The Pioneer Women

The stone stands for women no one can point to. The National Park Service counts more than twenty emigrant graves around Devil's Gate and only one of them marked: a granite boulder for Frederick Richard Fulkerson, who died near here on July 1, 1847, bound for Oregon, and whose headstone the forty-niner J. Goldsborough Bruff sketched two years later. The stone does not name the women among the rest. The Business and Professional Women's Club of Casper set it in 1930, the year the trail association placed its stone for Meeker beside it.

What the plaque says

Oregon Trail Memorial In honor of The pioneer women Buried here In unmarked graves 1836-1870 Erected 1930 By Business and Professional Women's Club of Casper

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sun Ranch and Devil's Gate — steps away
  Tom Sun's 1872 cattle ranch at Devil's Gate, sold in 1996 to the church for whom the cove nearby is sacred, and the fight over who should hold that cove.
• Independence Rock State Historic Site — 5.7 mi
  A granite whaleback named before the wagons came, by trappers in 1824 or Sublette in 1830, and polished by wind until it took names easily.

More markers nearby

• The Oregon Trail — steps away
• Tom Sun Ranch — steps away