Chimney Rock appeared on the western horizon the morning after they left Courthouse Rock. Not the dark mass that Courthouse had been at first sighting, but something more improbable, a vertical point rising from a conical base, a spire of brule clay and volcanic ash standing perhaps three hundred feet above the surrounding tableland, thin and improbable against the enormous sky. It was visible for thirty miles in the clear July air. (Excerpt from The Road Not Taken)
They had been watching it for two days before they reached it.
Every emigrant who had ever written about this road had written about Chimney Rock. The journals and letters that had circulated through Missouri and Ohio kitchens in the winter of planning had described it in terms that most of the company had filed as probable exaggeration. The actual formation, seen for the first time across thirty miles of flat country, converted from exaggeration into inadequacy. The thing was more than the description in the way that the plains’ scale exceeded every description of it, the country too large for the words available to it.
They reached it on the Fourth of July.
Up close, which on the North Platte Road meant within a quarter mile, because the formation’s unstable lower slopes and the trail’s established routing kept the wagons off its immediate base, Chimney Rock was stranger than the distance had suggested. The conical base from which the spire rose was composed of eroded clay and rock worn into irregular terraces by the same patient wind and water erosion that had been working on this country for millions of years. It had a raw, unfinished quality at its edges. Fresh falls of material were visible at the base where the erosion was ongoing, the formation actively diminishing even as the company looked at it, losing inches per year to the wind and the freeze that no one watching it in July would have been able to detect but the process of its disappearance was well underway.
The spire itself, the chimney, rose from the cone’s summit in a solitary way, the clay and ash compressed and hardened into something that had so far resisted what the cone below it had not resisted. Its survival the result of a slightly harder composition.
The celebration began before supper, which was itself the first sign that something was different about this evening. The Henderson boy’s fiddle appeared, tuned and ready, its player having apparently decided that the Fourth of July at Chimney Rock was a sufficient occasion to override the social protocol that had governed its use since Courthouse Rock.
