SCOTTS BLUFF was a celebrated landmark on the great North Platte Valley trunkline of “the Oregon Trail,” the traditional route of overland migration to Oregon, California, and Utah. Today the massive castellated bluff looks down upon concrete highways, railways, airports, irrigated farms, and bustling communities of the mid-20th century; but it is the same awe-inspiring sentinel which 100 years ago watched the passage of countless trains of ox-drawn covered wagons, and the twinkling of many campfires. Scotts Bluff National Monument keeps alive the epic story of our ancestors who dared cross the wilderness of plains and mountains to plant the western stars in the American flag.

Present Scotts Bluff is but a part of the historic “Scott’s Bluffs” named for Hiram Scott, an employee of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, whose skeleton was found in the vicinity in 1829. The first known published reference is to be found in The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, by Washington Irving, published in 1837. The first map to show this landmark is in Robert Greenhow’s Memoir, Historical and Political on the Northwest Coast of North America, published in 1840. It appeared next in the Fremont map of 1843, which became basic for later emigrant guides.