Scotts Bluff was visible from a long way east, the same flat country that had made Courthouse Rock and Chimney Rock visible from thirty miles. Scotts Bluff, however, was something different. It comprised multiple connected masses of pale clay and sandstone running along the north side of the valley for several miles. The highest promontory rose perhaps eight hundred feet from the surrounding tableland. The whole formation sat above the North Platte valley. The Native people had been right to call Me-a-pa-te, which meant the hill that is hard to go around, which was exactly what it was, and the company was about to go around it the long way. (Excerpt from The Road Not Taken)
The trail left the river at the point where the badlands between the bluff’s base and the North Platte made continued passage along the bank impossible. The ground there eroded into a broken, gullied terrain of clay and sandstone that no wagon had yet found a way through. The trail accordingly swung south, away from the water, into the Wildcat Hills country below the bluff complex, adding nine miles and the better part of a day to the journey in exchange for a route that wagons could actually travel.
Cord had known this was coming since Fort Kearny, which was where he’d gotten his information about the Robidoux Pass Road from two different captains who’d been through in the previous season. He had said nothing to the company about the detour or its length, but Whitfield had been told the night before and had quietly prepared the company’s expectations, so that when the column turned south away from the familiar comfort of the river the morning of July 6th the company received it as Cord’s decision rather than as an abandonment of the road, which it was not, but which it could have felt like to ninety people who had been using the North Platte as their primary navigational reference for three weeks.
The highest mass—the main bluff, the one that bore Scott’s name—dominated everything to the north of the column’s line of march, rising above the intervening badlands with a vertical authority that the morning light hit differently at every hour, the pale clay and sandstone face going from the cool gray of early morning through the warm cream of mid-morning and into the deep ochre and rust of the afternoon’s low angle light.
It looked, from this angle, like a city. Several people said this independently and without apparent coordination. Not a building, which was what Courthouse Rock had looked like, but something more complex and more inhabited seeming, the multiple masses at different heights producing the impression of towers and walls and something like streets between them.
The story of Hiram Scott traveled the column at the evening fire, as it had traveled every company that had passed this way since the late 1830s when the fur trade people had brought it east and the emigrant traffic had taken it up and carried it west again. The versions of it varied. He was injured and his companions had left him because they had no choice, or his companions had left him because they chose not to have a choice. His bones had been found near the bluff the following year. The facts that all versions agreed on were the bones and the abandonment and the name on the formation above them, and these were sufficient for the moral weight the story carried.
