Chimney Rock National Historic Site

Fur traders knew Chimney Rock before the emigrants did, and to the wagon trains it marked the end of the plains and the start of the climb toward the mountains. Travelers kept trying to say how tall it was, and their figures read like a record of a rock wearing away.

In 1830 the trader Warren Ferris put it at three hundred feet high and half a mile around the base, and Captain Benjamin Bonneville described a column about 120 feet tall rising from its top. In 1849 the forty-niner David Cosad worked out 360 feet by comparing shadows. In 1864 Captain Eugene Ware judged the spire about 85 feet and passed on a trapper's belief that some 35 feet had crumbled off it in fifteen years. Today History Nebraska gives about 325 feet from tip to base, with a spire of about 120 feet, and the whole stands some 470 feet above the river valley.

The spire is Brule clay with bands of volcanic ash under a cap of Arikaree sandstone, soft enough that the names travelers carved in its base have mostly eroded away. In 1941 the Roszel F. Durnal family transferred eighty acres around it to the Nebraska State Historical Society, and Norman and Donna Brown deeded more land in 1956, the year it was designated a National Historic Site. The Ethel S. and Christopher J. Abbott Visitor Center looks across at the rock.