversion in a monotonous journey (Appendix A). [76]

Despite months on the trail, many had not yet adjusted to the size or immutability of the western landscape: upon approaching the vast Pyramid Circle, Helen Carpenter described a land base of "about an acre"; Lucena Parsons predicted "a few more years & then [the City rocks] will be leveled to the ground."

Carpenter wrote:

Emerging from [Echo Pass] we came into what is known as Pyramid Circle. There was perhaps a acre of partially level land with a good sized stream flowing through it. On this level, and the hills which encircled it, were the most beautiful and wonderful white rocks that we ever saw. This is known as the City rocks and certainly bears a striking resemblance to a city. To be sure it was a good deal out of the usual, for the large and small houses were curiously intermingled and set at all angles. There was everything one could imagine from a dog house to a church and courthouse. [77]

Vincent Geiger echoed:

You can imagine among these massive piles, church domes, spires, pyramids, &c., & in fact, with a little fancying you can see [anything] from the Capitol at Washington to a lovely thatched cottage. [78]

At City of Rocks, emigrants generally described what they saw, rather than what they did. Yet the logistics of the City of Rocks camping experience are easily recreated. As it had for the previous 100 days, camp had to be made and broken; the stock cared for (although the relative abundance of grass would have spared men the task of driving the herds miles from the trail); men, women, and children fed; in Indian country, in bad years, a careful watch mounted. Carpenter describes the ritual of travel, nooning, and camping:

the plain fact of it is we have no time for sociability. From the time we get up in the morning, until we are on the road, it is hurry scurry to get breakfast and put away the things that necessarily had to be pulled out last night—while under way there is no room in the wagon for a visitor, nooning is barely enough to eat a cold bite—and at night all the cooking utensils and provisions are to be gotten about the camp fire and cooking enough done to last until the next night.

Although there is not much to cook, the difficulty and inconvenience of doing it, amounts to a great deal—so that by the time one has squatted around the fire and cooked bread and bacon, and made several dozen trips to and from the wagon—washed the dishes . . . and gotten things ready for an early breakfast, some of the others already have their night caps on—at any rate it's time to go to bed.

In respect to women's work the days are all very much the same.... Some women have very little help about the camp, being obliged to get the wood and water (as far as possible), make camp fires, unpack at night and pack up in the mornings. [79]

Yet with all that, more than one woman would have echoed Carpenter's grateful "Am glad I am not an ox driver." [80] Men were charged with "the care of wagons and stock, driving and droving, leadership and protection of the family and party." On a normal day of travel:

the men of each family were up between four and five in the morning or cut their oxen from the herd and drive them to the wagon for yoking and hitching. The wagon and running gear had to be thoroughly checked over.... Normally a man drove each wagon . . . [and] some men herded and drove the stock to the rear of the line. A good morning march began by seven and continued until the noon hour, when drivers pulled up, unhitched their oxen, set the stock to grazing, and settled down for the midday meal the women produced.... Driving and droving were strenuous and demanding occupations.... Most [men] drove by walking alongside the trail. . . . Walking the fifteen or so miles of trail each day was, in the best of conditions, enough to tire any man Driving, and especially herding the cattle, meant eating large portions of dust: "It has been immensely disagreeable for the drivers today for a Northwest wind drove the dust in clouds into their faces . . . Am glad that I am not an ox driver." [81]

City of Rocks provided a welcome diversion from these travel rituals. Carpenter wrote:

While the stock was being cared for the women ad children wadered off to enjoy the sights of the city . We were . . . spellbound with the beauty and strangeness of it all. . . [82]

J. Goldsborough Bruff "dined hastily, on bread & water, and while others rested, . . . explored and sketched some of these queer rocks." [83] Young Harriet Sherrill Ward was similarly impressed. In a joyful description she painted a camp scene very different from the scenes that had preceded and those that would follow:

At eave we encamped in Pyramid Circle, a delightful place indeed. . . . Our tents and wagons grouped together and a merry party tripping the light fatastic toe upon the green, whose cheerful, happy voices echo from the hills around us, presents a scene altogether picturesque and novel." [84]

Emigrants consistently referred to the city as one of the memorable scenic wonders of a phenomenal journey: "This is one of the greatest curiosities on the road" wrote Eliza Ann McAuley in 1852. [85] Others agreed:

[Our] camp was pitched in a unique spot between Independence and Hangtown, one to be remembered along with Ash Hollow and Independence Rock for genuine singularity. . . . 'The manuscript of God remains Writ large in waves and woods and rocks.' [86]

Encamped in Granite City one of the finest natural places of its kind in the World, I banter the World to beat it. [87]

Within the Circle is one of the coldest springs seen on the route — and the Circle is surrounded on all sides with lofty mountains, covered with ever green Cedars; rendering the whole one of the most beautiful, grand. pictures[que] and delightful scenes I ever saw. [88]

The City was unusual not only as a geographic oddity but also as a register of those who had gone before and as a rare and valued opportunity to communicate with those who followed. Count Leonetto Cipriani described "a cave used as a mail deposit... There were many letters, but none from the wagon company, a sure sign that it had not yet come by." The cave, at the base of what J.G. Bruff christened Sarcophagus Rock, is no longer visible, presumed buried by years of erosion and deposit. Yet elsewhere in the city vestiges of historic graffiti remain, marked with wheel grease or tar:

From the human standpoint, this Pyramid Circle is of greater interest because here we have another registration book of transcontinental travel. Rocks, walls, and monuments are covered with thousands of names and dates, and bear, as well, messages to on-coming friends and acquaintances. Some names date back to the earliest explorers. . . . The road from the Missouri River westward is lined with penciled messages or names and dates of passage. . . but Pyramid Circle is the volume de luxe. [89]

Although names and dates of travel are the dominant extant inscriptions, an occasional message remains legible, including O.E. Dockstater's terse "Wife Wanted." Emigrants also platted the city, signing rocks as "NAPOLEON'S CASTLE," and "CITY HOTEL"; those monoliths nearest the central trail were the most heavily inscribed. [90]

The larger countryside surrounding the City of Rocks, viewed in mid-August — at the end of the summer drought — was greeted with substantially less enthusiasm than the city itself. The vast majority of emigrants were "driven by a farmer's motives," and judged the passing countryside through the filter of what they had left behind in the well-watered east and what they expected to find in verdant California. They noted favorably the adequate grass along the Snake and Raft rivers but disdained the lands lying beyond the immediate water courses. [91]

In 1847, Chester Ingersoll reported:

. . . Since leaving the South Pass, it has been one entire volcanic region, all burnt to a cinder. The rock and stone look like cinders from a furnace. We have not had any rain for two months worth noticing. [92]

H.B. Scharmann cautioned:

The land . . . from Fort Laramie to California is not worth a [farmer's notice], I think. It consists of nothing but desert-land and bare mountains covered with boulders and red soil which makes them resemble volcanoes. The best thing the traveller can do is to hurry on as fast as possible from one river to the other. [93]

Leander Loomis added:

And we believe that some day there will be [gold] Discoverys made through here that will astonish the world. [I]f there is not something of this kind, in this country, it is folly in our opinions, for our Government, to try to settle it with White men, — for there is no timber through here, and if there was, there is (comparitive) no land fit for farming purposes from the Missouri to the Humboldt. [94]

Only the far-sighted recognized that grazing "would claim a high place on these lands." [95] The first generation of emigrants left their messages on the rocks and hurried to the next river, voicing no inclination to stay.

"When we had all gratified our curiosity, we bid the place adieu and rode away." [96]