Colorado

The Society's 1970 list puts this 1956 board at the Kansas line on US 40, where its first sentence, the Mountain State reaching across the plains to welcome you, made sense. It now stands in the fairground park at Cheyenne Wells, about seventeen miles in. The board counts Cheyennes among nomads who attacked wagons; the town around it is named for wells Cheyenne people had dug five miles north on the Smoky Hill route, where the Butterfield Overland Despatch kept a station from 1865. The town moved south to meet the Kansas Pacific in 1870.

What the plaque says

Entering the Centennial State Colorado The Mountain State reaches across the Great Plains to welcome you. This is the Smoky Hills Trail, a short cut found in 1860 from the Missouri River to the Pikes Peak and Cherry Creek gold diggings. On this route to the mountains wagon trains and stagecoaches brought thousands from water hole to water hole across the dry plains. In the 1870's rails followed the wagon tracks and steam trains were halted by herds of buffalo. Nomad Indians Cheyennes, Comanches and Kiowas sometimes attacked wagons and outlaws held up trains. Today these dry lands yield immense crops and graze thousands of fat cattle. The Rocky Mountains will soon be visible as you proceed west, traveling in a quarter of an hour or less the distance the wagon trains came in a day.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site — 20 mi
  Lost even to the survivors' descendants for more than a century, and found again in 1999 by tribal oral history, archives and a metal detector working together.

More markers nearby

• Kit Carson — 24 mi
• Old Cattle Trail — 25 mi