Pinnacles Entrance

That's the last gate on this road. This end nearly had the headquarters. Planners first liked the spot where two highways met, and then it lost out to Cedar Pass. Maybe it was water, and maybe it was Ben Millard, the hotelkeeper there, and his offer of land. The gravel road you passed just inside the gate is Sage Creek Rim Road. It's bison country, with the biggest prairie dog town you can reach. It can close after rain, and there's no water out there. Sage Creek itself always had a reputation. In eighteen fifty-three the geologists Hayden and Meek spent several days on it. Travelers knew that water for its purgative qualities, and it left men and horses weak. People tried the basin anyway. Jess and Nellie Harris ran five hundred head of cattle down there. They raised hogs and chickens and kept a big garden. They even grew peanuts, a skill Jess presumably brought from Tennessee. Cattle losses and crop failure wore them down, and by the early nineteen thirties they had to leave. The last full-time residents followed. Clyde Wyant, whose family had homesteaded there, was reportedly the last out, around nineteen thirty-six. Older than all of them is the trail. The road between Fort Laramie and Fort Pierre crossed the far end of this country. Trappers and traders hauled furs and supplies along it from at least the early eighteen thirties. An old history says the wagon ruts could still be traced for miles in the unplowed ground.