Pawnee Rock

What the Woman's Kansas Day Club saved was a remnant. Settlers as well as the railroad quarried it, and much was gone in the 1870s. The club acquired what was left in 1908 and gave it to the State of Kansas in 1909. On May 24, 1912, some 8,000 people came to dedicate the stone monument on top, where a pergola now looks over the Arkansas River valley and the route of the trail. Matt Field, who traveled the trail in 1840, wrote that the rock sprang "like a huge wart from the carpeted green of the prairie."

What the plaque says

Pawnee Rock "We first rode nearly north about a mile to a remarkable Rocky Point...We rode upon the top which is probably 50 feet above the plain below, and from whence there is a charming view of the country in every direction." —George Sibley, 1825 Pawnee Rock made an impact on Santa Fe Trail travelers, who referenced the Dakota Sandstone outcropping in their journals. "Pawnee Rock was covered with names carved by the men who had passed it. It was so full that I could find no place for mine." —John Birch, 1848 Located at the halfway point on the Santa Fe Trail, many stories have been told to explain how this "prairie citadel" earned its name. Once reaching a height of perhaps 100 feet or more, a large portion of the rock was stripped away for railroad bed material. The Woman's Kansas Day Club led a campaign to save what remained of the rock. It is now preserved as a State Historic Site. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Santa Fe Trail Center — 11 mi
  Pawnee County's museum and archive two miles west of Larned, ten buildings on ten acres that carry the story from the trail years into the town that grew up beside Fort Larned.
• Barton County Historical Society Museum and Village — 13 mi
  A village of buildings brought in from around Barton County to a lot on US-281 just south of Great Bend, from an 1898 limestone church to a steel Lustron house of 1950.
• Fort Larned National Historic Site — 15 mi
  Nine sandstone buildings of 1866-68 on the Pawnee Fork, a post that guarded the Santa Fe Trail and served as the agency where the Plains nations came for the annuities promised at Medicine Lodge.
• Ellinwood Underground — 22 mi
  The basement storefronts under the sidewalks of an 1880s German railroad town on US-56, where a harness maker padlocked his shop in 1920 and left everything behind.

More markers nearby

• Birthplace of Farm Credit — 11 mi
• Fort Zarah — 16 mi
• Camp Criley 1872 — 20 mi
• Battle of Coon Creek — 32 mi