Rebecca Winters

The grave this marker points to is not quite where William Reynolds dug it. By the 1990s Burlington Northern trains, more than twenty-five a day at about 50 miles an hour, passed some six feet away, and the railroad asked the family to move her for visitors' safety. On September 5, 1995, with more than fifty descendants watching, she was taken up and reburied about 900 feet off, the wagon tire and monuments with her, in a park dedicated in 1996. A 2018 plan to move her again, to a museum four miles away, came to nothing.

What the plaque says

Rebecca Winters Rebecca Winters, daughter of Gideon Burdick, a drummer boy in Washington's army, was born in New York State in 1802. She was a pioneer in the Church of the Latter Day Saints, being baptized with her husband Hiram in June 1833. Membership in the Church brought persecution in Ohio, Illinois and Iowa. In June 1852 the family joined others of their faith in the great journey to Utah. It was a pleasant trip across Iowa through June, but in the Platte Valley the dread cholera struck. Rebecca saw many of her friends taken by the illness, and on August 15 she was another of its victims. She was buried on the prairie near here with a simple ceremony. A close friend of the family, William Reynolds, chiseled the words "Rebecca Winters, age 50" on an iron wagon tire to mark the grave. The family continued on with the wagon train and settled in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Burlington Railroad surveyors found the crude marker and changed the right-of-way to save and protect the grave. In 1902 a monument was erected by Rebecca's descendants. Rebecca Winters is a symbol of the pioneer mother who endured great hardships in the westward movement. Scottsbluff Chamber of Commerce Historical Land Mark Council

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scotts Bluff National Monument — 4.8 mi
  A bluff named for a fur clerk whose death nobody witnessed, the narrow pass the wagons used beside it, William Henry Jackson's watercolors, and a 1937 road through three tunnels to the top.
• Wildcat Hills State Recreation Area — 10 mi
  A pine-covered escarpment south of Gering where bighorn sheep were released and mountain lions came back on their own, with Depression-era stone shelters and a nature center.
• Chimney Rock National Historic Site — 18 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

• Scottsbluff Army Air Field — 2.2 mi
• Fort Mitchell, 1864-1867 — 5.9 mi
• Chimney Rock — 17 mi
• The Great Smoke / The Horse Creek Treaty — 22 mi