Independence Rock - Wyoming - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

INDEPENDENCE ROCK, a landmark of the Oregon Trail covering an area of more than 53 acres, resembles a huge prehistoric animal sprawling on the arid plain. Almost every one who traveled through South Pass camped near the formation - and before 1850 most of them found enough energy to climb it and paint their names in black, red, or yellow on its face. By that year several Mormons 'with stone-cutting tools were located on the spot and did a profitable business in cutting names on the rock at a charge of from one to five dollars, according to the location,' as an emigrant, Theodore Potter, reported. Potter, who displayed the usual hostility of the period toward the Saints, added bitterly that after the Mormons had 'made a nice fortune from the emigrants by cutting their names for a fancy price, and when they had passed on erasing their names and cutting others in their places.' It is apparent that Potter had hoped to immortalize his name here, because he ended the story with 'So transient is our fame.'

No one knows who first gave the rock its name, but it is assumed that a party of traders did so after celebrating the Fourth of July near it. On July 4, 18862, a group of Masons held a lodge meeting on top of the rock and the State lodge in 1920 commemorated the event with a plaque that was cemented to the face. Since then a number of other commemorative plates have been added. On July 4, 1930, the rock was formally dedicated to the memory of the pioneers of the West in the course of the Covered-Wagon Centennial sponsored by the Oregon Trail Memorial Association.

It was near this area that westbound travelers neared the most difficult stage of their journeys. The oxen and cattle were beginning to show the strain of overland haul and anxious householders spent their evenings anointing the hoofs with grease and gunpowder, or other home remedies, and padding the yokes that were making ugly sores on the necks of the oxen. Many articles that had seemed indispensable at earlier stages of the journeys - when fine furniture and like vanities were discarded - were here recklessly thrown away in the hope of lightening the loads. In the 1850's and 1860's the area around Independence Rock and westward was strewn with anvils, bellows, plows, bar iron, stoves, kegs, axes, and even extra wheels and axletrees.

It has now been determined that the rock was named Independence Rock because to stay on schedule and be able to cross the mountains before winter set in you needed to reach the rock by July 4th.

The area is now a state park and a National Registered Historic Place. The names carved in the rock can still be seen, as well as the commemerative plaques that started being placed in the 1920's.