BAYARD, Neb. -- Chimney Rock isn’t the grandest geological spire in the West.
Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah, where John Ford filmed his westerns, has scores of chimney rocks. But what the spires in the American Southwest don’t have are stories of people.
“It’s not the granules of sand and grit that makes these places important, it’s the stories that stay in our hearts and minds of the people who passed by that make them important,’’ said Loren Pospisil, Chimney Rock National Historic Site supervisor.
Stories such as that of 13-year-old Marilla Washburn, who went west from Chicago with her family in 1852.
When she was 87, she told of cholera striking the party two days before arriving at Chimney Rock. Seven people died that night and four the next day.
The 72-wagon train paused for a half-day at Chimney Rock, she said, “and when we pulled on the next morning, we had a new brother,’’ the family’s 13th child.
An estimated 500,000 people traveled past Chimney Rock up the North Platte River Valley bound for Oregon, California or Utah from 1813 to 1866. About 1 percent left accounts of the journey.
Chimney Rock is noted in more emigrant diaries than any other feature on the 2,000-mile trail from Missouri to Oregon and California.
Contact the writer:
444-1127, david.hendee@owh.com
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