Ash Hollow

The trappers' cabin was not the hollow's only mail stop. When the government contracted carriers in 1854 to take the mail along the trail to Salt Lake City and on to California, they built a mail station at Ash Hollow, and like many such stations it became a trading post selling staples, liquor and hardware to emigrants. In April 1855, months before Harney's attack, Little Thunder's Sicangu band burned it. Archaeologists later recovered artifacts that confirmed the site, and History Nebraska adds that a short-lived Fort Grattan stood near the hollow in 1855 and 1856.

What the plaque says

Ash Hollow Ash Hollow was famous on the Oregon Trail. A branch of the trail ran northwestward from the Lower California Crossing of the South Platte River a few miles west of Brule, and descended here into the North Platte Valley. The hollow, named for a growth of ash trees, was entered by Windlass Hill to the south. Wagons had to be eased down its steep slope by ropes. Ash Hollow with its water, wood and grass was a welcome relief after the arduous trip from the South Platte and the travelers usually stopped for a period of rest and refitting. An abandoned trappers cabin served as an unofficial postoffice where letters were deposited to be carried to the "States" by Eastbound travelers. The graves of Rachel Pattison and other emigrants are in the nearby cemetery. In 1855 a significant fight, commonly called the Battle of Ash Hollow, occurred at Blue Water Creek northwest of here. General Harney's forces sent out to chastize the Indians after the Grattan Massacre of 1854 here attacked Little Thunder's band of Brule Sioux while the Indians were attempting to parley, killed a large number and captured the rest of the band. Lewellen Lions Club Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ash Hollow State Historical Park — 0.4 mi
  The emigrants' spring below Windlass Hill, six miles from the Blue Water Creek camp where Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six Lakota in 1855, and where their belongings came home in 2025.
• Julesburg — 23 mi
  The town that moved four times: a trading post, a stage stop burned in 1865, the wickedest end-of-track town on the Union Pacific, and finally Denver Junction renamed.
• Lake McConaughy and Kingsley Dam — 25 mi
  Nebraska's largest reservoir, 22 miles of North Platte water and white sand beaches behind a 1941 hydraulic-fill dam, built so farms far downstream could water their crops.
• Pilgrim Holiness Church (Baled Hay Church) — 29 mi
  A church raised in 1928 from bales of hand-tied rye straw in treeless Arthur, the oldest known straw-bale church in North America and a survivor of a Sandhills building habit.

More markers nearby

• Ash Hollow Geology — steps away
• Windlass Hill Pioneer Homestead — 2.5 mi
• The Battle of Blue Water — 4.7 mi
• John Hollman Grave — 13 mi