In the summer of 1862, a large train of 80 wagons was making its way west through mountains in what’s now western Wyoming when serious troubles led to the deaths of two women and their infants within a matter of days.

The grave of one of the mothers, 32-year-old Elizabeth Paul, remains today on the Lander Trail on La Barge Creek in the mountain country of the Salt River Range, Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Elizabeth Mortimore Paul was born in Indiana in 1829, the oldest daughter and second child of Thomas Plymworth Mortimore and Martha (Patsy) Alice Mortimore (née Deshil). Early in the 1830s the Mortimore family moved from Indiana to Wapello County, Iowa, where they eventually became acquainted with the family of Joseph and Mary Paul, Virginians who had moved to Indiana about 1830 and then to Iowa in 1845. Their son Thomas was had been born in Monroe County, Va., now West Virginia, in 1828.

Thomas Paul and Elizabeth Mortimore were married in 1849. Thomas was, like his father Joseph, a farmer and Methodist minister. By 1862, Elizabeth and Thomas were parents of six children: Louisa, age 12; Mary, 10; Isaac, 9; Harriet, 8; Patsy Alice, 5, and Lucinda, age 2. Another son, named Joseph Plymworth Paul for his two grandfathers, was born in 1859 but lived for less than a year.

In 1862, the families of Joseph and Thomas Paul and other relatives joined a company determined to move to the vicinity of Walla Walla in Washington Territory. They left home on April 24. Joseph Paul was selected captain of the outfit, of which a roster survives.

When all the contingents had assembled, the company consisted of 88 men, 69 women, and 86 children under the age of 18. They had 52 ox-drawn wagons, 315 head of cattle, 38 saddle horses, 14 mules, and 38 milk cows, for a total of 404 head of stock. As they headed west, others joined them, and by July 10 it was a train of 80 wagons, 334 people, and 532 head of stock.

There were worries about possible Indian attacks, so companies had come together for mutual protection. By then the overall captain of the wagon train was John K. Kennedy, also from Mahaska County, Iowa. Because of its size or perhaps because of the incompetence and its captain, the company had many problems, especially with stampeding cattle.

When the Pauls left home Elizabeth Paul was pregnant with her eighth child. Apparently, it was a troubled pregnancy. Diarists with the company say they were often delayed because of sickness in the train. There were other pregnant women in the company, but Elizabeth Paul is specifically mentioned on July 5: “We laid in camp until one o’clock on account of Thomas Paul’s wife being sick. She was better at noon so we hitched up.”

On July 16: “The party which was sick is able to travel this morning so we moved on once more.” Again on July 24, “Stayed in camp on account of sickness in the company.” The entries of the last two days may well refer to Elizabeth Paul. By this time many teams in the company, tired of the trouble and delays, had moved on.

Death in childbirth

On the night of July 25, the company’s cattle stampeded twice, and then again on the night of July 26. The next morning, July 27, 1862, Elizabeth Paul died giving birth to her eighth child, a girl.

Diarist Hamilton Scott wrote: “We remained in camp all day. Thomas Paul’s wife died about nine o’clock this morning. She died in childbirth. She has left an infant. She has been very poorly for some time. We buried her this evening under a large pine tree and put a post and railing fence around her grave.” Thomas Paul named the baby Elizabeth.

The Pauls’ oldest child, Louisa, believed six decades later that the last of these stampedes had something to do with her mother’s death: “Father being on guard at the time caused Mother a great deal of worry, and the excitement causing premature confinement she died the next day. … The baby lived but a week, and was buried a week later after Mother’s death. The ladies made up some verses and put them on a board which they placed at the head of Mother’s grave. The men made paling and put it all around her grave.”

Diarist Jane Gould’s company caught up to the Kennedy train on July 28, when she wrote: “Came past a camp of thirty-six wagons who have been camped for some time here in the mountains, they have had their cattle stampeded four or five times, there was a woman died in their train yesterday, she left six children and one of them only two days old, poor little thing it had better died with its mother, they made a good picket fence around the grave.”

Henry Judson, another emigrant from Iowa, came by on July 29: “We pass this afternoon a beautiful grave made in an opening in the forest & directly beneath a fine fir tree—Twas made on the 27^th inst (only 2 days ago) & was enclosed in a picket yard of hewn timber—a board set into a notch sawed into the tree informed us that the grave contained the remains of Mrs. Elizabeth Paul—aged 32 years—beneath some kind friend had pinned a paper on which were written 3 beautiful & appropriate verses & which I regret very much I had not time to copy.”

James McClung was a member of the Paul company and in his diary entry of July 27, he included the three stanzas of the verse left at the grave: “Elizabeth Wife of Thomas Paul died and was buried this afternoon near the foot of the mountain aged 32 years 7 months and 27 days this is a day of sorrow indeed.”

The first stanza was a well-known early 19th century epitaph:

Friends and physytions could not save

This mortal lovely body from the grave

Nor can the grave confine it here

When God commands it to appear

For tho it was her lot to die

Hear among the mountains high

Yet when gabriels trump shall sound

Among the blessed she will be found

And while she rests beneath this tree

May holy angels watch and see

That naught disturbs her peaceful day

Until the dawning of the day

On July 29, after gathering up all but four of their lost cattle, the company moved on. In the next few days they traveled through Star Valley, entered the mountains again after crossing what’s now the Wyoming-Idaho state line and camped the evening of Aug. 1 near Lane’s Creek.

“[G]ot through the mountains today,” a diarist wrote that evening. Their troubles were far from over, however.

A stampede and more deaths

The next day, Aug. 2, they experienced another devastating stampede. Twenty-five teams ran away, and several people were badly injured. Mrs. Nancy Townsend attempted to jump from her run-away wagon, but hampered by her advanced pregnancy, she wasn’t able to clear the wagon. She was run over by its heavy wheels and badly crushed. The next day she suffered a miscarriage, and she and the baby died soon after. Nancy Townsend, wife of Samuel Townsend, was 21.

On the night of Aug. 2, the week-old infant, Elizabeth Paul, died. She was buried at noon the next day, about the time Nancy Townsend passed away. Jane Gould wrote: “We passed by the train I have just spoken of, they had just buried the babe of the woman who died a few days ago, and were just digging grave for another woman that was run over by the cattle and wagons when they stampeded yesterday. She lived twenty-four hours. She gave birth to a child a short time before she died; the child was buried with her. She leaves a little two-year old girl and a husband, they say he is nearly crazy with sorrow."

The graves of Nancy Townsend and child, and that of Elizabeth Paul’s infant, are a mile or two east of Gray’s Lake on the Lander Trail, but the exact sites are now lost. The grave of mother Elizabeth Paul, however, still survives.

Julius Merrill was there on Aug. 15, 1864, and wrote: “Passed a grave enclosed by a picket fence, painted white. A lovelier spot I never saw. There was an opening of perhaps, half an acre, with one large shady pine near the center. Under this lone tree was the grave. The beauty of the place and the care bestowed upon the remains of the woman cause us all to look at it.” The gravesite has much the same appearance today. The original pine tree still stands over the grave.

Thomas Paul went on to Washington Territory and settled on Dry Creek, six miles north of Walla Walla, and married again to Susan Zaring (née Ellis) in 1863. They had four more children. Thomas Paul died in 1904 and is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Walla Walla.

Resources

Sources

• “Another Pioneer Dead.” The Evening Statesman, Walla Walla, WA. vol. XXXI, no. 168. September 29, 1904, p. 1, col. 3.
• Estes, Louisa J. “Reminiscences Of Mrs. Louisa J. Estes At Age 75 Of Her Trip Across The Plains Over The Old Oregon Trail By Ox Team In 1862.” typescript by Pauline E. Thompson. Cage 676, Box 3. Pauline E. Thompson Collection. Chapter 5, “My Genealogy.” Six pages. 1994. Washington State University Library, Pullman, WA.
• Find a Grave. “Nancy J. Townsend.” findagrave.com, accessed April 25, 2017 at https://findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Townsend&GSiman=1&GScnty=210&GRid=133924027&
• Find a Grave. “Thomas Plemworth Mortimore.” Findagrave.com, accessed April 25, 2017 at https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=42554781
• Gould, Jane Augusta Holbrook. The Oregon & California Trail Diary of Jane Gould in 1862. Ed. by Bert Webber. Medford, OR: Webb Research Group, 1997.
• Iowa, Mahaska County. Cedar Township. 1860. U. S. Census.
• Judson, Henry M. Diary, 1862. MS 953, Nebraska State Historical Society. Typescript, 137 pages.
• McCarley, Jayne. Roots Web. “Reconstruction of Roster of 1862 Kennedy Company, John Knox Kennedy, Capt.” Pat Packard and Marjorie Ellis Miles. Additions and corrections by Ella Jane Allison McCarley. Originally published April 1993. vol. 36, no. 2. Yakima Valley Genealogical Society. Accessed April 25, 2017 via www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~orgenweb/ReconstructionofRosterof1862-2.doc.
• McClung, James Scott. Diary and Letters, 1862. Mss 1508, Oregon Historical Society. Transcribed by Richard L. Rieck.
• Merrill, Julius. Bound for Idaho: The 1864 Trail Journal of Julius Merrill. Edited by Irving R. Merrill. Moscow, Idaho, University of Idaho Press, 1988.
• Scott, Hamilton. A Trip across the Plains in 1862. Mss 596, Oregon Historical Society. Typescript, 10 pages.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Elizabeth Paul Grave.” Emigrant Trails Across Wyoming. Accessed April 25, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/elizabethpaul.htm.

Illustrations

• Both photos are by the author. Used with permission and thanks.

Among the many branches and variants of the Oregon Trail was the 35-mile Seminoe Cutoff, which allowed travelers to avoid the last four crossings of the Sweetwater River as well as the difficult climb over Rocky Ridge.

The cutoff was opened to wagons in the spring of 1853, after heavy snowmelt and heavy spring rains made the fords across the Sweetwater impassable well into the traveling season. The cutoff, combined with the use of the so-called Deep Sand Road that bypassed Three Crossings, enabled emigrants to stay south of the Sweetwater and avoid all the river’s fords except the first one—near Independence Rock. There, French-speaking traders with Shoshone families built a bridge across the river that lasted only until late June 1853, when it washed away.

In subsequent years, the cutoff was used at times of exceptionally high water or early in the season when the river was too high to be safely forded.

In a letter on June 1, 1853, Joseph Crabb wrote: “We started for the Sweet Water, a distance of 26 miles, got within two miles of the crossing, and stopped, finding the Sweet Water from 8 to 10 feet deep. Here we expected to be detained some days or weeks. I rode up to the crossing, and luckily found that there was a company of French traders encamped at Independence Rock, and lots of shanties. They came there early in the spring, and had built a bridge over this stream. It was just finished.”

Crabb’s company was to become one of the first to use the bridge and then the Seminoe Cutoff. Succeeding bridges at Independence Rock came and went as the years of the emigration passed.

The cutoff was probably named for Charles Lajeunesse, one of owners of the post at Devil’s Gate and likely one of the builders of the Independence Rock bridge of 1853. His nickname was “Semino.”

The cutoff commenced about seven miles west of Ice Slough. Warm Springs and Alkali Creek were passed on the way, but they only supplied poor, brackish water essentially unfit for use. The first good water on the route was at Immigrant Springs, as it is called now; in trail days it was called Rock Springs or Antelope Springs. The spring is about 15 miles west of where the cutoff leaves the main branch of the Oregon Trail and seven miles west of Alkali Creek.

A grave at immigrant springs

Diary and newspaper accounts show that there were emigrant deaths on the Seminoe Cutoff just as there were on the “old road,” as the main route was sometimes called, but existing identified graves on both routes are now rare. The only one that can be identified on the Seminoe is the grave of Sarah A. Thomas at Immigrant Springs.

Nothing is known of Sarah Thomas other than the date of her death and age at the time, and these facts only because someone inscribed the information on her headstone. The epitaph reads: “SARAH A. THOMAS D. JUN 29 /54 AG. 22.”

One account survives of her burial, but it does not even include her name. Jacob Hays of Missouri was heading for California when his company reached the springs on June 29, 1854. He wrote: “Clear but very windy, traveled over some pretty rough roads some 13 miles, encamped for the night on Rock Creek [the runoff from Immigrant Springs]. Witnessed the burial of a lady, herded cattle some miles from the wagons to the left of the road where there is a noble spring. Spring near the road called Rock Spring.” That’s it, and it’s the only contemporary account of the life and death of Sarah A. Thomas thus far discovered.

The grave was covered over with large rocks collected from the surrounding hills, and a headstone was neatly inscribed and placed over the grave. Whoever Sarah Thomas was, her family and friends went on, likely to California or Oregon, and only Jacob Hays left us an account of her burial.

New stones in 1924

His is the last-known record of the grave until 1924 when it was re-marked by three newly inscribed stones. Two were left at the grave, and a third is now in the Pioneer Museum in Lander, as is the original. One of the two placed at the grave has since vanished completely. They are all dated Oct. 10, 1924, inscribed “10, 10, 24.” and all confirm what Jacob Hays had written, that Sarah A. Thomas died on June 29, 1854, at the age of 22.

These three markers include a cryptic postscript that proved difficult to interpret, as was the 1924 date. For years this postscript was a mystery to trail researchers, and several interpretations of what it says were suggested including “bacon colic,” as a possible cause of death, or “Bogan County” as her place of origin, but nothing really made any sense.

I now think the phrase is the name of the person who inscribed the three secondary markers, a Bogdan Cosic—the “S” is backwards—who, immigration records show, came to America in 1907 to settle in Rock Springs, Wyo. The immigration officials apparently spelled his name wrong: “Bogdan” instead of “Bogan.”

Cosic must have become a history buff, since it seems he went to the Thomas grave in 1924, collected the original marker, and left at least two of the replacements he had inscribed, signed and dated by himself, but all this is speculation. Emil Kopak of Oshkosh, Neb., photographed the grave and these two markers in 1930.

This convoluted story of Thomas grave markers received a happy ending when curator Randy Wise at the Lander Pioneer Museum rediscovered in storage what is assuredly the original headstone. The inscriptions on the replica markers were found to exactly match the inscription on the original grave marker, inscribed and placed over the Sarah Thomas grave on June 29, 1854. Whoever Bogan Cosic was, we owe him a debt of gratitude, along with the Lander Museum, for preserving this historic artifact.

Sometime early in the 1960s a ghoulish vandal desecrated the Sarah Thomas grave by digging up her bones, and leaving them scattered at the grave. It is not known if anything was taken, perhaps nothing. When Tom Bell, the curator at the Lander Museum at the time, heard about the vandalism, he organized a party that went to the grave where they collected the bones, reburied them, and replaced the rocks over the grave, including the remaining secondary headstone. Except for occasional visits by trail buffs exploring the Seminoe Cutoff, the grave has remained undisturbed ever since.

Resources

Sources

• Crabb, Joseph. Letter. The Alton Weekly Courier, Alton, IL, July 8, 1853, Vol. 2, #6, p. 3, 3, cols. 2-3.
• Hays, Jacob O., 1854. Diary- Lexington, Mo., to Sacramento, Calif., typescript, Acc. No. 543 Box 1, 10 p., American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
• Wise, Randy. “Emigrant Trail Grave.” E-mail messages to Randy Brown. November 17, 18, 20, 24, 29, 2015.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Sarah Thomas Grave.” Emigrant Trails Throughout Wyoming. Accessed April 28, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/sarahthomas.htm.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Cutoffs Seminoe.” Emigrant Trails Throughout Wyoming. Accessed April 28, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/seminoecutoff.htm.

Illustrations

The two color photos are by Randy Brown, and the black and white photo of the two headstones from his collections. Used with permission and thanks. The photo of the two BLM staffers at the Sarah Thomas grave is from the Lander Pioneer Museum. Used with permission and thanks. The map of the Seminoe Cutoff is from the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. Used with permission and thanks.

Like many of their faith, Charlotte and Robert Dansie converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while still young adults in England. After 13 years of marriage they determined to make their way with other Mormons to their Zion in the Salt Lake Valley. Crossing an ocean and a continent, would prove too much, however, and Charlotte, pregnant with her eighth child, would fail to finish the journey.

Charlotte Rudland and Robert Dansie were married April 8, 1849, in the parish church at Newton Green, Suffolk, England. They were residents of Boxford, Suffolk County, northwest of London. Robert was a blacksmith. Robert had been born Feb. 5, 1825, in Boxford and Charlotte Feb. 10, 1832, in nearby Newton. Their houses of birth still stand in their respective Suffolk villages. Robert described Charlotte to his grandchildren as a “beautiful wife,” small in stature with black hair and dark, flashing eyes.

Shortly after their marriage, the Dansies joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then moved to Barking, Essex, a town near London. Disapproval of their new religion by their families and friends prompted the move. Robert became a gardener and took care of the grounds and flower gardens of a wealthy landowner. They left for America on May 12, 1862, with their five offspring, leaving behind in England the graves of two other children.

They sailed from Liverpool on May 14 aboard the sailing ship William Tapscott, which had been chartered by the church to bring 850 English saints to the United States. They arrived in New York on June 25 and docked the next day, arriving after 42 long days at sea, a voyage that harmed the health of many of the passengers.

The church had chartered a train to take the converts to Florence, Neb., the gathering point near Omaha on the Missouri River, where Mormons gathered to outfit for the trip to the Salt Lake Valley. The Dansies were assigned to the company of Capt. Ansil P. Harmon, who led one of six companies of teams sent east from Utah that year—so-called church trains—to bring Mormon emigrants to the valley. The Harmon company consisted of 48 wagons and nearly 500 individuals. They left Florence on Aug. 2.

John D.T. McAllister was elected president and chaplain of the company and unofficial journal keeper. He had made several similar trips between Salt Lake and Florence in previous years and now was returning from missionary work in Birmingham, England. From his journal we learn there were eight deaths while the company camped at Florence and probably at least 25 more, the majority children, many of them from measles, before the company in the third week of September reached a camp on the Sweetwater River a mile east of Twin Mounds as they approached South Pass.

Charlotte Dansie was expecting the birth of an eighth child, but we do not know how far along her the pregnancy was. She had suffered during the voyage, and her health had continued to deteriorate during the wagon journey. On the night of Sept. 20 the baby was born prematurely and lived just long enough for his parents to name him Joseph.

A Dansie descendant would remember years later that “before grandmother died she was in such pain that she told [her husband] she could stand her suffering no longer and asked him to pray to God that she might be released and return to her maker. Grandfather did pray and it was only a matter of minutes until both she and the baby died.”

The journal of John D.T. McAllister, president and chaplain of the company, notes, “September 21, Sunday. At 7 ½ o’clock a few of us went ahead to dig a grave for the body of Sister Charlotte Dansie, wife of Robert, age 32, who died early this morning of a “Miscarriage” and general debility. One mile brought us to the Summit or pass. Three more we made the Pacific Spring, one mile farther we crossed Pacific Creek and dug her grave on the right of the road[. W]hile [we were] digging the grave, Captain Harmon rode up and informed us that Caroline Myers, aged 25 was dead. She died of bilious fever just after the wagons left camp. We widened the grave for both bodies. We stopped there three hours then traveled 11 miles to Dry Sandy.”

Little is known about Caroline Myers (or Meyers) except for the sad circumstances of her death. She seems to have been traveling alone with no other family members, and does not appear on the list of passengers from the William Tapscott.

Caroline had probably been sick for several days, but on the morning of the 21^st she began that day’s journey by walking ahead of her team. Diarist William Priest wrote, “When the wagons came, the teamster reported another death a young woman belonging to Bro Jarmin’s tent. She started to walk a little from camp but had to sit down on the road. The teamster of the wagon she belonged to would not take her up. The captain had her put in another wagon. She had only been in a few minutes and she died. The camp stopped to water the oxen where they was all buried.” [The passage has been edited for readability.]

Robert Dansie put a strand of blue beads around Charlotte’s neck and, from the family belongings, tore the lid off a large trunk, its brass hinges stamped with images of the British lion, and placed it over Charlotte’s body in the grave. The baby was buried in the arms of its mother who lay beside the body of Caroline Myers. After the burial a large rock was placed over the grave.

The Harmon company arrived in Salt Lake on Oct. 2. In December Robert married Jane Wilcox, who also had been a member of the company. They settled in Herriman, Utah, and had nine children together. In all, Robert and his two wives, Charlotte and Jane, had 13 children who lived to have families of their own, by which the Dansie family has continued to multiply and prosper in Utah and Idaho.

Some of Robert’s children later tried to locate Charlotte’s grave, but without success. In 1939 some members of the next generation, armed with an earlier letter to the family from D.T. McAllister, made another attempt. When they reached Pacific Springs they found a man they described as a “Mexican sheepherder” camped nearby. They asked him if he knew of any old graves in the area. He told them that some other sheepherders had dug into a grave he had noticed nearby, but when they found that three people were buried in the grave, two adults and a baby, it had been covered back up.

After they questioned him further, it began to appear to the Dansies that the man himself had dug up the grave. Becoming frightened, they said, he admitted to it and produced a string of blue beads that he had found in the grave. The necklace was recognized as the one placed by Robert around Charlotte’s neck before her burial.

At the grave, scrap metal from the trunk, copper rivets, brass hinges and lock engraved with the image of the lion, and old pieces of leather were scattered around the grave. All this evidence led the family members to believe that they had finally relocated the grave of Charlotte and Joseph Dansie and Caroline Myers.

Little more than a month later, the present monument and fence were installed and dedicated by more 80 members of the Dansie family. The senior Dansie present for the ceremony was Sarah Ann Dansie, Charlotte’s last surviving child, who had been 4 years old when she witnessed her mother’s burial 77 years before.

In 1958 President Eisenhower authorized the Secretary of the Interior to convey an acre and a quarter of land to be used as a grave site and memorial to Charlotte Rudland Dansie. The Dansie Family Organization now has a deed to this property, where every few years they hold family reunions.

The words quoted on the monument are from the Mormon rallying anthem, “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” written by William Clayton of the 1847 Mormon Pioneer Company that led the way into Salt Lake Valley. Clayton wrote the words while camped in Iowa 43 days out on the journey from Nauvoo to Winter Quarters—later Florence—in 1846. The fourth verse is as follows.

And should we die before our journey’s through,

Happy day! All is well!

We then are free from toil and sorrow too;

With the just we shall dwell.

But if our lives are spared again,

To see the Saints, their rest obtain

Oh, how we’ll make this chorus swell –

All is well! All is well!

Resources

Sources

• Brown, Randy. “The Grave of Charlotte Dansie.” Headed West: Historic Trails in Southwest Wyoming. Brown, ed. Mike W. and Gorny, Beverly. Sweetwater County Joint Travel and Tourism Board. Printed for the Oregon–California Trails Association 10^th Annual Convention in Rock Springs, Wyoming. 1992.
• Dansie, Julian LeGrande. “Robert Dansie: Devoted Pioneer Father, Faithful Latter-Day Saint.” Privately printed. Dansie Family Association. 55 pages. No date.
• Dansie, Marvin. “Finding the Pioneer Grave of Charlotte Rudland Dansie after Seventy-five years.” Unpublished monograph, 6 pages. No date.
• Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel. Priest, William, "A record of my life, 1828," 42-62. https://history.lds.org/overlandtravel/sources/17501/priest-william-a-record-of-my-life-1828-42-62.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Charlotte Dansie Grave.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming, accessed May 2, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/charlottedansie.htm.

Illustrations

The photo of the grave is by the author. The photo of Robert Dansie is from the author’s collection, courtesy of the Dansie family.

As they made their way toward the sixth crossing of the Sweetwater River, emigrants found the Oregon Trail descending a steep bluff of sand and gravel. Half a mile later, the trail split, and half a mile after that the trail crossed the river in two different spots.

The travelers were glad, at this point, to get back to good water again. Previously, they had threaded the Narrows at Three Crossings—their third, fourth and fifth crossings of the river—or avoided those fords altogether by way of the accurately named Deep Sand Route. From Three Crossings sixteen more miles took them to Sixth Crossing, where the Oregon Trail crossed the river about three miles southwest of today’s Sweetwater Station at the intersection of U.S. Route 287 and Wyoming Highway 135.

The route between the fifth and sixth crossings was mostly dry. It passed Ice Slough and Warm Springs Creek, but water at both those places was alkaline. Most emigrant parties camped at Sixth Crossing—on one side of the river or the other. Many mentioned crossing another stream soon after crossing, but this in fact was a second channel of the river itself.

Norton Jacob, traveling in 1847 with the first company of Mormon pioneers to cross the Rocky Mountains, wrote of this approach to the Sweetwater on June 24, “[W]hile we were descending a long sandy hill, suddenly through a small grassy bottom, winding, appeared [the Sweetwater’s] sparkling waters, a welcome sight to man & beast.”

The way had been difficult, Jacob’s entry continues, with “tired teams, several having failed on the way by reason of the heat of the Sun & fatigue of the Journey.”

Not all diary entries convey this sense of struggle, however. On the same day, William Clayton, with the same company, noted, “The feed here is very good and plenty of willow bushes for fuel.” A member of Clayton’s company picked up an “Indian arrow point … almost as white as alabaster.”

Nothing so interesting caught the eye of Riley Root a year later. He wrote, “Here the country is a barren waste, except along the river where a little grass is found. Back from the river, nothing grows but wild sage.”

The years 1849 and 1850 brought a huge flood of traffic along the trails—the great majority of it headed for the gold fields of California. Tens of thousands of people and their livestock consumed water, wood and grass as never before.

After fording at Sixth Crossing on July 2, 1849, Patrick McLeod wrote, “We could find no grass to noon on the river.” Worse yet, when his company drove up out of the Sweetwater valley, “The wind blew furiously, raising clouds of sand, cold and disagreeable.”

But next day, July 3, 1849, Ansel McCall’s party evidently crossed at a different spot, finding “a beautiful green meadow in a bend of the river, where there was very fine grazing.” Charlie, one of McCall’s oxen, died there, however. “No more fitting resting place for his old bones could have been found,” wrote McCall, “than that sweet meadow on the bank of this murmuring stream in the heart of the ‘Old Rockies.’”

“Grass very scarce, no wood,” Augustus Burbank wrote on July 5, 1849. “I have seen 8 dead and 2 disabled cattle today.”

Emigrants were sometimes forced to leave useful items along the trail, Burbank noticed. “Wagons, boxes, chains, lead, stove, guns, axes, I saw wedges, clothing & c. was among the sundry articles that lay by the way side.” Burbank also saw “gold dust” in the Sweetwater that turned out to be mica.

Later that month, on July 29, J. Goldsborough Bruff seemed much struck by the view just before the descent to the crossing. “From the edge of the bluff above, we had a beautiful view of the Stream, meadow, and camps below, and the mountains around, in every shade of distance.”

Better yet, Bruff said, he “was informed here, that a few miles below, on the other side of the Stream, were plenty of buffalo and antelope.”

On June 12, 1850, James Shields’s party camped at the crossing, where he reported, “Grazing is very poor.” His diary entry continues, “There were about 60 teams camped near by us. All of us are pretty well done for by today’s travel.”

“[W]ater 18 inches deep, good crossing, grass scarce, willow bushes for fuel,” was Isaac R. Starr’s brief comment on July 7, 1850.

Travel was still difficult in 1853. Although on July 4 Andrew S. McClure noted, “plenty of grass, plenty of water, plenty of wood, plenty of sage,” he also saw, a mile up the river from the crossing, “plenty of hungry cattle.”

No doubt echoing the experience of so many emigrants, McClure added, “The valley in the vicinity of the ford is dotted with cattle. There is little for them to eat there and this is the foundation of so much suffering on this road.”

About three miles west of Sixth Crossing, emigrants sometimes crossed the river twice more at two crossings half a mile apart—the seventh and eighth crossings of the Sweetwater. These fords allowed them to avoid a climb up over a steep, sandy hill on the north side of the river. The approaches to the crossings were swampy, however, and had to be avoided when the route was wet. Ruts over the sandy hill remain today, and are deep and well preserved.

After that, the trail left the river for a far more difficult stretch—over Rocky Ridge.

It was at Sixth Crossing in late October 1856 that the 500 members of the Willie Handcart Company, nearly all of them Mormon converts who had traveled that year from factory cities of the English Midlands, finally stalled. They were starving, freezing and completely out of food, and nine of them died here, shortly before the rest were reached by rescuers with wagons and supplies from Salt Lake City.

Sixth Crossing is now on private land, but a visitor’s center maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is open to the public. It stands on a hill just south of U.S. route 287 and a mile or so east of Sweetwater Station.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Bruff, J. Goldsborough. Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, Captain, Washington City and California Mining Association, April 2, 1849–July 20, 1851. 1 vol. edition. Ed. by Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.
• Burbank, Augustus Ripley. Overland Diary, 1849. Manuscript. MSS P-A 304, Bancroft Library. Typescript.
• Clayton, William. The Journal of William Clayton. Salt Lake City, Utah: International Society of Utah Pioneers, 1945, reprinted 1994.
• Jacob, Norton. The Mormon Vanguard Brigade of 1847: Norton Jacob’s Record. Ed. by Ronald O. Barney. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2005.
• McCall, Ansel J. The Great California Trail in 1849: Wayside Notes of an Argonaut. Bath, N.Y.: Steuben Courier Printing, 1882.
• McClure, Andrew S. The Diary of Andrew S. McClure, 1853. Eugene, Ore.: Lane County Pioneer-Historical Society, 1959. Typescript.
• McLeod, Patrick H. Diary, 1849. Manuscript Collection No. WC001, Philip Ashton Rollins Papers, Box 11, F1, Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. Richard Rieck transcription.
• Root, Riley. Journals of Travels from St. Joseph to Oregon. Oakland, Calif., 1955, reprinted from the Galesburg, IL, Gazeteer and Intelligencer, 1850.
• Shields, James G. Overland Journey from St. Joseph to Sacramento, 9 April to 13 August 1850. WA MSS 423, Beinecke Library. Typescript.
• Starr, Isaac R. Diary, 1850. Manuscript and Typescript, MSS 2473, Oregon Historical Society.
• Woodworth, James. Diary of James Woodworth: Across the Plains to California in 1853. Eugene, Ore.: Lane County Pioneer-Historical Society, 1972.

Secondary Sources

• Brown, Randy. Oregon-California Trails Association. WyoHistory.org offers special thanks to this historian for providing the diary entries used in this article.
• Long, Gary Duane. The Journey of the James G. Willie Handcart Company, October 1856. Published by the author, 2009, pp. 66-73.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, “5th 6th 7th and 8th Crossings of the Sweetwater." Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed April 17, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/6th,7th,8thcrssngs.htm.

Out of nearly 200 people who died from murder or other homicides on the Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s, only one lies in a grave with a known location. Missourian Ephraim Brown, a leading figure on a wagon train bound for California, was killed near South Pass in 1857 in what appears to have been a bitter family dispute. Details, however—who killed him, why and how—are frustratingly sketchy.

Arguments and fights were frequent on the overland trails, and murders happened from time to time. The many irritations of the journey tended to make for short tempers. Disagreements over divisions of property, not to mention outright theft, led to conflict and, once in a while, killings.

For the years 1841 through 1865, Richard L. Rieck, the leading expert on trail deaths, has documented 89 murder victims by name and another 83 “unknowns” who were slain by their fellow emigrants. During that time as many as half a million people made the trip west. Rieck’s numbers do not include another dozen or more anonymous individuals reported as dying after incidents of violence, and many more reported cases of attempted murder.

Bodies of obvious murder victims were occasionally found on the trail. Most often the perpetrators were unidentified and escaped punishment. Others who killed emigrants in fights or in self-defense were sometimes banished from their company. Still, there were 21 reported murder trials that resulted in executions on the trail.

But of the graves of the nearly 200 people involved in these incidents, only one survives, that of Ephraim Brown, killed in 1857 on the trail at Rock Creek near South Pass.

Ephraim Brown and his family

Ephraim James Brown was born in Kentucky about 1823. In 1846 he married 16-year old Nancy Ann Sheckles. They settled on a farm in Ralls County, in northeast Missouri near the Mississippi River. Nearby were several farms occupied by her extended family.[1] Among these were two of Nancy’s married sisters, Rebecca Sheckles Witt and Mary Frances Sheckles Menefee, wife of Nimrod W. Menefee. The Menefees lived with an aunt next door to the Browns; Ira Sheckles, the sisters’ younger brother, also lived there. All told, these relatives numbered 33 people at the time of the 1850 census. Many of them would be in the wagon train of 1857.

About 1852, Ephraim Brown and Nim Menefee, brothers-in law, went to California where for a year or two they were partners in a general store in Sacramento. After saving a portion of their profits and perhaps selling the store—the record is unclear—they returned to Missouri with a plan of returning to California with their families.

The ensuing wagon train of 1857 became a general migration of many members of these extended families, including Nim’s father, Arthur Menefee, and several more of his grown children and teenage daughters. By then Arthur, age 61, had married the young widow Rebecca (Sheckles) Witt, then about 24, the sister of Nancy (Sheckles) Brown and Mary (Sheckles) Menefee.

Ephraim and Nancy Brown were the parents of four children, of whom only three can now be identified—William, Ann and Harriet.[2]

The only account of the journey is Arthur Menefee’s diary. It is short on detail and lacks a company roster. Some members of the company can be identified, however, including three unmarried brothers of Nancy Brown: Ira, Napoleon and Jackson Sheckles. The count for the number of people in the wagon train comes to 27, but the list is probably incomplete. The center of authority in the company was the trio of Arthur Menefee, his son Nim Menefee and Nim’s brother-in-law Ephraim Brown. All three were married to daughters of Paulina and Ira Sheckles, Sr.: Rebecca, Mary and Nancy.

Arthur Menefee’s account

So it was a big company comprised primarily of kinfolk, perhaps a dozen wagons and many animals including least 125 head of loose cattle. They left home on May 13, 1857, apparently in different contingents, for on May 24 while camped at the Grand River in western Missouri, Arthur Menefee wrote: “Nim and Ephraim coming up about 1 o’clock. Great joy in camp. All supted together in mutual friendship & harmony and continued until next morning when a little storm rose between Mary & Nancy.”

Arthur Menefee was a dispassionate and impersonal diarist. After June 4, when he briefly described the marriage of his widowed daughter, Mrs. L. Underwood, to J. Westfall, while they were in St. Joseph, he rarely mentioned anyone by name. Even on the day Ephraim Brown was killed, he remained uncannily reserved.

On August 2, the company was camped at Rock Creek about 15 miles east of where the trail crosses the Continental Divide at South Pass. Arthur Menefee wrote: “Next morning at the point of leaving a conflict took place, which terminated in the death of E. Brown. Buried him & left at 12 A. M. traveling over a tolerable road until we arrived at the Mormon Station, distance 11 miles.” The Mormon Station was a post maintained by the short-lived Brigham Young Express service on the south side of the upper Sweetwater. “Still not satisfied with the justice unfortunateness of the past day,” Menefee continued, “owing all the Women’s tounge [sic]. I feel somewhat better health.” He never commented on the incident again, at least in his diary.

Clues to a killing

What happened? After his entry of May 24 Menefee made no other reference to disagreements between the women of the train until his “owing all the Women’s tounge” comment. In two obituaries in 1936 for Anne Louise Brown, the daughter of Nancy and Ephraim, it is written: “[Ephraim] Brown was fatally shot in a quarrel shortly after the trek began.” The second obituary adds that when the quarrel took place, they were “standing guard over the stock to prevent Indian raids.”

It is not known if the fight was prompted by a quarrel between Nancy Brown and Mary Menefee, who after all were sisters, and it is useless to speculate. On Aug. 11 while they camped east of Commissary Ridge on the Sublette Cutoff, about 100 miles west of South Pass, Menefee wrote: “Here we tried the Boy & dismissed him from the Train after finding him guilty, thence pursuing our journey….” The “boy,” presumably Ephraim Brown’s antagonist, is unidentified.

Aftermath

While traveling down the Humboldt River in western Nevada on Sept. 19, Menefee wrote: “Nancy Brown left us & four other wagons,” so there the company broke up, but it is not known who split off with Nancy, perhaps one or more of her brothers.

The remainder of the Menefee company reached Eagle Valley, present Carson City, Nev., on Oct. 11. Most of them went on to California, but Arthur Menefee stayed in the valley and died there two months later.

Nancy Brown also remained in the valley for the winter and did not proceed to California until the following year. She married ex-Forty-niner Chester Swift in Sacramento in 1859 and had several more children. Swift was a teamster for the Nevada mines, but also a habitual gambler. He lost their home in Carson City sometime in the 1870s and then deserted the family.

Nancy made a meager living as a cook and by selling pies but was forced to give up her three young Swift children to an orphanage in Vallejo, Calif. She appears in the 1880 census living alone in Bodie, Calif., apparently running a rooming house. Soon thereafter she went to Merced, Calif., where her daughter Ann Louise Brown Carter was living with her husband and family.

Not having heard from her husband Chester Swift in many years, Nancy married William Newman in 1882 and then was able to retrieve her children from the orphanage. When Chester Swift showed up not long after, the marriage to Newman was dissolved, and then both men abandoned her and the children. She never married again.

In the 1890s Nancy Brown Swift moved with her daughter Lillie May Swift French to a ranch near Winslow, Ariz., where Nancy died March 22, 1901. The location of her grave, unlike the grave of her first husband Ephraim Brown, is now unknown.

Resources

Sources

• Ancestry. “Johnson Barnard.” “Nancy Sheckles.” “Arthur Menefee.” ”Ephraim Brown.” “Paulina Nelson.” ancestry.com
• Brown, Randy. “The Grave of Ephraim Brown.” The Overland Journal. Vol. 7. Number1. (1989). 25 – 27.
• Find a Grave. “Ann Louise Brown Heffner.” findagrave.com.
• French, Inez Eleanor. Letter to Raychell Sumner, containing “Notes for Lillie May Swift,” 1983. Cited in email message to author from Paul Carter. April 25, 2017. E-mail.
• Menefee, Arthur M. “Travels Across the Plains, 1857.” Nevada Historical Quarterly 9. (1966). 1–29.
• U.S. Census. Missouri, Ralls County, District 73. 1850.
• “Mrs. Annie Heffner.” Obituary clipping, unknown date, unknown newspaper, author’s collection.
• Rieck, Richard L. E-mails to author. May 1, 2017.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Ephraim Brown Grave,” accessed June 6, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/epriambrown.htm.

Illustrations

• The photo of the grave in the sagebrush is by the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. The close-up of the gravestone is by the author. Both are used with permission and thanks.

In the summer of 1878, William O. “Billy” Owen was working with a surveying crew high in the Medicine Bow Mountains, about 36 miles west of Laramie, Wyoming Territory. “Over that vast forest,” he later wrote, “the moon’s shadow was advancing with a speed and rush that almost took one’s breath.” This was the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878.

“It was terrifying, appalling,” Owen’s account continues, “and yet possessed a majestic grandeur and fascination that only one who has seen it can appreciate.”

Worldwide, solar eclipses occur relatively often, at a rate of two to five per year. In a solar eclipse, the moon passes between the earth and the sun, sometimes blocking part of its light and at other times, all. A complete blockage is a total eclipse, and the zone of the earth traversed by the moon’s shadow is called the path of totality. The width, length and route of the path all differ from one eclipse to the next.

“Totality” is the brief period of darkness on Earth when the sun is completely obscured. Totality can last less than one minute or more than seven. During totality, astronomers have a unique opportunity to study the “night” sky around the sun. Because the light of the sun itself is blocked, they can also observe the corona—the sun’s outer atmosphere—otherwise invisible.

Besides the 1878 eclipse observed by Owen and his party, two other total solar eclipses since territorial times crossed present Wyoming before 2017—in 1889 and 1918. These were important opportunities for astronomers with enough personal or institutional means to travel to a choice location and to pay for shipping the necessary equipment. In two of the three eclipses, the totality paths crossed the line of the Union Pacific railroad in Wyoming, greatly simplifying all logistics.

The 1878 eclipse

The path of totality of the July 29, 1878, eclipse crossed most of Wyoming Territory in a swath from northwest to southeast. It was 191 kilometers wide—about 118 miles. Darkness on the centerline of the path lasted three minutes, 11 seconds.

Wyoming residents watched the eclipse through smoked glass, as did Owen and his companions. They also viewed part of the eclipse using their Burt’s solar compass, a large brass surveyor’s device with a mirror and other attachments that allow the user to find true north using the angle of the sun, instead of magnetism.

Such a simple setup was not sufficient for the professional astronomers who spent ten days or more in Wyoming Territory, however. They were there to gather data available only during totality and had to work fast and with the best possible tools.

The inventor Thomas Edison traveled with a party that set up a temporary observatory near Rawlins, Wyo., attracting substantial local publicity. Edison was eager to test his new tasimeter, a highly sensitive heat-measuring device. The July 30, 1878, Laramie Daily Sentinel reported that seven experts, some with their wives as assistants, were working at the observatory. Henry Draper of New York, director of the Rawlins observatory, was the most eminent astronomer in the party.

Draper was a pioneer, perhaps the first, in the young science of astrophotography. He planned to photograph the corona, and delegated other important observations to his colleagues. Draper reported their findings in the September 1878 American Journal of Science and Arts.

The scientists hauled nearly a ton of equipment, including at least four telescopes and accessories plus chemicals needed for the wet-plate collodion photographic process. The best system available at the time, it required the glass plate to be coated, exposed and developed, usually in a portable darkroom, all within about 15 minutes.

At Separation, a railroad station 14 miles west of Rawlins, the Canadian-American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, was in charge of a small party, one of two from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Newcomb was director of the Nautical Almanac, which provides astronomical data for celestial navigation and is still published by the U.S. Navy.

There was nowhere to sleep at Separation except in tents; the stationmaster’s wife cooked for the party. On July 24, Newcomb traveled to Rawlins to meet British astronomer J. Norman Lockyer, founding editor of the prestigious science journal, Nature. Lockyer had led eclipse expeditions to Sicily in 1870 and India in 1871, but this time was traveling alone and intended to assist Newcomb and the other American astronomers. After spending a night in the Separation depot, Lockyer returned to Rawlins to stay at the Railroad Hotel, quarters for the Draper expedition.

At Creston, the station 12 miles west of Separation, the second party from the U.S. Naval Observatory, led by William Harkness, enjoyed more conveniences than did Newcomb and his assistants.

Harkness, Otis F. Robinson, Alvan G. Clark and a few others slept in the railroad car that had delivered their equipment, and enjoyed the cooking services of soldiers sent from Fort Steele, where the railroad crossed the North Platte River, 41 miles to the east. The Harkness party’s temporary observatory had a canvas roof for quick removal before observations.

Harkness and his party spent the days leading up to the eclipse rehearsing, and testing equipment for the big event, down to the tiniest details. To establish their precise latitude, Harkness used a sextant and artificial horizon—a basin of mercury under glass. To find their longitude, Harkness received telegraph signals at the Creston station, helping him compare local time with the time at locations where longitude was already known, in Utah, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C.

At the observation point of an eclipse, knowledge of the exact latitude and longitude enabled astronomers to compare the predicted path of the moon’s orbit with its actual path, and therefore to make needed corrections.

Alvan Clark was a maker of fine scientific instruments. The company Alvan Clark and Sons had received a medal from the French Academy of Sciences for making huge telescope lenses, many of which had been installed in the best American telescopes, including some shipped to Wyoming for the eclipse.

At Creston, Alvan Clark was to photograph the corona. During the party’s many drills, Clark inserted a plate into his camera, exposed it, removed it and inserted a new plate. Otis Robinson tested a polariscope, which might offer clues to the nature of the corona—did it shine by its own light, or was it just reflected somehow from the sun? To study the chemical composition of the corona, Harkness practiced with his spectroscope, which, by isolating different parts of a star’s spectrum, made it possible to determine the different chemical elements in the star.

The men drilled from 7:30 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., with breaks for lunch, supper and an evening walk. All the expeditions performed similar drills, day after day, to perfect their routine so no time would be wasted during the brief totality.

Another American astronomer, James C. Watson from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, traveled with his wife and set up a Clark and Sons telescope near Rawlins. Like Lockyer, Watson and his wife stayed at the Railroad Hotel.

Watson had high hopes that during totality he would be able to see Vulcan, supposedly a new planet orbiting between the sun and Mercury. The existence of Vulcan had been proposed to account for a known disturbance in Mercury’s motions.

The Sentinel captured the excitement of the scene near Rawlins in the days leading up to the eclipse. The visiting astronomers, the Sentinel reported, were kind and courteous. They “furnished a rare opportunity to us frontier residents to enjoy some of the wonders of science … and they never tired of showing and explaining … the use of the instruments, and showing [curious citizens] the wonders of the heavens through their glasses.”

The visitors, too, appreciated the treatment they received. Draper later wrote, “Of the citizens of Rawlins it is only necessary to say that we never even put the lock on the door of the Observatory, and not a thing was disturbed or misplaced during our ten days of residence, though we had many visitors.”

Lockyer, Newcomb and others reported their findings in or were interviewed by The British Journal of Photography, Scientific American, The Washington Post, the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., the New-York Tribune, the New-York Daily Tribune and the American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Lockyer reported that he was convinced that Watson had, in fact, seen Vulcan. It would be nearly 37 years before Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity would account for this disturbance, and rule out the existence of Vulcan.

The weather was clear for all observers.

The 1889 eclipse

The path of the total eclipse of Jan. 1, 1889, crossed just a small piece of Wyoming—across the far northwest corner of Yellowstone Park. Totality on the centerline lasted two minutes, 17 seconds, and was 175 kilometers, or about 108 miles, wide.

Apparently, few astronomers visited Wyoming Territory for this eclipse, probably because transportation to Yellowstone was still difficult. Besides, there were plenty of other good locations in the country for viewing totality.

The Cheyenne Daily Leader reported on Jan. 6, 1889, “The eclipse was seven eighths total here. The sky was perfectly clear and darkness settled down as on a cloudy day. The air became decidedly cooler. Observations were taken by Prof. Garrard of Kentucky and Prof. John Harrington and Dr. Glover of the Thirty Society of this city.”

“Hundreds of Laramie people viewed the eclipse through smoked glass,” reported TheLaramie Boomerang on Jan. 2, 1889. “During the [partial] obscuration Venus could be plainly seen.”

The 1918 eclipse

Totality for the June 8, 1918, eclipse lasted two minutes, 23 seconds, and the path was 112 kilometers (about 69 miles) wide, crossing the southeast corner of Wyoming, including Rock Springs and Green River.

At least six well-known astronomers visited Wyoming for this eclipse. The Green River Star reported on June 14, 1918, that the town “probably never again will … see so many great astronomers at any one time. Professors Frost, Hale, Barnard, Ellerman, Parkhurst, Anderson and many others have been located here for some time.”

The Star goes on to describe the “wonderful clock-driven heliostat” owned by the Yerkes Observatory, of the University of Chicago. The heliostat—a mirror geared to a clock in order to continue reflecting the sun’s light at a single target as the sun moves through the day—threw the sun’s rays into a horizontal telescope and kept the light “steadily in one direction, without deviation for any length of time,” The Star reported.

Complete with “gigantic cameras and spectrographs,” the Yerkes telescope was set up near a local outcrop known as Teapot Rock—not to be confused with the better-known rock in central Wyoming that gave its name to the Teapot Dome oilfield.

The Yerkes party, a total of 16 observers, included Edwin Brant Frost, co-editor of the international Astrophysical Journal and professor of astrophysics at the Yerkes Observatory, as well as Edward Emerson Barnard, whom Isaac Asimov described in 1975 as “perhaps the keenest-eyed astronomer in history.”

The September 1918 Monthly Evening Sky Map published a photograph taken by Barnard of solar prominences, one of them more than 47,000 miles high. A solar prominence is an incandescent stream of protons, extending beyond the corona’s normal edge.

A party from the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory near Los Angeles, Calif., was led by George Ellery Hale. Hale was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and established the Astrophysical Journal in 1895. He had been associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Chicago and had obtained all the funding for the Yerkes Observatory. In 1904, Hale founded and also raised money for the Mount Wilson observatory, and became its director.

Like the Yerkes party, the Mount Wilson expedition set up its temporary base near Green River. In addition to hauling the 30-inch mirror from their prized Snow telescope—a permanent fixture at Mount Wilson—the scientists brought three cameras and three spectrographs. A spectrograph is a device for isolating a portion of a star’s spectrum, and recording this data with a camera.

Clearer skies than in Illinois

Jacob Kunz and Joel Stebbins, a two-man expedition from the University of Illinois Observatory at Urbana, set up their equipment about two miles south of Rock Springs, Wyo. Their account of the expedition and its results, published in the December 1918 Popular Astronomy, is the most extensive and least technical of all the visiting astronomers’ reports.

To measure the brightness of the corona, Kunz and Stebbins hauled more than 400 pounds of equipment, including electric lamps, batteries and galvanometers. A galvanometer measures or detects a small electric current by movements of a coil or a magnetic needle. Kunz and Stebbins achieved their goal of comparing the corona with light sources of known strength, including a candle and an electric light bulb.

“Before leaving Urbana where smoke has been a nuisance for a dozen years,” Kunz and Stebbins reported, “we vowed that with several hundred miles of eclipse track to choose from we would make sure that this trouble at least would be left at home.” Except for two coal mines about a mile away, in Wyoming they were “as secluded as though we had been far from any town.”

A local contractor, Mr. Kellogg, built the shelter that was their temporary observatory, and Kunz and Stebbins also recruited two local assistants, “Messrs. Homer Coté and Paul Freeman, two mining surveyors.”

The performance of their equipment was superb. “Being far from traffic, the galvanometers were perfectly steady, and the dry air of Wyoming eliminated troubles with electrical insulation.” Their report continues, “Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before, and it remained for our cozy little hut in the desert to demonstrate what a model laboratory should be.”

They described in detail the partly cloudy sky, and the suspense they endured right up until two minutes before totality. They were the luckiest of the 1918 parties: At the critical time, thin clouds had covered the eclipse near the Green River observatories.

The June 8, 1918, Laramie Republican noted, “[O]ne may look at … [the eclipse] through a pinhole in a piece of paper or through a dark glass … easily smoked by a candle or oil lamp.” The Republican cautioned, “One must be very careful to have the glass so dark that the sun does not dazzle the eye at all.”

Kunz and Stebbins noted in their Popular Astronomy article that although Stebbins had witnessed two other total eclipses, he “was quite unprepared for the weird effect of the ashy light on the desert landscape shortly before totality, and for the spectrum colors in the clouds about the sun as they were breaking at the last minute.”

As in 1878, visitors were pleased to find the inhabitants so friendly. “We received uniform courtesy and aid from the people of Rock Springs,” wrote Kunz and Stebbins, “and in particular enjoyed the hospitality of the mayor, Dr. E. S. Lauzer.”

Except for the wind, which can disturb the precision of astronomical instruments, Wyoming is an ideal place to observe a solar eclipse. High altitude, fair weather and clear air, far from polluting population centers yet near sources of food, shelter and building services, attracted experts to these early eclipses from the United States, Great Britain and Europe. In turn, their discoveries advanced the science of astronomy worldwide.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Anderson, J.A. “The Expedition of the Mount Wilson Observatory to the Solar Eclipse of June 8, 1918.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 58:4, 1919, 255-258. Accessed April 27, 2017, at http://www.jstor.org/stable/984401.
• Barker, George F. “On the Total Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 18:102, July-December 1878, 103-114. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://www.jstor.org/stable/982766.
• Barnard, E.E. “The Large Prominences on the Sun’s Western Limb at the Total Eclipse of the Sun, June 8, 1918.” The Monthly Evening Sky Map, XII: 41, September 1918. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://books.google.com/books?id=pmxCAQAAMAAJ&pg=PT130&lpg=PT130&dq=parkhurst+wyoming+eclipse+1918&source=bl&ots=OjY_f6CeA9&sig=FxVdO30uLmhm8Qnz2zsYmpbusD8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis2rvsysXTAhWrwlQKHRn0AygQ6AEINzAF#v=onepage&q=parkhurst%20wyoming%20eclipse%201918&f=false.
• Draper, Henry, M.D. “The Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” American Journal of Science and Arts, September 1878, 227-230. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/113467#page/1/mode/1up.
• “The Eclipse.” New-York Tribune, July 31, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The Eclipse of the Sun, July 29, 1878.” Scientific American, XXIX: 7, Aug. 17, 1878, 96. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/scientific-american-1878-08-17.
• Frost, Edwin B. “Results of Observations of the Eclipse by the Expedition from the Yerkes Observatory.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, LVIII, 1919, 282-288. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://scans.library.utoronto.ca/pdf/4/33/proceedingsofame58ameruoft/proceedingsofame58ameruoft.pdf.
• ———. “Total Solar Eclipse, June 8, 1918.” Popular Astronomy, Vol. 26, 458-461. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1918PA.....26..458F.
• Kunz, Jacob, and Joel Stebbins. “The Illinois Eclipse Expedition to Rock Springs, Wyoming.” Popular Astronomy, XXVI: 10, December 1918, 665-676. Accessed May 24, 2017, at https://books.google.com/books?id=o8EzAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA665&lpg=PA665&dq=parkhurst+wyoming+eclipse+1918&source=bl&ots=GrAQkGfR4b&sig=v6SbLnpnxPHEUWCnPYC4wPoo27g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis2rvsysXTAhWrwlQKHRn0AygQ6AEIMzAD#v=onepage&q=parkhurst%20wyoming%20eclipse%201918&f=false.
• Lockyer, J. Norman. “The Recent Eclipse.” The British Journal of Photography, Aug. 30, 1878, 412-414. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The New Planet: Professor Watson’s Report of His Observations During the Eclipse—Mr. Swift’s Observations.” Courier-Journal [Louisville, Ky.], Aug. 25, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• Owen, William O. Unpublished autobiography, c.a. 1930, 28. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, William O. Owen collection, #84, Box 1.
• “Professor Lockyer’s Idea. A Conversation with the Great English Scientist.” The Washington Post, Aug. 9, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• Rae, W. Fraser. “With the Astronomers.” New-York Daily Tribune, Aug. 13, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The Total Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” The American Catholic Quarterly Review, October 1878. Accessed Feb. 9, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/AmeriCatholicQRevV03.
• Wyoming Newspapers. Accessed Dec. 19, 2016, Dec. 20, 2016, May 17, 2017, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov:
  • The Carbon County Journal, Jan. 5, 1889.
  • The Cheyenne Daily Leader, July 27, 1878, July 31, 1878, Jan. 2, 1889, Jan. 6, 1889.
  • The Cheyenne Daily Sun, July 29, 1878, Aug. 1, 1878.
  • Cheyenne State Leader, June 8, 1918.
  • Cheyenne Weekly Leader, Aug. 8, 1878.
  • The Green River Star, June 7, 1918, June 14, 1918.
  • The Laramie Boomerang, Dec. 31, 1888, Jan. 2, 1889.
  • Laramie Daily Sentinel, July 30, 1878.
  • The Laramie Republican, June 8, 1918.
  • Laramie Weekly Sentinel, July 20, 1878.
  • Riverton Chronicle, June 14, 1918.
  • Rock Springs Miner, June 14, 1918.
  • The Sheridan Enterprise, June 9, 1918.
  • Wyoming State Tribune, June 10, 1918.

Secondary Sources

• Asimov, Isaac. Eyes on the Universe: A History of the Telescope. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975, 91-94, 110-117, 122-159, 181-182.
• Baron, David. American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2017, 105-118, 133-149.
• “Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses -1999 to +3000 (2000 BCE to 3000 CE).” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Accessed May 23, 2017, at
• https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Secat5/Secatalog.html#cattab.
• “Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses 1801 to 1900 (1801 CE to 1900 CE).” NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/SE1801-1900.html.
• "Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses 1901 to 2000 (1901 CE to 2000 CE)." Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Secat5/SE1901-2000.html.
• "George Ellery Hale." Accessed May 18, 2017, at https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/fac/facch04_01.html.
• "Golden Era of Refractors." American Institute of Physics. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/cosmology/tools/tools-refractors....
• “The Nautical Almanac.” Accessed June 12, 2017, at http://aa.usno.navy.mil/publications/docs/na.php.
• Rea, Tom. "A Kid in Hell on Wheels: Laramie as the Railroad Arrived." WyoHistory.org. Accessed May 23, 2017, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/kid-hell-wheels-laramie-railroad-arrived.
• Roberts, Phil. "Edison, the Electric Light and the Eclipse."Annals of Wyoming, 53:1, Spring 1981, 54-62. Accessed May 3, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/annalsofwyom53121981wyom.
• ———. "Edison, the Light Bulb and the Eclipse of 1878." WyoHistory.org. Accessed May 3, 2017, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/edison-light-bulb-and-eclipse-1878.
• Sheehan, William, and Richard Baum. "Vulcan Chasers."Astronomy, December 1997, 42-47. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/vulcan.pdf.
• “Simon Newcomb (1835-1909).” From a St. John’s University astronomy course, accessed June 27, 2017 at http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/astro/newcomb/SNewcomb.html.
• “Spectroscopy and the Birth of Astrophysics.” American Institute of Physics. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/cosmology/tools/tools-spectroscopy.htm.
• Struve, Otto. "Biographical Memoir of Edwin Brant Frost."National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: Biographical Memoirs, Vol. XIX, 25-51. Accessed May 18, 2017, at http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/frost-edwin.pdf.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1878 July 29". NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=18780729.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1889 January 01." NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=18890101.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1918 June 08." NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=19180608.
• “What does a spectroscope do?” Telescopes from the Ground Up, accessed June 27, 2017 at https://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/lesson/basics/g23/.

Illustrations

• The photo of Billy Owen is from the American Heritage Center. Used with permission and thanks.
• The color maps of the paths of the totality of the solar eclipses of 1878 and 1889 are from NASA. Used with thanks.
• Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s image of the 1878 eclipse and the photos of Henry Draper and George Ellery Hale are from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image of Henry Draper’s phototelespectroscope is from his report in The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Jul.-Dec. 1878, p. 105. Used with thanks.
• Edward Emerson Barnard’s 1918 photo of the sun's corona is from The Monthly Evening Sky Map, September 1918.
• The image of part of the front page of the June 18, 1918 Cheyenne State Leader is from the Wyoming Newspapers website; see http://newspapers.wyo.gov.  Used with thanks. 
• The image of Kunz and Stebbins’ 1918 temporary observatory is from their report in Popular Astronomy, December 1918.

The National Road, the first federally sponsored highway, enters Indiana just east of the town of Richmond, passes directly through it and heads for Centerville six miles west. From there it continues across the Wayne County toward Indianapolis. Funneling traffic west, the road was extremely busy during the peak years of the California Gold rush, 1849 and 1850.

During the Gold Rush years beginning in 1849 there was a very large emigration of men from the towns, villages and farms of Wayne County. Out of about 110 graves that can be identified on the Oregon-California Trails across the West, 53 are in Wyoming. And remarkably, three of these Wyoming graves are graves of Wayne County people.

Two of the Wyoming graves, of Alva Unthank and Martin Ringo, are in Converse County, Wyoming, a mere eight miles apart, just a little nearer than their homes had been in Indiana. There is no other connection between the two. Unthank died in 1850, Ringo in 1864.

The third grave of a Wayne County resident is that of Daniel Lantz of Centerville. He is buried about five miles north of present Granger, Wyo., near the near the western border of Sweetwater County in southwestern Wyoming.

Daniel Lantz was a native of Fairfield County, Ohio, where he was born about 1803. In 1832 he married 16-year-old Mary Elizabeth Wilson of Pittsburgh, Pa. In 1833 they moved to Centerville, where Daniel’s wagon-making business took off. Business was so good that in 1835 the couple could afford to buy a substantial brick home on Centerville’s Main Street, the local name for the National Road.

They built a substantial two-story residence that was connected to the shop by a spanner arch, through which Daniel could wheel his completed wagons and present them for sale. The Lantz home is a landmark in the town to this day.

Daniel Lantz was a member of Centerville’s Oddfellow’s Lodge, Hoosier Lodge No. 23, I.O.O.F. Their lodge meetings were held in a room above the shop in the Lantz house. Access to the room was limited to a single doorway just inside the arch. The door at the top of the narrow stairway has peepholes, and there are pulleys above the windows that were used to lower blinds to insure lodge privacy.

By 1850 Daniel and Mary Lantz were parents of five surviving children. Henry, the oldest, was 15, followed by John, 13, Thomas, 6, Amanda, 4. Lewis, the baby, was just 2. When the census taker came in August, Mary estimated the value of their real estate as $2,600—that magnificent house and wagonmaker’s shop. By then, probably unknown to Mary, her husband was already dead.

That spring Lantz had joined a company of men from Centerville, including diarist James Seaton. They traveled first to Cincinnati and then by steamboat down the Ohio and up the Missouri River to St. Joseph, Mo., where they joined up with a company from Richmond. Smaller contingents from the neighboring towns of Economy and Boston, Ind. also joined the party. The “Richmond boys,” as they were called, included diarist Henry Starr. Thus, two excellent journalists, Seaton and Starr, described the company’s travels and eventually the illness and death of Daniel Lantz.

On July 3 the company reached the Parting of the Ways west of South Pass between Dry Sandy and Little Sandy creeks and turned left toward Fort Bridger and the Salt Lake Valley beyond it. They celebrated the Fourth of July in grand fashion and all seemed well, but on the following day James Seaton wrote: “This day D. Lantz was taken quite sick.”

On July 6 three more members of the company were stricken with what Starr called the “flu.” Seaton called it “the bloody flux”—dysentery—very likely the correct diagnosis. They stayed in camp all day and tended the men who were ill. All except Lantz improved and eventually recovered.

On July 7, Seaton wrote that Lantz thought he was able to go on, so they drove 10 miles to the Green River and ferried their wagons across. The river was very high; they did not succeed in getting the cattle to swim the river until the evening of July 8. The next day they went 18 miles to the Blacks Fork of the Green River and camped near the road about a half-mile from the river where, according to Starr, they found excellent pasture for their stock.

Seaton wrote on July 10: “As Lantz was getting worse it was agreed to stop until there was a change in him for better or worse.” Starr wrote: “We had to ly by today. D Lance having got worse and being considered by the Physician unfit to travel … we have a beautiful camping Place “

The company doctor was Dr. David S. Evans of Boston, Ind.

Seaton on July 11: “As Lantz was not improving any it was now feared he could not live. The Dr. said he could do nothing for him and did not believe he would live another morning.”

On the morning of the third day at their camp at Blacks Fork Daniel Lantz died. Seaton wrote: “Mr. Lantz is still alive but insensible. He lived until 9 ½ o’clock A. M. When he was no more he was buried at sunset near the road in a very decent manner. His grave was marked by a neat stone. His disease was the bloody flux. There are 10 more get the same disease but none dangerous.”

Starr: “D Lance died this morning In him we lost a most exemplary man one whom we always found cheerful and resigned come what would. We gave him as good and decent a Burial as we could. but it looked hard to consign him to the grave Coffinless.”

Someone in the company carved an inscription on the headstone that read: “Daniel Lantz of Centreville, Wayne County, Ind. Died July 12. 1850. Age 47 years.”

Near the top of the stone were carved three linked rings with the initials F, L and T, one letter in each link, representing Friendship, Love and Truth, a symbol of the Odd Fellows Lodge. Fragments of this stone still lie over the grave.

On July 13 the company rolled on toward California and Seaton wrote: “This morning we again started but [with] feelings of regret for having to leave a friend behind.”

It’s not known when Mary Lantz learned of her husband’s death, but on Oct. 23 a death notice appeared in the Richmond Palladium that is somewhat judgmental in tone and misspells his name. It reads in part: “Mr Lautz was an honest, industrious man, and was acquiring at his business a competency before he left home—but ambitious for sudden wealth he concluded to try his fortune in the far West.”

We cannot know for certain whether Lantz expressed any regrets in his final days when it became evident that death was near. Still, Henry Starr’s diary entry may give us a clue: “… [A] most exemplary man one whom we always found cheerful and resigned come what would.”

If in fact Daniel Lantz’s last words were “cheerful and resigned,” we might infer that any feelings of regret were not bitter ones, and that at the end he did not condemn himself for having been foolish. Like so many others in the Gold Rush, Daniel Lantz gambled and lost.

Resources

Sources

• Brown, Randy. “Daniel Lantz and the Wayne County Companies of 1850.” Overland Journal. Vol. 9, Number 3. Fall, 1991. 2 – 13.
• “California Items.” Richmond Palladium. October 23, 1850. p. 1.
• Seaton, James A. “Recollections of James A. Seaton.” Richmond Palladium, July 10, 1942. Randy Brown transcription.
• Starr, Henry W. Diary, 1850. Typescript, Indiana State Library.

Illustrations

• The photo of the historic Daniel Lantz house in Centerville, Ind., is from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks. The photo of the grave is by the author. Used with permission and thanks.

On Oct. 5, 1857, a band of Mormon militia attacked U.S. Army supply wagons in three different places in what’s now southwest Wyoming, burning 76 wagons altogether and running off a great deal of livestock. No one was killed in these skirmishes.

Best known of the attacks was at a low spot in the sagebrush along the trail later named Simpson's Hollow, about 10 miles southwest of present Farson, Wyo., on Wyoming highway 28. The place is named after Lew Simpson, the wagon master. There, the militiamen captured and burned 26 wagons, and stampeded hundreds of army mules.

The supply wagons were part of an army of U.S. troops, 2,500 strong but marching in many small groups, advancing on Utah in the summer and fall of 1857 to enforce federal law in Utah Territory. Mormons had first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Utah had been a territory since 1850, with Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—serving also as territorial governor and chief federal officer of Indian affairs.

Growing friction between the Mormons and federal judges and other territorial officials through the 1850s, however, together with widespread anti-Mormon feeling in the East, led newly elected U.S. President James Buchanan to appoint Alfred Cumming as the new governor for Utah. Buchanan ordered the army, under the command of Col. Albert Sidney Johnston, to ensure that Cumming and other federal officials could take up their new offices.

Buchanan and others expected trouble in dislodging Young. Although his term had ended in 1854, he had legally kept his post because the only replacement named before Cummings had refused to serve.

The militia, under the command of Capt. Lot Smith, was under orders from church authorities to harass and resist the army, bloodlessly if possible. They burnt supply trains, stampeded stock and burned as much grass as possible, to deprive the animals of feed.

Reports of the skirmish began reaching the East the following month.

On Nov. 14, William Carter, traveling on the Oregon Trail, wrote, “[We] came suddenly upon the smoldering ruins of 26 wagons which were corralled on each side of the road when burned by the Mormons.”

Four days later, on Nov. 18, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported, “The trains were altogether without any escort, and the teamsters made no defense of resistance whatever. … The contents were, I believe, mostly commissary stores. The supply sent out was estimated for a force of twenty-five hundred men for eight months.”

“The Utah expedition was supplied with full provisions for one year,” reported The Tennessean of Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 21.

“I am authorized to say,” the account continues, “that the expedition will suffer not the slightest inconvenience from the loss of the destroyed trains, and that the force under Col. Johnston – two thousand men all told – are in no peril whatever from either the Mormons or the season.”

This would prove highly inaccurate, as winter was coming on, Johnston’s plans upset and provisions were drastically reduced. The army spent a very hungry winter near Fort Bridger—which also had been burnt by the Mormons—in what’s now southwestern Wyoming. Negotiations the following spring allowed the conflict to be settled peaceably.

In 1859, travelers on the Oregon Trail could still see traces of the burned wagons, and knew of the episode, although not necessarily the precise date of its occurrence. On June 23, 1859, more than a year and eight months later, emigrant J. A. Wilkinson wrote, “We saw today where the Mormons had burned a government train a year ago, giving the teamsters what provisions they could pack on their backs and drove the oxen to Salt Lake.”

“We passed more dead cattle today than any day yet, all of an ancient date however, we saw where several wagons had been destroyed by the Mormons,” John McTurk Gibson wrote on July 19, 1859.

British travel writer and adventurer Richard Burton rode in a stagecoach along the Oregon Trail in 1860. On Aug. 21 of that year, he wrote, “[W]e passed through a depression called Simpson’s Hollow, and somewhat celebrated in local story. Two semicircles of black still charred the ground; on a cursory view they might have been mistaken for burnt-out lignite. Here, in 1857, the Mormons fell upon a corralled train of twenty-three wagons, laden with provisions and other necessaries for Federal troops.”

Thus, Simpson's Hollow became notorious. The destruction of wagons in the vicinity, the burnt grass and evidence of other guerrilla tactics used by the Mormon church against the U.S. government marked an episode in what historians David L. Bigler and Will Bagley have called “America’s first civil war.”

On the north side of State Highway 28, there is a historical marker about Simpson's Hollow, and on the south side, Pilot Butte Interpretive Site, with more recent information.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Burton, Richard F. The City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California [1860]. London, UK: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861. American edition, New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1862. Reprinted as The Look of the West, Overland to California, University of Nebraska Press, 1963.
• Carter, William A. “Diary of Judge William A. Carter Describes Life on the Trail in 1857.” Annals of Wyoming 11:2 (April 1939), 75–113.
• Gibson, John McTurk. Journal of Western Travel. Manuscript at Saunders County Historical Society Museum, Wahoo, Nebraska. Typescript.
• “Interesting Letter from South Pass, Route of the Army to Utah.” New Orleans Times Picayune, Nov. 18, 1857, p. 4, col. 1.
• “The Mormon Attack on the Government Trains-The Condition of the Utah Expedition.” The Tennessean, Nashville, Tenn., Nov. 21, 1857, p. 2, col. 4.
• “The Mormon War Begun.” Ottawa Free Trader, Ottawa, Ill., November 21, 1857, p. 2, col. 2.
• “The News from the Plains.” Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio, November 25, 1857, p. 4, col. 3.
• Wilkinson, J. A. Journal: Across the Plains in 1859. Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill. Richard Rieck transcript.

Secondary Sources

• Bigler, David L., and Will Bagley. The Mormon Rebellion: America’s First Civil War, 1857-1858. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011, 203-231.
• Brown, Randy. Oregon-California Trails Association. WyoHistory.org offers special thanks to this historian for providing the diary entries and newspaper excerpts used in this article.
• Ramos, Donna G. “Utah War: U.S. Government Versus Mormon Settlers.” History.net. Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://www.history.net.com/utah-war-us-government-versus-mormon-settlers.htm.
• Wyoming Historical Markers. “Simpson’s Hollow.” Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMFBQK_Simpsons_Hollow.
• Wyoming Places. “Simpson's Gulch.” Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://wyld.sdp.sirsi.net/client/en_US/places/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ASSET$002f0$002f1012917/ada?qu=Simpson%27s+Hollow&qf=SOURCE%09Source%09Places%09Places&te=ASSET.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Simpson’s Hollow.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/simpson's_hollow.htm.

Illustrations

• The photos of the Simpson’s Hollow markers are from Waymarking.com. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Oregon/Mormon trail in the sagebrush near Simpson’s Hollow is by Tom Rea.

First described in 1842 by explorer John C. Fremont of the U.S. Topographical Engineers, Warm Springs is one of the most famous water holes on the Oregon-California Trail. About three miles southwest of present Guernsey, Wyo., in northern Platte County, the spring is in a draw or canyon where emigrants carved their names on the sandstone bluffs.

On July 21, Fremont noted the approach to the springs from Fort Laramie. “The road led over an interesting plateau between the north fork of the Platte on the right and Laramie river on the left. At the distance of ten miles from the fort we entered the sandy bed of a creek, a kind of defile, shaded by precipitous rocks, down which we wound our way for several hundred yards to a place where, on the left bank, a very large spring gushes with considerable noise and force out of limestone rock.”

Fremont’s account continues, “It is called ‘the Warm Spring,’ and furnishes to the hitherto dry bed of the creek a considerable rivulet. On the opposite side, a little below the spring, is a lofty limestone escarpment, partially shaded by a grove of large trees whose green foliage, in contrast with the whiteness of the rock, renders this a picturesque beauty.”

There are two outlets at Warm Springs, one forming a large pool, the other flowing out of rocks about 100 yards east.

In 1849, emigrant Amos Batchelder wrote, "[Warm Springs] comes out of the ground at the foot of a hill of limestone, in a dry, sandy, barren valley, which has a range of high limestone hills on each side, with not sufficient soil on them to support vegetation, except a very few yellow pines, and cedars, and these are small and shrubby. ... A company of men from the fort were nearby, cutting wood, and preparing to burn lime for the fort."

The spring was occasionally called “Lime Kiln Spring” because of these operations. Heating crushed limestone in a kiln produces quicklime, which was an important ingredient in cement. Shortly after starting the lime kiln near Warm Springs, the military moved it to Cold Springs, about two miles north.

Israel Hale, on his way to California during the first of the two most heavily traveled gold- rush years, wrote on June 15, 1849, “We followed the river two or three miles and took across the hill. It was an open rolling prairie with cedar or pine hills in plain view, but no appearances of water until we drove ten or twelve miles, where we found a fine spring. ... It affords us as much water as House Spring of Jefferson County, Missouri. The water, however, was warm.”

Also in 1849, John Benson wrote, “In going up a hollow we came to warm spring, water clear and tasted well. Scenery beautiful. This afternoon a shower fell and layed the dust. We camped about 3 miles from the warm spring.”

Benson noticed many items left along the trail by previous travelers. “This afternoon I counted six abandoned wagons. Saw 8 stoves, two to three thousand pounds of flour and bacon thrown away and perhaps did not see one-half of what was on the road.”

Like Israel Hale, Henry Puckett was one of many travelers who commented on the unusually warm temperature of the water. On June 23, 1850, Puckett wrote, “These springs are quite a curiosity. The water gushes up from under a high bluff, in such quantities as to form a considerable stream, and its temperature at all seasons, is considerably warmer than the river water in summer. During our afternoon walk we saw acres literally covered over with different varieties of cactus – many of them in full bloom.”

Sometimes called “Big Springs” by the emigrants, Warm Springs is known in Wyoming folklore as the “Emigrants’ Laundry Tub” because the pool formed by the spring was a convenient place for travelers to wash the trail dust out of filthy clothes.

One 1850 traveler, Pusey Graves, washed his clothes in the pool on June 24. Graves wrote, “We all felt an unusual buoyancy of spirits on entering this region; the change from the mountain to the valley air was truly pleasant and agreeable. … I proceeded to the spring a distance of 1 ½ miles with my bucket of dirty clothes. Instead of taking the road I passed over the hills and ravines to gaze on Nature’s beauties. For up to this time our road was apparently a dead level and the scenery dead and sullen monotony.”

There are five graves near Warm Springs, including the grave of a Dr. McDermott of Fairfield, Iowa, who died on June 21, 1849, at the age of 28. Many emigrants commented on McDermott’s grave, possibly because of its unusual appearance.

On June 27, 1852, California-bound Richard Keen wrote, “On an eminence about 200 yards from the spring, I accidentally came upon a grave which made quite an impression at the time. Here was a grave neatly finished and well paved with small boulders and on his headboard was nailed his epitaph which he had procured before starting, a physician’s sign or shingle. It read Doctor McDermott and under was scratched the date of his death which is June 21st 1849. He sleeps here alone in these rugged mountains far from the road and in a place seldom seen by a White man.”

On this day Keen inscribed his name on a bluff a half mile beyond Warm Springs, “R. A. Keen.” The inscription is still there along with seven or eight others.

Warm Springs and the surrounding land, though owned by the state of Wyoming, is controlled by the National Guard camp in nearby Guernsey, Wyo. Permission to visit this area must be obtained at Camp Guernsey.

The Warm Springs area remains undeveloped and little changed since Oregon-California trail days, except for fences and grazing cattle.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Batchelder, Amos. Journal. Manuscript in Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Typescript.
• Benson, John H. Diary. Morrison Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo. Typescript.
• Fremont, John Charles. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843 – 44. Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1996.
• Graves, Pusey. Diary and Letters. Earlham College Library, Richmond, Indiana. Typescripts.
• Hale, Israel F. “Diary of a Trip to California in 1849.” Quarterly of the Society of California Pioneers 2:2 (June 1925), 61–130.
• Keen, Richard Augustus. The Diary of a Trip to California and Return. State Historical Society of Iowa. Typescript.
• Puckett, Henry. Diary. Nebraska State Historical Society. Typescript. Location of original manuscript is unknown.

Secondary Sources

• Brown, Randy. Oregon-California Trails Association. WyoHistory.org offers special thanks to this historian for providing the diary entries used in this article.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Warm Springs.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/warmsprings.htm.

Illustration

The photo of Warm Springs is by Gary Schoene of the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. Used with permission and thanks.

On Sept. 27, 1923, John Trevett celebrated his 69th birthday with his family in Casper, Wyo. Following a special supper, they planned to board the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy No. 30 passenger train headed to Denver for the first leg of their journey to California. At the last minute, he looked out the window at the rain and decided not to go.

Others in Casper spent that dreary Thursday evening at the movies, watching “The Purple Highway,” at the Rialto, or “The Toll of the Sea,” at the Wyoming, hailed as “the first motion picture in natural colors.” Some attended a Silk Stocking Dance at the Arkeon Dancing Academy where a dozen pairs of silk stockings were given away to those fortunate ladies with winning ticket numbers.

When a news flash interrupted the movies, many theater patrons thought it was because of a refinery explosion. The oil business and the refining business were booming in Casper at the time. However, this news reported a train wreck.

The CB&Q No. 30 had crashed into Cole Creek near its mouth about 16 miles east of Casper. Some of the bodies were swept by flooding waters into the North Platte River about 200 yards away.

Estimates of the number of casualties vary, but it was clearly the worst train crash in Wyoming’s history. Some reports estimate 30 or 31 were killed in the accident out of 66 total passengers who rode the train.

One 1978 newspaper article quoted long-time Casper resident Edness Kimball Wilkins, who was reportedly given the official investigation report of the crash, as saying that a crew of between 60 and 80 construction workers who had been building tanks at the Clayton tank farm near Glenrock were aboard the ill-fated train. That article also noted that the passenger load that night was “the lightest it had been for quite some time.”

It had been raining for several days. That Thursday, a drizzle had been followed by steady and sometimes heavy rains. Railroaders had inspected the route at various times during the evening. Tom Cole, an early-day railroad employee, recalled in a 1976 Casper Shopper report that the railroad’s roadmaster had traveled across the wooden Cole Creek bridge at 6:15 p.m. on a local freight train. (Cole’s name is not related to the name of the creek, which was first known as Coal Creek and later came to be recognized with the different spelling.) Other reports mentioned the continuing rain but indicated the bridge was still secure and the creek’s water level was “less than 16 inches.”

Engineer Ed Spangler replaced Roy Jackson who was regularly assigned to trains 29 and 30. Jackson “had laid off on arrival of No. 29 on the morning of Sept. 27,” Cole recalled. Engineer Spangler was informed that the bridge had been inspected and was “urged to use extreme caution in traveling.” The train departed for Denver at 8:30 p.m. Some of the passengers who chose the sleeper cars went to bed soon after boarding.

The bridge washed out ahead of the train’s arrival at Cole Creek. The 100-ton steam locomotive, Colorado & Southern No. 350, nose-dived into Cole Creek about 45 minutes after leaving Casper. Several of the cars the engine pulled crashed into it and each other. According to Cole, the mail car, express car, day coach, smoker car, and one Pullman car went off the tracks. Only two Pullman cars remained on the tracks.

Several people involved in the accident are said to have reported the incident. The 1978 article credits the flagman, who rode on the car farthest to the back, as leaping from the train after the crash and running four miles to the Fry way station east of Casper to call officials. According to the recollections of Wilkins contained in a 1973 Casper Star-Tribune article, the flagman said, “I have lost my train in the river.”

Other reports state that passenger Dan J. McQuaid crossed a bridge over the North Platte River a little way west and upstream, then swam across Muddy Creek to reach Muddy Station and telephone the CB&Q dispatcher’s office in Casper with the first news. Another article states that Casper hotel owner Henry Wyatt, also a passenger, escaped from the Pullman car he rode in and walked a mile to telephone railroad officials.

A rescue train arrived by 11 p.m. Its headlights helped illuminate the horrific scene, made even more terrifying by the screams and moans of the people trapped in the wreckage. Darkness, flooding and continuing rain hampered the rescue.

Tom Cole rode out the next morning on the work train. Though the water had receded, the locomotive had sunk out of sight in the mud. Cole recalled, “One end of the mail or baggage car was protruding from the sand near the opposite bank with a chair car laying over [the] demolished top of the car.”

“The only body I viewed,” he added, “was a man’s legs protruding from under the end of the mail car.”

Rescue crews included roundhouse, repair track, section and bridge gangs from both Casper and Alliance, Neb. Wrecker derrick crews also assisted in the cleanup, which lasted from Sept. 27 to Oct. 15, 1923.

The Casper Daily Tribune printed a casualty list on its front page on Sept. 28, It was incomplete, however, as some of the bodies were carried downstream and not found for months.

The newspaper recognized a civil engineer from Salida, Colo., M.A. Robinson, a conductor on the Pullman car named Coburn and a porter named Littleton as heroes who used a rope made of bell cords as a guide to help rescue people. The trio returned three times to a submerged compartment of one of the cars to assist others. Robinson, the report said, was on the train traveling home with his wife. By the time of the newspaper report, she was in the hospital in Salida giving birth to their child.

Recovered bodies were laid on a platform at the depot for identification.

Contemporary articles list names and dates of some of the deceased who were found much later: Douglas resident Charles Guenther, April 12, 1924; Conductor Guy Goff, May 24, 1924; Engineer Ed Spangler, Jan. 22, 1925, when workmen were rebuilding the bridge. Four years after the accident, a mailbag from the mail car was recovered.

The accident, which Tom Cole estimated to cost “close to a million dollars,” with the losses to the railroad cars totaling $98,000, made national headlines. Reports indicated that the engineer had applied brakes shortly before the crash.

An investigation conducted by the Interstate Commerce Commission in the years before there was a National Transportation Safety Board, ruled that the wreck was “accidental and unpreventable,” according to one news report. The railroad was said to have paid $60,000 in settlements to survivors and heirs of the dead.

Dave Johnston, for whom the power plant at nearby Glenrock, Wyo., is now named, took photographs of the accident. Johnston spoke at a Casper Kiwanis program on the 50th anniversary of the crash. He recalled that Natrona Power, predecessor to Pacific Power and Light, was building the North Casper steam-electric plant in 1923 and bids were being taken on Sept. 27 on power plant equipment items from Denver representatives. One of those representatives, Johnston said, was Dan McQuaid, among the first people to call in the crash. McQuaid called the accident “a hell I will never forget.”

The locomotive was eventually raised from the creek bed and rebuilt in Denver, a task that took many months. It operated for 27 more years until it was scrapped.

The Trevett family boarded a different train later for their move to California. After spending a dozen years there, they returned to Casper. John Trevett, according to the 1978 article that contained his daughter-in-law’s memories of the ill-fated 1923 train, had helped build the Union Pacific railroad line across Wyoming from Nebraska to Utah when it was rebuilt in 1899 and 1900.

Resources

• BP Amoco Timeline. Casper Star-Tribune, June 22, 2005. Accessed Sept. 13, 2017 at http://trib.com/news/local/article_95dec472-b119-5f7d-8be3-740c6deaf8a1.html.
• Casper Daily Tribune, Sept. 26, 1923; Sept. 27, 1923.
• “Glenrock Train Wreck” Wikipedia. Accessed Sept. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenrock_train_wreck.
• “Interstate Commerce Commission.” Wikipedia. Accessed Sept. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission.
• “List of American Railroad Accidents,” 1900-1929. Wikipedia. Accessed July 23, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_railroad_accidents. (Also see “List of Rail Accidents” at Wikipedia.)
• “National Transportation Safety Board.” Wikipedia. Accessed Sept. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Transportation_Safety_Board.
• Nickerson, Gregory. “The Burlington Route: Wyoming’s Second Transcontinental Railroad.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Sept. 13, 2017, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/burlington-route-wyomings-second-transcontinental-railroad.
• “Over 25 Perish in Railroad Wreck,” Casper Daily Tribune, Sept. 28, 1923.
• Roberts, Phil, David L. and Steven L. Wyoming Almanac, 7th ed., rev., 2013, 482, 484.
• From Casper College Western History Department files:
• Cole, Tom. “Cole Creek Wreck Retold,” Casper Shopper, Feb. 25, 1976.
• Garbutt, Irving. “Survivor Remembers Screams in the Night,” Casper Star-Tribune, Oct. 1, 1973.
• Joyce, Roger, AMH Dept. “1923 Train Wreck Recalled,” Casper Journal, Aug. 23, 1986.
• Odom, Sue. “Tragic Accident Recalled after 55 Years,” clipping from unnamed newspaper, Oct. 1, 1978.

Illustrations

All photos are from the Casper College Western History Center. The photo with the cranes is from the Western History Collection; the other two photos are from the Art Randall Collection. All are used with permission and thanks.

Union Pacific locomotives still rumble through Cheyenne, as they first did 150 years ago. But after the railroad arrived in November 1867, skeptics questioned whether the town would last, as so many other end-of-tracks communities had died once the graders and tracklayers moved on.

Gen. Grenville Dodge had established the first Union Pacific Railroad townsite in the area at Crow Creek on July 4 of that year. Three married couples and three men arrived on July 9. First referred to as Crow Creek Crossing, the name of Iron City was reportedly considered for the place, which the railroad had already publicized as “one of the most important cities to be built between Omaha and California.”

Dodge and some of his friends are said to have renamed it Cheyenne for the Great Plains Indian tribe. The townsite, in what was still Dakota Territory then, was four miles square. By July 22, an office had opened to sell lots. On July 25, 1867, the first frame house was erected at the corner of Ferguson and Sixteenth streets. Construction of Fort D.A. Russell, a military post to protect the railroad, began a couple of weeks later.

Early days

The life of this place was tied to the railroad. The first tracks reached Cheyenne on Nov. 13, 1867. A combination of construction challenges and the shrewd efforts of enterprising businessmen helped the town endure and grow.

Wyoming historian T.A. Larson noted that Cheyenne spent six months as an end-of -tracks town, “a much longer period than was allowed to any other Wyoming town.” Cheyenne merchants, he explained, supplied goods to railroad camps on Sherman Hill and also to Colorado towns as the Kansas Pacific Railroad built toward Denver. Larson also credited Fort Russell as being “a stabilizing force in the Cheyenne economy.”

Growing rapidly, Cheyenne soon gained another name, “The Magic City of the Plains.” The Cheyenne Leader reported 200 businesses in town by November 1867. By July 1868, just a year after the first settlers arrived, the paper noted a population of “not less than 5,000."

Luke Murrin defeated attorney W.W. Corlett to win election as the town’s first mayor on Jan. 23, 1868. Early day revenues accumulated in city coffers from business licenses and fines. When Dakota Territorial District Judge Ara Bartlett ruled in March 1868 that only businesses named in the charter were required to pay license fees, city finances suffered. Eventually, a bond issue and even the sale of desks and tables owned by the city would become necessary.

Larson explains town citizens endured “disorderly behavior,” such as shootings, thefts and stabbings. Entertainment included dance halls and saloons. One barkeeper, James McDaniels, was known as the “Barnum of the West,” according to Larson, who stated McDaniels’ flamboyant attractions included a free museum, live theater and a zoo stocked with “porcupines, parrots, monkeys, apes, snakes and bears.”

Methodist, Episcopal, and Roman Catholics established congregations in Cheyenne; however, Larson noted, “Church folk were not legion in Cheyenne’s end-of-track days.”

In May 1869, Wyoming Territorial GovernorJohn Campbell named Cheyenne the temporary capital, and the territorial lawmakers soon approved. Still, during the 1871 and 1873 legislative sessions, other towns, including Laramie and Evanston, were considered as possible capital cities. The cornerstone for the Wyoming Capitol in Cheyenne was laid May 18, 1887; the building was completed in the spring of 1890, with additional wings constructed in 1915.

The Durbin Brothers brought sheep to the area in 1870. In July 1870, Hiram “Hi” Kelly shipped the first cattle out of Wyoming, loading stock on railroad cars at the Cheyenne depot. Francis E. Warren, who would became the state’s first governor and one of its first two U.S. senators, was prominent in the livestock business as well.

Years later, Warren reportedly recalled the “rough and tumble” atmosphere of early Cheyenne, noting "Every man slept with from one to a half-dozen revolvers under his pillow, for depradations [sic] of every character could be expected at any hour, day or night." Another early stock raiser, Alexander Swan, is credited with bringing the first Hereford cattle into Laramie County in 1880.

The Cheyenne Club—patronized primarily by owners of the territory’s huge ranches—was established in 1880, but falling beef prices followed by the harsh winter of 1886-1887, brought a bust to the cattle business. Interest in the elegant clubhouse and its bar, billiard and reading rooms diminished.

The first Cheyenne Frontier Days occurred in the fall of 1897. Warren Richardson, the event’s first chairman, credited the idea, which he said was “born on the train” between Cheyenne and Greeley, Colo., to Col. E.A. Slack, editor of the Cheyenne Daily Sun Leader.

Slack envisioned a western show to rival Greeley’s Potato Day celebration. The first Frontier Day featured “cow punchers,” cow-pony and wild-horse races, bucking horses, stagecoaches and Indians as well as other events. Purses for the races ranged from $25 to $75. The newspaper reported that thousands came on the railroad to attend the festivities.

Fort D.A. Russell retained its military significance. Troops trained there for service in the Spanish American War and for World War I. In 1929, the fort was renamed in honor of Frances E. Warren.

Aviation and defense

Transportation remained important to the city, with airplanes added to railroad tracks as technology advanced.

In the 1930s, Cheyenne became a major stopover for transcontinental aviation. Historian Rick Ewig notes that by 1935, United Airlines had scheduled a dozen arrivals and departures daily. In 1942, when flying was restricted on the West Coast because of World War II, United relocated its pilot training school to Cheyenne.

At the same time, the company opened a factory that modified military bombers, installing new guns and instruments on B-17s and B-24s. Workers modified more than 5,000 aircraft. Half of the 1,600 employees were women.

Ewig estimated that the aviation payroll in Cheyenne, which also included the Civil Aeronautics Authority, Inland Air Lines and Plains Airways, totaled in the millions of dollars per year. As aircraft became more modernized, for example with the use of pressurized cabins, the airlines moved their hubs to Denver. However, United created a stewardess school in Cheyenne in 1947, where 83,000 women eventually trained. In 1961, the school was moved to Chicago.

Also during World War II, Frontier Refining built a special fuel refinery in Cheyenne for aviation fuel, which was critical for aircraft of the era, and continued its operations after the war ended.

In 1947, Fort Warren became a U.S. Air Force Base—now the oldest continually active base in that military branch of service. The base has no airfields, however. In the late 1950s it was chosen as headquarters for the Atlas ICBM missiles under the leadership of the Strategic Air Command. According to Ewig, by the summer of 1963, 200 missiles were located in silos within 100 miles of the base in Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska.

In 1966, Mayor Herbert Kingham appointed James Byrd as the first black chief of police in Cheyenne, and Byrd became the first black police chief in the state. He served for 16 years under several different mayoral administrations before he retired.

In 1977, F.E. Warren Air Force Base, one of the largest missile-command bases in the nation, was designated a National Historic Landmark. Ewig called the economic impact of the base and its early day Fort Russell predecessor “incalculable.”

He reported that U.S. Air Force officials estimated the annual economic contribution of the facility in 1982 as more than $156 million, which included military and civilian salaries for personnel who comprised about 13 percent of Laramie County’s workforce.

Current trends

Cheyenne citizens elected their first woman mayor, University of Wyoming alumna Marian Orr, in 2017. She used social media extensively during her campaign. She plans to increase the number of police officers, which had previously decreased, and wants to eliminate blight in the city.

Population for the Magic City, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, was 64,019 on July 1, 2016.

State figures show that Cheyenne’s prosperity continues to be dominated by government, as it has been since the city was first established as the territorial capital in 1869.

According to the Wyoming Division of Economic Analysis, government jobs were the largest sector of the economy in 2000. There were 15,709 of them, or 29.4 percent of total employment. In the next two largest sectors, by comparison, service jobs totaled 12,370 and retail jobs totaled 9,822.

But the government jobs paid much better, on average, than jobs in the next two largest sectors. Total earnings that year were $868.1 million for government, $449.2 million for services. That averages out to slightly more than $55,000 per job in government, compared to $36,000 per service job.

By 2015, according to state figures, the number of government jobs had risen to 17,503, but because employment was growing faster in other sectors, government jobs represented only 26.2 percent of total employment. Government earnings in 2015 in Laramie County were slightly more than $1.4 billion, which comes to an average of nearly $81,000 per job in pay and benefits.

In 2016, Cheyenne Frontier Days total attendance was tallied at 259,193. The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association rodeo, considered to be the world’s largest outdoor rodeo, drew nearly 1,500 contestants competing for a total purse of more than $1 million. Other events included nightly concerts by well-known entertainers, free pancake breakfasts, parades, Indian village and art show and air shows by the U.S. Air Force’s Thunderbirds.

The Wyoming Capitol, arguably the most important historic building in the state and a dominant structure of Cheyenne’s skyline, is currently being restored. The remodel of the three-and-one-half story structure, 300 feet long by 83 to 112 feet wide, is expected to be finished in 2018. The height of the center and wings is about 60 feet; the distance from the grade of the building to the top of the spire on the dome is 146 feet. All offices in the Capitol have been moved to temporary locations for the duration of the project.

Resources

• “The First Frontier Days,” Cheyenne Sun Leader, Sept. 23, 1897. Accessed Oct. 13, 2017, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “The Pioneers, First Anniversary of the First Actual Settlers in Cheyenne,” Cheyenne Leader, July 9, 1868, 1. Accessed Oct. 13, 2017, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “Cheyenne Economic Indicators.” Wyoming Economic Analysis Division. Accessed Oct. 23, 2017, at http://eadiv.state.wy.us/creg/Cheyenne_Economic_Indicators.pdf, 1.
• “Cheyenne’s First Female Mayor,” UWYO Magazine. April 14, 2017. Accessed Oct. 16, 2017, at http://www.uwyo.edu/uwyo/2017/18-3/alumnews/cheyennes-first-female-mayor.html.
• Cheyenne Frontier Days™ Fact Sheet 2017. Jan. 1, 2017. Accessed Oct. 9, 2017, at http://www.cfdrodeo.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2017-Fact-Sheet.pdf.
• “Cheyenne, Wyoming.” Wikipedia. Accessed Oct. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne,_Wyoming#cite_note-city-10.
• Drake, Kerry. “Francis E. Warren: A Massachusetts Farm Boy Who Changed Wyoming,” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Oct. 13, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/francis-e-warren-massachusetts-farm-boy-who-changed-wyoming.
• Ewig, Rick. Cheyenne: A Sesquicentennial History. HPN Books: San Antonio, Tex., 2017, 41-42, 53, 73, 60-61.
• Hanesworth, Robert D. “Early History of Cheyenne ‘Frontier Days’ Show.” Annals of Wyoming, 12 (1940): 199-211. Accessed Oct. 13, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/annalsofwyom12141940wyom.
• Herman, Marguerite. “Laramie County, Wyoming.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Oct. 3, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/laramie-county-wyoming.
• Hillinger, Charles. “Only Black Cop a Popular One, Too.” Google News. The Tuscaloosa News, April 12, 1973. Accessed Oct. 16, 2017, at https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1817&dat=19730412&id=DgEdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OJwEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5852,2183605&hl=en.
• Laramie County Earnings by Industry and Industry Sectors,” Wyoming Economic Analysis Division. Accessed Oct. 23, 2017, at http://eadiv.state.wy.us/wef/P_Laramie_WY.pdf 8,9.
• “Laramie County Employment by Industry” and “”Industry Sectors.” Wyoming Economic Analysis Division. Accessed Oct. 23, 2017, at http://eadiv.state.wy.us/wef/P_Laramie_WY.pdf, 6, 7.
• Larson, T.A. History of Wyoming, 2d ed., rev. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978, 28, 41-42, 50, 52, 56-57.
• Mackey, Mike. “Cheyenne’s 100-Octane Aviation Fuel Plant.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Oct. 16, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/cheyennes-100-octane-aviation-fuel-plant.
• “Marian Orr Elected as Mayor of Cheyenne.” KGWN.tv., Nov. 9, 2016. Accessed Oct. 16, 2017, at http://www.kgwn.tv/content/news/Marian-Orr-elected-as-Mayor-of-Cheyenne-400506411.html.
• U.S. Census Bureau. “QuickFacts selected: Wyoming.” Accessed Oct. 24, 2017 at https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/WY.
• Van Pelt, Lori. Capital Characters of Old Cheyenne. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 2005. 15,18, 31-33, 214-215.
• ___________. “Liz Byrd, First Black Woman in Wyoming’s Legislature.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Oct. 16, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/liz-byrd-first-black-woman-wyoming-legislature.
• Whipple, Dan. “Wyoming’s Nuclear Might: Warren AFB in the Cold War.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Oct. 13, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyomings-nuclear-might-warren-afb-cold-war.

Illustrations

• The bird’s eye view of Cheyenne, 1882, is from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Cheyenne Club is from Wyoming Tales and Trails. Used with thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.

On Aug. 8, 1919, young Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in Cheyenne with a long line of military cars, trucks and motorcycles. The Transcontinental Motor Truck Convoy entered the city on the Lincoln Highway during an evening thunderstorm.

The soldiers had spent 11 hours on the road that day, traveling from Kimball, Neb., to Cheyenne. Today, drivers on Interstate 80 can easily make the 66 miles between Kimball, Neb., and Cheyenne in less than an hour.

A few days before, on August 5, after leaving North Platte, Neb., the daily convoy log noted that many of the trucks had to be pulled through a 200-yard stretch of quicksand, resulting in a delay of seven hour and 20 minutes. A large, heavy truck called the Militor was able, after five unsuccessful attempts by other vehicles, to pull out one of the lighter trucks that had sunk into sand deep enough to cover both right wheels and its differential.

The purpose of the cross-country trip—never attempted before—was to determine the condition of the roads nationwide. The Cheyenne StateLeader article explained that the 72 vehicles and personnel “showed signs of the road, but both were eloquent evidence of the efficiency” of the United States’ effort that helped win World War I the year before.

The push for better roads

The nation’s roads and efforts to improve them had long been a concern. “Since the late 19th century,” writes author Sarah Laskow, “the Good Roads Movement had been advocating for upgrades to the dirt and gravel tracks that connected cities to one another—and forming associations to finance and build them.”

Author Tom Lewis traced the Good Roads Movement to Albert A. Pope, a Union Civil War veteran who, in 1878, created a “safety bicycle.” Pope organized the League of American Wheelmen, which advocated better roads through a variety of efforts including financing road-engineering courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By 1900, according to Lewis, 300 companies produced more than a million bicycles per year, and “the ‘good roads’ movement was sweeping the country.”

In 1913, the Lincoln Highway, one of the earliest transcontinental highways for automobiles, was dedicated. The 3,400-mile highway route crossed 13 states from New York to San Francisco. For many years, however, it remained a route only—with roads that varied widely in their quality.

On July 16, 1916, Woodrow Wilson signed the first Federal-Aid Road Act into law. The act created the Bureau of Public Roads and allocated $75 million for next the five years, with federal funds to pay states half the cost for building or improving federal roads. At the time, there were more than 21 million horses, 3.5 million cars and 250,000 trucks in the United States, according to Lewis.

During World War I, troops drove new Army trucks and material from factories in the Midwest to Eastern ports where they could be shipped to Europe. In December 1917, the first convoy took three weeks to drive from Toledo, Ohio, to Baltimore.

Other factors also led to the push for better roads. Trucks, more convenient and better able to go more places, were gradually becoming competitive with trains as a way to move freight. But trucks weighed much more than automobiles, and their tires were solid rubber; paved roads crumbled under the wear.

By 1919, the BPR had spent only about a half million of the $75 million allotted, and only 12 and a half miles of roads had been constructed.

Ike’s 1919 journey

The members of the convoy that Eisenhower traveled with in 1919 discovered that the nation’s roads, especially those west of Nebraska, were in rough condition. The soldiers faced mechanical breakdowns, quicksand, and in Utah and Nevada, rationed food and water. They traveled more than 10 hours daily at an average speed of about 5 miles per hour. On some days, they covered as little as three miles.

The convoy left Washington, D.C. July 7, 1919, to head for San Francisco. The caravan stretched for three miles. Eisenhower and his friend, Maj. Sereno Brett, had served as tank officers together during World War I. They were among the 24 officers and 258 enlisted men on the journey, accompanied by a 15-piece band courtesy of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

“In the Rockies of Wyoming and Utah and across Nevada, they went where few automobiles had gone before,” Lewis writes. The convoy log of the journey between Kimball and Cheyenne noted “The effect of altitudes exceeding 6000’ very noticeable in connection with the starting and operation of motors.”

On August 8, Gov. Robert Carey and a host of other dignitaries met the convoy at tiny Hillsdale, Wyo., 17 miles east of Cheyenne, to welcome them to the state. A wild west show was held in their honor at Frontier Park in Cheyenne. Following the show, the soldiers stopped at Fort Russell for a meal and the opportunity to bathe and rest. A dance was also held in honor of the visitors. In appreciation of the “distinctive” welcoming, the Leader report explained that the convoy would carry “cloth posters”—proclaiming “Stop Your Roaming, Try Cheyenne Wyoming”—and declaring that Wyoming was spending $7 million on roads.

Crossing Wyoming, the convoy encountered daily breakdowns and obstacles. Two-hour delays to repair mechanical problems were not unusual. The August 14 entry in the log noted the rough roads after departing Tipton Station west of Rawlins early in the morning. “Bad, sandy trail, very rough, with drop-offs over shelves of rock just below surface. 7 mi west a bad sandy stretch was negotiated more easily by F.W.D.s than other makes.”

Eisenhower noted in a November 1919 report about the trip that in addition to the Militor, which once pulled four trucks at one time, four-wheel drives (F.W.D.s), 2-wheel rear drive vehicles and Mack trucks with chain drives were among the vehicles that made the trip. Because the vehicles each operated at different speeds, keeping the convoy in formation was troublesome. Ike explained that the one-and-a-half ton Packard trucks performed in “remarkable” fashion throughout the trip.

Much of their route across southern Wyoming was not on roads at all, but on the old Union Pacific right-of-way, abandoned after 1899 when the railroad had straightened its routes and improved its grades. The old route was often very winding, soft and sandy, with wobbly, rickety bridges and culverts the trucks broke through.

And although the soldiers were feted in towns at various stops along the way—a Red Cross canteen offered refreshments in Rock River, and the people of Medicine Bow put on a street dance—the daily routine was wearing. Dust choked up the carburetors, and unrelenting, bleak terrain was hard on the men. “The intensely dry air, absence of green trees and vegetation,” the log notes in its description of the stretch between Point of Rocks and Medicine Bow, “and parched appearance of the landscape exerted [a] depressing influence on personnel.”

The convoy left Evanston, Wyo. at 12:30 p.m. August 17 and crossed into Utah that afternoon.

Eisenhower joined the convoy “partly for a lark and partly to learn,” he wrote many years later. Ike recalled the time in Wyoming with fondness. His wife, Mamie, and her family, met the “truck train” in the middle part of Nebraska and traveled with them as far as Laramie, Wyo.

Ike recounted these stories in his 1967 book, At Ease: Stories I Tell Friends, in a chapter entitled, “Through Darkest America with Truck and Tank.”

Eisenhower and his friend Maj. Brett enjoyed playing some practical jokes along the way, especially enjoying the surprises they foisted on Easterners, like warning them of hostile Indian attacks in western Wyoming. No such attacks actually happened, of course. Another time, Ike “aimed the pistol in the general direction of the North Pole and fired,” to shoot a jackrabbit that he had shot hours before and that Brett posed beside a bush away from the road. Brett, to impress the Easterners, proclaimed what an excellent shot Ike was, holding the dead rabbit by its ears at a distance to disguise its stiff condition.

Hijinks aside, the 62-day journey stayed with Ike for years and impressed upon him the need for good highways throughout the nation.

Highway funding after World War I

In 1921, the Federal Highway Act increased funding for federal roads to $75 million per year. Lewis explains that by the end of the 1920s, the BPR had spent $750 million for roads. The 1921 act, he writes, “made real the idea of a national road system. Each state would designate seven percent of its roads to be linked with those in other states.” In the 1920s, the numbering system for U.S. highways began. The portion of the Lincoln Highway from Pennsylvania through Wyoming became U.S. Highway 30.

In 1922, the Bureau of Public Roads commissioned Gen. John J. Pershing, who had been a son-in-law of Wyoming’s U.S. Sen. Francis E. Warren, to draw a map that could be used for the construction of roads and also for the purpose of clarifying which roads would be most important for defense if the nation became involved in a war.

The “Pershing Map” became the first official topographical map of the United States. Pershing had commanded the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) on the Western Front during World War I. He also became a mentor to a number of other illustrious United States generals, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In the late 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed routes for a transcontinental system of roads to the chief of the BPR, but World War II and then the Korean War interrupted the plans.

Lewis explains that 1953 was a turning point in American transportation history. Eisenhower, who had served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II, became the first Republican president elected in two decades, and he “brokered an armistice in Korea, thus enabling the United States to return to full peacetime production.”

More people could purchase cars than before. Between 1950 and 1960, Lewis writes, the number of families owning automobiles increased from 60 percent to 77 percent. During the same decade, the number of railway passenger cars decreased from 37,359 to 25,746. “Since 1936 [railroad] passenger operations had made a net profit only during the war when the government had curtailed automobile travel.”

By the time he became President of the United States in 1953, Eisenhower had driven on the German autobahns and had appreciated the ease and speed of travel on those highways. The 1919 transcontinental trek across the United States had convinced him that the nation needed better roads. He wrote, “The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.”

Lewis explained, “After V-E Day, when he traveled the autobahn, Eisenhower learned firsthand the value of modern highways to defense.”

By the time Eisenhower became president, the nation felt itself under threat of nuclear attack. An interconnected highway system could facilitate routine travel and could provide an efficient escape route in the event of an attack.

The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956

On June 29, 1956, Congress authorized the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, approving $25 billion for the completion of 41,000 miles of highways within a decade. The interstate was the largest public works project approved in the nation’s history.

The Bureau of Public Roads eventually became part of the Federal Highway Administration, formed on April 1, 1967, as a part of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike, a 162-mile stretch completed in 1940, became part of Interstates 70 and 76—one of the earliest interstate highways. However, in 1956, Missouri claimed to have been the state with the first contracts signed and Kansas claimed status as the first state to begin paving. Nebraska, on Oct. 17, 1974, became the first to complete all of its interstate highway system.

A treacherous stretch through Wyoming

In the late 1950s, the interstate was planned to run through a 77-mile section of Wyoming between Laramie and Walcott Junction. Despite objections from locals, Bureau of Public Roads officials determined to place the highway closer to Elk Mountain on a more direct route, rather than following the path of U.S. Highway 30—the Lincoln Highway—where it swings north through Rock River and Medicine Bow.

Historian John Waggener writes, “After three years of debates, and after receiving no federal support for locating I-80 along U.S. 30, state highway officials accepted defeat. On May 15, 1959, the Wyoming State Highway Commission approved the direct route. All that they could do was delay construction while the rest of I-80 was completed across the state. Under pressure from the BPR after a seven-year delay, construction finally began in the summer of 1966.”

The stretch from Laramie to Walcott opened Oct. 3, 1970. Waggener writes, “On October 7, an early-season storm caused havoc for drivers on the new highway just as Wyomingites warned would happen. It took only four days for I-80 to become The Snow Chi Minh Trail [italics in original]”—a Vietnam-era nickname that, though fading, is still in use. The section has suffered a high accident rate and frequent wintertime road closures ever since it opened.

Nationally, the interstate system also took longer to complete than had been planned. Author Tom Lewis explains that it “took 40 years not 13 as specified by the legislation President Eisenhower signed in 1956 to build the Interstate Highway System.”

In 1991, the interstate, according to Lewis the “largest engineered structure in the world,” was named the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. On Sept. 12, 1991, Interstate 90 between Seattle, Wash., and Boston, Mass., became the final coast-to-coast interstate highway completed. Today, the interstate system consists of about 47,856 miles of completed highways, and in terms of 2016 dollars, the cost of construction was approximately $526 billion.

Resources

• “Daily Log of the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy, Washington D.C. to San Francisco, Cal., July 7^th to Sept. 6, 1919.” Eisenhower Archives. Accessed Dec. 22, 2017, at https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/1919_convoy/daily_log.pdf.
• Distance between Cities. Accessed Dec. 2, 2017, at https://www.distance-cities.com/distance-kimball-ne-to-cheyenne-wy.
• “Eisenhower’s Army Convoy Notes 11-3-1919, Rock Island Arsenal.” U.S. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration. Accessed Dec. 22, 2017, at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/convoy.cfm.
• Eisenhower, Dwight D. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967, 155-168.
• Federal Highway Act of 1921. Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_1921.
• “Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.” Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 15, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956.
• “Information about the Lincoln Highway.” Lincoln Highway Association. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/info/.
• “Interstate Highway System.” Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 15, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System.
• “John J. Pershing.” Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Pershing.
• Laskow, Sarah. “In 1919, Eisenhower Suffered Through History’s Worst Cross-Country Road Trip.” AtlasObscura.com. Accessed Nov. 6, 2017, at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1919-dwight-d-eisenhower-suffered-through-historys-worst-cross-country-road-trip. This article contains a link to the convoy log.
• Lewis, Tom. Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life. New York: Viking, 1997, 4, 7-8,10-11, 13,16,18-19, 50-51, 61,71-72, 81, 84, 86, 88-90, 98, 105, 107, 108, 112-113, 201, 294.
• “Lincoln Highway.” Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway.
• Thompson, Helen. “How a Hellish Road Trip Revolutionized American Highways.” Smart News, Smithsonian. Accessed Dec. 16, 20117, at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1919-ike-took-hellish-road-trip-across-us-180956284/.
• “Trucks of Transcontinental Motor Convoy Cross the Continental Divide in Wyoming.” YouTube. Accessed Dec. 22, 2017, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRXkh_WjWBc.
• Waggener, John Richard. Snow Chi Minh Trail: The History of Interstate 80 between Laramie and Walcott Junction. Wheatland, Wyo.: Wyoming State Historical Society, 2017, 343-345.
• “Wild Western Reception Given Motor Convoy by Old Cheyenne.” Cheyenne State Leader, Aug. 9, 1919, 1. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.

Illustrations

• The photo of the convoy stopped in Rock River is from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks. The rest of the photos are from the Eisenhower Archives, via an article on mashable.com that offers large-sized versions of the photos. Used with thanks.

With another British royal wedding slated for May 2018, many observers have remarked on the unusual interest these events seem to hold for Americans. They say it seems paradoxical that citizens of a nation that broke away from a hereditary monarch more than two centuries ago would have such interest in a personal milestone of a faraway prince.

Such observations are nothing new. In 1876, as the nation was celebrating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, America hosted the first-ever visit by a reigning royal head of state to the United States. The visiting monarch wasn’t from Britain. He was Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil.

To many Americans, bewildered by rapid industrialization, social upheavals from immigration and the recent end of slavery, the visit by a royal personage may have brought some yearnings for the apparent stability of hereditary rule. Some simply viewed the visit as a mere curiosity. To others, it was an awkward intrusion of an anti-egalitarian symbol at the very time when the country was celebrating the anniversary of independence from another empire.

In his own nation, Dom Pedro was widely popular. He was 50 years old and had been on the throne for 44 of those years, since 1831 when his father, Pedro I suddenly abdicated.

Brazil, a parliamentary monarchy during much of Dom Pedro's nearly 50-year reign, had two political parties, but both represented the landowning, slaveholding oligarchy. Dom Pedro was personally opposed to slavery, but at the time of his U. S. visit, Brazil was the last remaining slaveholding nation in the Western hemisphere. The emperor worked successfully to maintain social stability and promote economic growth, but his efforts to eliminate slavery failed during his reign.

Before going to the festivities in Philadelphia for the Fourth of July 1876, the emperor traveled to every region of the United States. Huge crowds greeted his train in Chicago as he set out for a trip to the West. Newspaper coverage was extensive with every reporter seeking an interview. Some got an audience with the emperor; others had to settle for somewhat less.

It was the middle of the night when Dom Pedro’s train passed through Cheyenne. A reporter for the Cheyenne Daily Leader, unable to land an interview, still had to come up with an eyewitness story. So, on the morning of May 3, 1876, he paid a visit to the sleeping monarch. “He arrived here at 4:30 this morning,” the reporter wrote. “He didn’t climb down out of his royal car and saunter about the city in search of sights, because he was still dreaming of his far-off palaces when the train reached the Magic City.”

The account continued: “This reporter was permitted to gaze upon his sleeping majesty and listen to the imperial snore which may be described—the snore we mean—as a cross between the sonorous nose-buster of a bullwhacker and the quivering wail which issues from the proboscis of a lovely woman when her bronchial tubes are affected by a bad cold.”

The reporter had his brief look, got off the train and left the depot platform. The train continued on. Nonetheless, the reporter had his story. Not much of a story, perhaps, but Wyoming readers wanted to know every tiny detail of the emperor’s visit to their town. Even in the wild west of Cheyenne in 1876, royalty held some fascination. Many 21^st century Wyomingites watching the royal wedding likely follow in that singular tradition.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Cheyenne Daily Leader, May 3, 1876, p. 3, c. 4.
• Sidney (Neb.) Telegraph, May 6, 1876

Secondary Sources

• “Pedro II of Brazil.” Wikipedia, accessed Feb. 19, 2018 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_II_of_Brazil.
• Phil Roberts, "'All Americans are Hero-Worshippers': American Observations on the First U.S. Visit by a Reigning Monarch, 1876,"Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7 (October 2008): 453-477.

Illustrations

• The image of the emperor’s portrait is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image from the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, 1876, is from Norton Frank, ed., Frank Leslie's Historical Register of the United States Centennial Exposition, 1876 (New York,1877), p. 81. Used with thanks.

[Editor’s note: This account was first published in the Natrona County Tribune, Aug. 1, 1901, under the headline “Over the Stage Line.” Special thanks to Tom Davis, formerly of Greybull, Wyo., and now of Cody, for finding the account and sending us a transcript.]

If you have never made a trip on the stage from Casper to Thermopolis in thirty-six hours, a distance of 140 miles, then you have missed something in this life which you would remember until your last day. Being up for two nights and a day seems hard, but we assure our readers that they would be kept awake along the entire route, and they would have a good appetite at all the meals.

You leave Casper at 9 o’clock in the evening, with a four-horse team ahead of you. After traveling west for fourteen miles you come to the first relay station, where the four horses, which have been going at a continual trot all the way, are unhooked and four fresh horses take their place; in five minutes you are again heading west at a full trot.

About midnight you pass the “stone ranch,” where O.K. Garvey is living, and has been running the past year. In another hour or two you come to the “Casper Creek Road Ranch, which is now under the management of Ballard & Steed. A small mail-bag is dropped off at this place, but no one was disturbed from their slumbers.

You hit the road again, and keep time with a nod of your head to all the ruts and jolts encountered until you reach William Clark’s home ranch on South Casper Creek, about 2:30 in the morning.

[Editor’s Note: William Clark owned and operated the Casper-Lander-Thermopolis stage line. He called his ranch “Hobart.” There was even a Hobart post office for a time, near present Natona, Wyo. west of Casper.]

You are fed breakfast here, although it is somewhat earlier than most of us are accustomed to eating breakfast. You will, nevertheless, enjoy the meal, for Mrs. Clark and her daughters are well aware how to set a nice breakfast. The good cooking and the hospitality of the hostess are indeed a comfort to tired mortals who have been bumping along the road all night long.

After you finish your breakfast and have a little social chat with Mrs. Clark, you make your way out to the stagecoach and get ready to proceed on your journey. At Clark’s ranch is where you notice the first break of day in the east, and you feel more like lying down on the ground and taking a nap than hitting the trail again. But, just as sleep is beckoning you hear the driver’s “ALL ABOARD,” and in a minute you are again heading west on a swift trot, as another fresh team of four horses has been hooked to your chariot.

When Mr. Clark’s ranch is a few miles behind you the sun makes its first appearance, and you can see some evidence of life on the lone prairie. Now you are traveling along what is known as the “hog-back of the Powder River country.” There is not a freighter who has ever been along this road in wet weather but who knows all about the hog-back, for when it rains or snows the horses sink in the gumbo up to their bellies, and the wagon wheels go down as far as their hubs. This few miles of road has caused more profanity from freighters than all the rest of the road between Casper and Wolton. Consequently, someone has named this particular spot, “The Freighter’s Delight.”

After getting well up on the hog back, you come to what is known as “Hell’s Half Acre.” It is a patch of ground which has the appearance of at one time containing a bed of coal, and the coal having been all burned out. There are deep sinks in the ground, almost a half-mile deep, and peaks sticking up in all shapes and sizes. It is truly half an acre of, so far as good-for-nothing land is concerned …

After leaving this spot and traveling for several miles you meet the east-bound stage, which is bringing all the mail, express and passengers from Lander and Thermopolis to Casper. You get a squint of those dusty passengers, and wonder if they are as tired and sleepy as you are—and from the way they look at you, they are probably wondering the same thing about you.

Another change of teams is made at Keg Springs, where Martin Oliver is the stock tender. Eight miles more and you reach Wolton, where you are greeted by Oliver Johnson, the postmaster and general manager of the Wolton Commercial company’s store. He will talk business with the driver, chat with the passengers, and wait on customers all at the same time. Oliver has sheep interests in the vicinity, and the management of the store at Wolton is so close to his monied interests, that he is perfectly satisfied with his lot. Genial Tom and Mrs. Hood are living in Wolton, where they have management of the hotel … The Cooper Dipping Plant is located here, as well as large shearing pens, and many thousands of sheep are shorn here each spring, and given a good hot bath in a solution which Mr. Holliday says is the best remedy on earth to cure scab, and give sheep a clean, nice looking fleece. Hundreds of sacks of wool are stacked here from early spring until late in the summer, waiting for freighters to come along and haul them to Casper for shipment east on the railroad.

After the mail is transferred and the express is unloaded, the passengers are again told to all get aboard, so you arouse yourself from any pleasant dreams you are having, or tear yourself away from an interesting conversation and start for Round Hill. There you will take dinner, and perhaps get a little sleep before changing “cars” for either Lander of Thermopolis.

[Editor’s Note: The route divided at Round Hill, where one coach headed north to Thermopolis, and a second west to Lander.]

Everything is unloaded from the coach here and divided up for the two branch roads, one leading to Thermopolis, and the other to Lander. Round Hill Station is looked after by Mr. and Mrs. George Demorest, Mr. Demorest looking after the stock and Mrs. Demorest attends to the comfort of the “inner man” of the passengers. She gets up a good meal, but as a general thing most passengers are too tired and sleepy to enjoy eating. After dinner the weary passengers lay down in the barn, out of the hot sun, and many are snoring away when they feel a jolt in their ribs and awaken to find the driver is about ready to leave on the final seventy-five miles of the trip, which will require the balance of the day and all the next night. You get a new driver here, and if it happens to be Gene Brown, you are sure of a safe trip, for he is not only a careful driver, but he can make better time and allow the horses to go slower than any man you ever rode with.

You start out across the burning sand and alkali flats for Thermopolis. What the Lander passengers might see along the road that is interesting, we know not, for we have never gone that route. But, the Thermopolis passengers experience the hardest part of the trip between Round Hill and Lost Cabin, for it is done during the hottest part of the day, you pass along through about six miles of alkali flat, and the road is very rough.

About 3 o’clock in the afternoon you reach Lost Cabin, where there is a long lost gold mine, which Mr. Okie found a few years ago when he put up his general store. There are a number of buildings at Lost Cabin, and the elegant mansion of Mr. Okie, which is almost completed. The mansion is indeed a treat to the eye, after coming in from the miles of waste and desert that you have been traveling over all day.

After transacting the necessary business at Lost Cabin, the driver again shouts “all aboard,” and the coach starts across country headed for a mountain peak, which you are informed you must cross over before you get supper. At first the mountain looks about twenty miles away, but after the driver informs you about supper it looks to be twice that far away.

A few hours from Lost Cabin you come to a steep hill, which looks almost impossible for a team of horses to descend with a wagon. The driver stops and rough-locks the wheels, and makes an examination of the wagon and harness. If everything looks all right, you suddenly pitch downward. When you get to bottom you say to yourself that if you ever go down that hill again, you will get out and walk down. This is called Moore Hill, because it is only a short distance from the ranch J.W. Moore once owned on Bridger Creek. M.L. Bishop is living on this ranch now, and is stock tender for Mr. Clark’s stage line. Another change of horses is made here, and once again you start for the mountain which you must pass over before you get supper.

You travel along the valley of Bridger Creek, in which are located many prosperous ranches; the first after the Moore ranch being the Rider ranch, where Mrs. Rider and her daughter Minnie live, and thrive on their little garden. They also have some stock running out on the range. We notice Minnie coming up from the creek, where she had been watering horses and other stock, but her manner of riding was not appropriate with her style of dress, and she quickly made an escape into a nearby draw and out of our sight as soon as she noticed the stage. The next ranch up the creek is owned by Samuel Warden, and a great deal of valuable land, which has not yet been cleared of sagebrush. But, he has a nice garden spot, and has the reputation of furnishing the nicest lot of garden truck to passersby of any in this part of the country.

A little farther up the creek you come to DeRanch, where Wm. Long has made his home for years. He has one of the nicest and most valuable ranches in this valley. He has a large tract of land cleared, and raised and puts up hundreds of tons of alfalfa each year. Mr. Long is postmaster at DeRanch, and all the settlers on Bridger Creek receive their mail at this office.

After you leave DeRanch you commence to climb the mountain, on the other side of which you are promised dinner. But, it is already beginning to get dark, and it is a two-hour’s ride before you will get to the Mountain Home ranch. You commence to realize that meals are far and few between. The horses must necessarily travel slow up the mountain, and the weary passengers are beginning to suffer from a combination of hunger, thirst, sleep and fatigue. After a long pull of an hour or more, the stage finally reaches the top of the mountain, where the horses are given a short rest. Then you start to slide down the other side of the mountain, where you strike the head of Kirby Creek and Tom Clark’s ranch. Mr. Clark has a nice ranch house and a band of sheep which he runs on the nearby range. You are attracted by the lights from his camps as you glide by on your rapid rush to supper. It is about 10 o’clock p.m. when you finally reach Mr. Clark’s home ranch, where Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Burgess are in charge. This is the place you’ve been looking for for a long time, and when you get your feet under the table, you are not disappointed. There is where you get one of the nicest meals along the entire route. Mrs. Burgess seems to know just what the weary traveler most desires. She is an excellent cook, and the man who is not satisfied with the meal he gets here, is indeed hard to suit. A man never took a meal at the Brown Palace or Palmer House that gave such satisfaction as the one he gets at the Mountain Home ranch.

After supper, if the stage is on time you are allowed to rest about 10 minutes while a fresh team is hitched up. Soon you are off for Thermopolis, which is forty miles distant, and which will require an all night’s drive before you reach there. The are many interesting sights along this stretch of road, if you have any desire to look for them. The first and most interesting is a stone chimney, which has stood on the lone prairie since the early 50’s. Two hunters and trappers built cabins at this lonely place—they were the first white settlers in this part of the country. They had not been here very long before the Indians found them, burned their cabins and killed the settlers. But, their chimney has remained there undisturbed for all these years, and serves as a headstone for the white men who lost their lives in those early years.

You travel on and on, even getting a little sleep now and then when a smooth stretch of road is reached. But, you are awakened so often that it is only an aggravation trying to sleep. So, then you brace yourself up and take a look at the countryside in the moonlight. About daybreak you reach the turbulent waters of the Big Horn River. Then you come to Andersonville, and across the river you will see where the old town of Thermopolis was located just three years ago. There is a schoolhouse at Andersonville in which Miss Caan is teaching the summer term. She has about a dozen scholars, but where they come from is beyond the power of the human eye to see.

Thermopolis is six miles from here, but it is the longest six miles we have ever yet traveled. You pass over hills, through canyons, around creeks and curves, and by the time you reach town you are certain you have traveled at least ten miles from the little schoolhouse seen along the wayside.

You finally reach Thermopolis, completely tired out and exhausted; the first thing you do is look for a bed in which to fall, where you plan to sleep the sleep of the tired and weary pilgrim far from home. After remaining in bed all the rest of the day and the following night, you are ready to go over to the hot springs and take a bath to relieve yourself of some of the real estate you have accumulated on your person along the stage route.

It requires 125 head of horses to keep the stages moving on this route, and there are at least twenty men employed. It matters not what kind of weather we have, the coaches must be kept on the move. They carry the U.S. Mail, and like time, the mail waits for no man. Mr. Clark has conducted this line for lo these many years, and had given universal satisfaction to the government and the passengers. Everyone hopes he will again be awarded the new mail contract this fall, after his present contract expires.

Resources

• “Over the Stage Line.” Natrona County Tribune, Aug. 1, 1901, accessed Feb. 24, 2018 via Wyoming Newspapers at http://newspapers.wyo.gov/.

Illustrations

• The stage coach advertisement from the April 1899 Wyoming Derrick and the highlighted map of the route were provided by Tom Davis. Used with permission and thanks.

Identifying the person who lies in an Oregon Trail-era grave on private property in Goshen County, Wyo., has long proved difficult, but it is now certain that the occupant is Henry Hill of Monroe County, Mo., who died June 8, 1852, probably of cholera. Hill was 59 years old when he died, a veteran of the War of 1812 and a native of Virginia. The Hill clans, consisting of more than 30 members from two families related by marriage, made up the majority of the 62-member wagon train from the Paris area of Monroe County.

Henry Hill, son of Samuel and Clarissa (Holloway) Hill, was born around 1793 in Caroline County, Va., not far from Richmond. His father, Samuel, was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1755. In Virginia he became a prosperous farmer, and according to his will, owned two farms and 13 slaves. Henry was the oldest child. There were two other sons in the family, William and George, and two daughters, Anne and Elizabeth.

In 1808, Samuel Hill was involved in a violent dispute with a neighbor. The issue of the conflict is now unknown, but Samuel shot and killed Gawin Sommerson and was tried and executed for murder. It is believed that 15-year-old Henry Hill testified during the trial in defense of his father, but to no avail. After Samuel’s death, Clarissa Hill, with the support of her Holloway relatives, raised her children alone. In 1815, they moved to Fayette County, Ky. All five of Clarissa’s children, including the recent war veteran, 22-year-old Henry, went with her to be near Clarissa’s brother John Holloway who had settled in nearby Clark County. The next year, on Sept. 14, 1816, Henry Hill and his cousin Elizabeth Holloway, John’s daughter, were married.

Henry and Elizabeth Hill lived for a time in Clark County where their three children were born: Martha Ann in 1819, Joseph Littlewood in 1821, and Clemencia (Clemency) in 1824. A year or two after Clemencia’s birth they moved to Henry County where Henry had purchased a farm.

Prior to their move from Clark County, the Henry Hill family may have become acquainted with Abraham and Elizabeth Hill and their large family of eight children living in neighboring Bourbon County. Beginning in the early 1830s, brothers Samuel, Wesley, Steven and James Hill of this family moved to Missouri and eventually settled in Monroe County. This was a time when many Kentuckians were heading west to Missouri, and in 1836, Henry Hill followed suit. He sold his Henry County farm and moved with his family to Monroe County, as did Ann (Hill) and William Pickett, Henry’s sister and brother-in-law. Sometime in the early or mid-1840s Henry’s wife Elizabeth died, leaving Henry and his three unmarried adult children living alone on their farm.

In 1845, 26-year-old Martha Ann Hill, Henry’s daughter, married Stephen C. Hill, one of the Bourbon County Hills who were now neighbors of the Henry Hill family in Monroe County. Although both families had migrated from Virginia to Kentucky in the early 1800s and settled in adjoining counties, it is thought they were not closely related, if at all. In March 1851, Joseph Littlewood Hill, Henry’s son, married Mary Elizabeth Hill, daughter of Wesley Hill, creating a second link between the two Hill families.

In 1849, Wesley and Samuel Hill, brothers of Stephen C. Hill, left Missouri and joined the California gold rush. After a year in the mines, they returned to Monroe County, and like many other former forty-niners, they resolved to head back west and settle in California with their wives and children. The wagon train of 1852 was organized and led by four Hill brothers, Wesley, Samuel, Stephen, and James.

Then in his 60^th year, Henry Hill was of an age when he might have thought his travels ever westward were over. He had been born in Virginia and had migrated in turn to Kentucky and Missouri. Why pull up stakes again and go to California? His son, Joseph—married to Wesley Hill’s daughter—and their infant child were going. Henry’s daughter, Martha Ann, married to Stephen Hill, and their three sons would also be in the company. Therefore, two of Henry’s children and four grandchildren were leaving Missouri. It was only natural that Henry and his unmarried daughter Clemencia, who had been keeping house for him, decided that they too would head for California, an overland journey of roughly 2,000 miles.

The wagon train consisted of 62 men, women and children, including 19 hired hands. Of the remaining 43 members, more than 30 were named Hill. They were also driving a herd of

350–400 head of stock. This was a family migration of biblical proportions, and one that would have its share of bad luck. Before they reached California, there would be six deaths in the company.

The only contemporary account of the journey consists of letters written by James Hill to a former neighbor in Monroe County named Jefferson Marr. In a letter written June 15, he summarized the first three of these deaths, including that of Henry Hill:

We have had a great deal of sickness in our train since I last wrote you and have lost three of our company. John Quigley died on the Big Blue. He was taken with diarrhea, was sick about a week. We had a doctor attending him nearly all the time of his illness. About thirty miles below Fort Laramie we was called on to pay the last tribute of respect to Father Hill. Complaint the same. The next morning we buried Eglantines’s little black boy Billy. There has been a great deal of sickness on the road and a great many deaths, some said to be cholera and some of small pox.

The “Father Hill” referred to is Henry Hill. The exact date of his death is known from the inscription on the headstone carved by Robert Gillaspy, one of the hired hands. The information on the headstone is confirmed by a report in the Sacramento (Calif.) Daily Union, a death list compiled by emigrant John Hays, who wrote: “Henry Hill of Missouri, died June 8, 1852, age 59 years.”

It is likely that several of the Hill family contingents had enslaved people with them on the trail, but only two can be identified with certainty, both owned by Eglantine Hill, Wesley Hill’s second wife. Eglantine was the daughter of one of Henry Hill’s sisters. The slaves were Billy, 8 years old when he died, and Davidson, age 12 in 1852, who is listed in a Missouri document in 1848 and later, in October 1852, appears in the California census entry with Elgantine.

The exact site of Billy’s grave is unknown. Likely, it is somewhere near the grave of Henry Hill, but because Billy was a slave, the bodies were probably not buried next to one another.

On July 5, Nancy Jane Hill, daughter of James Hill, died. Her grave still exists, on Dempsey Ridge on the Sublette Cutoff in present western Wyoming. After a long illness, Wesley Hill died on the 40-Mile Desert and was buried at Ragtown on the Carson River in what’s now Nevada. A few days later—the exact date is unknown—Clemencia Hill, age 28, Henry Hill’s unmarried daughter, died. It had been a costly trip for both Hill families.

The Henry Hill grave lies on private property in Goshen County, Wyo., about two miles west of the state line between Wyoming and Nebraska. The Oregon-California Trails Association fenced the grave and provided a marker for it in 1987. The original headstone disappeared sometime in the 1970s.

Resources

Primary sources

• “Deceased Emigrant List.” Sacramento Daily Union.” Oct. 9, 1852, p. 2, c.3.
• Haines, Aubrey. Letter to Reg Duffin. April 10, 1986. Copy in author’s collection.
• Hill, James. Letter to Jefferson Marr of Monroe County, Mo. June 15, 1852. Copy in author’s collection.

Secondary sources

• Craig, Marilyn Jean (Hill). Some Hill Families of Monroe County, Mo., Their Ancestors and Descendants. McMinnville, Ore.: Self-published, 1999.
• Duffin, Reg. “The Nancy Hill Story: Final Chapter.” The Overland Journal 4, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 56-64.
• Duffin, Reg. “Review of Various Data Pertaining to Henry Hill Gravesite as of July 2006.” Unpublished monograph. Author’s collection.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Henry Hill Grave.” Emigrant Trails Throughout Wyoming. Accessed March 1, 2018 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/henry_hill.htm.

Illustrations

• All photos are from the author’s collection. Used with permission and thanks. The photo of the headstone was taken around 1970 by Aubrey Haines, longtime historian of the Oregon, California and Mormon trails.

Cattle drives along the Oregon-California Trail were fairly common during the 1850s, but are poorly documented and scarcely mentioned in diary accounts. The Cyrus Loveland diary, written by a member of one cattle drive, is unique.

The diary is also interesting for its details on the death and burial of William Clary, one of the men on the drive. Clary’s grave still survives on private land southeast of present-day Torrington, Wyo., not far from the Wyoming-Nebraska line.

Loveland spells the name “Clarey,” but the 1850 census for Pike County, Mo., confirms that the spelling shown on a photograph of the headstone, “Clary,” is correct. The census finds William, age 19, and John A., 17, in the household of their presumed parents, Daniel and Rachel (Llewellen) Clary.

William and John had one brother, Abraham, and five younger sisters. The two teenagers were born in Kentucky, but the six younger Clary children were all born in Missouri, indicating that the family arrived in Missouri about 1834. In the box for “occupation” in the 1850 census record for William and John Clary, it is written, “to the mines.”

On July 3, 1850, Micajah Littleton, a diarist with another company, passed the Clary grave. In the evening Littlejohn recorded inscriptions of nine grave markers he had seen that day. Among these were “Geo. A. Gillum, June 21,” and “Wm. D. Clark,” also June 21. Littleton must have erred in copying the “Clark” marker, for it is believed that what he saw was indeed the grave of William L. Clary of Ashley, Pike County, Mo. Clary died within a few hours of his messmate, George A. Gillum, while they camped with their company near the site of the Clary grave.

Walter Crow, captain of the cattle-drive company of which Clary was a member, had been to California in 1849, but had returned almost immediately to Missouri to buy cattle to bring over the trail to the California market. He and four of his sons led the outfit.

There were 46 men, mainly from Pike and Lincoln counties, in the 1850 cattle-drive company. Diarist Loveland writes that he was from Cooperstown, N.Y., and was a recent arrival in Missouri. The group left Independence, Mo. on May 13, 1850, with 721 head of loose cattle and 64 head of work steers, and, judging from the number of work steers, about ten wagons. Apparently, William and John Clary were not working for the Crows, as their mess—the group they cooked and ate with—is listed by diarist Loveland as “a team that traveled with us.”

Many of the men were plagued by ill health. On June 10, Levi Armstead died near Ash Hollow, in present Nebraska. On June 15, the main body of the Crow Company camped near the eventual site of the Clary grave. Later that evening the Gillum-Clary team arrived. They had been left behind on June 13 because of the illness of George Gillum. On June 16, the main party went on and again left the Gillum-Clary team behind, along with two additional teams from the main company. They stayed because one of their own, John Mosier, was also on the sick list, and for at least a week this smaller party remained in camp tending several men too ill to travel.

On July 3, the main party camped near Devil’s Gate, 200 miles farther west, determined to wait until the balance of the company could catch up. The next day they celebrated Independence Day with a meal of fresh beef and peach pie. Loveland’s diary for July 4 reads as follows:

This evening we heard from our company behind by the arrival of John Clarey. They have had three deaths since we left them. John Mosier died the 19 June, from Pisgah, Cooper County, Missouri; William Clarey died the 20th June, from Ashley, Pike County, Missouri; George Gillum died the 21st June, from Louisville, Lincoln County, Missouri. They all died with the cholera.”

Markwood Merritt, another cholera victim, died the same day as Gillum while the main company was camped at La Bonte Creek, near present Douglas, Wyo. and about halfway along the trail between the Clary grave and Devil’s gate. Capt. Walter Crow would become the sixth company member to die when he passed away soon after their arrival in California. He had been in ill health for almost the entire journey.

Presumably the graves of John Mosier and George Gillum are close to that of William Clary, but only the Clary headstone survived to be recorded by later historians, albeit with some confusion whether the correct name was Clark or Clary.

The headstone disappeared sometime in the 1970s, and the site was nearly lost. The grave was restored and fenced in 1988, and then marked in 1993, by the Oregon-California Trails Association.

Resources

Primary sources

• Colvin, S.A. “Letter from California.” Democratic Banner, Dec. 30, 1850, p. 2, col. 2.
• Littleton, Micajah. “Diary of Overland Journey from Independence to California, 11 May to 11 October 1850.” Typescript. MS Box 230, Folder 3, James Littleton Collection. California State Library, Sacramento, Calif.
• Loveland Cyrus C., California Trail Herd: The 1850 Missouri-to-California Journal of Cyrus C. Loveland. Ed. by Richard H. Dillon. Los Gatos, Calif: The Talisman Press, 1961.
• U.S. Bureau of the Census. Cuivre Township, Pike County, Missouri. 1850. Accessed via ancestry.com.

Secondary sources

• Brown, Randy and Reg Duffin. Graves and Sites on the Oregon-California Trails. 2d ed. Independence, Mo.: Oregon-California Trails Association. 1998, 31-32.
• Brown, Randy. “Who Was William Clary?” News from the Plains, Newsletter of the Oregon-California Trails Association, January 1993, 1-2.

Illustrations

• The early photo of the Clary headstone is from the author’s collection. The photo of the grave today is by the author. Both are used with permission and thanks.

Military records show that Ralston Baker of Philadelphia enlisted in the 51st Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on Aug. 4, 1864, and served with that regiment during the last months of the Civil War. The regiment was part of the 9th Corps, Army of the Potomac. He was mustered out with his company on June 1, 1865.

Baker must have liked military life, however, for in October 1865, back in Philadelphia, he enlisted in the regular Army—the famous 2nd Cavalry, formerly the 2nd Dragoons—which was shortly to leave for service on the frontier. Baker’s enlistment papers reveal that he was then 19 years old, stood 5 feet, 6 and one-half inches tall, with gray eyes, light hair, and fair complexion. When asked his occupation, he replied, “Soldier.”

After reaching the frontier, Ralston Baker served with his regiment at and around Fort Laramie for about a year. His messmates called him Bill and nicknamed him “the philosopher” because of his thoughtful and cheerful nature. Late in 1866, Baker’s Company E was ordered to Fort Caspar.

The winter of 1866-1867 was a severe one. Before settling into garrison life, members of Company E had to construct new quarters, which were not completed until mid-November. Despite the harsh weather, the winter was mostly uneventful, but the troops endured many a cold day patrolling the road and inspecting the telegraph line.

One exception to the routine occurred in December when a party of Arapaho managed to run off part of the fort’s mule herd.

A primary duty of the soldiers was to escort the mail between posts—hazardous duty during what came to be known as Red Cloud’s War, when Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors were regularly attacking soldiers and freighters on the Bozeman Trail, which led from the Oregon Trail north to the Montana gold fields. On April 30, 1867, Baker was serving escort duty, accompanying the mail wagon to the post at Bridger’s Ferry on the North Platte River about 60 miles east of Fort Caspar.

The detachment consisted of eight members of Company E and six “doughboys,” infantrymen of the 18th Regiment, a company of which was also stationed at Fort Caspar. A six-mule team drew the mail wagon. Besides Baker, all but one of the eight-member cavalry escort can be named. They were Pvts. F.W. Mixer, William Hynes, Sam Jones, William Armitage, and a man whose first name is unknown and whose last name was Luck, all under the command of Cpl. Dolfer. The infantrymen cannot be identified.

According to a later recollection by Hynes, the night before their departure Baker cut his blond hair short saying, “No Injun will ever hang my scalp on his belt or in his tepee! I can see the disappointment of the mad Indian when he bares his knife.”

The standard route to Bridger’s Ferry, near present Orin, Wyo., was via the old Oregon Trail along the south bank of the North Platte River. A spring storm had left six inches of wet snow on the ground, so it must have been a miserable trip on a muddy trail. Despite the conditions, they traveled about 40 miles and camped at La Prele Creek the first night out. During the night, they were plagued by packs of hungry coyotes whose yips and howls made sleep difficult. After a late start the next morning the group had gone about three miles and reached a place where the road was intersected by two ravines, one on each side of the road. Without warning, they were attacked by about one hundred Indians from both sides.

When the first shots rang out, Baker was with the mail wagon conversing with the soldiers riding inside. The rest of the troopers were about two hundred yards in advance. Impulsively, Baker bolted from the wagon intending to join the other cavalrymen, but had not gone far when he received a shot through the neck. He died instantly.

The soldiers scattered in all directions. Some climbed the hills that surrounded the road while firing back at the Indians and injuring several. Armed with antique weapons, the Indians soon gave up the chase and returned to the wagon. They drove it back four hundred yards west to where the trail crosses Sand Creek, unloaded it, cut the mules loose, and set the wagon on fire.

The soldiers did not dare leave their hiding places until dark. When they had gathered together again, they found that Baker had been their only casualty. His badly mutilated body was discovered in the bed of Sand Creek. Still fearful of attack, the soldiers went on to the ferry without burying it.

When they arrived at Bridger’s Ferry, the news was telegraphed back to their company commander at Fort Caspar. In the meantime, Company E had been ordered “down the road—“east to Fort Laramie from where they would be sent to another posting. A few days later the entire company rode east from Fort Caspar to La Prele where they set up camp.

A detachment went ahead to Sand Creek to collect the body of Baker. He was buried near the creek in a coffin made of cracker (hardtack) boxes, “the burial place being a rocky hill not far from the road. Tons of boulders were placed over the grave to prevent the body from being disinterred by wolves or Indians,” wrote Pvt. Mixer in a newspaper account published decades later. Baker’s grave is not far from the site of La Prele Station and is now in an enclosure that also contains the grave of Joel Hembree, a young emigrant who died in 1843.

Pvt. Hynes seems to have been a particular friend of Baker’s. In his narrative, Hynes describes him with affection:

“With his death there perished as noble a heart as was ever inspired by the best of human feeling. His wit, humor and philosophies were natural and spontaneous, they were rarely studied. He was as free from egotism as he was of affectation; he was generous in his toleration of the errors of others, but wicked in a fight. His peculiar outlook on life first attracted my attention. His personality and character gave me a new viewpoint. He was always cheerful and difficult to quarrel with. He was an unusual if not an extraordinary type of that class of persons whom we sometimes meet, that accept life as it comes from day to day, making or fighting for things that should be, but buoyantly accepting the decision even if defeated, yet always ready to renew the struggle.”

Who was Ralston Baker?

Baker’s effects were searched to identify a next of kin, and according to F.W. Mixer, letters revealed that he had enlisted under an alias, his true name being Salter. An uncle was located in Philadelphia who stated that Salter was the only son of a widow living in that city. There is no reason to doubt Mixer’s belief in this story, but there may have been some confusion over what Ralston’s last name actually was.

A family named Baker can be found in the Philadelphia census of 1850 that includes “Ralston Baker, age 2,” son of Benjamin and Sarah Baker, the youngest of six children. In the 1860 census, Sarah appears with four of the children who were with her in 1850, but she is listed as a widow. The two oldest boys, Jacob and Benjamin, Jr., were then working, one as a painter, and the other as a “box maker.” Ralston is also there, age 11, but his name is spelled incorrectly, this time appearing as “Raulston.”

It seems likely that this is Pvt. Ralston Baker who was killed in the Indian attack. As often happened with underage recruits of that era, he added a couple of years to his actual age when he enlisted in 1864. He may have been only 15 or 16, but likely told the recruiting officer he was 18, and when he reenlisted in 1865, he naturally continued with the deception. By then he was 17 years old instead of the 19 that appears on his enlistment document.

The name discrepancy might be explained if Salter was Sarah Baker’s maiden name, and the uncle contacted was her brother, last name Salter, with the resultant confusion. There are several Salters in the Philadelphia city directory who are possible candidates for this uncle. Perhaps significantly, William Hynes, who wrote as if Baker was a good friend of his, did not mention any doubt that Baker was Ralston’s real last name.

The current headstone for Ralston Baker’s grave near La Prele Creek was obtained from the Department of the Army in the early 1950s and placed by Oregon Trail enthusiasts then living in Douglas. Reportedly, the stone replaced a worn, wooden board whose whereabouts is now unknown. The present writer placed an Oregon-California Trails Association marker at the grave in 2001.

Resources

• Hynes, William F. Soldiers of the Frontier. Denver. 1943.
• McDermott, John D. Frontier Crossroads. Casper, Wyo.: The City of Casper. 1997.
• McElroy’s Philadelphia City Directory. Philadelphia: E.C. and J. Biddle & Co., 1860.
• Mixer, F.W. “An Indian Ambuscade.” The National Tribune, Sept. 8, 1905, p. 3. col. 1.
• U.S. Federal Census, 1850. Moyamensing Ward 2, Philadelphia, Pa., p. 163, dwelling 1143, family 1340.
• U.S. Federal Census, 1860. Philadelphia Ward 19, Philadelphia, Pa., p. 515. dwelling 277, family 308.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Joel Hembree and Ralston Baker Gravesites, La Prele Station.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed March 24, 2018 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/hembreebaker.htm.

Illustrations

• The photo of trail enthusiasts and landowners at the Baker grave is from the author’s collection, and the photo of the grave today is by the author. Both are used with permission and thanks.

The Oregon Trail headed west from Fort Laramie via several branches, most of which eventually merged in Warm Springs Canyon after about 14 miles. Two of those branches, the Bluff Road and River Road trail segments, join at a place marked by huge, sandy swales about four miles from the fort. In another mile and a half the trail descends to the North Platte River bottom via a steep, rocky hill, a kind of chute where the iron wagon tires carved out deep ruts in the soft sandstone bluff.

The site is now called Mexican Hill. It is on the south side of the North Platte River, seven or eight miles east of the much better-known Oregon Trail Ruts and Register Cliff sites.

The name “Mexican Hill” is derived from a group of Spanish speakers who lived in dugouts at the base of the hill. Reportedly, they had been brought from the southwest in 1841 by the American Fur Company because of their skill in building with adobe. The story goes that they were employed during the construction of Fort John—the 1840s adobe version of Fort Laramie that replaced the original wooden stockade—or in building another trading post nearby, Fort Platte or both.

After the posts were built, the people settled there for a time, and raised vegetables in the river bottom to sell to the traders and travelers at the forts. The story of the settlement may be a local legend and cannot be documented, but there are also reports that dugouts—remains of the Mexican dwellings—were still visible near the foot of the hill up through the early 1950s.

Diarists noted the challenges they encountered on this treacherous spot. In his “Emigrant’s Guide,” Mormon pioneer William Clayton described the hill as “very steep” and “dangerous to wagons” although he also noted that it was “not lengthy.”

The Mormon Pioneer Company led by Brigham Young arrived at Mexican Hill on June 4, 1847. Thomas Bullock, company clerk, recorded the difficulty of the descent, writing, “The road is very irregular & uneven. We came to a very steep bank of Sand where the teams had to halt several times . . . After the ascent, continued our route by the River. We had a very steep hill to descend between 4 & 5. We not only locked Wheels, but had attached ropes to the hind end of the Wagons [with] the brethren holding back [at] the same time.”

Forty-niner J. Goldsborough Bruff arrived on July 12, 1849, and wrote: “A steep and rugged hill to descend beyond this [the grave of T. Green]. High perpendicular white Sandstone cliffs in an acute angle of the river, where it turns left then right, and the trail descends to a grassy bottom, where alongside a large island, thick with willows, a short distance below the bend, my Company were camped.” Other emigrants also mentioned graves near the foot of Mexican Hill, but they are now lost.

Some diarists attested to the wreckage created at the bottom of the hill when travelers lost control of their wagons. On July 4, 1849, Elisha Perkins witnessed one crash near the bottom of Mexican Hill:

“At 11 we came to a steep descent & Cross being a little in advance went over first & and as I came to the top I saw a sight about half way down for fourth of July! There was the old cart bottom side up all the goods & chattels spilled out & Cunningham underneath the whole! In descending the hill both shafts had again broken & the body swung under the axle capsizing the cargo animate and inanimate as I have described. Cunningham crawled out from under his sugar & flour & somewhat discomposed, but unhurt & we began to deliberate what was best to be done. . . .

When Henry Starr came to Mexican Hill with his company on June 15, 1850, he noted in his diary that travelers still used ropes attached to the back of the wagons to try to slow their descent and control their speed. Eventually a detour with a long, gradual slope to the river bottom was developed a mile or so farther west. The Mexican Hill descent was abandoned.

Resources

• Clayton, William. The Latter-Day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide. Stanley Kimball, ed. Gerald, Mo.: The Patrice Press. 1983.
• Bruff, J. Goldsborough. Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, Captain, Washington City and California Mining Association, April 2, 1849–July 20, 1851. 1 vol. edition. Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines, eds. New York, NY. Columbia University Press. 1949.
• Bullock, Thomas. The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock. Will Bagley, ed. Spokane, Wash.: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1997.
• Perkins, Elisha Douglas. Gold Rush Diary: Being the Journal of Elisha DouglassPerkinson the Overland Trail. Thomas D. Clark, ed. Lexington. University of Kentucky Press, 1967.
• Starr, Henry W. Diary, 1850. Typescript, Indiana State Library.

Illustrations

• All photos are by the author. Used with permission and thanks.

The Child’s Cutoff of the Oregon Trail was opened in 1850. This new route allowed emigrants who had been following the Council Bluffs Road along the north bank of the Platte River to remain on the north side and so avoid having to cross the North Platte at Fort Laramie and then again in the area near what’s now Casper, Wyo.

After leaving the river bottom a few miles east of what’s now Guernsey, Wyo., the cutoff passes through the present town of Hartville. Beyond Hartville the emigrants crossed rugged country hitherto deemed impassible for wagons.

The current highway, Wyoming Route 270, has been built up over deep gullies the emigrants negotiated with their wagons. The current road turns left a few miles north of Hartville and leaves the highway, as does the trail, rises slightly and then descends a steep hill, now called Rocky Pass. According to diarists, this was a very steep and rough descent for the wagons. After reaching the bottom the trail continued down a valley for a short distance and then turned right to climb a steep hill now called Emigrant Hill.

After passing through the present site of Hartville, on July 4, 1852, John McAllister wrote: “After crossing a few more rough places you come to a long rocky descent that will require 2 wheels locked [Rocky Pass], at the foot of this [the] road turns down a hollow for some distance [and] it then turns to the right up a long rocky steep hill that is truly hard on the teams [Emigrant Hill].”

John Clark wrote a colorful diary in 1852 while following the north bank trail. He made up names for the features he described, names that seem somewhat bizarre today. At Rocky Pass on June 13, he wrote:

From the top of the ridge go down an awful steep [hill] through Grannies Gut [Rocky Pass], a devil of a place with four broken waggons at the foot. We had the wheels all tied & cattle off but one yoke, then the men with ropes to hold back, and a small tree for a dragging anchor. Our dunnage was scattered all the way down. However, we gathered it up with little swearing & drove on to Jacob’s Ladder [Emigrant Hill], where we had to wind waggon & teams up with a windlass. Here we had to put in the extra lick with whip & hard words to the top of another beautiful slope to Battle Creek [Broom Creek].

The next year, Michael Luark was more subdued than Clark when he wrote, “then passing through a gorge in the mountain between two high spurs 1 1/2 miles we descended a steep rough hill [Rocky Pass] to another small stream. Then down it ½ mile we made a short turn to the right and then ascended a long steep rough hill 1 mile to the summit [Emigrant Hill]. 2 miles more brought us to a dry branch [Broom Creek] near the river.”

There is an unidentified child-sized emigrant grave at the top of Emigrant Hill, and across a deep draw that diarist Byron McKinstry called a “notch,” the grave of Elva Ingram can be found. It is situated on a knoll about a hundred feet above the trail.

Elva Ingram was the daughter of James and Ritta (Akin) Ingram of Salem, Henry County, Iowa. The Ingrams were members of the Caleb and Stuart Richey/James Akin/ James Ingram wagon train. All these families were related by marriage. They numbered 39 individuals when they left Council Bluffs for Oregon in the spring of 1852. Nineteen of them were children under the age of ten, including Elva Ingram who was just over 4 years old. She was not the youngest Ingram child, however. Two other girls, Leana and Louisa, were younger than Elva. Other families named Rhodes, Gilliam and Mace, all from Henry County, plus many unattached men hired to drive teams, were with the company.

This company was plagued by cholera. At least ten in the train died on the trail. Seven from the related families died, including Elva Ingram who died at Emigrant Hill on June 23, 1852.

The only known account comes from James Akin, Jr., whose diary entry on the day of her death is very brief: “Elva Ingram daughter of James and wife died,” is all he wrote concerning the death of his young cousin.

Only two later emigrants are known to have mentioned the grave. James McLung in 1862 wrote that “we passed a beautiful spring some two rods from the road furnishing water in abundance for drinking purposes to quench the craving of the weary traveler. Near here we passed the grave of Elva Ingram who died June 23 1852 aged 4 years & 6 months from Salem Iowa. It is just ten years ago today since the death of this child.” Elizabeth Baker arrived there are few days later, and on July 3, 1862, she recorded a garbled transcription of the headstone, properly recording the name but confusing the date of death with the child’s age.

When Stuart Richey found time to write home from Oregon to his father in Iowa, he summed up his wagon train’s tragic journey with these few words. “It is of no use for me to tell you of our troubles, for words would fail. These are the names of the dead, viz., Louisa Richey, Eliza Akin, James Akin, Sr., Elva Ingram, Miranda Jane Richey, Eliza Ann Richey and Mary Ann Akin. The four last names are children—.” He did not list those who had died from the other families in the company.

Byron McKinstry was there on June 23, 1850, and summarized the route to Emigrant Hill with this entry in his diary:

We bear to the Northward among the hills making a circuit to avoid the high hills that cross the Platte at the first Kanyon. [These high hills now overlook Guernsey Reservoir, which now partially fills the canyon.] After winding among the hills for about 10 m. we passed through a notch and descended to the river again. … We passed some fine springs of pure cold water just before we reached the summit, say 9 m. from the River, but water was scarce on the route.

The “notch” McKinstry refers to is apparently the course of the trail where it dips and passes below the Ingram grave on the shoulder of Emigrant Hill.

The trail passes down the southwest side of Emigrant Hill to Broom Creek and follows the creek nearly to the river. Diarist McAllister described the route, writing, “By descending a very long hill & crossing several ravines 2 1/2 miles the road joins the river.”

Describing Broom Creek, which he called Battle Creek, John Clark wrote, “High ledge of rock encloses the branch for over a mile with good grass on the narrow flat.” An emigrant inscription on the ledge of rock over Broom Creek reads, “J.H. Bradley 1852.” From the river the trail turns north and in 15 miles reaches Box Elder Springs.

Elva Ingram’s grave was rediscovered in the 1920s. The headstone is probably original. About 40 years ago, an officer in the National Guard took the headstone and reportedly incorporated it into a fireplace he was building in his home in Wisconsin. The officer was tracked down and forced to return it. This stone has marked the grave ever since. The fence was built by trails historian Randy Brown and his students more than 30 years ago and seems to be holding up well. A memorable event during the 1987 Oregon-California Trails Association convention in Casper occurred when Dr. Jack Ingram of Medford, Ore., gave a talk at the grave. Dr. Ingram is a grandson of James Henry Ingram, one of Elva’s older brothers.

Resources

• Akin, James, Jr. “Diary of James Akin, Jr.” [1852]. Transcribed by Paul Henderson.
• Transactions of the 36th Annual Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association, Portland, June 11th, 1908, 259–274.
• Baker, Elizabeth Helen. “Oregon Trail Diary.” Transcript by Richard Rieck.
• MS in possession of Jacque Turner, Fresno, Calif.
• Clark, John. “The California Guide with Distances and Notes of Travel by Clark and Co. in Fifty-Two from Ohio to the Sacramento Valley.” Typescript. WA MSS 83, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
• Ingram, Jack S. “The Descendants of James and Ritta Ann (Akin) Ingram, Children and Grandchildren.”Monograph. Author’s collection.
• Luark, Patterson Fletcher and Michael Fleenen Luark. From the Old Northwest to The Pacific Northwest: The 1853 Oregon Trail Diaries of Patterson Fletcher Luark and Michael Fleenen Luark. Ed. by Howard Jablon and Kenneth R. Elkins. Vol. 3, Emigrant Trail Historical Series. Independence, Mo.: Oregon-California Trails Association, 1998.
• McAllister, John. “Diary of Rev. John McAllister, A Pioneer of 1852.” In Transactions of the Fiftieth Annual Reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association. Portland, Ore.: Chausse-Prudhomme Co. Printers, 1922.
• McKinstry, Byron N. The California Gold Rush Overland Diary of Byron N. McKinstry, 1850–1852.Ed. by Bruce L. McKinstry. Glendale, Calif.: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1975.
• Richey, Stuart. Letter to James Richey. Nov. 26, 1852. In Transactionsof the 40th Annual Reunionof theOregon Pioneer Association.Portland, Ore.: Chausse-Prudhomme Co. Printers, 1915.

Illustrations

• The color photos are all by the author, and the photo of Elva Ingram’s parents is from his collection. Used with permission and thanks. 

Perched on the southeastern corner of the high Laramie Plains, Laramie, Wyo., has been the site of human activity for more than 10,000 years. Today, the town of about 30,800 is well-known for its nationally ranked university, its proximity to the Medicine Bow Mountains and recreational opportunities, and recognized as the historic place where a woman first cast a vote in a general election.

In the early days, American Indians seasonally frequented the area in pursuit of big game. A French-Canadian trapper named Jacques La Ramee, sometimes spelled La Ramie, arrived in the area about 1817,and is thought to have explored the area around the Laramie River in what is now Wyoming. Euro-American settlement commenced in 1862 with the arrival of Ben Holladay’s Overland Stage line.

The impending arrival of the Union Pacific Railroad on the Laramie Plains was assured when company surveyor James Evans laid out the general course of the line in 1864. The 1866 construction of Fort Sanders basically ensured settlement would continue in the area.

The site of the city itself was not determined until July 1867, when Union Pacific Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge selected the location just north of the fort and located near the Laramie River. The town was apparently named for the river. Dodge had earlier ordered construction of Fort Sanders when he served as the U.S. Army’s commander of the Department of Missouri.

In February 1868, railroad surveyors laid out the streets and lot lines of the new town. Settlers, anticipating the arrival of the rails, started coming to the area about the same time. Among them was Edward Ivinson, who would become the most prominent banker and philanthropist in the city’s history.

Sale of city lots commenced on April 20, 1868. About the same time an announcement from the railroad’s Vice President and General Manager Thomas Durant ensured the town would have a major Union Pacific presence for the next century. Durant surprised other railroad officials and Cheyenne citizens when he announced that Laramie—not Cheyenne—would be the first location of a major repair depot with machine shops, a large roundhouse and a power plant.

As the number of settlers and speculators increased, Laramie citizens determined to elect a provisional government in hopes of curtailing any impending violence. Attorney Melville C. Brown, newly arrived from Cheyenne, was elected mayor on May 2, 1868.

On May 4, 1868, men working for the Casement brothers, contractors, laid track into the burgeoning town.The same day, the first locomotive arrived with residents of Cheyenne aboard, checking out the prospects for investment. Contemporary accounts indicate the town soon swelled to more than 3,000 “residents,” many only transient—typical of the end-of-tracks towns that had sprung up as the railroad built west.

Rough frontier town

In Laramie, violence became endemic, and the provisional government collapsed on June 12, due, as Brown said in his resignation letter, to the “incompetence” of the other elected officials. From that day until mid-October, rowdies controlled the town and trouble increased. Not content to see the town despoiled by the criminals, a vigilance committee was formed. On October 18, three men were lynched and 24 wounded, and the next morning another man was lynched. This put a stop to much of the discord.

With the departure of the railroad construction crews after a few months, the town shrank to 800 residents. Viable businesses, however, were established to meet the needs of the remaining railroad workers and the increasing number of area residents employed in cattle and sheep ranching. With the violent faction gone, Laramie settled in the normal rhythms of a frontier town.

Famous women

Women led the way, establishing the first school in 1869. Worldwide prominence came to the town in 1870. Under the authority of Wyoming Territory’s 1869 Suffrage Act, for the first time in the world, six women in March 1870 were selected and served on a formal jury—and suffered considerable public ridicule for doing so. Six months later, on Sept. 6, 1870, a Laramie woman, Louisa Swain, became the first woman in the world to vote in a general election. She was one of 93 women who voted in Laramie that day. Women were also instrumental in bringing several churches to Laramie by 1871.

Further normalcy came on Jan. 13, 1874, when Laramie was officially incorporated pursuant to an act passed about a month earlier by the Wyoming Territory Legislative Assembly.

A major step forward for the community occurred in 1874 when the Union Pacific announced the construction of a rolling mill on the north side of town. The mill reprocessed worn iron rails into new ones. The plant would eventually employ 300 men. This increased the already large railroad presence, which, according to the 1870 census, employed nearly a third of the 600 men in town.

Agricultural activities

A surge in cattle and sheep businesses bolstered the economy of the new town. Ranches established by Philip Mandel, Thomas Alsop, Charles Hutton, Robert Homer and the Bath brothers necessitated the construction of nearby stockyards so cattle and sheep could be more easily shipped to markets. Later, the stockyards would be expanded, and the railroad would build and operate an ice plant for refrigeration of produce being transported across the country. The Union Pacific’s role in Laramie’s economy would be dominate for nearly a century.

Those same ranchers and newcomers like the Willan Sartoris outfit from Great Britain, continued adding value to the livestock industry. Stock raisers relied on Laramie businesses for their needs, helping the town’s economy to grow more. Ranching reached its zenith in the 1880s, but the cattle market collapsed in 1886, dealing a blow to local business. Agriculture would continue to play a role, albeit diminished, in the Laramie economy through the remainder of its history and to the present day.

Prominent businessmen

The Trabing brothers, who arrived in Laramie about 1869, opened a sizable commercial enterprise to meet the financial needs of the town residents and local businesses, and soon established stores and a freighting business across large parts of the territory. Banking, necessary for any significant community progress, was guaranteed by Edward Ivinson when he purchased the only bank in town in 1871. He converted the private bank into the federally chartered Wyoming National Bank of Laramie in 1873. Ivinson remained the sole banker in Laramie until a competitor, the Laramie National Bank, opened in 1882.

From Laramie’s earliest days, men scoured the mountains east and west of town in search of precious metals. Hoping to strike it rich, many invested substantial sums of money in operations which, unfortunately, showed very meager returns. Attorneys Melville Brown and Stephen Downey were in the forefront of the efforts, each eventually being nearly impoverished by their continuing failures.

Downey, however, would play a very important role in the growth of the community. In 1886, while serving in the Territorial Legislative Assembly, he was largely responsible for the creation of the University of Wyoming and its location in Laramie. For these efforts, he earned the title “Father of the University.”

University of Wyoming

In a deal brokered with legislators from Cheyenne, Laramie gained the university and Cheyenne the permanent location of the soon-to-be state’s capital. The university opened its doors to 40 students in September 1887, marking the beginning of a new chapter in Laramie’s history.

For several years from that small beginning, the University of Wyoming struggled financially, and growth of the student body was slow. Creation of the College of Agriculture enabled the university to tap into federal funds related to the Morrill and Hatch Acts, solidifying its finances. Expanded curriculum and faculty led to increasing enrollment with more than 200 students in 1905; 1,200 in 1925 and more than 2,000 in 1940. Rapid growth after World War II, caused by an influx of veterans using the GI Bill, expanded enrollment even more.

Contemporary economy

With the decrease in railroad jobs in Laramie from the mid 1950s on, the University of Wyoming became the largest employer in the city with nearly 3,000 employees currently. Offering hundreds of degree programs ranging from accounting to zoology, and having received designation as a National Collegiate Athletics Association Division 1 sports program, the university provides a well-rounded educational experience for students throughout the world as well as Laramie and Wyoming residents. In 2018, UW enrollment totaled more than 12,000.

Laramie’s economy, anchored by the university, is nevertheless, quite varied. Tourism, health care and retail sectors combine to provide as many jobs as the university does. Travelers seeking the recreational opportunities offered by the nearby Medicine Bow National forest both winter and summer use Laramie as a hub. City and non-governmental entities such as the Laramie Area Visitor Center and Laramie Main Street Alliance continue to push for more opportunities to further expand the area’s financial base.

More offered for history buffs

Laramie also offers more opportunities for the history buff than almost any other community in Wyoming: the Laramie Plains Museum, the Laramie Historic Train Depot; the Wyoming Territorial Prison State Historical Site; UW’s American Heritage Center; UW’s Emmett D. Chisum Special Collections at Coe Library;and the university’s geology, anthropology and art museums.

The AHC houses nearly 70,000 cubic feet of historically important documents and artifacts and is among the largest non-governmental archives in the nation. With a staff of more than 20, the AHC serves the general public, researchers, genealogists, university students and students from elementary grades through high school who participate in Wyoming History Day.

Local history is commemorated each year with Laramie Jubilee Days. The first celebration was in 1940, and on that occasion, a re-enactment of the 1870 jury was convened, “Miss Equality” was crowned and horse races were run on the west side of town. Held each year in July, the event has expanded to include a multiday rodeo and downtown activities like street dances. In 2018, the celebration will honor Laramie’s 150^thanniversary. Additional events and open houses at area museums are among the special festivities planned.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Casement, John and Frances. Papers. Collection Number 00308. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming
• Downey Family Papers, 1866-1997, Collection Number 10555, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
• General Laws, Memorials and Resolutions of the Territory of Wyoming: Passed at the First Session of the Legislative Assembly, Convened at Cheyenne, October 12th, 1869. Cheyenne, W. T.: S.A. Bristol, Public Printer, 1870.
• General Laws, Memorials and Resolutions of the Territory of Wyoming: Passed at the Second Session of the Legislative Assembly, Convened at Cheyenne November 7^th,1871. N.A. Baker, Public Printer, 1872
• Hebard, Grace. Papers. Collection Number 400008. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
• House Journal of the Ninth Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Wyoming. Cheyenne, Wyoming: Bristol and Kane, 1886.
• University of Wyoming Board of Trustees minutes. Accessed April 28, 2018 at http://www.uwyo.edu/trustees/board-meeting-archives
• Wyoming State Library. "Wyoming Newspapers." Accessed April 28, 2018 at http://www.wyonewspapers.org

Secondary Sources

• Albany County Historical Society. Accessed April 28, 2018 https://www.wyoachs.com/.
• Bain, David Haward, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking, 1999
• Beery, Gladys B. The Front Streets of Laramie City. Laramie, Wyo.: Albany Seniors, Inc., 1990
• Brown, Melville C. Wyoming State Archives MSS #319, “History of Albany County, Wyoming.” 1927.
• Clough, Wilson Ober. A History of the University of Wyoming 1887-1937. Laramie, Wyo.: Laramie Print. Co., 1937.
• Duncan, Mel. The Medicine Bow Mining Camps. Laramie, Wyo.: Jelm Mountain Publications, 1990.
• Fleming, Sidny Howell. “Solving the Jigsaw Puzzle: One Suffrage Story at a Time.” Annals of Wyoming 63, no. 1.
• Hardy, Deborah. Wyoming University the First 100 Years 1886-1986. Laramie, Wyo.: University of Wyoming. 1985.
• Hebard, Grace Raymond. “The Frist Woman Jury.” The Journal of American History VII no. IV (1913): 1293-1341
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• “Jacques La Ramee.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 23, 2018 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_La_Ramee.
• “Laramie, Wyoming.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 23, 2018, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laramie,_Wyoming.
• Lawrence, Amy M. From Fox Hounds to Farming: the History of the Douglas-Willan Sartoris Ranch and the Wyoming Central Land and Improvement Company. Laramie:University of Wyoming, 1995.
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• “NCAA Division 1.” National Collegiate Athletic Association. Accessed April 23, 2018, at http://www.ncaa.org/about?division=d1.
• Thybony, Scott, Robert G. Rosenberg, and Elizabeth Mullett Rosenberg. The Medicine Bows: Wyoming's Mountain Country. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1985.
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• Viner, Kim. Melville C. Brown, Frontier Lawyer and Jurist. Laramie, Wyoming: Kim Viner: 2015.
• Viner, Kim. Rediscovering the Ivinsons.Laramie, Wyoming: Kim Viner: 2013.
• Viner, Kim, West to Wyoming - The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Stephen Wheeler Downey. Laramie, Wyoming: Kim Viner: 2018

Illustrations

• The AJ Russell photo of early Laramie rail yards and the photo of Old Main are from the photo library of the U.S. Geological Survey. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Ivinson Museum is from the Laramie Plains Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photos of Laramie in the early 1870s, the three big-wheel bicyclists and the tank cars and oilrefinery are all from the American Heritage Centerat the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.