A drive of seventeen miles brought us to the town of Bayard, 1,338 miles on the way from The Dalles, Oregon, where our continuous drive began.
CHIMNEY ROCK.
Chimney Rock is six miles southwesterly, in full view, a curious freak of nature we all remembered while passing in '52.
Chimney Rock, Platte Valley.
The base reminds one of an umbrella standing on the ground, covering perhaps twelve acres and running, cone-shaped, 200 feet to the base of the spire resting upon it. The spire (chimney) points to the heavens, which would entitle the pile to a more appropriate name, as like a church spire, tall and slim, the wonder of all—how it comes that the hand of time has not leveled it, long ago and mingled its crumbling substance with that lying at its base. The whole pile, like that at Scott's Bluff and Court House Rock, further down, is a sort of soft sandstone, or cement and clay, gradually crumbling away and destined to be leveled to the earth in centuries to come.
A local story runs that an army officer trained artillery on this spire, shot off about thirty feet from the top, and was afterwards court-martialed and discharged in disgrace from the army; but I could get no definite information, though the story was repeated again and again. It would seem incredible that an intelligent man, such as an army officer, would do such an act, and if he did he deserved severe condemnation and punishment.
I noticed that at Soda Springs the hand of the vandal has been at work and that interesting phenomenon, the Steamboat Spring, the wonderment of all in 1852, with its intermittent spouting, had been tampered with and ceased to act. It would seem the degenerates are not all dead yet.
NORTH PLATTE, NEBRASKA.