Building a transcontinental railroad in the 1860s was, as University of Wyoming historian Phil Roberts wrote, 'today's equivalent of the mission to Mars: Big, expensive and impossible.' The Ames brothers made it possible. Oakes Ames, a Massachusetts congressman, used his family's shovel manufacturing fortune to finance the western half of the project. His brother Oliver served as Union Pacific president from 1866 to 1871. The Ames Company shovels had dug the Erie Canal, excavated Pennsylvania coal mines, and would later carve the Panama Canal and the New York City Subway. Now those shovels broke ground across the Great Plains and through the Rocky Mountains.

Henry Hobson Richardson was America's most influential architect - the man who designed Boston's Trinity Church and gave his name to an entire architectural style. For the Ames monument, he chose an ancient form: a pyramid of native Wyoming granite, 60 feet square at the base and 60 feet high, constructed of rough-hewn boulders weighing thousands of pounds each. Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens carved bas-relief portraits of both brothers from Quincy, Massachusetts granite, placing them on the east and west faces near the pyramid's apex. The Norcross Brothers of Worcester, Massachusetts employed 85 workers who lived on site, where reportedly no liquor or gambling was allowed. President Rutherford B. Hayes attended the dedication.

Sherman sprang up around the monument where trains stopped to change engines before descending from the summit. The town had a roundhouse with five stalls, a turntable, section houses, and a windmill with water tank. Trains were inspected here before tackling the long grade down to Cheyenne or crossing the 130-foot-high Dale Creek Bridge toward Laramie. Then in 1918, Union Pacific moved its tracks three miles south to an easier grade. Sherman's death knell had sounded. The station house closed. The workers left. Today Sherman is a ghost town, and the pyramid stands alone on its windswept knoll.

In 1885, a local resident named William Murphy discovered that Union Pacific had made a surveying error. The monument stood not on railroad land but on an adjacent plot available for homesteading. Murphy filed a claim, bought the parcel, and announced his intention to cover the pyramid with advertising. Union Pacific's lawyers descended. Years of litigation followed. By 1889, the railroad had obtained a special deed to the property, frustrating Murphy's scheme while bankrupting him through legal proceedings. The pyramid remained dignified. Murphy's advertising dreams blew away across the Wyoming plains.

The Ames Monument stands today where it has stood for nearly 150 years, on a treeless summit south of Interstate 80 near the Vedauwoo exit. No town surrounds it anymore. No trains pass. The wind never stops. The granite has weathered but holds. Richardson's pyramid and Saint-Gaudens' portraits endure in this high, cold, empty place - a memorial to two brothers who made possible what Lincoln called the work of the century. Inside the structure, a sealed interior passage runs along the base, its purpose now forgotten. The monument itself is purpose enough: a geometric declaration that someone did something here worth remembering, even if the tracks moved and the town died and the world moved on.