Burned Wagons Point

The Jayhawkers were about forty men from the Midwest, and by the end of December 1849 their wagons had become useless weight. Near here they burned them, using the wood to dry the meat of oxen too weak to pull, then walked west over the Panamints carrying what they could. One of them, a man named Fish, died in the Slate Range and left his name on a canyon there. They had come looking for a shortcut to the goldfields; what they found cost them four months and several lives.

What the plaque says

Near this monument, Jayhawker group of Death Valley Forty-Niners, gold seekers from Middle West, who entered Death Valley in 1849 seeking short route to mines of central California, burned their wagons, dried the meat of some oxen and, with surviving animals, struggled westward on foot.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes — 1.7 mi
  Fourteen square miles of dunes near Stovepipe Wells, and the easiest sand in the park to reach.
• Furnace Creek — 20 mi
  The valley hub, the hottest air temperature ever officially recorded, and the Timbisha village that was here first.
• Zabriskie Point — 23 mi
  Gullied gold badlands eroded out of an ancient lakebed, best at first light.
• Racetrack Playa — 24 mi
  A dead-flat lakebed where rocks leave trails behind them, twenty-seven miles down a tire-shredding road.

More markers nearby

• Eichbaum Toll Road — steps away
• Old Stovepipe Wells — 5.2 mi
• Old Harmony Borax Works — 17 mi
• Death Valley Gateway — 20 mi