01Summary
A soft sandstone bluff where thousands of emigrants carved their names. Hundreds of inscriptions from the 1840s and 1850s are still legible.
02History
Register Cliff is a 100-foot wall of soft Brule sandstone along the south bank of the North Platte, three miles south-east of present-day Guernsey, Wyoming. The same soft stone that made it easy to carve also makes it easy to weather.
Fur trappers carved the earliest dated inscription, 1829. Emigrants began signing in numbers from the 1843 Great Migration onward, and by the peak years thousands of names appear, some in pencil, some painted in axle grease, most chiseled. Many were teenagers or children writing home with their first significant act of self-record.
About a mile away lie the Guernsey Ruts, a quarter-mile section where iron wheels and metal-shod hooves wore the trail four to six feet deep into solid sandstone.
03Today
Register Cliff State Historic Site is a free, walk-up monument with viewing fences in front of the most legible inscriptions. The Guernsey Ruts are a separate, equally accessible site about a mile away.
05Stops nearby
The Oregon Trail ran roughly 2,170 miles from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City. The stops immediately before and after this one are linked below; show Register Cliff on the interactive map for the full route.