Independence Rock State Historic Site

No one is sure who named it. One account gives the honor to fur trappers who camped at the rock on the Fourth of July in 1824, Thomas Fitzpatrick among them by some tellings. Another gives it to William Sublette, who came by with eighty-one men and ten wagons on July 4, 1830, and kept the holiday there. Either way the name was on the rock before the emigrant trains arrived.

It is a single whaleback of granite about 1,900 feet long and some 130 feet high, standing alone in the Sweetwater valley at the southeastern end of the Granite Mountains. Windblown sand has grooved and polished its surface, which is part of why it took names so readily; thousands were cut or painted on it, and lichen and flaking have since taken many. Emigrants reached for comparisons. John Ball, passing in 1832, thought it looked like a great bowl turned upside down.

On July 4, 1862, the first Masonic lodge meeting in what became Wyoming was held on its summit, and in 1930 Boy Scouts came on pilgrimage to mark a century since Sublette's wagons. The rock was made a National Historic Landmark in 1961. It stands beside a rest area on WY-220, about fifty-five miles southwest of Casper, and a trail of about a mile circles its base.