Wind River Meridian Initial Point, Wyoming

The Wind River Indian Reservation was established in 1868 for the Eastern Shoshone, and was surveyed by the federal government starting in 1875, from this site, known as an Initial Point. The reservation covers around 3,500 square miles in west central Wyoming. The original sandstone monument at the initial point was last reported to have been there in 1948, but after that it was slowly broken away, and was gone by the 1980s. Pieces of it since been retrieved and placed back at the site. The regulation brass tablet (disc) installed by the General Land Office in 1931 is set in a 12-inch square concrete post, anchored 30 inches in the ground, which marks the site. The reservation was one of four surveyed by the federal Western Lands Survey, and one of 37 federal survey points of origin covering the USA (outside of the 13 original colonies), known as Initial Points, selected over a span of 150 years, to anchor newly acquired federal land to the legal and cartographic grid.