Scotts Bluff National Monument in western Nebraska includes an important 19th-century landmark on the Oregon Trail and Mormon Trail. The National Monument contains multiple bluffs (steep hills) located on the south side of the North Platte River. It is named for one prominent bluff called Scotts Bluff, which rises over 800 feet (240 m) above the plains at its highest point, after Hiram Scott, a fur trader who died in 1828 near the bluff. The local Native Americans had called it Me-a-pa-te, "the hill that is hard to go around.

The collection of bluffs was first charted by non-native people in 1812 by the Astorian Expedition of fur traders traveling along the river. The expedition party noted the bluffs as the first large rock formations along the river where the Great Plains started giving way to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Their findings were not widely communicated because of the War of 1812. Explorers rediscovered the route to the Rocky Mountains in 1823, and fur traders in the region relied on the bluffs as a landmark.