August 5, 2010
Adventure #28
As soon as we turned off the highway I spotted it, rising out of the sparse prairie grass like a hapless gold digger's gilded mirage. But, as illogical as it seemed, we knew it really did exist: a pyramid in Wyoming.
A few weeks before I embarked on a road trip from Colorado to Idaho with Mike and my best friends from college, I had coffee with an old high school friend, David. He had spent his college years in Laramie, Wyoming so when he heard I would soon be driving through his old stomping grounds, he let me in on a little secret that would break up the monotony of the windswept drive: go see the pyramid.
Today, the pyramid is not visible from the highway, but it used to be beside a major railroad stop until the tracks were rerouted in the 1920s. The pyramid, which is officially called the Ames Brothers Pyramid, was built about 1880. The Ames brothers were not upstanding men, according to Roadside America; both made millions by selling shovels during California's gold rush, and with their wealth, they took control of the Union Pacific Railroad. One brother became president of the railroad, and the other became a Massachusetts congressman notorious for bribing people in favor of railroad interests. Late in their lives it was revealed they swindled tax payers out of nearly $50 million. Union Pacific's reaction to this was to build the 60-foot pyramid with the Ames brothers' faces carved on the side (both look like Lincoln's penny portrait) in hopes that it would repair their tarnished reputations.
Now, I am no expert at scandal cover ups, but I would think that building this monument in a desolate part of Wyoming would bring more attention to the two's misdeeds rather than letting the swindlers fade into oblivion. I can only hope that if I ever become tangled in a sinister web, that my colleagues will erect an equally bizarre, misplaced installation in my honor. I'm thinking a mini Taj Mahal in Nebraska or a Stonehenge replica on Colorado's western slope.
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