Two small, simple stone monuments mark the summit of South Pass. Overlander Ezra Meeker, who first crossed South Pass in 1852, erected the first on June 24, 1906 as part of what the then 75-year-old pioneer called his "Ox-Team Monument Expedition." The Meeker monument is one of many he placed at trail landmarks between The Dalles in Oregon and Independence, Missouri. Meeker chiseled this same memorial into Independence Rock where it can still be seen just east of the gate at the Rock. Like all the other markers Meeker placed, the one at South Pass reads "Old Oregon Trail 1843-57." (Meeker apparently never explained why he selected those dates to mark the "Old" Oregon Trail, but he probably chose the "Great Migration" of 1843 as the beginning and the exploration of the Lander Cutoff as the concluding date.)

"I was working there when Ezra Meeker, who was setting markers on the Oregon Trail, came by that way to have his oxen shod," Bill Carr remembered. "There were no oxen shoes in the shop so Mr. Halter made them. After he had made them, he told me I could nail them on since my back bent much easier than his. That was my only experience in shoeing oxen." Meeker spent four days at South Pass, and "searched for a suitable stone for a monument to be placed on the summit of the range, and after almost despairing of finding one, had come upon exactly what was wanted," he recalled. It required four men to drag it down the mountain and load the stone onto Halter's wagon. It was "a monument hewed by the hand of Nature," Meeker wrote, and the men estimated it weighed half a ton.  

Herman G. Nickerson of Wyoming's Oregon Trail Commission raised the second monument at the summit of South Pass in June 1916. This black monolith commemorates Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and Eliza Hart Spalding as the "FIRST WHITE WOMEN TO CROSS THIS PASS July.4.1836" (Since Whitman and Spalding were traveling with a fur-trade caravan that was bound for the Rendezvous on the Green River near today's Pinedale, they did not actually cross South Pass on what later became the emigrant road; instead, they crossed some twenty-three miles to the northwest, where the Lander Cutoff crosses the divide between Lander Creek and the Little Sandy.) When Nickerson erected his monument, he righted Meeker's toppled 1906 marker and set both in concrete.

Today, ranching has endured as pretty much the only way to make a living in the high country and harsh climate of South Pass. Cattle raising began surprisingly early in the shadow of the Wind River Range. In 1860, Frederick Lander described the famous mountain man and army scout, Tim Goodale, as "a mountaineer who resided at the South Pass."  At the same time, Richard F. Burton reported "a well-built ranch" at Willow Creek, where he found two Canadian traders, "apparently settled for life." (Instead of stock raising, it appears their main operation was selling whisky, which Burton said did not poison him, but "that is about all that I can say for it.")  Several journal keepers described the short-lived South Pass City built near the Eighth Crossing of the Sweetwater as a ranching operation.  Harriet Sanders met "a mountaineer on the track of stray cow" in 1864 who told her he was six miles from his ranch near Strawberry Creek.  Viola Springer camped on Little Sandy "not far from a sheep ranch" in July 1885.  Many if not most of these early operations served as trading, stage, or mail stations, and some of them, such as Burnt Ranch at the Ninth Crossing and the Halter and Flick Ranch at Pacific Springs, are legendary.

AHW thanks Will Bagley for allowing us to use this text from his "South Pass Context Study," commissioned by the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office.