Wagon train trail landmark for sale

CITY OF ROCKS, Idaho – More than a century ago, wagon train travelers scrawled names, dates, even “Wife Wanted” in axle grease on the granite pinnacles lining this popular stopover on the trail to California’s gold fields.

“There are thousands of names here,” pioneer Richard Augustus Keen wrote in an 1852 journal entry. “I registered mine on a large rock.”

Much of the historic graffiti is preserved in the National Park Service’s City of Rocks National Reserve 200 miles southeast of Boise.

But a sign reading “Private Property No Trespassing” sits in front of Register Rock, the monolith that contains the best-preserved inscriptions. And a sagging red-and-white “For Sale” sign in the sagebrush has been getting much of the attention in the federal park lately.

After five years of negotiations, the Park Service says it may be close to reaching a deal to buy the iconic fixture of western expansion from the Idaho rancher who owns the rock and a rutted section of the original California wagon trail.

William Loughmiller says if the Park Service can’t meet his price, he’ll try to use the land as a recreational vehicle campground – even though it is completely enclosed within the reserve.

He bought the land from another rancher with the expectation the Park Service and state of Idaho would trade him for livestock grazing rights on land outside the reserve, he said.

Recently, the Park Service took the unusual step of offering to buy Loughmiller’s 290 acres for more than the estimated fair market value of the land.

The Park Service was able to boost its undisclosed purchase offer to Loughmiller with a $25,000 contribution from the Oregon-California Trails Association, a 3,000-member organization of overland trail buffs headquartered in Independence, Mo.

Register Rock is one of several cases along the old wagon train routes where historic sites are sometimes threatened by the very development they helped usher in, said Dave Welch, the association’s national preservation officer.

The law doesn’t prevent private landowners from bulldozing the remnants of the migration routes.

But when projects are built on trail sections located on private land, “oftentimes we find out too late to have a chance at making a difference,” said Jere Krakow, superintendent of the National Trails System in Santa Fe, N.M.