Laramie Peak was a familiar western landmark for countless travelers in Wyoming and for emigrants on the Oregon and Mormon Trails, who first saw its hazy silhouette near Scottsbluff, Nebraska, about 80 miles east of Dwyer Junction, as their first view of the western mountains and a sign that their journey was leaving the plains for the more treacherous mountain country. Emigrants and other travelers commonly recorded seeing it in their diaries, and in Chapter IX of his 1891 Roughing It, Mark Twain recalled finding himself in the Black Hills with Laramie Peak seeming to loom nearby, though actually thirty or forty miles away. Rising 10,272 feet above sea level, Laramie Peak is the highest point in Wyoming's Laramie Range, part of the central Rocky Mountains, a range once called the Black Hills that extends 125 miles from the Colorado-Wyoming border to the North Platte River near Casper. Visible from more than 100 miles away, the peak takes its name from the early French trapper Jacques La Ramie, who disappeared during a beaver trapping expedition on what is now the Laramie River, after which other trappers named the river for him and the name spread to the nearby mountains, plains, and other places.