Names Hill State Historic Site

Wagon trains that took the Sublette Cutoff west of South Pass crossed some forty miles of desert without water before they reached the Green River here, and after the crossing, by ferry when they could pay for one, many stopped under this soft limestone cliff and cut or painted their names into it. Caleb Greenwood and Isaac Hitchcock brought the first wagons this way in 1844. Diarists noted graves near the crossing, some of people drowned in the river. The state counts an inscription dated 1822, left by trappers, as the oldest in Wyoming, and the cliff carried Native rock art before any of them; in 1849 the traveler J. Goldsborough Bruff sketched a petroglyph here showing people, forty-three rifles, two horses and a fork in a river.

The best-known name, fenced off and lettered James Bridger, Trapper, 1844, is probably not his. Bridger, who was a partner in a ferry near here, could not read or write, and historians doubt he carved it, though the state's own description credits him. One of the clearest names left belongs to a man named Snyder of Belleville, Illinois, dated June 1850.

The site lies six miles south of La Barge on US-189, is listed on the National Register and is kept by the state, with a monument and two interpretive signs.