Scotts Bluff and the great westward trails
For about twenty years, almost everyone walking to Oregon, California, or Utah squeezed through one narrow gap in this bluff. The wheel ruts are worn away now, but the track they left is still under your feet.
Stand in Mitchell Pass and look at how narrow it is. Rock walls rise on both sides, and the gap between them is just wide enough for a wagon. Now hold this number in your head: more than 350,000 people came through here. Not all at once, but year after year for about two decades, a single-file river of wagons, oxen, dust, and hope pouring through one notch in the rock because there was nowhere else to go.
That is the strange power of this place. Scotts Bluff did not invite the trails. It blocked them. The soft clay at its base had eroded into badlands no wagon could cross, so the great roads west bent inland and threaded the one weakness in the wall. Geography made the decision, and a continent followed. Pioneers camped at the springs, wrote in their journals that the bluff looked like the ruins of some ancient city, and pushed on toward mountains they could not yet see.
There is a second story here, older and quieter. Long before any of those wagons, this bluff had a name and a people. The Lakota called it Me-a-pa-te, "the hill that is hard to go around," and the families who knew it were not passing through to somewhere else. They were home. Both stories belong to this gap. This page holds them together.
Why did the great trails bend toward Scotts Bluff?
Because the easy ground ran out. For hundreds of miles the road followed the flat, watered floodplain of the North Platte. That was the best travel a wagon could ask for. At Scotts Bluff the floodplain closed.
The cliffs and the eroded clay badlands ran straight to the river. So the badlands became an impassable maze. One emigrant described "innumerable mounds six to eight feet in height, the space between them frequently so narrow as scarcely to admit our horses." No wagon was crossing that.
How did Mitchell Pass become the main route?
Before 1851, trains detoured about nine miles south through Robidoux Pass. It had springs and a trading post, but it pulled them away from the river. Then, around 1850 and 1851, crews graded a usable road through the gap at the bluff itself. They were likely military, working out of nearby Fort Laramie.
"The passage through here was only made possible in 1851 and is now preferred by nearly all emigrants, cutting off eight miles from the old road."William Lobenstine, Mormon traveler, 1851
That was the whole argument: shorter, and closer to water. So almost overnight, Mitchell Pass became the main road west. The reason that gap existed at all is pure geology, told on The geology of Scotts Bluff.
What were the three trails, and who traveled them?
Three of the great overland routes shared this corridor. They joined near Fort Laramie and passed the bluff together.
| Route | Active through Scotts Bluff | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Oregon Trail | 1843 to 1869 | Families bound for the Oregon Country's farmland |
| California Trail | 1846 to 1869 | Gold seekers, especially in the 1849 and 1850 rushes |
| Mormon Pioneer Trail | 1847 to 1869 | Latter-day Saints emigrating to the Salt Lake valley |
The same gap later carried the Pony Express (1860 to 1861) and the first transcontinental telegraph line (1861). Both followed the wagon road. Some years were staggering. An estimated 25,000 people passed in 1849, and 44,000 in 1850, at the height of the Gold Rush.
Then it all ended fast. When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, the wagons stopped almost at once. So the great trail era closed within a single season.
Why is it called Scotts Bluff?
The bluff is named for Hiram Scott, a clerk for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company who died near here in 1828. The documented facts are spare. Scott fell ill on the North Platte and was separated from his party. His remains were later found at the foot of the bluff. So fur traders began calling the landform "Scott's Bluffs" almost immediately, and the name stuck.
How much of the Hiram Scott story is true?
The story that traveled with the name grew far beyond the facts. Emigrants retold it as a tale of betrayal. They said Scott's companions abandoned him while he was sick, and that he crawled dozens of miles to die in the bluff's shadow. The Oregon Trail guide Joel Palmer wrote it down in 1846 as "a melancholy tradition," noting that one of a party "named Scott, fell sick," was left behind, "and here human bones were afterwards found."
How much is true and how much is campfire embellishment, no one can say. But this much is certain. A real man's death gave this landmark the name a third of a million people would carry west.
What did the pioneers see, and what did they write?
They saw it from far off, and it stayed with them. Scotts Bluff was a milestone, the sign that the long flat plains were ending and the mountains were near. So emigrant diaries are full of it. The Mormon clerk William Clayton traveled with Brigham Young's company in 1847. He recorded the bluffs in words that ran through account after account.
"To the southwest, Scott's Bluffs look majestic and sublime," and the bluffs were "very high, steep, and broken, resembling ancient ruins."William Clayton, Mormon clerk, 1847
A natural cliff mistaken for the wreck of some old city: that image shows up again and again. But the journals are not only scenery. They record camps at the springs, trades with Native families, illness, weather, and the daily work of moving a household across a continent on foot.
Read them in the visitor center, a few hundred yards from the gap they describe, and the distance between then and now collapses. These were not legends. They were tired people writing by firelight, and the bluff they described is the one outside the window.
Who was William Henry Jackson?
William Henry Jackson is the reason we can almost see the wagon era, not just read about it. In 1866, at twenty-three, Jackson drove ox teams as a bullwhacker through Mitchell Pass with a freight train. After that he became one of the most important photographers and painters of the American West. He was the man whose images of Yellowstone helped persuade Congress to make it the first national park.
But he never forgot this gap. Across a long life he painted the overland trail again and again. So the monument now holds the largest collection anywhere of his original work.
Picture seeing a Jackson painting of a wagon train laboring through Mitchell Pass, then walking out the door into the same pass. That is the closest the trail era comes to a photograph and a time machine at once. His art is one more reason the visitor center is the right first stop, covered on Planning your visit.
Whose land was this first?
The bluff was a landmark for thousands of years before it was a milestone on anyone's map to Oregon. The Lakota name, Me-a-pa-te, "the hill that is hard to go around," records the same hard fact the wagon drivers later discovered. But it comes from the point of view of people for whom this country was not a passage through to somewhere better. It was home. For generations, Lakota bands, along with Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other Plains nations, hunted the bison that moved along the North Platte and camped near the bluff's springs.
How did the trail era change that?
It changed fast, and not by accident. Wagon traffic carried cholera and other epidemics that swept the Plains nations from 1849 through 1851. In 1851, more than 10,000 Native people gathered at Horse Creek, near Fort Laramie, for a treaty. It promised peace and annual payments in exchange for letting roads and forts cross their lands.
Then within a generation the bison along the Platte were nearly gone, killed off by hide hunters and emigrants. The treaties that followed forced these nations onto reservations. So the view that made pioneers reach for words like "sublime" was, to the people already here, the center of a world coming apart. An honest visit holds both meanings at once: a threshold for some, a homeland for others, the same rock seen from two directions.
Can you see the wagon ruts today?
You can stand in the track, but not in the way most people expect. After more than 150 years of erosion, the individual wheel ruts are gone. What survives is a "swale," a broad, shallow trough worn down by countless wagons traveling single file through the same soft ground. It is still visible in Mitchell Pass.
The way to walk it is the Oregon Trail Pathway. It starts near the visitor center by a pair of replica covered wagons and crosses the historic route. The trail is paved at each end. But where the surface changes from asphalt to dirt, you are standing on the actual Oregon Trail.
There are no signs on the swale itself. The dirt underfoot is the monument, so staying on the path protects what is left of it. For the trail's distance and accessibility, and the other walks here, see Hiking Scotts Bluff and the Summit Road.
Common questions about the trails at Scotts Bluff
Why is it called Scotts Bluff?
What is Mitchell Pass?
Can you see Oregon Trail wagon ruts at Scotts Bluff?
Which trails went through Scotts Bluff?
How many emigrants passed Scotts Bluff?
What is the difference between Robidoux Pass and Mitchell Pass?
Who was William Henry Jackson?
What is the Lakota name for Scotts Bluff?
Did the Pony Express go through Mitchell Pass?
More of Scotts Bluff
Scotts Bluff National Monument
The overview: history, geology, trails, and planning in one place.
layersThe geology
Why the bluff forced the trails through one narrow gap.
hikingThe Oregon Trail Pathway and trails
Walk the historic route, plus the Saddle Rock Trail and Summit Road.
mapPlan your visit
Hours, drive times, and what to pair it with.
The trail story continues across the panhandle on the Nebraska public lands road trip.
Support the monument
Black Hills Parks and Forests Association is the cooperating association at Scotts Bluff. The visitor center bookstore, the online shop, and membership fund the interpretation and education that keep these stories accurate and alive, including the care of collections like the Jackson art. You can also donate or volunteer.
