The Ames Monument, Wyoming

       

    Before I visited, I had seen the pyramid of H.H. Richardson’s rugged Ames Monument  for years—in photographs.  Rough hewn, steeply angled in the low perspective, it appeared in architecture books, such as Henry Russell Hitchcock’s famous book on   Richardson, surveys by Vincent Scully of Yale and many others.   Richardson’s rugged Ames Monument has been called the greatest monument design in the country, but few have seen it in person.  It sits alone on a windswept high plain in Wyoming, near the highest point on the transcontinental railroad and also on today’s I-80---elevation 8835 feet--between Laramie and Cheyenne.

    The monument commemorates the brothers Oliver and Oakes Ames, who were leaders in arranging for the financing of the transcontinental railroad—the Project Apollo of its time.  Oliver was president of the Union Pacific Rail road, Oakes a Congressman who pushed through the legislation for the railroad.
 They were also scions of a wealthy Massachusetts family whose firm built its fortune on shovels---shovels for digging the Erie Canal, shovels for the gold miners of the 1849 rush to Sutter’s Mill.  Abraham Lincoln is said to have personally enlisted Oakes Ames to push the railroad, which was paid for with grants of Federal lands to railroad companies, through Congress.  "The road must be built, and you are the man to do it,” Lincoln is said to have told Ames. “Take hold of it yourself. By building the Union Pacific, you will be the remembered man of your generation." 
But the Ames were caught up in the Credit Mobilier scandal.  The name comes from a firm through which money for building the railroad was diverted to Congressmen and fat cats.   It was the Enron or AIG or Teapot Dome scandal of its day.   It was as if the head of NASA had been caught bribing politicians.
A Congressional investigation in 1873 implicated Oakes Ames in feeding stock under the table to Congressmen.  Censured by Congress, he died later that year.  The brothers were nicknamed the “Kings of Spades” in the press and more memorably as far as posterity goes, caricatured by the great political cartoonist Thomas Nast.
 But the Union Pacific clung to assertions of their innocence and planned a monument in 1875.  Nothing was done until a court decision early in 1879 marked the end of the scandal—outrage was deep but memories were short in those days as well---and essentially cleared Oakes Ames. The railroad hired H.H. Richardson  to design a monument. The choice came at the behest of the family, for whom Richardson was not only the best architect in the country but the family’s virtual house architect. 
His notable Ames Gate Lodge displays huge boulders and a similar sense of ambiguity between found forms and created forms as does the monument. The site chosen was the highest point on the railroad, a pass in the mountains which had also carried the Oregon trail, the Mormon trail and the Pony Express.
Richardson’s favorite builders, the Norcross brothers of Worcester, Massachusetts, were hired to build the structure.  Between1880-1882 they quartered some eighty men on the site, and it was a notable enough exception to standard practice that histories record drinking and gambling were forbidden on site.  The men used oxen to drag stone a half mile to the site. The granite blocks were about five by eight feet at the base and each weighed several tons each.
     The pyramid is a form associated with persistence and memory at least since the Egyptians.  But Richardson’s design is more than a simple pure pyramid, however.  The first angle of its rise is interrupted by an offset, well above the heads of viewers,  and by a smaller pyramid that tops the whole.  The effect it to create a visual thrust upward, suggesting to the modern eye a sense of space rocket staging.   On the side are two bas-relief sculptures of the Ames brothers by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and inscription in foot high letters reads    "In Memory of Oakes Ames and Oliver Ames."
    Richardson’s use of simple bold forms, rough stone and massive forms suggested the roughness and power of America after the Civil War.  
     By the time the monument was completed in 1882 the reputation of the Ames brothers had been sufficiently rehabilitated that President Rutherford Hayes attended the dedication.  But in fact the monument was really much more about commemorating the  builders of  the railroad than  just the Ames.  
    Passengers on the Union Pacific could look out and see the pyramid a hundred yards away.
    In 1885, a politician  in Laramie named Murphy learned from the county surveyor  that the railroad had never obtained proper title to the land.  It stood on Federal land.  In  one of those pranks that enliven the dullness of small towns and give local characters their character, Murphy filed a homestead claim to the site and for $9.50 became its owner.  At first he ordered the  Union Pacific to “remove their rock pile” from his land.  Then he announced in the Laramie Boomerang, the local newspaper that he planned to sell advertising space on the pyramid, tweaking the noses of the railroad executives.  He was paid off  in cash and land after having his fun.
Within a few years after the monument was completed, surveyors discovered better routes through the mountains and the railroad was moved twice.  The monument was left stranded, landlocked and invisible.   In 1918, the town of Sherman was shut down, leaving a ghost town, then just a cemetery and a name.
    Today the road builders are better memorialized in the area than the rail builders.  The Lincoln Highway, U.S. 30 and finally Interstate 80 found their way through the same pass that Gen. Grenville Dodge chose for the railroad.  It was the best natural gateway through the mountains.   Even early airliners crossing the continent flew through this pass, I learned.   Until pressurized cabins came along after World War II they were limited to altitudes of 10,000 feet. 
The photographs I had seen had all been closely framed around the monument.  I half assumed that I would find it in the midst of some sort of development.   But I learned it was set alone on the plain when I visited the site not long ago.  At the pass, a bust of Lincoln—rough and weathered—stand beside a visitor center and overlook off the Interstate.    Lincoln is the symbol of union, of course, and the Union Pacific railroad and the Lincoln Highway. Henry Joy, the champion of the Lincoln Highway, gets more play than the Ames brothers.
The monument sits well off the highway, alone on a slight rise. In the spring, the plain can be bright with wild flowers but in the summer, when I stopped it is a dusty and windy place, and the winter a snowy one.  A motel where I stayed nearby offered complimentary earplugs:  “Use if distrubed (sic) by wind.”  Elaborate snow fences and snow breaks are visible all along I-80 through the state. 
I drove  off the interstate at exit number 329, marked Vedauwoo Rocks, drove along a quiet two lane road for a couple of miles and then onto a gravel  road.  Dust flew up in a cloud behind me and prairie dogs kept disappearing into their holes as I drew near. No one else was there.  I looked up at the pyramid looming overhead on its knoll and it seemed huge. Far away I could see a house trailer and then the distant mountains.
    I stood at the base of the monument. It loomed impressively above me, feeling much larger than it had appeared from the distance of the road. Its rough surface and sheer, radiant sense of power recalled other Richardson works I had seen back east. 
From the monument I drove across the highway to the Vedauwoo Rocks. Driving away, I was amazed at how soon the monument in the mirrors appeared small and lost again on the high plain.
The rocks by contrast, towered powerfully ahead and  as I approached the rocks looked taller and richer in shape.  The name Vedauwoo,  I read,  comes from an Arapaho word for earthborn and the tribe believed the rocks had been created by sprits, both animal and human.  It was a scared are, where young men went on the rites of passage, fasting “vision quests.”
    The various shapes of the rocks, like cumulus clouds frozen into granite, would surely have provided sufficient inspiration for association to young minds.   But to me, visiting after looking at the Ames monument, the rocks seemed to mock that structure as small in stature and simplistic in shape.   It was as if God or the Arapaho spirits were showing off, piling boulders lightly and precariously in a way no architect or builder could.
     When I got home I looked at the area of the monument  through Google map and its satellite images At the five hundred yard resolution scale, you  could see the pyramid from above, a tiny reddish gray crystal on the reddish gray scruff,  the way you can see NASA's Mars lander in photos taken from the Mars orbiter circling overhead.   At two hundred feet it is clear, so is an automobile captured beside it.
     The historian James O’Gorman, in his essay "Man-Made Mountain: 'Gathering and Governing' in H.H. Richardson's Design for the Ames Monument in Wyoming," says that in all likelihood, Richardson never visited the site.  Instead, he apparently learned about it—as most of us learn about the monument itself—from photographs.   The images he used probably included those of A.J. Russell, the great photographer of the transcontinental railroad project and of expeditions into the West.    O’Gorman reproduces Russell’s photograph of the town of Sherman in 1868, a desolate, snowy ground with a strip of false front stores and hotels along the railroad.  He also includes recent images of the monument by Jean Baer O’Gorman, which offer rare views of the landscape around the structure.  They show the line of rocks and ridges much closer to the monument than I recall from my visit.
The images raise questions.  Could the photographs of Russell and others have conveyed to Richardson the sense of space and sky one feels at the site?  Having visited, I doubt it.  Did Richardson think consciously or not of designing a structure that would look impressive in photographs, since most people would see it that way? Did he know of the nearby rocks and think of matching nature?
O’Gorman argues that Richardson’s design was inspired in part by rock formations of the west—astonishing towers of boulders, piled seemingly by intent, often photographed with pioneers standing on top.  Richardson always like  to explore the ambiguity of natural materials and  artificial creation, as seen in the boulders he famously used at the Ames family gate lodge. 
Indeed, O’Gorman reports that the stone for the monument was quarried from one of the natural towers of stones in the area.  The so-called Reed Rock as named after another man who built the railroad, the construction manager named Reed.
    Oliver and Oakes Ames are now largely forgotten by the public, but those few who come across the pyramid are forced to consider their identity.  The monument is testimony to the frailty of historical memory—and its power.   For the millions who will see its image and the mere thousands who see it in person, the monument is also testimony to both the limits and the powers of photography.

Comments

[ypsi-slim]

"At the pass, a bust of Lincoln—rough and weathered—stand beside a visitor center and overlook off the Interstate. Lincoln is the symbol of union, of course, and the Union Pacific railroad and the Lincoln Highway. Henry Joy, the champion of the Lincoln Highway, gets more play than the Ames brothers."

Both the Lincoln sculpture and the Henry Joy momument were moved from the original Lincoln Highway to the I-80 Summit rest stop. The Joy monument was previously located off the I-80 Continental Divide exit, over a hill on a dirt road, in an area even more obscure than the Ames Monument. It was moved for protection. A perimeter of 4 Lincoln Highway concrete markers were shot up by less than historically minded locals.

[generic propecia]

I also meant to tell you that you can comment to your heart's
content in the comment section and it doesn't turn on any lights nor
do you receive any GA notification. You're only aware of it if you
check your question activity regularly. Feel free to chat with us
there as much as you like.

[buy viagra]

Hello, how you're doing today!!!???
I was wonder if you could do some more stuff like this, you're awesome dude, an incredible stuff for us readers!!!
What a great blog, you write so interesting things about good stuff
i would like to stay in touch with your blog, thanks!!!

Daniel Zweig
4254 Mapleview Drive
Tarpon Springs, FL 34689

[lacoste shoes]

Where there is life, there is hope. I feel strongly that I can make it.

[Juicy Couture Handbags]

Man has had an urge to satisfy his needs.Probably this might be the reason why we human are the most developed of all living species on the earth, and probably also in the universe. Do you think so? Posed By Juicy Couture Handbags

[gucci shoes]

I am not on this earth by chance. I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Do you think so? Posed By gucci shoes

[NFL Jerseys]

Where there is life, there is hope. I feel strongly that I can make it.

[ugg womens boots]

I enjoy your posts. You write beautifully. That’s all…

[gucci sunglasses]

You say well, I care what you do, I think you must have made a lot of thought, it is thank you, hope you can sub regular posts, so that we can be discussed, information can be shared, this is a very Good practice, I think so.

[Buy Generic Viagra]

Smoking is injurious to health. Smokers should think twice before smoking as it causes passive smoking. More importantly, they should try all ways to quit smoking. I found this information useful to quit smoking.

[jj boots]

Louboutin shoes are effortlessly recognizable from a distance as well, since the red leather sole could be the attraction that catches each eye.

[jj boots]

Louboutin shoes are effortlessly recognizable from a distance as well, since the red leather sole could be the attraction that catches each eye.

[Cheap Jordans]

get the Det siges at øjnene er sjælens spejl og hver farve har sine helt egne meninger og værdier tilknyttet.

[Steelers jerseys]

Thank you so much for writing this! I learned a lot and appreciate the perspective.

[Chanel Bags Outlet]

I am donating Two My Baby Loves Cd’s and Baby Dipper Bowls is donating a specially designed triangular Baby Dipper bowl! I would love for you to check it out over at Adventure’s in Babywearing! Bidding starts at only $10 and goes up in increments of $2. Please, go and visit and see if this is something you would want. If you are not interested in my things I am donating, then there is a whole list of other goodies up for bidding on! Here is the FULL LIST!

[handbags wholesale]

Oh gosh, this is such a wonderful thing to do -- it's so nice to include your little ones in this spirit of giving.
Good work mama :)
20110217pilipalagaga

[cheap jordans]

Seems like a place where many tourists would hav e a great time... with their cameras!

[mbt shoes]

This article is very interesting, I like it. I will always come to visit after.I would recommend to friends more

[Home Decor]

Thanks for taking this opportunity to discuss this, I feel fervently about this and I like learning about this subject.

[charles david platforms]

I keep listening to the news speak about getting free online grant applications so I have been looking around for the best site to get one.:)

[b makowsky fashion]

thanks !! very helpful post!

[cheap jordans]

This article is very interesting, I like it. I will always come to visit after.I would recommend to friends more

[cheap oakleys]

When we talk about this view, i agree with your point, thanks for sharing.

[Cheap Jordans]

7.2 magnitude earthquake in north-eastern Myanmar has caused at least 25 people were killed and local time at 20:25 on the 24th or so, Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, near the northeast junction of the Richter 7.2 earthquake, focal depth about 20 km, the earthquake has killed at least 25 deaths. Shan State in the country, the earthquake triggered landslides and other geological disasters

[Cheap Jordans]

7.2 magnitude earthquake in north-eastern Myanmar has caused at least 25 people were killed and local time at 20:25 on the 24th or so, Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, near the northeast junction of the Richter 7.2 earthquake, focal depth about 20 km, the earthquake has killed at least 25 deaths. Shan State in the country, the earthquake triggered landslides and other geological disasters