Grace Raymond Hebard - Trail Trekker

Trail Trekker

Grace Hebard had a passion for marking, preserving, and commemorating the quickly disappearing frontier. She helped found organizations such as the Wyoming Oregon Trail Commission and participated in Wyoming Historical Association and the state chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. As state historian for the D.A.R., she helped erect and dedicate historic markers in elaborate unveiling ceremonies at sites throughout Wyoming. Locations included iconic Oregon Trail landmarks, such as Fort Laramie and Independence Rock; as well as less known sites on the Bozeman Trail and the Pony Express route.

Hebard was a tumbleweed of activity. Summers often found her bouncing along Wyoming's sagebrush rangeland, sometimes by horse and wagon and later by automobile, searching for Oregon Trail ruts or seeking to locate yet another historic site or pioneer to corner for an interview. Only after the High Plain's long winter had retreated would conditions become favorable for Hebard's expeditions. Although the record shows that she sometimes strapped on snowshoes to continue her explorations in the winter. But even summer treks presented difficulties. Thunder boomers easily turned the primitive tracks that then served as roads into impassable quagmires of Wyoming mud.

Summer rains producing axle-deep mud were but part of the problem. She noted while marking the Oregon Trail in Western Wyoming with Civil War veteran and former bullwhacker H.G. Nickerson that she traveled:

"...with a team about 800 miles, consuming the warm months of the summer of 1913 and 1914, with much inconvenience and hardship, owing to the frequent rains storms, and often high winds, deep dust and the mosquitoes, the insects often driving us from the streams out in the hills or plains to camp, making camping in the open country very disagreeable."

Hebard particularly recognized the efforts of Nickerson in Wyoming trail marking. Nickerson, who had lived in the South Pass area since 1868, later became president of the Oregon Trail Commission of Wyoming. Hebard saluted his work locating and marking old western trails during a period of eight years noting that: "Here and there Captain Nickerson has placed stones, boulders and slabs of native material on which he, in the open, has carved with his chisels and mallet inscriptions and notations.

Trail marking naturally often included remote locations. Yet Wyoming's isolated rangeland and mountain passes did not prevent trail boosters such as Hebard and the Daughters of the American Revolution from staging formal unveiling ceremonies with a pageantry of music and "religious, patriotic and historical exercises, prayer, national songs and addresses." Stone markers placed by Nickerson, Ezra Meeker, Hebard, and others (some weighing several tons) are still found throughout Wyoming and are monuments to the state's early historic preservation efforts.