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I’m a guy who likes a good mystery, as some of you have probably figured out. Back in the late ‘90s, George Frison told me of an intriguing enigma. He said there is an inscription in a stone near Big Trails that appears to be authentic, one that refers to a date in the late 18th century and is clearly European in origin. For some time, conventional wisdom has declared that John Colter, who dropped off from the Lewis and Clark expedition as the members were returning to the United States, was the first white man in Wyoming, starting in 1807. But this inscription, if valid, would refute that narrative.

So, fired by a strong curiosity, I charged after this clue. First, I went to the landowner, a man who sometimes allowed people to come on his place and view the inscription, and sometimes didn’t. I must have caught him in a good mood, because he allowed me to visit the site. My son, Dan, and I, traveled to this location and there found a large sandstone rock in the side of a gulley, with the following writing: “1784 IBEASH.” The “4” may be a “1,” but that was not my impression when I visited the rock. The “S” seems reversed. Also, the inscription has a cross with an enclosure about it, a cross in a box, you might say.

This short trip led to a long trip, to Santa Fe, once the capital of the Spanish province of New Spain (and now the capital of the American state of New Mexico). Folks in this area usually think of early exploration as an English or American enterprise (sometimes French), and don’t consider the presence of the Spanish. But Spain claimed and explored what is now New Mexico even before the English arrived on the east coast of North America, and established their capital, Santa Fe, in 1610. The natives drove out the Spanish in the 17th century (1680), but the Spanish soon came back (1692). Just as an aside, Santa Fe is one of the most interesting towns in America. It doesn’t look like the rest of an increasingly uniform and bland America, but has a distinct, perhaps unique charm, looking every bit the Spanish colonial capital. The adobe structures go back to the very early 18th century and the town has insisted that its special character be preserved and continued.

I learned a lot in Santa Fe about how active the Spanish were in the lands that would become the United States. Many were miners, diligently searching for precious metals, especially gold, all over the area. There are Spanish digs throughout the West, including Colorado, Utah and even eastern Oregon, where enclosed cross symbols, generally used during the late 18th century by the Spanish, are found.

I learned that in 1780 a large punitive expedition against the Comanches was carried out to the north, leading into the Rockies near what is now Colorado Springs. Most significant to me was that reports of the expedition show that the country traversed was already well known. In Colorado the Rockies form a wall to the west, but the base of this wall presents an open avenue to the north, an avenue that can be easily followed all the way into central Wyoming, to the present-day site of Casper, where the Rocky Mountains swing east and west. It is only about 75 miles from Casper to the site of the inscription.

In 1783, Spanish authorities offered a $5,000 reward to any Spanish subject who located the headwaters of the Missouri River. Louisiana, then Spanish territory, was defined as the drainage of the Missouri and Spain had an obvious interest in knowing what it held. That reward also gave a strong incentive for a New Mexico Spaniard to go north after 1783 — far north. The reward of $5,000 was a big sum in 1783, worth something in excess of $140,000 in 2015 dollars (based on the earliest reliable inflationary figure I could find, for 1850).

I tried to confirm that the inscription is Spanish, rather than French, but my efforts were inconclusive (although I continued to believe it was Spanish) and that deflected my great quest. In the last few years, however, I’ve discovered new information that has revived my interest and strengthened my belief that the Spanish were here in the eighteenth century. And in the next column I’ll tell you all about this new information.

John Davis was raised in Worland, graduating from W. H. S. in 1961. John began practicing law here in 1973 and is mostly retired. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is The Trial of Tom Horn.