Names Hill emigrant inscriptions
— — a wall the wagons stopped to sign.
Not only on a wall.
“A sandstone bluff above the Green River where Oregon Trail emigrants stopped to carve their names into soft rock. Jim Bridger's initials are read here, scratched in 1844, alongside hundreds of others from the 1840s and 50s. The river crossing below was a hard one, so the bluff caught the small ceremony of arriving and the smaller one of leaving a mark. Wind has been eating the names ever since. from the studio
Names Hill emigrant inscriptions, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Names Hill is a low sandstone bluff on the west bank of the Green River in Lincoln County, Wyoming, a few miles south of the town of LaBarge along U.S. Highway 189. The soft Bridger Formation rock here is unusually carvable, and emigrants on the Sublette Cutoff of the Oregon Trail stopped at the river crossing to scratch their names and dates into it. It is one of three principal signature sites along the trail, with Independence Rock and Register Cliff. The bluff and a short interpretive pull-off are managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
The rock face is fine-grained sandstone of the Eocene Bridger Formation, soft enough that a knife or nail cut into it cleanly. Hundreds of names remain legible, with most dates clustered between 1840 and 1860, the peak years of the Oregon and California migrations. The most-read inscription reads simply James Bridger 1844, though scholars at the National Park Service note that Bridger himself was illiterate and the cut was likely made for him. Newer carvings from the twentieth century crowd alongside the older ones, the worst of them now covered behind protective fencing.
The pull-off sits along U.S. 189 about six miles south of LaBarge, Wyoming, between the highway and the river. There is a small interpretive panel, a short walk to the rock face, and no fee. A protective chain-link fence covers the densest panel of inscriptions to slow vandalism. The site is open year-round but most readable in low-angle morning or late-afternoon light, when shallow letters catch shadow. The Sublette Cutoff river crossing is just below; the original ford is no longer used.