Rough Travels

The panel's congressman was not one yet when he rode. Demas Barnes was a Brooklyn patent-medicine man and amateur geologist who crossed the continent in 1866 to study the mineral country of Colorado, Nevada and California, by Bridger's Pass and Salt Lake City along this line, and sent home letters published that year as From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Overland. He took his seat in Congress in March 1867 and served one term, and later became an original trustee of the Brooklyn Bridge and part-owner of the company that made Fletcher's Castoria.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Boar's Tusk and the Killpecker Dunes — 29 mi
  The throat of a vanished volcano made of rock from the mantle, standing over a fifty-five-mile river of dunes that crosses the Continental Divide.

More markers nearby

• Almond Overland Stage Station — 0.4 mi
• Overland Stage Route (Point of Rocks) — 0.5 mi
• The Reliance Tipple — 21 mi
• Rock Springs Coal — 23 mi