A Pause on a Journey

The great lodge in Stuart's journal has a likelier name than the panel gives it. The historian Adrian Heidenreich has identified it as an Apsáalooke (Crow) Sun Dance lodge, standing in an abandoned Crow village on Pine Creek where Pinedale is now. A fuller quotation of the journal describes the three people buried at its west end, feet to the east, each with a buffalo skull painted black at the head. The horses the panel says Indians stole had been run off by Crows on September 19, near the Snake, which is why seven men were walking.

What the plaque says

A Pause on a Journey On Oct. 16, 1812, the Astorians (Robert Stuart, Ramsay Crooks, Robert McClellan, Joseph Miller, Benjamin Jones, Francis LeClair and Andy Vallee) passed this way and forded Pine Creek near here, the first white men known to have seen it. They were returning to St. Louis from Fort Astoria on the Oregon coast and were on foot, all their horses having been stolen by Indians. From Stuart's journal: "We forded another stream of considerable magnitude whose banks were adorned with many pines, near which we found an Indian encampment of large dimensions, deserted apparently about a month ago." In the center of camp, they found a great lodge, 150 feet around and 40 feet tall. Inside three persons lay interred. Stuart noted: "must have required great labour and time in erection, from which we infer that the personages on whose account it was constructed were not of the common order." Six days later, on Oct. 22, 1812, they made the memorable discovery of South Pass. Sublette County Museum Board

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of the Mountain Man — 0.8 mi
  Six fur-trade rendezvous met near here on the Green; the only artist who ever saw one, Alfred Jacob Miller, came in 1837.

More markers nearby

• The Naming of a Lake — 2.5 mi
• Rendezvous - Birth of an Empire — 5.9 mi
• First Holy Mass in Wyoming — 8.9 mi
• Pinckney W. Sublette — 8.9 mi