The Great Platte River Road

The crossing the panel calls the Old California Crossing put emigrants on the north bank of the South Platte, and the first thing waiting there was California Hill. Wagons climbed 240 feet off the river bottom to the tableland between the two forks, and the dragging cut ruts that still run up the slope from U.S. 30, about four and a half miles west of Brule. The hill was listed on the National Register in 1974. Malcolm E. Smith Jr. gave it to the Oregon-California Trails Association in memory of Irene D. Paden, and visitors can walk the ruts.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Julesburg — 4.3 mi
  The town that moved four times: a trading post, a stage stop burned in 1865, the wickedest end-of-track town on the Union Pacific, and finally Denver Junction renamed.
• Ash Hollow State Historical Park — 19 mi
  The emigrants' spring below Windlass Hill, six miles from the Blue Water Creek camp where Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six Lakota in 1855, and where their belongings came home in 2025.

More markers nearby

• Big Springs — steps away
• Julesburg and Fort Sedgwick — steps away
• Colorado — 4.1 mi
• Sam Bass and the Big Springs Robbery — 7.3 mi