Camp Clarke Bridge and Sidney-Black Hills Trail

Camp Clarke left one more line in the record books after its trail faded. On February 12, 1899, the thermometer there read 47 degrees below zero, still Nebraska's lowest recorded temperature, matched at Oshkosh in 1989. By the time the bridge site went on the National Register in November 1974, from Ronald L. Kivett's nomination, the North Platte had moved and no longer flowed through the bridge's location but slightly north of it. Archaeologists file the 120-acre site as 25MO68, about nine miles east of Chimney Rock.

What the plaque says

Camp Clarke Bridge and Sidney-Black Hills Trail Just north of here the Camp Clarke bridge crossed the North Platte River. The bridge was built in the spring of 1876 by entrepreneur Henry T. Clarke to improve the trail from the Union Pacific Railroad at Sidney, Nebraska, to the gold mining towns in the Black Hills. The route first supplied the Sioux at Red Cloud Agency on the White River and the army at adjacent Camp Robinson; by 1876 the trail extended to Custer City and Deadwood in Dakota Territory. In 1878-79 some twenty-two million pounds of freight was shipped over the trail. Clarke's bridge was about 2,000 feet long with 61 wooden trusses. Tolls of $2 to $6 were assessed on the hundreds of freight wagons, stagecoaches, and riders that crossed. A hamlet known as Camp Clarke, with a hotel, store, saloon, and post office, sprang up at the south end of the bridge. A log blockhouse stood on an island in the river near the north bank. Although travel on the trail declined after 1880, the bridge continued in local use until about 1900. The site is on the National Register of Historic Places. Bridgeport Community Morrill County Visitors Committee Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Courthouse and Jail Rocks — 6.0 mi
  Two clay and sandstone buttes south of Bridgeport that emigrants called a castle, a capitol, a church and coffins before the courthouse and jail names stuck, with a path to their base.
• Chimney Rock National Historic Site — 8.7 mi
  The spire the trains watched for along the North Platte, measured again and again by the people passing it, and shorter now than when the first of them wrote it down.

More markers nearby

• Bridgeport, Nebraska "Trail City, USA" — 3.6 mi
• Courthouse and Jail Rocks — 6.0 mi
• Amanda Lamme — 9.4 mi
• Chimney Rock — 9.4 mi