In southwestern Wyoming, Ham’s Fork is a principal tributary of Blacks Fork of the Green River. Presumably, it was named for mountain man Zacharias Ham of William Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company, who trapped in the area during the early 1820s. There were two Oregon/California Trail crossings of the Ham’s Fork. One was on the Sublette Cutoff of the near present Kemmerer, Wyo., and the other near present Granger, Wyo. on the main branch of the trail to Fort Bridger. The second of these is the focus of this article.

Coming from the northwest, Ham’s Fork flows into Blacks Fork, coming from the southwest, near Granger. Fort Bridger is located on the upper Blacks Fork about 30 miles southwest of where the two forks join. Blacks Fork then continues east to the Green River—Flaming Gorge Reservoir at that point—10 or so miles south of present Green River, Wyo.

The trail normally crossed near the junction of the two streams, although the precise site was not fixed and moved up or down Ham’s Fork depending on conditions. Usually, it was an easy crossing.

William Clayton described the area in his guidebook, The Latter-Day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide,on July 6, 1847: “Ham’s Fork, 3 rods wide, 2 feet deep. Rapid current, cold water, plenty of bunch grass and willows, and is a good campground.” The wagons made this crossing with ease.

After several snowy winters, however, emigrants in 1849 and during the early 1850s found a far different stream, especially if they arrived early in the season. Ham’s Fork then was high and swift. A local mountain man operated a profitable ferry, as attested to by William J. Clark on June 2, 1849: “[T]raveled fourteen miles to Blacks Fork, followed up another four to Hams Fork where we ferried our things in a skiff of rough architecture two dollars per load. Had to swim our horses, river forty yards wide. Ferry kept by half-breed Indians and French. Traveled three miles and camped on Blacks Fork.”

William Johnston arrived about two weeks later. Though he seems to have crossed at a different location from Clark, his company found the stream still too high to ford easily. On June 15, 1849, Johnston wrote: “By measurement we ascertained that to ford it without damaging our goods in our wagon, it was necessary to elevate their beds a few inches; and further to aid in crossing we were obliged to use ropes, these being fastened to the forward axles, and carried to the opposite shore; while with others tied to the mules in the lead they were kept from being borne down stream by the rapid current. In all this we succeeded admirably, although at the outset we feared that we should be necessitated to ferry across as at Green River.”

In July, Ansel McCall found a stream more in keeping with Clayton’s description. On July 12, 1849, McCall noted, “[A]bout nine o’clock struck Ham’s Fork, a tributary of Black’s Fork, a beautiful little mountain brook, clear as crystal, rattling over a pebbly bed. Its banks were clothed with rich grasses and fringed with alder and willow.”

The ferry owner was back the next year and probably ran the ferry for about a month, when water was high. On June 8, 1850, Daniel Gardner arrived and ferried across, but it is unclear if his company used the commercial ferry. He wrote, “Thence to Hams Fork, a small stream sixty feet wide, very swift current. Too high to ford. We ferried our things in a wagon box and swum our horses and wagon. Here we came very, very near having one of our horses drowned by getting his feet entangled in the reins of his bridle. F swam in after him and came very near drowning himself.”

Silas Newcomb reached Ham’s Fork on June 28, and found the ferryman out of business, but apparently settling down for a longer stay. Newcomb found conditions a bit different from those recorded in Clayton’s guidebook, which he referred to, explaining that the water was deeper and the grass had been “eaten down and passed on.” He wrote that the water “wet our wagon boxes, though not to injure anything in the wagons. … Here also was the lodge of the now idle ferryman who had a squaw and several half breeds around–he had a large number of horses and oxen, cows & calves. Soon after leaving Ham’s fork we rose a small hill, and found on the left of the road a grave ‘N. Tharp, died Aug. 6th, 1849.’”

In 1857, during the so-called the Utah War, when President Buchanan sent U.S. troops to the Salt Lake Valley to re-establish federal control, the Army built a bridge at Ham’s Fork, but it was rarely used and short-lived. New York newspaperman Horace Greeley arrived on July 8, 1859, aboard the overland stage. He didn’t mention seeing a bridge, but did take notice of the locals Newcomb had seen nine years before.

“Eighteen miles [from the Green River] more of perfect desolation brought us to the next mail company’s station on Black’s Fork, at the junction of Ham’s Fork, two-large mill streams that rise in the mountains south and west of this point, and run together into Green River. They have scarcely any timber on their banks, but a sufficiency of bushes—bitter cottonwood, willow, choke-cherry, and some others new to me—with more grass than I have found this side of South Pass. On these streams live several old mountaineers, who have large herds of cattle which they are rapidly increasing by lucrative traffic with the emigrants, who are compelled to exchange their tired, gaunt oxen and steers for fresh ones on almost any terms,” Greeley wrote.

The mail station and future Pony Express and telegraph station was in a small cove on the north side of the stream and was described well by British travel writer Richard Burton, who arrived there on Aug. 22, 1860. Like Greeley, Burton was traveling in a stagecoach.

He was often unimpressed by the stations or their keepers, but thought he had discovered a new low at Ham’s Fork: “At mid-day we reached Hams Fork, the north-western influent of Green River, and there we found a station. There pleasant little stream is called by the Indians Turugempa, the “Blackfoot Water.” The station is kept by an Irishman and Scotchman—“Dawvid Lewis:’ it was a disgrace; the squalor and filth were worse almost than the two–Cold Springs and Rock Creek–which we called our horrors, and which had always seemed to be the ne plus ultra of western discomfort. The shanty was made of dry-stone piled up against a dwarf cliff to save back-wall, and ignored doors and windows. The flies–unequivocal sign of unclean living!–darkened the table and covered everything put upon it.” Station keeper David Lewis was actually a native of New York, but his two wives, sisters, were from Scotland.

From Ham’s Fork the trail continues southwest past Church Butte and after about 30 miles reaches Fort Bridger.

Resources

• Antilla, Jacob W. and Alice. History of the Upper Hamsfork Valley. Salt Lake City, Utah: Smith Printing Co. 1972.
• Burton, Richard F. The Look of the West, Overland to California. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.
• Clark[e], William J. Diary, 1849. Elko, Nevada. Undated typescript. Northeastern Nevada Genealogical Society.
• Clayton, William. The Latter-Day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide. Stanley Kimball, ed. Gerald, Mo.: The Patrice Press, 1983.
• Gardner, Daniel B. Journal to California. Transcribed by Richard Rieck. MS 703, Shelf 21. Library of Congress.
• Greeley, Horace. An Overland Journey, from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859. Charles T. Duncan, ed. New York, N.Y: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.
• Johnston, William G. Overland to California. Oakland, Calif.: Biobooks, 1948.
• McCall, Ansel J. The Great California Trail in 1849: Wayside Notes of an Argonaut.Bath, N.Y: Steuben Courier Printing, 1882. Photocopy.
• Newcomb, Silas. Overland Journey from Darien, Walworth County, Wisconsin, to Sacramento, California, 1850. Typescript. MS 359, Beinecke Library.

Illustrations

• The photos of Richard Burton and HoraceGreeley are from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Ham’s Fork Crossing is from the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. Used with permission and thanks.

Haystack Butte was a minor landmark on the Sublette Cutoff of the Oregon Trail west of South Pass. Depending on where emigrants crossed the Big Sandy River, the butte was one to three trail miles farther west. Perhaps because many passed it before dawn or in the early evening when it was dark, the butte was not often mentioned in emigrant diaries. It was notable only because it stands out alone on the plain and is visible for miles. Viewed from a distance, the butte does look like a large haystack. Estimates of its height varied from 60 to 200 feet, with 60 feet probably the most accurate guess.

Different trail branches passed on each side of the butte. Some travelers they saw it on the on the right, others on the left. A trail branch coming up from Little Sandy Creek passed quite close to the butte and met the regular Sublette trace just beyond.

Hosea Horn described it in his Horn’s Overland Guide as being three miles distant from the Big Sandy and as a “Clay Mound, north of road: —Resembling a bee-hive; 200 feet high.”

Amasa Morgan noticed it not long after he crossed the Little Sandy more than five miles to the east. On July 16, 1849, he wrote, “I noticed a singular little mountain here in the shape of a hay stack. It looked in the distance just like a farmer’s hay stack. At night we camped on Big Sandy.”

P.C. Tiffany came by on June 25 and wrote, “A few miles brought us opposite a beautiful mound standing in the level plain to the right of the road. I had seen this mound before crossing the Big Sandy. When seen at different points it appears an exact resemblance to a large hay-stack. It covers probably half an acre of ground and is 60 or 70 feet high.”

Still in 1849, J. Goldsborough Bruff sketched the butte and briefly mentioned it in his diary on August 4: “On right of the trail today, and near it, passed a singular clay mount, of buff colored clay and soft sand-stone, which I found contain’d fossils: digging out, with the point of my bowie-knife, a fragment of a bone & piece of madrepore [that is, coral].

The last diary entries mentioning the butte come from 1850. William Parker was there on June 12, and wrote, “About four miles from the Sandy is a conical mound about sixty feet high and when viewed from the south or east sides, it resembles a huge haystack. This may serve to identify the road.”

Three days later J.F. Snyder noticed the landmark and was reminded of something other than a haystack: “At some distance to the left, I noticed an odd looking mound, the exact shape of a sugar-loaf, perhaps a hundred feet high, standing alone on the plain.”

In later years, alternate trail variants were established and far fewer emigrants used the original Sublette Cutoff. Haystack Butte is rarely mentioned.

Resources

• 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. Edited by Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1949.
• Horn, Hosea B. Hosea B. Horn’sOverland Guide, from the U.S. Indian Sub-Agency, Council Bluffs, on the Missouri River, to the City of Sacramento, in California. New York, N.Y.: J.H. Colton, 1852.
• Morgan, Amasa. “Diary, 2 April to 28 July 1849.” Mss. 2001/111. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Calif.
• Parker, William Tell. “Notes on the Way, 1850.” Typescript. Henry Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
• Snyder, John F. Diary. Ms. 180E. Typescript. Illinois State Library, Springfield, Ill.
• Tiffany, Palmer C. “Overland Journey from Mount Pleasant, Iowa to California, Experiences at the Mines, and the Voyage Home by the Isthmus by P. C. Tiffany, 1849—1851.”WA Ms. 474. Transcription by William Robertson. Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Illustrations

• Forty-niner J. Goldsborough Bruff’s drawing of Haystack Butte is from an edition of his book of drawings and journals, Gold Rush, published in 1949. The photo is by the author. Used with permission and thanks.

Church Butte is a soft sandstone and clay landform standing alone to the left of the Oregon-California Trail as it heads southwest toward Fort Bridger. The butte was an important landmark on the route between Green River and Fort Bridger and is located about 10 ten miles southwest of present Granger, Wyo., adjacent to a gravel road that once was a branch of U.S. Highway 30. At its highest point, the butte rises about 100 feet above the surrounding prairie. Except for nearby gas wells, the area is now deserted and just as desolate as it was in trail days, though at one time a busy service station stood just across the road. .

The name Church Butte did not come into general use until the 1850s. Before that, emigrants, if they called the landmark anything, made up their own names, often comparing its knobs and eroded towers to imaginary castles and pyramids.

An early use of a name involving the word church comes from Howard Stansbury, an Army officer returning with his surveying expedition from Salt Lake City on Sept. 12, 1850. Stansbury wrote, “Struck out of the bottom of Black’s Fork & reentered the road rising a hill to ‘Church Hill’. Followed the road for about 3 or 4 miles over a level country of sand and clay almost denuded of vegetation except Artemisia & liquorice weed. …”

Civilian Albert Carrington was with Stansbury’s outfit and on the same day, wrote, “Rose onto 1^sttable & went nearly East to the old road, near the church (an isolated cliff of brown & green indurated clay, & brown sandstone [worn] by the elements into fantastical shapes, as minarets, spires, aisles etc. capped by domes) traveled on the old road & soon left it on the left . . .”

Stansbury and Carrington probably heard the butte called the “church” by Mormons in Salt Lake, as at various times church services conducted by Mormon companies heading for the city may have been held there.

One of the earliest descriptions of Church Butte comes from John Boardman, an Oregon emigrant of 1843. Boardman’s report predates Mormon companies by four years and the forty-niners by six. He passed on Aug.12, 1843, and seems to have been very impressed with the butte’s appearance: “Crossed Black’s Fork, and passed Solomon’s Temple, a singular mound of clay and stone of the shape of a large temple, and decorated with all kinds of images; gods and goddesses, everything that has ever been the subject of the sculptor; all kinds of animals and creeping things, and everything that art has manufactured or brought into notice. A magnificent and striking sight.”

Pardon D. Tiffany was a member of the Pioneer Line—a commercial enterprise that took paying customers over the trail to California for a fee—and came to the butte on July 28, 1849. Tiffany wrote, “Between the second and 3rd crossing of Black’s fork there is the remnant of a clay range of bluffs near & on the left of the road, the 1^stone of which appears to be nearly stone & the wind & rain have worked the edges & top into many curious shapes. The soil of clay for a long time past has been cut up into a worse [condition] than St. Louis dust & fills the eyes and mouth during the high winds with saleratus.”

Three days later David Staples called the line of buttes to the left of the road the “Rain Bow” bluffs and mentioned Church Butte, explaining, “Our road ran along near the ‘Rain Bow’ bluffs. They derive their name from the different colors of clay and sand mixed up the sides. We noticed one prominent bluff whose sides presented with a little stretch of imagination every variety of forms—groups of men, heads of animals &c. Looked like Egyptian architecture.”

In 1852, Oregon emigrant Mariett Cummings thought Church Butte was the most impressive trail landmark she had yet seen and had a unique name for it. On June 29 she wrote: “Passed the most magnificent curiosity I have ever seen on the road. It was a stupendous rock of petrified clay and sandstone of blue and light and dark brown color. There were spires and domes, grottoes and caves of every form and size. It was immensely high and colonnaded. One’s voice would reverberate several times. We called it ‘Echo Rock.’”

Frederick H. Piercy saw Church Butte in 1853, and in his description he let his imagination run riot: “Just before arriving at Black’s Fork, [ford] No. 3, where we camped, we passed as splendid range of clay bluffs which, as we passed them, seemed covered with figures in almost all attitudes—nuns confessing to priests, and warriors fighting, and transforming and varying themselves as we changed our position.”

Finally, British adventurer and travel writer Richard Burton, aboard the Overland Stage on his way to Salt Lake City, arrived on Aug. 7, 1860, and compared the scenic butte to cathedrals he had seen in his native England. Burton wrote:

After twelve miles we passed Church Butte, one of many curious formations lying to the left or south of the road. This isolated mass of stiff clay has been cut and ground by wind and water into folds and hollow channels which from a distance perfectly simulate the pillars, groins, and massive buttresses of a ruinous Gothic cathedral. The foundation is level, except where masses have been swept down by the rain, and not a blade of grass grows upon any part. An architect of genius might profitably study this work of nature: upon that subject, however, I shall presently have more to say. The Butte is highly interesting in a geological point of view; it shows the elevation of the adjoining plains in past ages, before partial deluges and the rains of centuries had effected the great work of degradation.

Burton’s description works just as well today as it did in 1860. Made as it is of soft sandstone, Church Butte might be expected to be eroding very rapidly; a plaque placed in 1930 to honor Mormon pioneers has been dislodged by erosion. Still, comparisons with photos from the 1800s show the butte looking very much the same then as it does now.

Resources

• Boardman, John. “The Journal of John Boardman: An Overland Journey from Kansas to Oregon in 1843.” Edited by Cecil Alter. Utah Historical Quarterly 2:4 (October 1929): 99–121.
• Burton, Richard F. The City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California. 1862. Excerpts reprinted as TheLook of the West, Overland to California. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.
• Cummings, Mariett Foster. “A Trip Across a Continent” [1852]. In Kenneth Holmes, Covered Wagon Women 4 (1985): 117–162.
• Hill, William E. The Pony Express Trail: Yesterday and Today.Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 2010.
• Piercy, Frederick Hawkins and James Linforth. Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley. 1855. Editedby Fawn Brodie. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962.
• Stansbury, Howard. Exploring the Great Salt Lake,The Stansbury Expedition of 1849–1850. Edited by Brigham D. Madsen. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989.
• Staples, David Jackson. “The Journal of David Jackson Staples.” Edited by Harold F. Taggart. California Historical Society Quarterly 22 (June 1943): 119–50.
• Tiffany, Pardon Dexter. Journals and Letters, 1849. Pardon Dexter Tiffany Collection, 1779–1967, AMC94-001159, Missouri Historical Society.
• Wilkins, James F. An Artist on the Overland Trail: The 1849 Diary and Sketches of James F. Wilkins. Edited by John Francis McDermott. San Marino, Calif: The Huntington Library, 1968.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Church Butte.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed May 20, 2018 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/church_butte.htm.

Illustrations

• The color photo of Church Butte is from the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. Used with Permission and thanks.
• The Andrew Russell photo of Church Butte is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The James Wilkins sketch is from his book, An Artist on the Overland Trail: The 1849 Diary and Sketches of James F. Wilkins. Edited by John Francis McDermott. Author’s collection. Used with thanks.

There were several “Emigrant Springs” on emigrant routes during the historic trail era. Two are in Wyoming, and these are only about 25 miles apart. One is on the Sublette Cutoff at the summit of Dempsey Ridge. The other—the focus of this article—is on the Slate Creek Cutoff about 15 miles west of the Green River.

The Kinney/Slate Creek Cutoff was opened in 1852 and was possibly developed by mountain man Charles Kinney. A variant of the Sublette Cutoff, this route was established to avoid most of the approximately 45-mile-long desert crossing of the Sublette between the Big Sandy and Green rivers. Instead of heading nearly due west across the desert from Big Sandy to the Green, emigrants intending to take the Kinney Cutoff stayed on the Fort Bridger Road and traveled farther down the Big Sandy until they were about eight miles from the crossing at Lombard Buttes. There they turned northwest and crossed 10 or 12 miles of desert to reach various ferrying operations on the Green River. Once across, they continued upstream seven or eight miles on the west side to near the mouth of Slate Creek. From there they followed upstream along the creek for about 15 miles to Emigrant Spring, located in a hollow at the bottom of a steep, rocky hill.

The spring had no generally accepted name, so emigrants, if they called it anything, used whatever name happened to occur to them at the time.

An early arrival, Luzerne Humphrey, stopped there on June 23, 1852. In his diary he described fishing in the Green River and catching two fish that resembled Pike, but without teeth. The road was “some sandy & quite hilly.” After crossing Slate Creek the next day, he camped at Mountain Valley Springs about 12 miles away, where, he wrote, “… I cut my name in the Rocks of the Bluffs to the North East.”

Humphrey pointed out the main interest the spring has for current visitors, the collection of inscriptions on the bluffs surrounding the deep hollow. Apparently, there were once thousands of them, but today a careful count finds only about 300 surviving on the crumbling sandstone bluffs, with fewer visible every year.

A few days after Humphrey arrived, R.O. Hickman saw the bluffs and noted that already there were thousands of inscriptions. On June 29, 1852, he wrote, “This place was one of the most singular looking places I have seen yet. It is called the Indian Springs. There was a most beautiful spring of pure water flowing from the foot of the mountain, and the bluffs along the north were composed of a soft substance resembling both chalk and lime and carved so full of names that I could hardly find room to register my own.”

The next year, Amelia Knight’s motherly report described a long day of travel—20 miles—in her diary entry of June 30, 1853. She spoke of camping “near a clear cold spring of good water, grass plenty, and dry sage brush to burn. The children have climbed a mountain to see the sun set.” The ”mountain” probably was the top of the bluff on the north side of the spring.

John Murray got there about three weeks later, and on July 19, made note of the gigantic sagebrush growing in the hollow. He wrote, “The hills around look red & where we came into the first deep hollow the ground was all red & a most beautiful cold spring gushed out of the hills 50 or 60 feet above the road. Here the red top’d Oregon Company were camped & about here in the hollows was the largest sage brush I ever saw 5 or 6 feet high and 4 to 6 inches thick at the ground.”

If anything, Murray underestimated the height of some of this sage. Today, much of it appears to be as tall as 10 or 12 feet, and a visitor could almost get lost in what seems like a forest of sagebrush.

Even after the Lander Trail opened in 1859, the Kinney Cutoff continued to be frequently used. Eva Morse with her company was there on Aug. 9, 1859, when she wrote, “We are now camped in a valley, between some high bluffs. Have just come down a very long and steep descent, at the bottom of which is a beautiful cold spring. We camped near it. Just above them rise high clay cliffs and sand bluffs, on the sides of which are written thousands of names.”

There are many inscriptions dated in the 1860s and continuing into the 1880s when the cutoff was being used primarily by Oregon and Idaho emigrants—including Emily Towell who described her experience on July 13, 1881. “We saw a band of cattle from Oregon and Idaho. This made us feel much nearer to our destination. At Rock Springs there were hundreds of names and dates carved in the rocks above the springs, names of emigrants who had gone before us. Some of our crowd cut their names beside those of their predecessors.”

Another emigrant of the 1880s, Viola Springer, like Emily Towell, noted the emigrants’ vast bulletin board carved on the surrounding bluffs. On July 27, 1885, Springer wrote, “We camped today noon by a spring where there was some big rock back of the spring covered with peoples names.”

A side road from the main Sublette Cutoff on Willow Creek may have passed to the spring, but the generally accepted and most important junction of the two cutoffs was on the west side of Slate Creek Ridge. Thereafter, the Slate Creek and Sublette Cutoffs followed one track and in about 18 miles, after a steep climb out of Ham’s Fork Valley, they reached the second Emigrant Spring on Dempsey Ridge.

Resources

• Brown, Randy. Historic Inscriptions on Western Emigrant Trails. Independence, MO.: The Oregon-California Trails Association, 2004.
• Hickman, Richard Owen. Dick’s Works, An Overland Journey to California in 1852: The Journal of Richard Owen Hickman.Edited by Paul C. Phillips. In “Sources of Northwest History No. 6,” Missoula, Mont: Montana State University, 1929.
• Humphrey, Luzerne. “Manuscript Journal of an Overland Journey.” MS C0199, No. 534. Typescript. Manuscripts Collection, Princeton University Library.
• Knight, Amelia. “Iowa to the Columbia River [1853].” Vol. 6, Covered Wagon Women, edited by Kenneth Holmes. Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1986, 33–75.
• Morse, Eva. Diary. Typescript. MS. Brigham Young University Library, Salt Lake City.
• Murray, John. Diary. “Galena, Illinois, to Portland, Oregon, 4 April to 4 October 1853.” Typescript. Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma, Wash.
• Springer, Viola.“From Princeton, Missouri, to Harney Valley, Oregon, 1885.”Vol. 11, Covered Wagon Women, edited by Kenneth Holmes. Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark Company. 1991, 73-141.
• Towell, Emily. “Missouri to Idaho, 1881.” Vol. 6, Covered Wagon Women, edited by Kenneth Holmes. Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark Company. 1991, 197-219.

Illustrations

• The photo of the Gardner inscription at Emigrant Spring is by Richard Collier of the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. The other photos are by the author. All are used with permission and thanks.

On the Oregon-California Trail in western Wyoming lies the grave of 20-year-old Nancy Hill, who died of cholera July 5, 1852, while traveling with her family from Missouri to California. The fenced grave lies near the summit of Dempsey Ridge about nine miles west of Ham’s Fork.

The stone at the grave is not original, however, and its inscription for many years caused some confusion about the cause of the young woman’s death.

Nancy Jane Hill was born in Monroe County, Mo., in 1832. In 1852 she was traveling with a wagon train made mostly of the families of her father, Wesley Hill, and his three brothers—about 65 people in all, driving 14 wagons and around 400 cattle.

Family background

Nancy was Wesley and Elizabeth’s second child. Her older sister, Mary Elizabeth, was born in Kentucky just before the move to Missouri. The Hills had five additional children who were born later, all in Missouri: John William in 1833, Angeline in 1834, George Wesley in 1837, Sarah Margaret in 1839, and finally Abraham, who was born in 1841. Elizabeth, Wesley’s wife, died in 1842.

Wesley was one of four Hill brothers who had moved to what became Monroe County in about 1830. They were from Bourbon County, Ky., where Wesley and Elizabeth Kiplinger were married on July 23, 1829. Nancy was named for Wesley’s sister, Nancy Jane, who was living with the family as Wesley’s ward since the death of their parents. Elizabeth Hill died in 1842.

Wesley Hill is said to have made one or two overland trips to California with local merchants in the 1840s. Back in Missouri, he married widow Eglantine (Holder) Sanders in 1848. In 1849, Wesley, with his son John, and two of his brothers, Samuel and Stephen, joined the California Gold Rush. Wesley left his six other children in the care of his brother James where they all are listed in his household in the 1850 Monroe County census. Nancy Jane Hill, age 17 appears as “Jane,” as she was probably known, to distinguish her from two of her aunts, both also named Nancy Jane. One of these was the foster sister mentioned above, the other the wife of James Hill.

California census records show that Wesley’s brothers worked as miners, while he worked as a merchant. By 1851 all four were back in Missouri to prepare for another overland journey to California, this time with their wives and families.

Ill health during the journey

Like many companies in 1852, they were plagued by ill health and disease. One of the hired men died of cholera on the Little Blue River in present Nebraska, and on June 8, Henry Hill, father-in-law of Nancy Jane’s sister, Mary Elizabeth, likewise died of cholera while they camped near present Torrington, Wyo. Henry Hill was a member of another Hill family, unrelated, except by marriage, to the family of Nancy Jane Hill.

It’s clear that the Hill clan used a trail variant called the Slate Creek Cutoff, for at Emigrant Springs on the cutoff, neatly carved on the sandstone bluffs, are inscriptions of three members of the Hill wagon train. The initials are those of J.W., M.E., and one unreadable initial followed by B. They are dated July 3, 1852.

Since the company did not travel on the third of July due to the illness of Samuel Hill’s son, Abe, who later recovered, the three had time on their hands that day. The first two inscriptions could be John W. and Mary Elizabeth Hill, siblings of Nancy Jane. It cannot be determined with any certainty who “? B. Hill” was, but perhaps he or she was one of their many cousins in the company.

Nancy Hill died on July 5, 1852, and was buried the next day.

The only contemporary account of the journey comes from letters James Hill wrote to a former neighbor back in Monroe County. From one dated July 6, we have a sparse eyewitness testimony about Nancy’s death:

This day was called on to consign to the tomb one other of our company, N.J. Hill. She was in good health on Sunday evening. Taken unwell that night, worse in the morning and a corpse at nine o’clock at night. We had two doctors with her. They pronounced her complaining cholera but I believe it was nothing more than cholera with congestion connected.

Wesley Hill, Nancy’s father, died--probably of cholera--on Aug. 24 after a long illness. He was buried at the emigrants’ cemetery at Ragtown on the Carson River in present Nevada.

Local stories

Local ranchers told many conflicting stories about imaginary Nancy Hill sweethearts who reportedly came back to visit the grave in later years. These stories probably have no basis in fact. One of them included a hair-raising story of an Indian attack on the wagon train and that Nancy had been killed by an arrow, all this supposedly occurring in 1847. This led one rancher to install in good faith the current headstone at the grave with that year as her date of death, and including, as part of the epitaph, “Killed by Indians.”

Family tradition has it that the original headstone was inscribed by Robert Gillaspy, one of the hired hands, who later married Nancy’s sister Angeline in California. Robert is thought to have worked as a stonemason in Missouri. There is no record of how this marker appeared. However, three later emigrants noted the grave and provided evidence of what the inscription was. Sarah Raymond, who having crossed Dempsey Ridge on Aug. 19, 1865, wrote, “We passed eight graves on the mountains one [a] young lady twenty years old from Monroe County, Missouri.”

Two days later Dr.Waid Howard passed the grave and wrote: “Twenty yards beyond [the 1849 Alfred Corum grave and to the right of the road is the grave of Miss Nancy J. Hill who died July 5, 1852, from Monroe county, Miss[ouri]. We are now resting against the headstone. The grave of Corum is plainly in view. Though far from their places of nativity these graves surely have each other company on one of the most lovely spots passed upon the mountain.”

William E. Jackson was on a west-east cattle drive that originated in La Grande, Ore., when he noted the grave on Aug. 3, 1876.

The headstone must have lasted until settlement times, since the grave’s identity was never lost. Eventually, after the headstone disappeared, the other details included on it were forgotten, and the replacement stone, with its incorrect information, along with confusion over other pertinent facts, misled later researchers.

The grave’s actual identity

In the 1980s when Hill family descendants living on the west coast became aware of the grave’s continued existence, the identity of Nancy Hill was firmly established. Later, several of them traveled to Wyoming to attend a dedication ceremony for the Oregon-California Trails Association marker placed at the grave in 1987. The marker and new fence around the grave was funded by Hartwell Gillaspy--a direct descendant of Nancy’ s sister Angeline and her husband, Robert Gillaspy, the hired hand who had engraved the epitaph on the Nancy Jane Hill headstone 135 years before.

Resources

• Craig, Marilyn Jean [Hill]. Some Hill Families of Monroe County, Mo., Their Ancestors and Descendants.McMinnville, Ore.: 1999.
• “Diary of Sarah Raymond.” In Overland Days to Montana in 1865, Settle, Raymond W. and Mary Lund, eds. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co. 1971.
• Duffin, Reg. “The Nancy Hill Story: Final Chapter.” The Overland Journal4, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 56-64.
• Hill, James. Letter to Jefferson Marr of Monroe County, Mo. July 6, 1852. Copy in the author’s collection.
• “Journal of Waid Howard.” In Overland Days to Montana in 1865, Settle, Raymond W. and Mary Lund, eds. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co. 1971.
• Oliphant, J. Orin, ed. William Emsley Jackson’s Diary of a Cattle Drive from La Grande, Oregon to Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1876. Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1983.

Illustrations

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

The grave of forty-niner Alfred Corum is located near the summit of Ham’s Fork Plateau in Lincoln County in western Wyoming, on the Oregon Trail variant called the Sublette Cutoff.

The year of his birth is uncertain, but based on the marker inscription reported at his grave by contemporary diarists, the date must have been 1826 or 1827. Unfortunately, Alfred is not included in membership lists for the Henry Corum family compiled much later by descendants. Because he died young, with no children of his own, Alfred was evidently forgotten by later Corum generations, but trails researchers have discovered diary entries that help sketch his life.

Alfred Corum was a native of Cooper County, Mo., one of nine children of Henry and Gilla Lowrey Corum. Henry was born in North Carolina in 1795 and was one of seven brothers. Four of the brothers, together with their parents, moved to Kentucky for a few years and then in 1819 moved on to settle in what became Palestine Township in Cooper County, Missouri, 15 or 20 miles south of Boonville, the county seat. The four brothers who made the move to Cooper County are known to have been Henry, Heli, Hiram, and Harden Corum. Many descendants of these four brothers still live in the Boonsville area.

Henry and Gilla, sometimes called Gilley, had married in 1817 when they were residing in Madison County, Ky. Between 1820 and 1840, Henry and Gilla had five sons and four daughters.

Nothing is known of Alfred Corum’s life before he left for California in 1849. He probably had been working somewhere in Cooper County, probably as a farmer’s hired hand, perhaps at his father Henry’s place or for a relative or neighbor. There is no evidence that Alfred ever married.

What is known about Alfred Corum is that in 1849 he joined what became known as “Clark’s train of mule teams,” organized and captained by Bennett C. Clark, clerk of the Circuit Court of Cooper County, and comprised of 24 county residents, including four men named Corum: Alfred and his older brother John, and two of their cousins, Simeon, age 20, and Heber, 24, the sons of Heli and Eveline Lowrey Corum. The two sets of brothers were double cousins. Their mothers were sisters, and their fathers were brothers.

The company members left their homes on April 10, 1849. They had nine wagons and one other vehicle that Clark at first called a carriage. He later was more specific and referred to it as a Dearborn wagon, a vehicle that often was light enough to be pulled by one horse or mule. Mules were the company’s draft animal of choice. Most wagons on the historic trails were pulled by oxen, which were cheaper, slower and hardier.

At the start of the trip, Bennett Clark in his diary listed Alfred Corum on the company roster. The diary indicates the company’s journey was mostly routine, but with a recurring problem of wagon breakdowns. Clark’s group managed, however, to make good time and reached Ash Hollow in present western Nebraska on June 2 and Fort Laramie just eight days later. West of South Pass, they took the Sublette Cutoff on June 20. Five days later, they ferried across the Green River. About this time, Alfred Corum came down with an unspecified illness, possibly mountain fever.

On July 2, 1849, the company crossed Ham’s Fork of the Green River and climbed the steep, 600-foot hill just beyond the river to the top of Ham’s Fork Plateau, a lower spur of Dempsey Ridge. Clark wrote that they “laid by a day” because Alfred had been “sick for a week or 10 days.” Outside of the roster, this is the first time Clark mentions Alfred.

Clark’s diary entries of July 3 and 4 show that Alfred’s condition was dire and illustrate the tough choices often forced on Oregon Trail travelers. Clark wrote, “Whilst lying by some 200 wagons passed us & Alfred continued to grow worse & there was no prospect of his living it was deemed prudent for the wagons to start the next morning.”

Clark explained that most of the group continued on their westward journey on July 4, but left the Dearborn and six men “to render every service to our dying friend.”

The account continues, “As there was neither wood nor water near us we concluded to move him about 1½ miles where we found both. About 1 o’clock he died without a struggle & in full possession of all his faculties to the last. It was truly melancholy to reflect that whilst our friends at home were doubtless enjoying this great anniversary of national Independence in the usual way we were performing the last sad offices to one of our dead companions.”

Many years later, Wesley Corum prepared a manuscript that told of his father, Simeon Corum’s, recollections of the trip. Simeon’s report about his cousin Alfred’s death was brief. He wrote, “… Had to leave before he died. John Corum his brother stayed with him until he died, then buried him and caught up with the crowd. Papa [Simeon] had to go on with the main crowd as his brother Herod was sick with fever.”

The Clark company went on to California, suffering through the usual hardships along the way. As often occurred, the company broke into smaller units. Diarist Bennett Clark was a sick man when he finally reached California, probably in September. As soon as he was able, he left San Francisco by ship and returned to Missouri. Alfred Corum’s brother, John, quite likely made the return trip with Clark. The 1850 census shows that John at that time lived with his parents in Cooper County.

The Corum grave is marked by a small stone with an inscription that reads: “A CORUM DIED JULY 4th 1849.” It has every appearance of being an original headstone of the trail era.

However, emigrant J. Goldsborough Bruff noted a wooden board at the head of the grave when he and Henry Austin passed by the following month. On Aug. 10 Bruff wrote that inscribed upon the board was, “Sacred to the memory of Alfred Corum, Who died July 4th, 1849. Aged 22 years.” On the same day, Austin recorded seeing the grave with the same date and age. The only other emigrant of the Gold Rush era who mentioned the grave by name was Andrew Woods on June 5, 1850. These three diary quotations are the only evidence we have of Alfred Corum’s age at the time of his death.

Sometime between 1850 and 1865, someone apparently replaced what was probably by then a badly worn wooden marker with the current small stone. Not all the information on the original marker was included in the new inscription, most particularly Alfred’s age when he died.

On Aug. 21, 1865, Dr. Waid Howard, a former resident of Cooper County, saw the grave and recorded an inscription that is identical to the one on the stone still at the grave. Howard stated that Corum’s grave was located about a mile beyond the grave of J.N. Tutt. However, because the stone only included Alfred’s first initial with his last name, Howard mistakenly noted Alfred’s name as Andy, and misidentified the town of Belton, Mo., as the location of the Henry Corum family. The Corums actually lived near now-defunct Cooper County town of Bellair.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has constructed a fence around the Corum grave and the other five or six graves thought to be nearby. Surface evidence for these other burial sites is scanty, and only one other grave, about 20 feet from Corum’s, can be located with any certainty, but the occupant of that grave cannot be identified.

Corum’s grave lies about three hundred yards east of the grave of Nancy Jane Hill, who died nearby while traveling west in 1852.

Resources

• Austin, Henry. Diary, 1849. MS C-F 157. Transcription by Richard Rieck. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Calif.
• 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. Edited by Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1949.
• Clark, Bennett C. “A Journey from Missouri to California in 1849.” Edited by Ralph P. Bieber. Reprinted from Missouri Historical Review 23, no. 1 (October 1928): 3–43.
• Corum, Heber Workman. “A True Story of My Heritage.” Handwritten ms, ca. 1910. Posted by “kimjor217,” June 15, 2008. ancestry.com.
• Corum, Wesley. “Papa’s Trip West in 1849 across the Plains.” MS, private collection of Mary Corum, granddaughter of Simeon Corum. Copy provided to author, Oct. 29, 2015.
• “Diary of Sarah Raymond.” In Overland Days to Montana in 1865, Settle, Raymond W. and Mary Lund, eds. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co. 1971.
• Johnson, W.F. History of Cooper County, Missouri. Topeka, Kan.: Historical Publishing Company, 1919, 233.
• “Journal of Waid Howard.” In Overland Days to Montana in 1865, Settle, Raymond W. and Mary Lund, eds. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Co. 1971.
• U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1830. “Henry Coram [sic].” Cooper County. Mo., 228.
• -----. 1840. “Henry Corum.” Cooper County, MO., 133.
• ------. 1850. “Henry Corum.” District No. 23, Cooper County, MO.,150.
• Woods, Andrew. “Diary Kept by Andrew Woods of Bellevue, Jackson County, Iowa.” 1850–1851. WA MS S-804 W8611. Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Illustrations

• The photos of the Corum gravestone and grave site are by the author. Used with permission and thanks. The image of the Dearborn wagon is a National Park Service photo from the author’s collection.

A presidential fishing trip that began in Green River, Wyoming Territory, late in the 1800s helped save Yellowstone National Park.

By 1883, 11 years after Yellowstone was created as the world’s first national park, the U.S. Department of Interior was set to grant a private enterprise more than 4,000 acres of park land for sale and commercial development. Plans of the Yellowstone National Park Improvement Company included allowing private business control of the park’s premier locations; building a railroad into the park and permitting logging, cattle ranching, and even mining.

The company was already cutting park forests for wood for a 250-room hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs and hiring local hunters to poach elk and other big game to feed its work crews. Company officials reported that workers already had cut 1,686,000 board feet of timber. Yellowstone was on track to become another Niagara Falls at a time when “Niagarizing,”—destructive exploitation of natural wonders for profit—was a term in common use.

Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan, by this time commanding general of the U.S. Army, was a fierce advocate of preserving the park for the incomparable natural wonder that it was. Other prominent figures, such as Sen. George Graham Vest of Missouri and conservationist George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream magazine, supported Sheridan’s position. In a campaign to preserve the park, a strategy was conceived to enlist the support of President Chester A. Arthur.

Sheridan had risen to national fame as a Union cavalry general in the Civil War when his troops laid waste to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. After the war, he commanded all the troops between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, where he used similar tactics—encouraging destruction of the Plains tribes’ food supply to subdue them.

Arthur was born in Vermont and by the 1870s was well connected politically in New York City. He was elected vice president in 1880 and ascended to the presidency after President James A. Garfield was assassinated in 1881. He would not run for reelection in 1884.

Arthur also was an avid angler. Sheridan proposed a three-week horseback fishing expedition to Yellowstone. The president agreed.

Sheridan, who had visited the park twice before, would himself lead the party, which included a 75-man cavalry escort and 175 pack animals. In addition to Sheridan and President Arthur, members of the expedition included Secretary of War Robert T. Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln; Sen. Vest and his son, George Vest, Jr.; Lt. Col. Michael V. Sheridan, Sheridan's brother; Montana Territorial Gov. John S. Crosby; Daniel G. Rollins, surrogate of New York—a kind of probate judge—and old friend of Arthur's; Brig. Gen. Anson Stager; Lt. Col. James F. Gregory; U.S. Army surgeon Maj. W.H. Forwood; Capt. Philo Clark of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment; and Frank Jay Haynes, the expedition photographer.

Sheridan took charge of the trip’s comprehensive planning. He made recommendations to members of the party concerning clothing and gear and provided Arthur with the following list of items to bring:  

• Four sets winter clothing
• Four sets of summer under clothing
• Four outer woolen shirts, with pockets
• Two suits of rough clothes, one heavy and one ordinarily light
• One heavy winter overcoat, Ulster preferable
• One rubber coat
• One pair riding boots or shoes, with leggins [sic]
• One doz. pair socks

In addition, Arthur purchased $50 worth of new fishing gear for the excursion. The group would travel to southern Wyoming by train and proceed from there to Yellowstone first by wagon, then on horseback.

On August 6, 1883, what came to be known as the President Arthur Expedition left Green River—in southwest Wyoming along the Union Pacific’s rail line—and traveled to Point of Rocks, east of Rock Springs, by horseback and spring wagon.

At Sheridan's insistence, no reporters would be allowed to accompany the expedition. Instead, most of the expedition's press dispatches—subject to review and approval by Arthur—would be written by Sheridan and Gregory.

That did not stop at least two reporters from trying. As reported in the Cheyenne Weekly Leader on August 9, 1883, “The president and his party were much annoyed in Green River by two young men who asserted that they were reporters of the Chicago Times and Tribune.”

The reporters had planned to take the stagecoach to Fort Washakie, Indian agency for the Shoshone Reservation, a scheduled stop on the expedition’s route. But Sheridan “sent them word that if they went on their journey the would be arrested the moment they got on the reservation at Washakie,” the Leader noted. After they discovered the government chartered the stage, they “threw up the sponge . … These reporters did not know what to do to carry out their ‘assignment.’ They had never been west before, and were at the end of their string.” The Leader article further explained that “had they been fully competent,” they would have gone all the way to Yellowstone on horseback to get the story.

However, two courier relay lines were created to keep the expedition in contact with the outside world. The first ran from Fort Washakie to Shoshone Lake in the park, and the second from Shoshone Lake north to Fort Ellis in Montana Territory, east of present-day Bozeman. Cavalrymen were stationed at 20-mile intervals along both routes. Until mid-August, telegrams and mail for President Arthur and Secretary of War Lincoln would be sent to Fort Washakie and relayed up the line by mounted couriers; afterward, communications were directed to Fort Ellis, then carried south.

From Point of Rocks, the expedition turned north for Fort Washakie and the Indian reservation, where President Arthur and Sen. Vest met with Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone tribe and Chief Black Coal, of the Northern Arapaho. Vest discussed with the chiefs a proposal under consideration in the Senate that would basically do away with the reservation system. Instead of the current system of tribal ownership of reservation lands—called “tenure in common”—Indians would adopt private land ownership, or “tenure in severalty.” Proponents of tenure in severalty professed their belief that private property ownership would encourage Indian assimilation and what they called “civilization” of the tribes. The fact that tenure in severalty would also open up huge swaths of Indian land for white settlement, mining, lumbering and other industries also was undoubtedly a factor in their thinking.

The response Vest received that day was unequivocal: “All the Chiefs expressed themselves against tenure in severalty,” Haynes, the photographer, noted in his published account.[1]

Leaving the wagons behind, the president’s party continued on horseback northwest along the east slope of the Wind River Range, turning west to cross over the Continental Divide at Lincoln Pass, known today as Sheridan Pass.

From there, they proceeded west down the valley of the Gros Ventre River, then turned north past the Tetons and Jackson Lake and entered Yellowstone on August 23. [2]

Arthur was the first president to set foot in Yellowstone Park. The party’s stops as it continued north included Lewis Lake, the Upper Geyser Basin, Old Faithful, Yellowstone Lake, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and Mammoth Hot Springs. Arthur was enthralled with the park—and he caught a lot of trout.

The expedition emerged from the park on September 1 and continued on to Livingston, Montana Territory, where the group boarded trains.

Arthur’s trip and the publicity it generated helped Sheridan and other powerful supporters of protection for Yellowstone, particularly Sen. Vest, make their case for conservation, wildlife preservation and strict control of commercial concessions inside the park. After a hard fight, Vest was able to pass a resolution that obliged the Secretary of Interior to submit concession proposals and contracts to the Senate for approval and oversight.

Concessions were sharply curtailed. No railroad was ever built inside Yellowstone. The Yellowstone National Park Improvement Company went bankrupt in 1886.

The legacy of Sheridan’s stewardship of Yellowstone extended well beyond his death in 1888. When, in 1886, the park’s management by the Interior Department proved a failure, he ordered that Company M of the 1st Cavalry, under the command of Capt. Moses Harris, then at Fort Custer in Montana, be stationed inside the park. The troopers built Camp Sheridan, later called Fort Yellowstone, at Mammoth Hot Springs and administered Yellowstone until the National Park Service was formed in 1916. The horse soldiers remained at Yellowstone until 1918. The facilities they left behind are now used as the Yellowstone National Park Headquarters.

Resources

References

• “Arthur in Cheyenne,” Cheyenne Weekly Leader, Aug. 9, 1883, 5. Accessed April 3, 2019, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• Bartlett, Richard A. Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged. Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1985.
• Gunn, Steven J. "Major Acts of Congress: Indian General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) (1887)." Encyclopedia.com. Accessed March 14, 2019 at https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-....
• Hartley, Robert F. Saving Yellowstone: The President Arthur Expedition of 1883.Westminster, Colo.: Sniktau Publications, 2007.
• Haynes, Frank J. Journey Through the Yellowstone National Park and Northwestern Wyoming 1883; photographs of [arty and scenery along the route traveled and copies of the Associated Press dispatches sent whilst en route. [Place of publication and publisher not identified.] Accessed April 12, 2019 at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002696055/.
• Haynes, Jack Ellis. “The Expedition of President Chester A. Arthur to Yellowstone National Park in 1883.” Annals of Wyoming 14, no. 1 (January 1942): 31-38.
• Reeves, Thomas C. “President Arthur in Yellowstone National Park.”Montana The Magazine of Western History 19, no. 3 (Summer, 1969): 18-29.
• Rydell, Kiki Leigh and Mary Shivers Culpin. “Managing the ‘Matchless Wonders’: A History of Administrative Development in Yellowstone National Park, 1872–1965.” National Park Service, 2006. Yellowstone Center for Resources, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, YCR-2006-03.

For further reading

• Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum. “Jackson Hole & the President Arthur Yellowstone Expedition of 1883.” JHHSM website, accessed April 23, 2019 at https://jacksonholehistory.org/jackson-hole-the-president-arthur-yellowstone-expedition-of-1883/.

Illustrations

• The photos are all from photographer Frank Jay Haynes’s portfolio of images of the expedition, available online at the Library of Congress. The Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum also offers an easy-to-view PDF of the portfolio.

The world’s first female flight attendants were trained in Cheyenne beginning in May 1930 by Boeing Air Transport. The company, a precursor of United Air Lines, had been based at the Cheyenne municipal airport since the mid-1920s, when the airport was playing a significant role in the development of early aviation in America.

One of the finest airports in the nation at the time, it was a main stop on the first transcontinental airmail route and Boeing Air Transport’s original home. The airport also served as an airplane modification center during World War II and the base for the United Air Lines Stewardess Training facility for several years.

Boeing trains stewardesses

Boeing Air Transport Company contracted with the U.S. Post Office to operate the airmail service in 1927. The firm also began providing passenger service, though airmail was still the priority. In 1931, Boeing would combine with Pacific Air Transport, National Air Transport and Varney Airlines to form United Air Lines.

In 1930, Steve Stimpson, manager of the Boeing Air Transport Company’s Pacific Division in the San Francisco office, had become concerned about the need for caring for jittery passengers on flights. All airlines were having difficulties encouraging the public to fly as most had experienced airplanes as good only for war or for barnstorming. Stimson had previously worked for a steamship line and noticed how the ship’s stewards helped the passengers. Other airlines had come to this conclusion as well and employed men as stewards prior to 1930. Stimpson sought a solution that would solve both problems at the same time.

The solution came from an unexpected direction. Ellen Church, a young registered nurse living in San Francisco often passed Boeing’s office on her way to work at the French Hospital. One day she entered the office and asked Stimpson if she could get a job on an airplane and explained her fascination with aviation. Even though Stimpson couldn’t offer her a job—flying was an exclusively male occupation—Church continued to visit him at his office and they became friends. She suggested that nurses would be valuable in encouraging people to fly and reassuring them during flights.

Stimpson realized that nurses were a logical choice for the first airline stewardesses. They would be able to help passengers who became ill, would be sensitive to individual needs and have a strong empathy with the passengers. However, he was opposed to informing the public that their safety depended on trained nurses as attendants. Nonetheless, he presented the idea to officials at Boeing and was given permission to hire the world’s first stewardesses.

Management was skeptical at first but decided to try adding young women to the flight crew. The presence of warm, knowledgeable and professional women added on the crew might be a strong factor in convincing the public to fly.

Requirements for the first candidates were strict. They must be a graduate nurses, unmarried, no older than 25, no taller than five feet four inches and must weigh no more than 115 pounds. The height and weight requirements were practical considerations because the aircraft of the time were tiny by modern standards. The planes had narrow aisles and low ceilings, making movement inside difficult. The Boeing Air Transport model 80A carried 12 passengers. Because these planes had relatively weak engines, the weight of the crew, passengers and luggage had a significant impact on the plane’s performance and therefore safety.

Eight candidates applied to be the first stewardesses and were flown to Cheyenne in May 1930 for training. The experience was planned for four days, but lasted for two weeks when the group became snowbound.

Cheyenne was the halfway point of the San Francisco-to-Chicago route operated by Boeing. Four of the original stewardesses worked the San Francisco-to-Cheyenne leg and four traveled between Cheyenne and Chicago. Their duties included tagging passenger baggage and loading it aboard; punching each ticket at each point on the route; seeing to it that planes were properly heated and ventilated; and carrying aboard hampers filled with cold chicken, apples, rolls, cake and vacuum bottles of hot beverages. Male stewards on ships and other airlines had performed similar duties.

Additional directions stipulated: Keep the cabin immaculate; sweep the floor and dust off the seats and windowsills before each flight; check the floor bolts and make sure that all seats are securely fastened to the floor; keep the clock and altimeter wound up; correct the time as the aircraft passes through time zones; keep an eye on passengers when they go to the toilet room to be sure they go through the toilet room door and not through the emergency exit door; warn passengers against throwing anything out the window; and carry a railroad time table just in case the plane is grounded somewhere.

Originally pilots and crews wanted little to do with the new stewardesses. However, these eight women, followed by hundreds of others, soon proved their worth to the crews, passengers and the public at large by working hard, being unflappable in difficult circumstances and doing their utmost to make flying a pleasant experience. The tenure of the first eight stewardesses created a career and a legacy that has become an institution in commercial flying. By the end of the decade, the stewardess had become indispensable to the airline industry.

Stewardesses in Cheyenne continued to be trained in rather informal settings, often by the stewardesses who preceded each new group. United Air Lines opened a stewardess school in Chicago in 1938, and other airlines established training facilities elsewhere.

Aviation and Cheyenne

Commercial aviation was important to the Cheyenne airport during the 1940s. The advent of World War II boosted the city’s economy. In support of the war effort, the United Air Lines maintenance facility was expanded to become the Cheyenne Modification Center. The facility employed hundreds of people and upgraded thousands of B-17 bombers for the war.

During the war many stewardess nurses became military nurses, however, causing a shortage of trained airline attendants. United had also moved its flight training division from California to Cheyenne. Operations in the city ran continuously until the end of the war, when many airline-related industries abandoned Cheyenne.

In 1947, United expanded its routes by inaugurating flights to Hawaii, made possible by the large and powerful DC-6 aircraft. After that, Cheyenne’s maintenance facility was moved to San Francisco to a new center specifically tailored for the advanced aircraft. The flight training program, meanwhile, was moved to Denver.

Following Cheyenne’s loss of hundreds of jobs in the airline industry, United offered to relocate its stewardess school there. The company recognized the value of the long-term relationship with the city and decided not to abandon it completely. The stewardess training center in Chicago had been demolished to provide space for more hangars, thus making it necessary to find new quarters for the school.

A new, postwar school

United opened a formal stewardess training school in Cheyenne in 1947. Candidates were instructed about in-flight procedures, company history and policy, regulations, first aid, geography, airline routes and codes, food service, charm and grooming. The new facility was in the building that had formerly housed the modification center, saving the company the expense of building a new structure. The facility was housed in the office addition to the west of hangar number three, using all three floors of that building. The cafeteria was in a building between hangars two and three, and a mockup of an airplane was located in one of the hangars.

Some young women who arrived in Cheyenne to attend the stewardess school were undoubtedly shocked when they learned they would be housed in a dormitory, sharing space with their classmates. Others complained that the area was “the middle of nowhere.” Most, however, adjusted to the conditions, made friends and even came to enjoy Cheyenne. During their leisure time they often frequented local restaurants and bars. Favorite meeting places included the Belecky Ranch, the Little Bear Inn north of the city and the Wigwam Lounge in the Plains Hotel downtown.

During the school’s years of service in Cheyenne, more than 6,000 stewardesses completed their education. With the arrival of the jet age in 1958, training needs began to change. To meet the demands of commercial jet travel, United Airlines constructed a new training school in Chicago, closing the Cheyenne facility in 1961.

With the closing of the stewardess school, Cheyenne lost its last direct connection to an airline that had been a strong economic partner since the late 1920s. The Nov. 2, 1961, edition of the Wyoming Eagle lamented that aside from the loss of the economic benefits of the stewardess school, the city also lost a romantic connection to a time when ladies of the sky visited the Wigwam Lounge. The town and its airfield became quieter in 1961 with the loss of the school, and several people yearned for the time when Wyoming gave the ambassadors of the “Friendly Skies” their wings.

Editors’ note: Authors Kassel and Talbott received a Homsher research grant from the Wyoming State Historical Society to research the Stewardess School in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The authors continue to seek information about former graduates of the Cheyenne Stewardess School. Please contact them if you have information: Michael Kassel at mike.kassel@oldwestmuseum.org or Starley Talbott at starwyo@yahoo.com.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Hayes, Jack. Personal interview with Michael Kassel. April 15, 2003.
• Romeo, Patricia Seibel. Personal interview with Michael Kassel and Starley Talbott. Sept. 21, 2019.
• Stimpson, Steve. Stewardess Circular No. 1 (United Air Lines Archives, Chicago) (Hereafter referred to as UALA)
• Boeing System Revised Stewardess Manual. Jan. 15, 1931. UALA
• Reminiscing.United Air Lines 25th Anniversary Luncheon, May 22, 1955. UALA
• Wyoming Eagle. Nov. 2, 1961.

Secondary Sources

• Haring, David. “Cheyenne Airport 2000 Economic Impact Study.” Cheyenne, Wyo.: January 2002.
• Kassel, Michael. “The United Airlines Stewardess School in Cheyenne, Wyoming.” Annals of Wyoming 75, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 11-18.
• Mahler, Gwen. “Legacy of the Friendly Skies.” Marceline, Mo.: Walsworth Publishing Company, 1991.

Illustrations

• The photos of the first eight stewardesses, the stewardess serving food and the photo of Ellen Church and Steve Stimpson are from the United Air Lines Archives in Chicago. Used with thanks; scans are now in the collections of the authors. The 1951 photos of stewardesses in their caps and of the stewardess training facility are courtesy of Patricia Seibel Romeo, and are also in the authors’ collections.
• The 1930s photo of the larger group of women with the airplane and the 1958 photo of the birthday party are from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The Boeing company photo of the Model 80 biplane is from a July 24, 2017 blog post at newyorkerstateofmind. Used with thanks.

In the winter of 1831-32, 21 fur trappers survived—in fact thrived—on the Laramie Plains, but it was another matter for their horses.

On September 4th of that year they packed their mules, saddled their horses, and began riding southwest up the Laramie River from the North Platte, near today’s Fort Laramie. They planned to travel until they found beaver, then trap until snow and cold sent them back downstream. But things did not go as planned. It would be May before they finally returned, having camped out all winter in the Laramie Valley. And they would walk back.

One of the men was 22-year-old Zenas Leonard. He had left the family farm in Pennsylvania after announcing “I can make my living without picking stones.” In 1839, he published an account of his five-year adventure in the Rocky Mountains: Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard.

Traveling was easy at first. In Leonard’s words, the trappers “found the prairies or plains very extensive—unobstructed with timber or brush—handsomely situated, with here and there a small creek passing through them, and in some places literally covered with game, such as Buffaloe, White and Black tailed deer, Grizzley, Red and White Bear, Elk, Prairie Dog, wild Goat, Big horned mountain Sheep, Antelope, &c.”

But when they arrived at the foot of the Laramie Range through which “the Laramies passes,” they found it impossible to continue, as “huge rocks projecting several hundred feet high closed it to the very current.” Instead, they traveled along the base of the range to a buffalo trail leading to the crest, where they made camp. At midnight it began snowing hard; they were forced to stay put for three days.

Not bothered by the early-October blizzard, the party continued on to the Laramie Valley. Leonard describes it as long and broad “with the river Laramies passing through the centre of it, the banks of which are covered with timber, from 1/4 to 1/2 a mile wide … on a clear morning, by taking a view with a spyglass, you can see the different kinds of game that inhabit these plains, such as Buffaloe, Bear, Deer, Elk, Antelope, Bighorn, Wolves, &c.”

Beaver were abundant; they trapped twenty the first night. Then they continued upstream, periodically stopping for a few days to trap. Clearly the Laramie Valley was worth the trouble of getting there.

But by October 22, the days were consistently cold and snowy. All agreed it was time to return to winter quarters on the North Platte. They followed the Laramie River to the buffalo trail but … surprise! It was no longer passable—there was too much snow. Several men searched for an alternative route but found none. In the discussion that followed, “a majority of the company decided in favor of encamping in the valley for the winter.”

The river was the obvious place to camp. Game was abundant. Cottonwood trees would provide wood for shelters, fuel for heat and nutritious inner bark for horses and mules when grass was buried in snow. They established camp on November 4th.

Less than a month later, the horses were struggling to find grass. The men collected armloads of cottonwood bark, but “to our utter surprise and discomfiture, on presenting it to them they would not eat it, and upon examining it by tasting, we found it to be the bitter, instead of the sweet Cottonwood.” By the end of December, most of the horses had died; apparently the two mules were less picky.

They celebrated the New Year anyway. “[W]e concluded to have a feast in our best style … These men killed ten Buffaloe, from which they selected one of the fattest humps they could find and brought in, and after roasting it handsomely before the fire, we all seated ourselves upon the ground, encircling, what we there called a splendid repast to dine upon. Feasting sumptuously, cracking a few jokes, taking a few rounds with our rifles, and wishing heartily for some liquor, having none at that place we spent the day.”

Food and fuel remained abundant, but the men grew restless. Someone had heard they could buy horses in Santa Fe, so all but four men headed south on foot with beaver skins to trade. It would have been a 500-mile trek, but two weeks later, they were turned back by snow.

Finally, on April 20th, they loaded what they could on the two weak mules, cached everything else, and headed east across the Laramie Range through deep snow. Back on the plains, they stopped at the first sweet cottonwoods they came to and let the mules feast on inner bark for several days. They reached the North Platte on May 20, 1832.

Why no one in the group recognized the Laramie River cottonwoods as the bitter type is puzzling. Travelers as far back as Lewis and Clark could distinguish between the sweet and bitter types, and knew that horses would not eat the bark of the latter.

Were they an ignorant bunch? After all, they crossed the snowy Laramie Range in October, trapped beaver in the Laramie Valley into early November, and rang in the New Year with gusto in spite of losing all their horses, intending to walk to Santa Fe to get more.

Or were they skilled adventurous men not averse to hardship? Maybe it was no big deal to spend five wintry months camped on the Laramie River before walking back to the North Platte.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article first appeared online among the collections of the Albany County Historical Society. Special thanks to the author and to Kim Viner of the society for allowing its republication here.

Resources

Sources

• Leonard, Zenas. Adventures of Zenas Leonard, Fur Trader and Trapper, 1831-1836. Reprinted from the original of 1839 and edited by W. F. Wagner, M.D. Cleveland, Ohio: The Burrows Brothers Company, 1904, accessed Jan. 23, 2020 at https://books.google.com/books?id=5XR5AAAAMAAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&dq=adventures%20of%20zenas%20leonard&pg=PP2#v=onepage&q=adventures%20of%20zenas%20leonard&f=false.
• Nesom, Guy. “Narrowleaf Cottonwood: Populus angustifolia James.” Plant Guide, Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, accessed Jan. 23, 2020 at https://plants.usda.gov/plantguide/pdf/cs_poan3.pdf.

Illustrations

• The image of John C. Fremont’s “Map of Oregon and upper California,” 1848 is from the David Rumsey Map Collection online. Used with thanks, and thanks to the author for adding the fur trappers’ route.
• The other photos are by the author. Used with permission and thanks.

Often we forget freighters and their important role in the early West. We read about cowboys, outlaws, mountain men and the rest but we have few freighter heroes. They hauled massive amounts of supplies to forts and soldiers, miners, settlers and Indian reservations using oxen, horses and mules. These bullwhackers, muleskinners and teamsters were hardy souls who provided what was needed to populate the West.

The Trabing Brothers, August and Charles, play a big part in this saga in Wyoming Territory. Born in Allendorf Hesse Cassel, Germany, they arrived in America in August 1853 with their blacksmith father. August was 11, Charles, 8. August wrote that the boys worked from that early age with their father in a wagon factory and learned the smithing trade as well. In June 1863, August went to Washington D. C. and enlisted with the U.S, Army’s Quartermaster Department, serving on guard duty at the Civil War forts around Washington D. C. and as a blacksmith until 1865.

On Aug. 28, 1865, both brothers departed for the West, working for the Army as blacksmiths and wagon repairers. They traveled with a quartermaster’s train of 258 six-mule-team government wagons headed to Fort McPherson near present-day North Platte, Neb., under Captain Gillis. This expedition, led by Col. Brown of the 12th Missouri, was to drive the Sioux and Cheyenne from the valley of the Republican River. During this time the Trabing brothers also acquired retail experience, ordering and dispensing at the sutler store. The campaigns lasted about five months.

With the mission complete, they were honorably discharged in spring 1866 and went into business two and one-half miles west of Fort McPherson at Box Elder canyon, where they had a blacksmith shop, boarding house, saloon and hotel. According to their records, they “…did a very profitable business and saved money.”

Although warriors ransacked and burned the store and ranch, that the brothers rebuilt, according to August’s Indian depredation claim filed decades later with the federal government. On April 21, 1868 they were burned out a second time and some of their men were killed, including a cousin who worked for them. They suffered heavy losses in horses and cattle. Selling everything that was left, the brothers bought some condemned government horses and wagons and moved west to Laramie, Wyoming Territory.

Early days in Laramie

August, Ulrika—August’s first wife—and Charles arrived in Laramie on June 18, 1868, five weeks after the tracks of the transcontinental railroad. They soon met J. C. Walters and the three went into business. They began bidding for and getting freight contracts from Col. Benton of the Union Pacific Railroad to supply cord wood and ties for the UP at Cooper Lake Station west of Laramie and at Medicine Bow Station.

A Notice to Freighters in the Frontier Index on July 21, 1868, read: “The undersigned will employ 25 or more teams in hauling cord wood from the head of Cooper Creek to Cooper Lake Station-Union Pacific Railroad. For further information, apply to J. C. Walters or A. Trabing, Cooper Lake Station, 25 miles west of Laramie.” At Medicine Bow and Cooper Lake Station, they opened small stores, supplying whatever their freighters and tie cutters needed. Outlaws robbed them at Cooper Lake Station in 1869, and were soon captured and jailed by Albany County Sheriff Nathan K. Boswell.

On July 28 and 29, 1869, Ulrika and August Trabing bought vacant property and buildings on First Street in Laramie from W. B. Bent, land agent for the Union Pacific Railroad. This purchase included The National Theater which stood on parts of two lots. They ventured opening a saloon and theater for traveling vaudeville troupes coming in on the railroad. August was a singer and may have performed with some of the groups from time to time.

The building, refurbished and painted blue, became known as “The Old Blue Front—” a place that would figure in their story for the next 37 years. Ulrika would try running the business while August was filling the tie and wood contract at Cooper Lake but she wasn’t successful. Near this time coal was discovered at Carbon, Wyoming Territory, west of Medicine Bow. The railroad no longer needed cordwood, so the Trabings had to find other work. They decided to expand their Medicine Bow way station. They built a more substantial store and started a freighting business from there as well.

On Dec. 6, 1869, the Trabings leased their “Blue Front” building to their employee, George Weiske. In March 1870 their building would be sub-leased to Albany County as a temporary courthouse, since one had not yet been built. The Blue Front building served as the courtroom for the first jury in the world impaneling both men and women.

A store in Medicine Bow

In late December 1869 the Trabings left Laramie for Medicine Bow, on the railroad 60 miles to the northwest, with $35 worth of groceries—two wagons full—bought from Edward Ivinson. This began their mercantile and freighting career. At that time Medicine Bow had a freight depot and large quantities of military supplies were shipped in by train. From there they were freighted north to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte near present Douglas, Wyo., and later to other forts farther north. Troops were also stationed at Medicine Bow along with tie cutters and UP employees.

The road to Fort Fetterman ran 83.5 miles through the Laramie Mountains and was often closed by snow and flooding creeks in winter and spring. There were four hazardous river crossings. Floods often washed out bridges, making travel unpredictable. In 1874, weather and flooded crossings delayed freighting until July. That month, one newspaper noted the government had begun the season’s freighting to Fort Fetterman from Medicine Bow, and guessed that “Trabings are doing more business and making more money than any other house in the territory.”

By this time the Trabing businesses were growing steadily. They were freighting to Fort Fetterman using their own teams and men, operating a growing grocery store at Medicine Bow and remodeling part of their Laramie warehouse. Local newspapers published their store advertisements frequently. A March 26, 1875, Laramie newspaper describes their Medicine Bow operation “.. as one of the largest store-rooms with warehouses, corrals, stables, blacksmith-shop and emigrant houses attached to be found in Wyoming Territory. Sales last year exceeded $50,000,” or more than $1.1 million in today’s dollars.

The Trabing Brothers continued expanding, buying a ranch 17 miles north of Medicine Bow on Shirley Rim. This cattle operation became the TB Ranch.

Army contracts

But war—and the military—would bring the brothers much bigger business. About this time, troops were being dispatched from Medicine Bow to Fort Fetterman and Cantonment Reno/Fort McKinney No. 1, near the Powder River crossing of the Bozeman Trail. This action started General Crook’s campaigns of 1876 to push the tribes onto reservations and open their land to settlers, beginning the most intense year of the Indian wars, later called the Great Sioux War.

The conflicts created more business for the Trabings and their freighters, who supplied the military forts and soldiers with tons of food, hay, cordwood, rifles and ammunition. Around that time, Trabing freighters were also hauling supplies to mining camps and settlers near Medicine Bow.

In early 1877, with the tribes subdued and northern parts of Wyoming Territory opened to white settlement, the Trabings decided they needed a permanent way station for their freighters along the Bozeman Trail. They chose the Crazy Woman Crossing on the old Bozeman Trail route for water, a change of horses and supplies halfway between Fort Reno to the south and the site of the former Fort Phil Kearny to the north, and a day’s ride from each.

In the Nov. 4, 1877, Cheyenne Daily Leader, the Trabings advertised their need for 50 teams to carry freight from Medicine Bow to forts Fetterman and Reno. They offered freighters $1.25 per 100 pounds from Medicine Bow to Fort Fetterman and $2.40 per 100 pounds from Medicine Bow to Fort Reno.

Many such ads ran in the Cheyenne and Laramie papers from 1874-1883, as Trabings needed many freighters to fill contracts to haul large loads to northern Wyoming. They employed 80 to 100 freighters at various times. August Trabing was frequently listed among the freight contractors present in Cheyenne at the Army’s Camp Carlin to bid for hauling immense amounts of military goods north.

They expanded still more in 1877, remodeling and enlarging their Blue Front Store into a large wholesale and retail business. The grand opening was May 28, 1877. Three days later, a telegram informed them that thieves had broken into the Medicine Bow Store and robbed them of $2,000 to $3,000 worth of goods.

In January 1878, the Laramie Sentinelwrote that the Trabing freighting business was supplying more than three million pounds of government supplies to military posts north of Medicine Bow, and the firm was reported to have made more than $85,000 in sales the previous year, 1877—around $1.7 million today. Snow, high water and river crossing accidents continued to delay their freighting at times.

In early 1878 military reconnaissance reports concluded that Rock Creek Station, between Medicine Bow and Laramie, was a better shipping point to Fort Fetterman than Medicine Bow. A new freight warehouse and shipping depot were established there by other freighters. This threatened the Trabings’ monopoly on freight from Medicine Bow, so they built a road from Medicine Bow north to the North Platte River above the bridge at old Fort Casper. From there they headed down Salt Creek and the Powder River to the station near Fort Reno, now site of the first Fort McKinney, near the Bozeman Trail’s Powder River crossing. This saved 40 miles over the Fort Fetterman route and helped them compete in bidding for freighting contracts directly into the Powder River Basin.

Laramie newspapers reported that Trabing freighters were “shipping freight of the Second Cavalry to [the Powder River country] and has 75 teams employed and will shortly need 25 more.” During this time they were busy with the Blue Front Store in Laramie, their store in Medicine Bow, the TB ranch out of Medicine Bow and, by early 1878, with building a large store, blacksmith shop, telegraph station and post office at the Crazy Woman location.

That store, remote as it was, was robbed multiple times by outlaw gangs. After Fort McKinney moved to its second location, on Clear Creek near the future site of Buffalo, Trabings decided to build a store closer to the protection of that fort. They leased their Crazy Woman location to two families, Deacon and Walker, who later purchased that store. Because the boundary of the original military reservation around the fort allowed civilian establishments no closer than six miles, the place was called Six Mile ranch.

When the size of the reservation was reduced to where civilians could settle just two miles from the fort, the Trabings freighted their buildings piece by piece into what would become town of Buffalo, on Clear Creek, and built the first store in that location. A bill of lading from that time shows the three Trabing stores operating during that time, Laramie, Medicine Bow and “on Clear Creek near Ft. McKinney.”

They obtained large freight contracts from Rawlins, where they had leased the old courthouse as a warehouse, north to Fort Washakie and south to White River in Colorado. During 1880 one such contract was sublet to J. W. Hugus and Company of Rawlins, which failed to fulfill its contract due to weather. In November 1883, the U.S. government sued August and Charles Trabing for $76,000 for the failure. The jury ruled in favor of the Trabing Brothers. Headlines read, “Uncle Sam Beaten.” Other contracts during this period included hauling mining supplies to North Park, Colo., Cummins City (later Jelm), W.T., Douglas Creek in southern Carbon County and other locations.

Further details of Trabing Brothers accomplishments in the settling of Carbon, Johnson and Albany counties could fill a book. They were remarkable businessmen filled with energy and foresight. When Laramie city officials courted them to bring all of their business interests to that city, they reduced their obligations in the north and began selling their far-flung assets: the Medicine Bow store to J. W. Hugus in 1880 and the Buffalo store to J. H. Conrad on March 8, 1882. They concluded the sale of the TB ranch and other assets in Carbon County on Sept. 22, 1883. They built their residences and consolidated their business empire in Laramie during the next 25 years—another story.

Resources

Primary sources

• Albany County Records, Office of the County Clerk, Laramie, Wyoming Deeds Book A., pp 81 and 86.
• Albany County Records, Office of the County Clerk, Laramie, Wyoming, Miscellaneous Book A, p. 8.
• Augustus Trabing vs. The United States et. al. Indian Depredations claim no. 1432 , U.S. Court of Claims, 32 Ct. Cl. 440; 1897 U.S. Ct. Cl. Lexis 33, June 14, 1897.
• Cheyenne Daily Leader. “Wanted Immediately.” No. 41, Nov. 4, 1877, p. 4, col. 4.
• Cheyenne Daily Sun. “The Robbery of Trabing’s Ranch.” No.188, October 14, 1878, p.2, col. 5.
• Cheyenne Weekly Leader. No. 14 December 26, 1878, p. 8, col. 3. “Capture of a Band of Outlaws.”
• Frontier Index. July 21, 1868, p. 3 col. 2.
• Laramie Daily Sentinel. “Robbed Again.” No. 183, Dec. 2, 1878, p. 4, col. 2.
• Laramie Daily Sun. “From Medicine Bow.” No.77, March 26, 1875, p. 3 col. 3.
• Laramie Weekly Boomerang. “Uncle Sam Beaten.” No. 36 November 15, 1883 p. 3 col. 1.
• Laramie Weekly Sentinel.“A New Route.” No, 39, February11, 1878 p.4, col. 4; “Routes from the Railroad to Fort Fetterman.” No.183, Dec. 2, 1878, p.4, col. 2; “Teams Wanted.” No. 4 May 22, 1880, column 4; “. . .36 teams wanted to freight to North Park and Cummins City Mine . . .”No. 27, October 30, 1880 p. 3; “Trabing Block,” December 1, 1883 p. 1, cols. 1-4;
• Trabing Family Collection

Secondary sources

• Baker, Lillian. “Progress of Buffalo since Its First Store Traced by Early Pioneer.” Buffalo Bulletin, Aug. 9, 1951.
• Beery, Gladys B. Sinners & Saints, Tales of Old Laramie City. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 1994. 63-68, 99-101, 157-160.
• Beery, Gladys B. 1990. The front streets of Laramie City. Laramie, Wyo: Albany Seniors, Inc., 27-167 .
• Bollinger, G. A. The Occidental, 1879 to 2009: an historic Wyoming hotel. Buffalo, Wyo: Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum Press, 2011, 10-11.
• Carter, Charles Hanna, ed. “ AN OLD-TIMER’S STORY OF THE OLD WILD WEST, Being the Recollections of Oliver Perry Hanna. Compiled 1926. Casper, Wyo.: Endeavor Books, 1986, 61-66.
• “Gus Trabing Rugged Merchant who Pioneered First Store in This Area.” Buffalo Bulletin, Aug. 16 1962.
• Hanson, Margaret Brock. Frank Grouard, Army Scout. Kaycee, Wyo.: published by author, 1983, 166-172, 184.
• Hanson, Margaret Brock, Ed. Powder River Country, the Papers of J. Elmer Brock. Kaycee, Wyo.: 1981, published by the editor, pp, 163, 166, 175, 176.
• “Lawless Elements Brazen in 1878. Road Agents Traveled Along Bozeman Trail Plundering Travelers and Stores.” Buffalo Bulletin, July 4, 1963.
• Miller, Mark. Military Sites in Wyoming, 1700-1920: Historic Context. Laramie, Wyo. : Wyoming Dept. of State Parks & Cultural Resources, 2012.
• Murray, Bob. “Mysteries by the Wayside: Trabing.” Country Journal, Aug. 6, 1980.
• Murray, Robert, Cultural Resource (Historic) Inventory of the Casper District of Wyoming: Technical Appendices and Bibliography, Vol. II, Sheridan, Wyoming, Inc., February, 1978.
• Pence, Mary Lou. Boswell, The Story Of A Frontier Lawman. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Pioneer Printing & Stationary Co., 1978.
• Smith, Omie. Trabing—Wyoming Territory. Buffalo, Wyo.: Johnson County Library, 1958.
• “Starting Settlement—Trabing.” Frontier City Argus, Byron, Ohio, May 29, 1879.
• Wall, J. Tom. Crossing Old Trails to New in North Central Wyoming. Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1973. 6-9, 13, 27.

Illustrations

• The A.J. Russell photo of the freighters waiting for the supply train at the end of tracks is from the online Russell collections at the Oakland Museum of California. Used with thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from the author’s collection of Trabing family photos. Used with permission and thanks. The photo of the log store in early Buffalo is reproduced from the Buffalo Bulletin of August 9, 1951. Used here with thanks. The accompanying article claims the photo is the oldest surviving photo from Pease County, before it was renamed Johnson County.

On March 2, 1863, Lt. Col. William Collins wrote to his superior officer, stationed in Omaha, Nebraska Territory. “It had stormed more or less for two days, and on the third day (Feb. 28) a few hours after leaving camp a terrific storm came on which lasted all day and into the night. The air was so filled with snow that it was often impossible to see ten yards in any direction. … Finding it impossible to kindle a fire on account of the violence of the wind, after a delay of about half an hour the march was resumed.”

Two men froze to death on this march of 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry’s Companies A and C from Fort Laramie to Fort Halleck, immediately north of Elk Mountain in present south-central Wyoming.

Just the year before, stagecoach magnate Ben Holladay had changed his route from the old Oregon Trail along the North Platte and Sweetwater Rivers to a new alternative across what’s now southern Wyoming, which came to be called the Overland Trail. The trail ran up the South Platte from Julesburg through present La Porte, Colo., and then northwest along what is now U.S. 87, past Virginia Dale. When the trail reached the Laramie Plains it turned west and continued across what’s now Wyoming on a route roughly parallel to but generally 10 to 20 miles south of present I-80.

Denver’s boom was subsiding from the late 1858-1861 Pike’s Peak gold rush, and Holladay now offered daily passenger and mail service from east of Denver to Salt Lake City and beyond. To serve his route through present Wyoming, he built about 17 stations, some for changing horses, and the others for passengers’ food and lodgings. All were well provisioned and had herds of horses and mules. Emigrants were still traveling west by wagon train, and commercial shipping ran both directions. Native tribes still roamed the plains, hunting, warring against other tribes and, more now as traffic increased than they had in previous decades, attacking white travelers, settlers, freighters and stagecoach stations.

Fort Halleck

With the start of the Civil War in 1861, military leaders withdrew large numbers of regular army troops from the western frontier to fight in the Union Army. This left many western Army posts undermanned, including Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail. Their first priority was to protect the line of the new transcontinental telegraph, which ran along the Oregon Trail. It was difficult or impossible for these few soldiers to also guard the Overland Trail.

As a result, for a year or more, large stretches of both routes were undefended. President Lincoln asked Mormon leader Brigham Young for help, and during the spring of 1862, Mormon militia patrolled the Platte-Sweetwater route. They were led by Lot Smith, whose militiamen had burned U.S. Army supply wagons during the so-called Utah War just five years earlier,

The Army, meanwhile, filled its need for manpower with untried soldiers from newly recruited volunteer regiments. To defend the Overland Trail, these newcomers built Fort Halleck starting in July 1862. It was the only military post in the 350 miles between Camp Collins—later the city of Fort Collins, Colo.—and Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming.

Fort Halleck became a base from which soldiers regularly traveled to defend emigrants, settlers and stagecoach passengers and stations. Nearby, at the Elk Mountain station, soldiers attended dances and parties, and weddings were held. On the dark side, in addition to skirmishes with Natives in both directions along the trail, a hanging and one especially horrific episode occurred at the fort itself.

Building the Fort

The fort was named after Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck of the Union Army. Men from Companies A and D of the Ohio 6th Cavalry were detailed to do the work, cutting down trees from the timber on Elk Mountain’s north face. Company C arrived in early September. Maj. John O. Ferrell, the fort’s first commander, supervised the building.

Later that month, Jim Bridger guided 10 men from Fort Laramie through Sybille Canyon in the Laramie Range to Fort Halleck. In the party were Lt. Col. Collins, his nearly 18-year-old civilian son, Caspar, and eight soldiers. On Sept. 30, Caspar wrote to his mother from Fort Halleck, “Three clear streams run through the garrison. The men have their stables built, but have not got their houses done. … Some Mexican teamsters have built themselves a house, partly under ground, which can be made as hot as a bake oven by a big fireplace in one corner. … [The Army] have to haul their hay for this place about ten miles and their corn from seven hundred to nine hundred miles.”

In October, Company C left Fort Halleck for Fort Laramie. Company B of the 9th Kansas Cavalry and the new Fort Halleck commander, Capt. Aspah Allen, arrived in November. By Christmas, the men had built two sets of company quarters, two 100-horse stables, storehouses, a headquarters, an officers’ quarters, bake house, sutler store and jail. A sutler was a civilian storekeeper, granted a monopoly on sales at military posts, with prices approved by a board of officers.

Although logs were used for most of Fort Halleck’s construction, lumber was hauled in from Denver and from a sawmill at Laramie Peak. As at Fort Laramie, there was no surrounding stockade.

Chasing stolen horses

Around Feb. 18, 1863, according to soldiers then stationed at Fort Halleck, some Arapaho stole about 75 ponies from a group of Ute south of the fort. At Pass Creek stagecoach station, 10 miles west of Fort Halleck, Ute warriors asked to borrow mules from the stagecoach company to pursue the Arapaho. When the station keeper refused, the Indians reportedly took the mules anyway.

Next, Capt. Allen sent 20 men to chase the Utes and recover the mules. Only 20 men could be spared, and even this small number left the fort under-manned. Two subsequent expeditions pursued the Ute, who were chasing the Arapaho. One version of this episode notes that the Ute eventually returned the mules to the station; another says that 24 Fort Halleck men caught up with the Ute, who fled, leaving the mules behind.

When news of this unfolding event reached Fort Laramie, members of the 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, including three officers, left for Fort Halleck, only to be caught in the severe blizzard in which two of the men died, and about which Col. Collins later wrote his superior. Collins himself came near to freezing to death and was briefly disabled. In the aftermath of this expedition, Dr. Andrew Holladay, brother of Ben Holladay, cared for these men at Fort Halleck.

Pressing emigrants into service

On July 16, 1863, a wagon train, including diarist F. E. W. Patten, camped at the Medicine Bow stage station, 10 miles east of Fort Halleck. There, the staff reported to the party that Indians had recently stolen horses from the Elk Mountain stage station, about a mile east of Fort Halleck. Seeing Indians near their camp, the emigrants corralled their 39 horses.

That night, responding to horse thefts throughout the area, including 200 head stolen from the vicinity of Fort Laramie, 70 enlisted men and two officers rode east from Fort Halleck. They camped near the Patten wagon train. The next day, Patten and his party continued traveling, stopping to rest at Rattlesnake Creek, six or more miles west of Fort Halleck. A messenger from the fort arrived, summoning many of the emigrants back to the fort to help defend it, since apparently only three or four soldiers remained. About 24 hours later, when the 72-man soldier party returned, Patten and his companions resumed their journey.

Another emigrant, George Bruffey, wrote that in September of that year, his train of 50 wagons, 47 men, nine women and 14 children stopped for two days at Fort Halleck. During their stay, Bruffey reported, soldiers twice raced their horses with one from the wagon train, losing both times.

Dr. John H. Finfrock arrived at Fort Halleck in October 1863 and two months later was placed on duty there as the Army physician. Physician Andrew Holladay left on Dec. 19. In 1863, the Ben Holladay stagecoach company reported losses from horses and mules stolen near Fort Halleck at about $41,400—around $871,000 today.

The first part of 1864

During 1864, spring snowstorms delayed stagecoaches and emigrants on the Overland Trail. Soldiers at the fort continued to assist civilians over the expanse of the trail and surrounding country. On March 27, Finfrock noted in his diary, “One of the worst Snow Storms of the season.” Next day, “Storm still raging but moderated.” On April 2, “Still snowing – 14 inches of snow on the ground at 8 P.M. and still snowing - no coach from East or West.”

Caspar Collins stopped at Fort Halleck on June 12 with a party escorting James A. Evans, a surveyor for the transcontinental railroad route. Collins had been commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the 11th Ohio Calvary.

The Fort Bridger sutler, William A. Carter, wrote to the commanding officer at Fort Halleck on Aug. 10, requesting an escort for his 25 wagons of supplies and ammunition, soon to be traveling from the east through the Laramie Range to Fort Halleck. Although it is not known whether men from the fort escorted these supply wagons, Carter’s request suggests the likely scope and geographical range of the soldiers’ duties.

A lynching at the fort

Finfrock had two black servants who drove his ambulance on trips from the fort to fetch or treat a civilian. It is unclear whether these men were enlisted men, civilian employees of the Army or privately employed by Finfrock—though he kept careful accounts and never listed any payments to them.

On Sept. 25, Finfrock wrote in his diary, “Asa [one of his ambulance drivers] killed by boys of Co. D for committing rape upon little girl just 12 year old.” Another version of the episode states that Asa insulted and kissed a “white girl, with further intentions.”

Accounts of the lynching also vary, but agree that either before or after his death, Asa was skinned, and the skin fastened to a wall of the fort. Finfrock wrote, “Dissected him - Exciting time.” Finfrock's diary entries were brief and impersonal. Therefore, there's no way to know if his excitement is purely scientific or if there was a darker side to it.

British writer William Hepworth Dixon heard about the episode, commenting in his book, New America, that life in the American West was of little value compared to in England; in the West, he wrote, a white man was valued “little more than a horse and a black man less than a dog.”

Another wintry march

On Nov. 16, 1864, Company K of the 11th Ohio Cavalry was officially transferred from Fort Laramie to Fort Halleck. These 75 soldiers and two officers began their march three days later. Snow covered the ground, and the men had to dig through the snow to make a bare place for their sleeping bags. After five days of hard travel, sometimes with not even a campfire at night, all the men reached Fort Halleck on Nov. 24.

That day, Sgt. Lewis Byram Hull, quartermaster of Company K, noted in his diary, “Have to go into open quarters without bunks, tables, or floors, the Iowa boys [Company D of the 7th Iowa Volunteer Cavalry] having taken everything out when they heard we were coming. Take everything into our own quarters to keep it from being stolen.”

Apparently, the Iowa men had to camp outside for a few days until Capt. J. L. Humfreville, the new post commander, arrived from Fort Laramie with the payroll he’d traveled to Denver to collect. Then Iowa Company D could leave with their commander, Capt. W. D. Fouts. Humfreville brought 13 more Company K soldiers, raising the strength of the garrison to 91.

Finfrock noted emigrants passing Halleck in 1864: “Waggons, 4264, Stock 50000, Men, etc 17584.”

Fort Halleck in 1865

Company K, before having to fight any resistance from the tribes, battled cold and snow through mid-April 1865. Many stagecoaches were delayed, and two Company K men froze to death in a storm while guarding Fort Halleck cattle, horses and mules pastured east of the fort.

Quartermaster Hull wrote on March 8, “Cold and very stormy. Can not see the mountains for the snow. … No wood in Post; all playing ‘freeze out.’” Next day he continued, “[N]o wood yet; have to tear down old shop for fuel to keep from freezing. Too cold to work, so go to bed to keep warm. No coaches; roads completely blockaded.”

Evidently, later that month freighters delivered a large load of corn. On March 22, Hull wrote, “Commence moving corn pile; a great many open sacks and considerable loose corn.” He spent the next week and more dealing with it, on March 29 noting, “Clear the snow off the corn pile and cover it with canvas.” On April 4, he was still shoveling corn.

On April 9, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, effectively ending the Civil War.

A hanging

On May 13, Bob Jennings, a trapper and Southern sympathizer, shot Horace “Hod” Russell, who sometimes cooked at Fort Halleck for the men. Russell and his wife also kept a boardinghouse at the Elk Mountain stagecoach station, and periodically welcomed the soldiers and other residents of the fort to their home for dances.

Russell often traveled to Denver for supplies, and may have been on one of these trips when he stopped at the Cooper Creek station about 27 miles east of Fort Halleck. Sources differ on the story of the murder: one says Jennings ambushed Russell and another that the two men got into an argument. The stationmaster’s wife at Cooper Creek witnessed the shooting.

William Averell “Medicine Bill” Comstock, an army scout and friend of the Indians, hunted Jennings down, helped by a few Arapaho scouts. On May 20, they turned him in at Fort Halleck. Capt. Humfreville presided over the trial the next day. While the stationmaster’s wife, Mrs. Fisk, was traveling to the fort to testify, he was sentenced to be hanged. “Sentence executed between one and two,” Quartermaster Hull wrote. “[S]aid that he did murder Russell and was not sorry for it. His last words were ‘Hurrah for Jeff Davis and the Southern confederacy.’”

“Give Indians a large quantity of corn,” Hull added. “Plenty of them around, big, little, old and young.”

Retribution for the Sand Creek massacre

In 1865, a wave of Indian attacks broke across the whole region, in reaction to the Sand Creek massacre of the previous November, in which Col. John Chivington and his men killed about 135 peaceful Cheyenne and some Arapaho, including many women and children, at a camp on Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado.

In July, Arapaho warriors would join thousands of their Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux allies from farther north to attack Platte Bridge Station at present Casper, Wyo. Caspar Collins and two dozen other soldiers were killed. In August, Brigadier Gen. Patrick Connor led a huge, three-pronged Army expedition north into the Powder River Basin—with entirely inconclusive results.

War intensified along the Overland Trail as well. On June 2, 1865, Hull wrote, “Messenger down from Platte [stage station] for assistance; says Indians are running off stock and killing station keepers. Lt. Brown and thirty men go up to see what the trouble is. Captain [Humfreville] gone to Rock creek.” The Platte station was about 30 miles west of Fort Halleck.

The worst battle occurred at the Sage Creek station, another three miles west of the Platte station. Lt. Brown wrote to Capt. Humfreville on June 14, “After an hour’s severe fighting … [the Company K detachment] were compelled to evacuate. … The moment they left the station they were completely surrounded. There ensued a desperate fight; the detachment retreated [a few miles west] toward Pine Grove Station.” Naming seven men killed, wounded or missing, and further describing the battle’s aftermath, Brown concluded, “Ten of the men have returned to this post [Fort Halleck]; the balance are doing all they can to keep open the road, but the force is inadequate to cope with the number of Indians.”

The Colfax excursion

About a month previously, on May 20, 1865, U.S. Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax left Atchison, Kan., bound for California on a trip to gather information for a Joint Senate and House Committee to recommend changes in the government’s policy toward the Indians. Despite news of Indian attacks all along the stagecoach route they were to travel, Colfax’s party continued west.

They arrived at Fort Halleck on June 6. Ten men and two officers escorted them to the Bridger Pass stage station, about 50 miles southwest near the Continental Divide, during the same time Indians were attacking stations all along the Overland Trail. Colfax and his companions reached Salt Lake City safely and continued on to California without incident.

Change of men

Company K of the 11th Ohio left Fort Halleck for Fort Laramie in late June and was replaced by five companies of the 11th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. This brought more men, of greater experience, to patrol and defend the Overland Trail, just before Indian attacks tapered off in the fall.

Civilians employed at the fort in 1865 were a clerk, storekeeper/forage master, blacksmith and guide.

The final half-year

Information is sparse on the last six months at Fort Halleck. Apparently, compared to 1865, it was a much quieter duty for the various troops serving there. The last soldiers to arrive, on June 19, 1866, were the 18th U.S. Infantry, Companies A and F, commanded by Capt. Henry R. Mizner. The fort was decommissioned on July 4. The 5th U.S. Volunteers Squad F, who had been there since the previous November, remained until July 14, dismantling the buildings to transport the materials to Fort John Buford, soon to be named Fort Sanders, near present Laramie, Wyo.

In all, about 23 companies of cavalry regiments from Ohio, Kansas, Iowa, Michigan and New York, plus some U.S. cavalry and U.S. volunteer companies, served at Fort Halleck during its four years.

Exhuming graves

By 1878, the cemetery at Fort Halleck had no fence, and livestock were grazing in it. The Army disinterred 40 graves, including some civilians, on Jan. 4, 1879, re-interring these remains in the Fort McPherson National Cemetery in Nebraska.

Although relatively little information is available about Fort Halleck, it was a crucial military post whose soldiers helped maintain what safety was possible on a long, dangerous thoroughfare.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Brown, James. Report to Capt. Jacob Humfreville. June 14, 1865. In Cullimore, Lee M. The Boys of Company K: Ohio Cavalry Soldiers in the West During the Civil War. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 2012, 191-192.
• Bruffey, George A. Eighty-One Years in the West. Bethesda, Md.: A microfiche project of University Publications of America, 1998. In Kinnaman, Daniel L. A Little Piece of Wyoming. Rawlins, Wyo.: Kinnaman Publications, 1996, 60.
• Collins, Caspar. Letter to his mother. Sept. 30, 1862. In Kinnaman, Daniel L. A Little Piece of Wyoming. Rawlins, Wyo.: Kinnaman Publications, 1996, 54.
• Collins, William Oliver. Letter to Gen. James Craig. March 2, 1863. In Cullimore, Lee M. The Boys of Company K: Ohio Cavalry Soldiers in the West During the Civil War. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 2012, 124-126.
• Dixon, William Hepworth. New America. 1867. Reprint. N.p. Forgotten Books, 2016. In Kinnaman, Daniel L. A Little Piece of Wyoming. Rawlins, Wyo.: Kinnaman Publications, 1996, 76.
• Finfrock, John H. Diary. 1863-1864. Box 7, Finfrock Family Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo. (Hereafter AHC).
• Fort Halleck Photofile, AHC.
• Hull, Myra E., ed. “Soldiering on the High Plains: The Diary of Lewis Byram Hull, 1864-1866,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 7, 1938, accessed March 7, 2020 at http://www.kancoll.org/khq/1938/38_1_hull.htm.
• Patten, F.E.W. Diary. 1863. In Kinnaman, Daniel L. A Little Piece of Wyoming. Rawlins, Wyo.: Kinnaman Publications, 1996, 58.

Secondary Sources

• Bagley, Will. “Fort Bridger.” WyoHistory.org, accessed April 13, 2020 at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/fort-bridger.
• Colorado Encyclopedia. "Colorado Gold Rush," Jan. 7, 2020, accessed April 3, 2020 at https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/colorado-gold-rush.
• Cullimore, Lee M. The Boys of Company K: Ohio Cavalry Soldiers in the West During the Civil War. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 2012, 119-129, 161-197.
• Frazer, Robert W. Forts of the West: Military Forts and Presidios and Posts Commonly Called Forts West of the Mississippi River to 1898. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, 181.
• Kinnaman, Daniel L. A Little Piece of Wyoming. Rawlins, Wyo.: Kinnaman Publications, 1996, 41, 52-105.
• Morton, Julius Sterling, Albert Watkins, and George L. Miller. Illustrated History of Nebraska, Vol. 1. 3rd. ed. Lincoln: Western Publishing and Engraving Co., 1911, 349-350, accessed March 9, 2020 at https://books.google.com/books?id=hHkUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA350&lpg=PA350&dq="dr.+Holladay"+nebraska&source=bl&ots=w2tr_SdstJ&sig=ACfU3U0aWGdlEUHVfmm67N1KXI4AoFguzg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi-sabUqo3oAhU_CjQIHdLkAicQ6AEwBXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q="dr.%20Holladay"%20nebraska&f=false.
• Murray, Robert A. Military Posts of Wyoming. Ft. Collins, Colo.: The Old Army Press, 1974, 53.
• Palmieri, Dr. Anthony and Chris Humberson. “Medical Incidents in the Life of Dr. John H. Finfrock.” Annals of Wyoming 53, no. 2 (Fall 1981): 64-69, accessed April 1, 2020 at https://archive.org/details/annalsofwyom53121981wyom/.
• Pike's Peak Gold Rush. Wikipedia, accessed April 28, 2020 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike's_Peak_Gold_Rush.
• Strayer-Hanson, Frances. Medicine Valley Pioneers: Closing the Overland Trail, Opening the Union Pacific Railroad. Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, 2009, 93-96.

Illustrations

• The drawing of Fort Halleck by Bugler C. Moellman of the 11th Ohio Cavalry is from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.
• The map of the Overland Trail is from a U.S. Forest Service website. Used with thanks. Click here to see a version of the map with many more tales of the Overland Trail attached.
• The photo of Schuyler Colfax is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Overland Trail marker, where the trail crosses Wyoming Highway 130 north of Saratoga, is by Tom Rea.

When the Union Pacific railroad tracks reached Cheyenne in the fall of 1867, three little newspapers had already appeared on the streets of what soon would become Wyoming Territory’s capital.

But the Frontier Index, which began publication in Wyoming a few months later, has attracted the most attention from newspaper historians during the past 150 years. The Index came to be called the “Press on Wheels” as it was published in five or perhaps six end-of-tracks towns that sprang up in southern Wyoming (then Dakota Territory) as the railroad’s graders and track-layers moved across the coal-rich southern part of the future state in 1867-68.

Press equipment for the Index was hauled by ox wagons ahead of the tracks from Kearney, Nebraska Territory, to North Platte, N.T., to Julesburg, Colorado Territory and then to Fort Sanders, just south of what soon became the town of Laramie. There, the Index was issued for the first time in Wyoming. Subsequently it was headquartered in Laramie, perhaps in Benton—east of present Rawlins near where the tracks crossed the North Platte River—Green River City, Bryan and southeast of present Evanston at Gilmer, which soon was renamed Bear River City at the request of the Index’s publisher.

The Index has also drawn attention because of the blatant anti-African American, anti-Native American and anti-Chinese attitudes displayed often in its pages by its owners and editors, two brothers from Virginia named Legh and Fred Freeman. The Freemans had served the rebel cause in the Civil War and, afterward, were dead set against giving the vote to African Americans. In essence they were white supremacists, still fighting. They hated Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, calling him “Useless Slaughter Grant—” an allusion to the hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers under his command who died in the war—and they hated his Republican allies’ Reconstruction program to extend civil rights to the formerly enslaved.

In those years the Republican Party was still the party of Lincoln. This was the party that had joined Abolitionism to the Union cause, had won the war and pushed through the revolutionary 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution—ending slavery, extending citizenship to former slaves and the vote to men of color. In coming decades the Republican party would abandon those priorities and transform into the party of business enterprise and corporate power.

The Freemans were Democrats, members of the party that traced its roots to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Its members saw themselves as the party of small farmers, small government and white men. Not until the 1930s did the party begin paying at least lip service to civil rights for black people. In the 1960s, when Democrats pushed through the Civil Rights Act, southern whites switched to the Republican Party.

During the Civil War, many Northern Democrats had little sympathy for the abolitionist cause and hoped for a peace settlement for the Confederacy. Angling for more unity in the North’s war effort, Lincoln, when he ran for president a second time in 1864, chose as his running mate Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee. When Lincoln was assassinated at war’s end, Johnson became president.

In the spring of 1868, the Republican-dominated Congress impeached but failed to convict Johnson, who had strong sympathies for the previously slaveholding class in the South and had turned out to be the most outspokenly racist president the nation has seen. That summer, the Republicans nominated Grant for president: the Index thus was published across the future Wyoming in an election year of deep divisions and partisanship.

The Index, perhaps out of old, anti-Union Army sentiments, also frequently criticized the U.S. Army units sent west to protect the railroad builders. The paper charged that Gen. John Gibbon, a veteran of Bull Run and Gettysburg, was misusing government funds for private gain at Fort Sanders.

Finally, the Index unintentionally achieved a sort of immortality when its support of a vigilante mob’s hanging of three robbers—“garroters,” they were called in the paper—led to a riot at Bear River City by liquored-up graders and outlaws who freed a fellow railroad grader from the newly-built jail and then burned the Index’s office and destroyed its presses.

This occurred Nov. 20, 1868. Grant had been elected president 17 days earlier. Though reports of whether anyone was killed during the riot are contradictory, Legh Freeman could very well have been a casualty if he had not been warned of the mob’s approach and escaped on horseback.

The Freemans

Frederick Kemper Freeman and Legh Richmond Freeman were born in Culpeper, Va. northeast of Charlottesville in 1841 and 1842, respectively, two of 12 children in the farming family of Arthur B. and Mary Freeman. They had slaveholders among their ancestors. One of the ancestors was an overseer for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. An uncle on their mother’s side would become the first post-war native-son governor of Virginia from 1875-79.

Their father for a time was a railroad depot agent at Gordonsville, Va., which is most likely where Legh learned telegraphy. He served as a telegraph operator in the Confederate Army until he was captured in May 1864 in eastern Kentucky and held at a Union prison on Rock Island in the Mississippi River between Illinois and Iowa. Frederick served in the signal corps.

In October 1864, Legh took advantage of a call from President Lincoln for prisoners at Rock Island to swear allegiance to the North and be sent west to man forts and protect Oregon Trail travelers. Thus, on the day in April 1865 when the South surrendered at Appomattox, Legh the “galvanized Yankee” arrived at Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory, and became a telegraph operator there.

The Kearny Herald had been founded in 1862 by Moses H. Sydenham, who sold it to Hiram Brundage, also a telegraph operator, and Seth P. Mobley, a cavalry soldier. (Brundage had previously published the first printed newspaper in what would become the state of Wyoming, the Daily Telegraph, while he was the telegraph operator at Fort Bridger in southwest Wyoming in 1863.)

Legh Freeman bought out and began publishing the Herald and, according to a 1979 biography of Legh, he interviewed Jim Bridger. Many years later, Sydenham recalled Legh Freeman as “a red-hot, unreconstructed ‘secessionist’ fresh from the southland.” But Legh soon developed a case of wanderlust, so he asked his brother Frederick in 1866 to come to Kearney and take over the newspaper.

During the next three months Legh traveled to California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah, often sending dispatches back to his brother for publication in their Index, sometimes under his nom de plume “Gen. Horatio Vattel, Lightning Scout of the Mountains.” During this time the brothers in their Index began frequently promoting the founding of a town named Freemansburg along the Colorado River in western Arizona, which never materialized. They predicted their town would become the capital of a new state of Aztec.

So Frederick edited and published their newspaper as it moved with the railroad builders. After moving to North Platte, N.T., the Freemans acquired a new Washington hand-press and the paper was renamed the Frontier Index.

Boosting towns and bashing tribes

Because the transcontinental railroad route dipped a short distance into Colorado Territory at Julesburg, Freeman published some issues of the Index there before moving the press ahead of the track layers to Cheyenne. Researchers have concluded that they did not publish any papers in Cheyenne; soon the brothers moved on across the Laramie Mountains to Fort Sanders ahead of the tracks. During this trip the wagon carrying their press and type cases capsized and ran over Fred in 20-degrees-below-zero weather. A wagon and personnel were sent from Fort Sanders to rescue him.

Many of the Indexes published in Wyoming can be searched and read at the Wyoming Newspaper Project’s web site. Many other issues have not survived. One hallmark of the existing issues of the four-page paper was its hyperbolic boosterism. Even before the tracks reached Laramie in May 1868, the Frontier Index was already proclaiming the Union Pacific would choose Laramie as its chief “half-way” city between Omaha and Utah, and that Cheyenne, often referred to derogatorily as “Shian,” and its newspapers would soon dry up and blow away.

The April 21st issue, for example, said that none of the railroad towns established through Nebraska and Wyoming “have one-hundredth part of the natural advantages that Laramie boasts of,” such as iron and copper ores, “coal cropping out from one end of the plains to the other,” gypsum, gold and silver, timber and “very attractive farming lands of which this whole valley is composed.”

Fred Freeman then exclaimed: “[T]ell us if we have not reached the real paradise of the western world. ... Laramie will prosper and become the pride of western people. ... The valley of the Nile offered not one half the flattering inducements to early settlement that we find here in this magnificent valley.” As late as September 1868, the Index was predicting that “Laramie will undoubtedly be the permanent capital of our new Territory.”

A week later, Freeman predicted that in six months “Shian will be composed of two saloons, two dance-houses—and another saloon.”

Another theme prominent in the Index’s pages was a hatred of Indians and, even more so, of the government’s “Commishers—” peace commissioners—including Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. The peace commission that spring negotiated a treaty at Fort Laramie between the plains tribes and the whites pouring into the West. “[H]ow kind it is in Sherman and the balance of the peace commissioners,” Legh Freeman noted sarcastically in the September 22 edition, “to give [the tribes] arms, ammunition and scalping knives to flay the frontier Democrats.”

On May 22nd, Freeman predicted that the nomination of Ulysses S. Grant to run for president on the Republican ticket would bury “the Republican party forever, and guarantees the victory of the Democratic or white man’s ticket.” At Green River City in August, the Index predicted that Grant’s Republican platform “will Africanise and Indianise our whole mountain region.”

In every issue the Index promoted the Democratic national ticket of Horatio Seymour for president and Francis Preston Blair for vice president.

An election year

In its June 9th issue, the Index described a visit to Laramie by railroad of eight carloads of New Yorkers and Chicagoans, including reporters from the leading newspapers. First they went on west to watch the track-laying and then returned to visit the gambling, dance and music halls of Laramie. “One Chicago gent remarked that our town was despretely [sic] wicked; we replied that the only difference between Laramie and eastern towns is that the people of Laramie are open and above board in all of their dissipations, while eastern people kept all of theirs behind the curtain,” Freeman wrote. (The June 30th issue reported a man found literally dead-drunk “in Askew’s tent. Death caused by excessive dissipation.”)

On June 16th the Index said Alexander Pyper of Salt Lake City was in Laramie preparing for 8,000 European emigrants on their way to join the Mormons in Utah. “They will start overland [by wagon train] from Laramie,” the report said.

On June 26th the Index discussed proceedings in Washington aimed at carving a new Territory of Wyoming out of southwestern Dakota Territory. Backers of Colorado statehood opposed the idea, the Index reported, because they wanted to have the population the railroad would bring included as part of Colorado. The Index also declared that when Wyoming Territory was created, “intelligent Western men should be appointed as territorial officers rather than “old, worn out Eastern politicians.” President Grant did not follow this advice.

On June 30th, the Index noted that its editor Fred K. Freeman had been appointed a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in New York City beginning July 4th. On July 3rd the Index said the 4th should be celebrated as the day on which the Convention meets “to frame a platform that will insure regenerated Independence of the white race.”

In the law enforcement report on July 7th the Index reported arrests for “females on the streets in male’s costume.”

Green River City

By Aug. 11, 1868, the Frontier Index had arrived by ox train at Green River City, Dakota Territory—the present Green River, Wyo. That issue includes a description of Legh Freeman’s previous railroad trip to the end of tracks at Benton. At Benton, the Index reported, Grant had given a campaign speech and afterward, “Buffalo Bill mounted a dry goods box at a street corner and returned thanks to the people for the splendid ovation (that was not) given.”

Also at Benton, Freeman met “a very prominent individual who thought a negro was as good as a white man, and a darned sight better than some white men.” Freeman replied that he thought “a ring tailed monkey was better than any white man who seeks to degrade anglo-saxons by comparison with any inferior race.”

This and subsequent issues included “The Motto of this Column:” “Only WHITE MEN to be naturalized in the United States. The RACES and SEXES in their respective spheres as God Almighty intended them.”

As they moved to Green River the Freemans called their paper “the Star of Empire taking its way westward” and “the official organ of the Armies of Masonic Democracy.”

Legh told his readers that Gen. Grenville Dodge, the Union Pacific’s chief engineer; Jack Casement, boss of the UP construction; and Col. John Wanless, “the proprietor of the largest wholesale houses at Laramie City and Fort Sanders,” were in town “looking after the winter terminus interests. Wanless seized our hand with ‘Is this Leg[h]? ... I left your brother (Hon. Fred K. Freeman) in New York as high as a kite!’”

In a 1903 article reviewing Legh Freeman’s time as a newspaper publisher in Ogden, Utah in the mid-1870s, the Ogden Standard said Legh “was a strong anti-‘Mormon.’” But it certainly appears he held a different view in 1868, as shown in a long discourse in the Sept. 18, 1868, Frontier Index, after a reader asked him what he thought of the Mormons:

We favor [the Mormons] because they are white people who have improved a savage desert waste when they were isolated thousands of miles from the necessaries and comforts of life and because they are white we want to see their one hundred thousand people ... admitted to the rights of citizen-ship before the polygamy-practicing Chinese, Indians and negroes are given the right of suffrage. ... We oppose the privilege of voting being extended to negroes, Indians and Chinese, at least until the industrious white citizens of Utah are given a State Government. Utah should have been admitted fifteen years ago!

Freeman noted to the reader that “the polygamists of the inferior races are being shipped into America by tens of thousands, and whom the Republicans are trying so streneously [sic] to have admitted to full citizen-ship in all the States, regardless of the will of the people of those States. . . . The Mexican Greasers, barbarians of Russian America [Alaska], Chinese, Indians and Negroes and all inferior races . . . .” He noted that the Mormons were supplying Green River with bread, meat, vegetables and fruit. “Lastly, we favor white men of all nationalities and believe in keeping all inferior races in their respective spheres, as God Almighty originally created them.”

On August 18th, the Index reported that one of the Union Pacific’s grading contractors—who were usually far ahead of the track-layers—was setting off “heavy blasts at the rock cut five miles east” of Green River and that the tracks would reach the town in about 30 days.

The Freemans loathed Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, a leading opponent of slavery in Congress before the Civil War and a fierce advocate of civil rights for former slaves during Reconstruction. After Stevens died on August 11th, the Index issued forth a “Glory to God in the highest. Death is victorious over the leader of the enemies of the white race.” Stevens’ “carcass,” the newspaper noted, was escorted from Washington to Lancaster, Pa., by an African American military company in the District of Columbia with only four white men in the funeral train—and “they were white only on the outside.”

The Freemans never hesitated to praise their own work. On September 8th Legh wrote that the Index “is eagerly sought for by our whole community. It is looked upon as the only outspoken, independent people’s organ in the Territory, and is admired by all parties for its anti-military Democratic bravery.” The paper’s influence, however, probably didn’t match its rhetoric.

The Index strongly supported Gen. John B. S. Todd of Ft. Randall, Dakota Territory in his race for Dakota’s delegate to Congress that fall. Todd was a cousin of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Lincoln. “None but enemies of the white race will vote for any one but Todd,” the paper noted, predicting he would badly beat the two leading candidates, Republican-independent Walter Burleigh and Republican Solomon Spink, both of whom the Index called “mongrels.” Spink came to Green River to campaign, but, according to the Index, “Stink or slink, the riptail wrangler and radical roaring rumpite” drank so much while playing billiards that he “lost all his oratory.” In the end, Spink won the election by a large margin.

On October 6 the Union Pacific tracks reached Green River City. As the editor looked eastward “we saw the breath ascending from the monster nostrils of the Iron Horse.”

Wild times at Bear River City

By November 3 the Index had moved to Bear River City near present Evanston, Wyo., and immediately began proclaiming that “the town is the greatest success of any founded on the line of the Great National Highway. ... Houses and streets are built up by magic. ... A jail is being built. Great is Bear River.”

In the same issue, the Index reported that somebody went crazy from bad whiskey and opened fire with a pistol in the Southern Restaurant on Uintah Street, severely wounding four men in their legs. It found that “a prize fight in front of our office just after our arrival is another evidence of the progress of civilization.” In short, the paper noted, it was “Times tip top, and prospects bright.”

Publication of the Index, like the town itself, was short-lived, however. On November 10, a group of citizens removed three alleged law-breakers from the jail and hanged them. When accused of being the mob’s leader, Legh Freeman denied it, but still supported the act. “We have never been connected with the vigilantes at any time, though we do heartily endorse their action in ridding our community of a set of creatures who are not worthy of the name of men,” he wrote. A few days later, a mob led by friends of some of those “creatures” put the Index out of business.

Suddenly, everyone moved on ahead to Evanston, and Bear River City quickly disappeared. The run of the Frontier Index in Wyoming was over before Wyoming even was Wyoming, and before the tracks had reached the Utah border.

Legacies

The newspaper’s and the Freemans’ sentiments, therefore, reflect national politics, not local ones, at a time when the nation was divided by the bitter aftermath of war and uncertain about the tasks ahead—especially Reconstruction. There really were little local politics and little law enforcement along the Union Pacific tracks in the future Wyoming in 1867 and 1868 – but crime, vice, dissipation and vigilante action thrived.

Boosterism of local business prospects, however, remained a solid foundation of the Wyoming press well into the 20^th century, and a deep skepticism of federal policies runs through the Wyoming press to this day. The Frontier Index’s attitudes on race, however, are another matter. One can hope they are gone forever.

The following May, the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory Point, north of Great Salt Lake, and the railroad became truly transcontinental. Real government arrived in Wyoming that same month when the first officials of the new Wyoming Territory, appointed by President Grant, arrived in Cheyenne. Politics began that summer; the first territorial election was in September.

Legh retreated to Culpeper, Va., and earned some money giving a lecture on his experiences in the West. He was married a few days after the lecture and took his bride back to Rock Island, Ill, where he had been held as a prisoner of war. There, he worked again as a telegraph operator. Census records show him living in Indianapolis in 1870. He came west again after that and published a semi-weekly newspaper, the Ogden Freeman from 1875-79.

On Aug. 26, 1879, the Weekly Miner in Butte, Montana Territory, reported that Legh’s wife, Ada Freeman, also of Virginia, died when a “gun dropped from its fastenings” and shot her in the midst of their four young children as the family was moving from Ogden to Butte, to participate in the mining economy there.

Legh died in 1915 in North Yakima, Wash. Fred followed in 1928 and is buried in Athens, Ga.

Editor’s note: WyoHistory.org thanks the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming for support that made publication of this article possible.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Chaplin, W. E. “Some of the Early Newspapers of Wyoming.” Wyoming Historical Society Miscellanies. Laramie Republican, 1919.
• Coutant, C. G. The History of Wyoming Vol. 1, Laramie, Wyo.: Chaplin, Spafford & Mathison, 1899.
• Freeman, Legh. Letter to Wyoming Historian C. G. Coutant. April 1887 University of Wyoming Chisum Collection, Coe Library.
• Frontier Index, 1868: April 21 p. 2; June 9 p. 3; June 16 p. 3; June 26 p. 2; July 7 p. 3; Aug. 11 p. 1, 2; Aug. 18 p. 3; Sept. 8 p. 1; Sept. 18 p. 2; Sept. 22 p. 2; Oct. 6 p. 2; Nov. 3 p. 2.

Secondary Sources

• Brumbaugh, Thomas B. “Fort Laramie Hijinks.” Annals of Wyoming 58 no. 2 (Fall 1986): 4-9.
• Heuterman, Thomas H. Movable Type: Biography of Legh Freeman. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1979. Includes an extensive bibliography.
• ______________. “Assessing the ‘Press on Wheels’: Individualism in Frontier Journalism.” Journalism Quarterly Fall 1976: 423-428. Joseph Jacobucci collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo.
• Larson, T. A. History of Wyoming. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
• Lent, John A. “The Press on Wheels: A History of the Frontier Index of Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Elsewhere?” Annals of Wyoming 43, no. 2 (Fall 1971): 165-204.
• McMurtrie, Douglas C. “Pioneer Printing in Wyoming” Annals of Wyoming 9 (January 1933): 729-42.
• “The Sweetwater Mines, A Pioneer Wyoming Newspaper.” Journalism Quarterly 12 (June 1935): 164-65.
• Tate, Michael L. The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
• Thompson, Claudia. “Driven from Point to Point: Fact and Legend of the Bear River Riot.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 46, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 24-37.

Illustrations

• The photo of the Washington hand press is from the Henry Ford museum. Used with thanks.
• The photos of Legh Freeman and his wife, Ada Freeman, are from glendalemt.com. Used with thanks.
• The image of the Index’s motto is from Wyoming Newspapers. Used with thanks.
• A.C. Hull’s photo of Benton in 1868 is from the western history collections at the Denver Public Library. Used with thanks.
• The photos of Bear River City, the locomotive and Bridges at Green River City and the the Union Pacific employees at Laramie are all from the Andrew J. Russell collections at the Oakland Museum of California. Used with thanks.

During Wyoming’s halcyon days of coal in 2008, Powder River Basin mines collectively filled more than 100 two-mile long trains per day and sent them rolling to power plants in 36 states. After 11 years of decline, the daily pulse of coal trains out of the basin slowed to fewer than 50.

In 2019, energy-market analysts warned that Wyoming’s coal industry, plagued with bankruptcies, was barreling down a track toward oblivion—in 15 years, if not sooner—due to a shift to cheap and abundant natural gas and broader implementation of renewable energy. The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 seemed to seal that fate.

It’s not the first time in Wyoming that the coal industry has gone bust and threatened to shrink into the past.

After World War II, North American railroads began to switch from coal-steam locomotives to diesel, taking advantage of a fuel that was easier to obtain and integrate throughout its system. By 1954, the dieselization of the railroads was nearly complete. The Union Pacific, the railroad that 85 years earlier had connected Wyoming to the nation, was laying off hundreds of coal miners and shutting its mines in the state.

Coal production in Wyoming crashed 46 percent that year, and the number of mining jobs was cut by nearly half. The bust brought Rock Springs to its knees and across Wyoming turned dozens of coal camps—essentially company towns—into ghost towns. The Local 8038 of the United Mine Workers wired Wyoming’s congressional delegates with a plea for food, explaining that families were in “dire circumstances.”

“It was the grim reaper, job-wise. You can’t imagine. Virtually every mining job was eliminated,” said Kathy Karpan, who was a young girl growing up in Rock Springs at the time. “The town of Rock Springs, for a short time, was thrown into a depression. It was a terrible time, and the turnabout did not come overnight.”

The coal bust of the 1950s marked a shift from underground to surface coal mining in Wyoming which, until the 1970s, required far fewer miners. Dozens of tiny coal towns were abandoned and dismantled. Predating modern state severance taxes on coal and partial rebates to states of federal royalties on coal, the bust didn’t threaten the state’s finances to the degree it might today.

Though many mining families left the state, many others packed up from coal camps and congregated in places like Rock Springs where a hearty and innovative multicultural community held on until the next boom.

History of Wyoming coal mining

From 1865 to 2018, Wyoming produced more than 11.9 billion tons of coal, according to the Wyoming State Geological Survey. By far, the bulk of that production came in the decades after large open-pit mining proliferated in the Powder River Basin in the 1970s.

American Indians were likely the first to burn coal in Wyoming, although there’s little archeological evidence they extracted coal by mining it below the surface. Early in the colonization of the West, emigrants were drawn to areas where coal outcropped at the surface—particularly on the high, arid plains of Wyoming where wide-open treeless areas provided little fuel for heat. Small “family” mines were abundant as homesteaders moved into the region, including in northeast Wyoming where red scoria hills from ancient coal fires demarcated the eastern outcroppings of Powder River Basin coal seams.

By the 1850s, coal began replacing wood-burning locomotives. The route planned by Union Pacific surveyors across the future Wyoming in the late 1860s was a route from mine to mine: Shafts were sunk throughout the state, with most coal production concentrated along the U.P. corridor from Cheyenne to Evanston. Later mines in Weston, Campbell and Sheridan counties served the Burlington Railroad in northeastern Wyoming.

Although coal was used to heat homes and buildings, mining primarily supplied railroads, which also owned many mining operations in the state.

Annual coal production in Wyoming climbed to 9.5 million tons in 1920 and employed 8,166 miners. But for the next 20 years annual production settled to an average of about 6 million tons. Production bounced back during World War II, peaking at 9.8 million tons in 1945, from 100 mines in 15 counties, according to the Wyoming Mining Association.

For the next seven years, coal production gradually receded to pre-war levels. However, there wasn’t a sense of an impending coal bust. An increase in the production of other minerals offset the backslide in coal. Major oil companies were expanding operations in the state. There was increasing demand for Wyoming’s bentonite, as well as renewed interest in Wyoming’s vast uranium deposits.

During this post World War II era, railroads—including the Union Pacific—accelerated efforts to switch from coal-steam locomotives to diesel. Railroads being the primary demand for Wyoming coal, men returned home to Wyoming from the war to find that coal mining jobs were vanishing. At the time, coal and hard rock mines were still fairly prevalent throughout the West. A miner who couldn’t find work in Wyoming could relocate to another mining town in another state.

As the Union Pacific shifted to diesel engines, it moved some of its last working coal-steam locomotives to Wyoming. But the state would not be spared from the fuel technology revolution brought on by the railroads.

An industry goes bust almost overnight

In the early 1950s, miners were increasingly aware of what the retirement of coal-steam locomotives might mean for their futures, and the railroads were desperate to avoid strikes at the union mines. They needed to buy time.

In 1953, Union Pacific Vice President of Operations P.J. Lynch gave a speech to 2,000 people in Rock Springs. “We are not giving up coal and the day when we do is too far away for us to consider tonight.” Later that year, over the Christmas holiday, Union Pacific began closing its mines at Reliance in Sweetwater County and Hanna in Carbon County. The hammer came down in January 1954 when the railroad shut both mines, cutting 180 jobs.

More closures and layoffs came quickly. That year, the Union Pacific laid off 760 miners in Sweetwater County. By 1957, another 340 miners had lost their jobs in Sweetwater County.

“They began to shut down coal mines as quickly as they could,” said Dudley Gardner, co-author of Forgotten Frontier: A History of Wyoming Coal Mining. “They would basically walk in and shut down a coal mine overnight. It came as a shock. They [miners] weren’t prepared, financially or anything else.”

When layoffs first came en masse in the winter of 1954, United Mine Workers officials worried that families might starve. They convinced officials in Washington D.C. to send rations to help families survive the winter. “There was surplus food distributed in our neighborhoods,” said Karpan. “There was powdered milk and powdered eggs, and canned pork and canned beef. It was surreal. I don’t think anybody had to sign up.”

In just five years—from 1953 to 1958—Wyoming lost 70 percent of its annual coal production, settling to just 1.6 million tons. The number of coal miners in Wyoming—which had peaked at 9,192 in 1922—crashed to below 500 in 1959.

Union Pacific closed its last Wyoming coal mine, Rock Springs No. 8, on Aug. 28, 1962. In 1965, there were 327 coal miners in Wyoming.

Coal miners, particularly in mining camps, did not own the property on which their homes stood. Company-owned coal camps were dismantled. They wanted to avoid paying taxes assessed on structures, so many homes and buildings were sold cheaply and moved to bigger towns throughout the state.

Southwestern Wyoming mining towns such as Glencoe, Sublet, Susie and Oakley in Lincoln County and Dines, Superior, Gunn, Quealy, Lionkol and Winton in Sweetwater County were all abandoned. In Sheridan County in the northeast, the mining towns of Carneyville, Acme and Monarch were dismantled. Many families scattered to wherever they could find jobs in iron ore, copper and surviving coal towns across the West.

A culture endures

The allure of union mining jobs with steady work, good salaries and benefits attracted emigrants from all over the world in the early 1900s. Many came from Wales, Scotland, Slovenia, Croatia and Greece, eager to sink roots and build a new life for generations to come. Rock Springs at the turn of the century had two Italian language newspapers; IL Grido Del Popolo (The Cry of the People), and Vita Nuova (New Life).

Karpan recalled a story that when the census was taken in 1920, census takers had to request a number of translators to come to Rock Springs. The Union Pacific intentionally recruited emigrants from multiple nationalities hoping to prevent one nationality being singled out. This strategy was in response to the September 1885 Rock Springs Massacre when striking coal miners killed 28 Chinese workers and razed the town’s Chinese district.

By the 1950s, Karpan remembers a Rock Springs that was a “tolerant and accepting society.” At one time, Rock Springs was known as the Home of 56 Nationalities. “It was an ethnic community,” Karpan said. “It was a town of immigrants who came to mine. Miners could buy a house. They encouraged their kids to get an education because they knew that mining was dangerous. I can’t think of one adult in my family that wasn’t injured in the coal mines.”

The community’s commitment to education would help Rock Springs persevere in the wake of the coal bust, a devastating economic blow. But the town’s rich multicultural heritage endured.

“There was still a core of people who remained in Rock Springs,” said journalist Paul Krza, who grew up in Rock Springs at the time. “Some of them were people who just couldn’t leave, some of them had money and could afford to sit back.”

Banks and meat markets held on, Chinese cafes remained, a Finnish flower shop, as well as various pubs owned by German and Greek descendants. As the coal camps were dismantled, many families moved to Rock Springs. All told, Rock Spring’s population dropped by only 500 people from 1950 to 1960.

“The people that had the ability fled, the people who really had no choice kind of scraped by,” Krza said. “The people who owned a house were better off hanging on rather than hitting the road with a skill [underground mining] that nobody wanted at the time.”

Life after the bust

After the bust, there were few opportunities to strike out as a rancher in Wyoming, and the skills of an underground coal miner were quickly losing favor. Just a few underground mines remained. Surface strip mining technology was already outpacing underground mines. In Sheridan County, the open-pit Big Horn Coal Mine produced more coal with fewer miners and forced the closure of several underground mines in the northeastern part of the state.

When the coal bust hit, there was no hint of big coal-fired power plants and large-scale strip mining in Wyoming’s future. The coal industry in Wyoming showed no signs of recovery. It seemed a relic quickly receding into the past until the latter half of the 1960s when electric utilities began building large coal-fired power plants.

A surface strip mine was constructed to supply the Dave Johnston coal-fired power plant near Glenrock in the late 1950s, but provided few jobs relative to the number of miners out of work. More coal-fired power plants would be constructed in Wyoming in the 1960s and 1970s. But it was Wyoming’s massive trona deposits outside Green River, Wyo.—the largest in the world—that would help save southwest Wyoming communities from disappearing in the wake of the coal bust.

“The trona mines opened up about the same time and saved the community,” said Gardner.

Trona is a sodium carbonate that is refined into soda ash, used to make glass, detergents and myriad products. Wyoming supplies 90 percent of the nation’s trona via underground mining.

Commercial trona mining began in the late 1940s with the merger of Westvaco Chemical and Food Machinery and Chemical Corp. Production expanded in the 1950s, and by the 1960s trona provided hundreds of good-paying union jobs for coal miners who’d been laid off—at least for those who’d stuck around.

Even in the economic ruin of the coal bust, the belief among Sweetwater County’s mining community that a good education was key to better, safer jobs for their children endured. In the 1950s, Wyoming saw an increasing exodus of young people, who were dissatisfied with job opportunities. A citizens’ campaign was launched in Rock Springs to establish a college district—now Western Wyoming Community College—in the fall of 1959, immediately enrolling 40 students.

“At that time, it was pretty daring,” said Karpan. “I think it was a recognition that the future would require highly-educated workers. People didn’t really give up.”

Boom times again

Statewide, the economic loss of coal was replaced with expanding oil and natural gas production, bentonite and uranium mining. World geopolitical dynamics in the early 1970s, along with a wave of new federal environmental laws and regulations, would dramatically change Wyoming’s coal industry as well as the state’s economy.

Utilities needed a reliable, low-cost supply to power a growing fleet of coal-fired power plants in the U.S. They also needed to cut ash, sulfur oxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, thanks to the federal Clean Air Act of 1970 and efforts by the newly-formed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to curb industrial air pollution.

Attention turned to the vast reserves of low-sulfur subbituminous coal in the Powder River Basin. Here, strip mines could remove a thin layer of overburden to access coal seams 50 and 100 feet thick, and fill coal trains that delivered the fuel to power plants in just about every region of the U.S.

As quickly as coal went bust in the 1950s, it boomed again in the 1970s. From 1969 to 1974, coal production in Wyoming quadrupled from 4.6 million tons to more than 20 million tons.

The first large commercial strip mine of this new era was Belle Ayr, constructed in 1970, about 20 miles south of Gillette. The mine sent its first shipment of coal in 1972. The race was on to build new strip mines in northeast Wyoming, and even global oil giants wanted in on the action. Exxon formed Exxon Coal, USA Inc., and had a stake in the Caballo and Rawhide mines.

Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) prepared to build a massive coal mine 50 miles south of Gillette, but the town was bursting beyond capacity with all of the coal mine construction. So it bought 735 acres near Reno Junction, closer to its new mine, from rancher Dale Wright. The new company town, Wright, housed construction crews to build the Black Thunder mine, and then grew into a small mining community.

Nearly all of the new large strip mines were built within Campbell County, a sheep and cattle economy that until the 1970s relied on oil and natural gas to buoy its revenue. In 1939, Campbell County recorded an assessed valuation of $8.4 million. By 1987, Powder River Basin coal mining had pushed the county’s assessed valuation beyond $1 billion. In 2012, $5.8 billion.

“Two environmental laws—” the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977—" set up the Powder River Basin to make a fortune in the last 50 years,” Karpan said.

Among the largest benefactors were the two railroads that served the Powder River Basin coal district: Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad.

Coal regained favor in the southwestern part of the state, too, with new coal mines to serve the Jim Bridger and Naughton power plants. Sweetwater County’s industrial service sector continued to grow to serve trona, coal and deep natural gas extraction, as well as the Shute Creek and La Barge natural gas processing plants northeast of Kemmerer. Halliburton, the oilfield services giant, became a major employer, supporting hundreds of jobs with its hydraulic fracturing headquarters initially based in Rock Springs in the early 2000s, but scaled back its operations in October 2019.

The coal bust of the 1950s demonstrates the magnitude of cultural and economic influence that railroads and mineral extraction have played in Wyoming. While those industries are mostly driven by forces outside the state, they also shape and are shaped by the hardy people and communities that call Wyoming home.

“I have never understood why we celebrate the cowboy on our license plate, for our sporting teams and for our culture when this state was started by and supported by railroaders and coal miners,” Karpan said in a recent interview. “The railroad came through here because it was flat country and there was plenty of coal. They paid the taxes. They created good jobs. And those industries have never gotten the recognition—in my opinion—which they deserve.”

Editor’s note: WyoHistory.org thanks the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming for support that made publication of this article possible.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Gardner, Dudley. Interview with author. April 2020
• “Italian Newspapers from Rock Springs.” Wyoming Newspapers, accessed May 15, 2020 at https://newspapers.wyo.gov/news/italiannewspapersfromrocksprings.
• Karpan, Kathy. Interview with author. April 2020
• Krza, Paul. Interview with author. May 2020

Secondary Sources

• Andersen, Chamois L. and Lori Van Pelt. “Wyoming's Uranium Drama: Risks, Rewards and Remorse.”
• WyoHistory.org, accessed May 15, 2020 at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyomings-uranium-drama-risks-rewards-and-remorse.
• Bleizeffer, Dustin. “Is PRB coal headed for gradual decline or sheer cliff?” Jan. 7, 2020. WyoFile, accessed May 15, 2020 at https://www.wyofile.com/is-prb-coal-headed-for-gradual-decline-or-sheer-cliff/.
• Frontier. Wyoming Mining Association. 1971, 25. This history of the WMA from 1956-1986 is a booklet in the collections of the Wyoming State Archives.
• Gardner, Dudley A., and Verla R. Flores. Forgotten Frontier: A History of Wyoming Coal Mining. Boulder, Colo.: Westview press, 1989, 3-190. The quote from Union Pacific Vice President P. J. Lynch’s 1953 “We are not giving up on coal” speech is on p. 184.
• “Gauging U.S. Economic Activity Through Rail Traffic Data.” Association of American Railroads, accessed May 15, 2020 at https://www.aar.org/data-center/rail-traffic-data/.
• Kelley, Mary. Coal in Campbell County. Images of America Series. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2013.
• Mast, Tom. “Refining Wyoming's Oil for 120 years.” March 1, 2015. WyoHistory.org, accessed May 15, 2020 at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/refining-wyomings-oil-120-years.
• Rea, Tom. “The Rock Springs Massacre.” WyoHistory.org, accessed May 15, 2020 at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/rock-springs-massacre.
• “Trona.” Wyoming Mining Association, accessed May 15, 2020 at https://www.wyomingmining.org/minerals/trona/.
• Western Wyoming Community College, accessed May 15, 2020 at https://www.westernwyoming.edu/about/overview/index.php.
• Wyoming Mining Association. “Coal Production 1912 through 2018.” Click here to see a pdf.

Illustrations

• The black and white photo of the small East Antelope surface mine, from the Niemcyk family collection, and the color photo of the Black Thunder Mine are both courtesy of the Campbell County Rockpile Museum in Gillette. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photos of the four miners, the Green River rail yard, the house being moved and the 1935 Old Timers’ reunion are all from the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the cave in in the coal mine is from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.

Rough Riders are usually associated with Theodore Roosevelt, but his was not the only cowboy regiment organized to fight in the Spanish American War of 1898. Wyoming had its rough riders, too, but due to a train mishap and the shortness of the war, they never saw combat.

When war with Spain over Cuba appeared likely in the spring of 1898, Jay L. Torrey, rancher and former legislator from Embar, Wyo., traveled to Washington, D. C., to convince Congress to authorize an army unit of cowboys. While other men made similar proposals, Torrey is credited with originating the idea of the rough riders.

Born in Pittsfield, Illinois, Torrey came to Wyoming to help his elder brother, Capt. R. A. Torrey, manage his ranch in the Big Horn Basin. The elder Torrey, who had been commander at Fort Washakie for a time, purchased pioneer J. D. Woodruff’s ranch holdings on Owl Creek about 25 miles west of Thermopolis in the late 1870s. Jay Torrey later bought his brother’s interest and enlarged the operation.

In 1894 Torrey was elected to the state legislature, representing Fremont County. which at that time included much of the Bighorn Basin. Even though he was a freshman legislator, he was elected speaker of the House. By the time hostilities with Spain appeared likely, he was politically well-known throughout the state though he had served only the one term in the legislature.

When Congress finally authorized “cowboy units,” three men were given command of the three volunteer cavalry organizations. Col. Leonard Wood, assisted by former undersecretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, was in charge of the First Volunteer Cavalry. Melvin Grigsby, South Dakota attorney general, was given command of the Third. Torrey was authorized to raise men for the Second Volunteer Cavalry.

Of the 842 recruits, 591 were from Wyoming. The volunteers were assigned to companies largely on the basis of their home towns. For example, most men in Troop E were from Sheridan,Crook or Weston county and the men in Troop G had been recruited from Albany County. Also assigned to the Torrey command were troops from Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah.

The recruits met strict requirements. They had to be between 18 and 45 years of age, stand between 5’4” and 5’10” in height and weigh no more than 165 pounds. The 230-lb. Torrey was exempted from the requirements. Of course, all had to be expert horsemen.

The troops assembled at Fort D. A. Russell near Cheyenne, now Warren Air Force Base, in May 1898, while the job of finding suitable horses took place. Torrey insisted on having the best mounts available and by the middle of May, only 175 of the needed 1,000 horses had met his high standards for the government-authorized price of no more than $110 per animal.

The horses for each unit were of the same color. A drawing for colors gave Wyoming units bay horses while the Nevada contingent drew chestnut and the Utah group, black horses. The two Colorado units would ride black and chestnut mounts.

Intensive training continued amid a great deal of patriotic fanfare until June 13 when the troops, by then dubbed “Torrey’s Rough Riders,” were finally ordered to Jacksonville, Fla., the staging area for Cuba. The send-off from Cheyenne was a festive occasion and all across the country, people cheered the passage of the rough riders on their way to war.

On June 26 while the two trains carrying the troops and their horses were nearing Tupelo, Miss., the first train stopped to take on water. The second train rounded a sharp curve and smashed into the rear car of the parked train. Five men were killed and 15 were injured. Col. Torrey injured both feet and had to be on crutches for several weeks after the accident.

After days’ delay, the Torrey group arrived at the base in Jacksonville. At the same time, Roosevelt’s rough riders were charging up San Juan Hill in Cuba. Within a month, the war was over and Wyoming’s rough riders were still in Jacksonville having never been ordered to the front.

Typhoid fever took its toll while the disappointed volunteers awaited their discharges. More than 30 men died of the disease—one newspaper report places the number as high as 50--before the unit was finally returned to Fort D. A. Russell and mustered out in late October 1898.

Most of the cowboys, hunters, miners, ropers and blacksmiths who made up “Torrey’s Rough Riders” returned to their home towns. A year later in an elaborate ceremony, the victims of the train mishap, all of whom were from Wyoming, were reinterred in the Fort Russell cemetery.

While Theodore Roosevelt was elected vice president and later became President after the death of William McKinley, Col. Jay Torrey returned to his ranch in the Big Horn Basin where he lived until about 1906. He sold his Wyoming interests that year and moved to Missouri. Although he was a very successful and prosperous farmer, he failed in an attempt to represent Missouri in the U. S. Senate. After a trip to Wyoming in 1920, he became ill and died Dec. 4 at West Plains, Missouri. Roosevelt, the more famous rough rider, had died a year earlier.

Editor’s note: The author originally published this article as one of his “Buffalo Bones” series, written for Wyoming newspapers in the 1980s while was working for the Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department. We’ve republished it here with special thanks.

Resources

For further reading and research

• “Five Troopers Killed.” Cheyenne Daily Sun-Leader, June 27, 1898, p. 4, col. 2. Wyoming Newspapers. Special thanks to Lucia McCreery for this and the Wyoming Press citation, below.
• Larson, T.A. History of Wyoming. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, 311-312.
• “On this day in 1898 . . . Spanish-American War Begins.” Wyoming State Archives blog, April 25, 2014, accessed June 5, 2020 at https://wyostatearchives.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/on-this-day-in-1898-spanish-american-war-begins/.
• Roberts, Richard C. “Utah in the Spanish American War.” Utah History Encyclopedia, accessed June 5, 2020 at https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/s/SPANISH_AMERICAN_WAR.shtml.
• Wyoming Press, Aug. 27, 1898, p. 3 col. 2. Wyoming Newspapers.

Illustrations

• The portrait of Jay Torrey and the photo of the Cowboy Cavalry button are from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of Torrey and his officers at Fort D.A. Russell is from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks. Left to right, according to a WSA caption, are Dr. Jeserum, Lt. Col. Cannon, Torrey, Maj. James Harboard, Maj. James Wheeler and Col. Bob Caverley.
• The photo of Torrey’s Rough Riders on parade in Salt Lake City is from the digital collections of the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the rough rider gun crew is from Wyoming Tales and Trails. Used with thanks.

On March 27, 1957, when Governor Milward L. Simpson commuted the death sentence of Herschel Clay “Tricky” Riggle, he did so because the Wyoming Constitution gave him that power. But more importantly, he did so because, as he related in his statement, he did not believe in capital punishment. With the stroke of his pen, he left his legacy in Wyoming political history.

When Simpson’s name comes up, Tricky Riggle’s often does also. Simpson’s friends and family will argue it was the governor’s stand on capital punishment that cost him re-election in 1958. However, a closer look at the election results and other challenges Simpson faced, including controversies over the proposed route of Interstate 90 and Teton County gambling, make it clear there were other factors at play as well.

Taxes: a contentious issue

As with any administration, taxes were a sore spot. In 1945 Wyoming was home to approximately 3,500 men and women who had served in the armed services. To express gratitude for their service, the state legislature granted a $2,000 exemption on assessed property value to all veterans living in the state.[1] Simpson was elected in 1954. When he took office in1955 and saw the likely loss of revenue to the state from the various tax exemptions, he knew that if they continued, a raise in taxes was inevitable.

At the same time he recognized the political stickiness of pitting one exemption against another: The homestead exemption versus the veteran’s exemption is one example. In letters to the governor, veterans expressed their anger toward the possible reduction or abolishing of this exemption. Especially with World War II still a close memory, they felt it was diminishing the significance of their service, and was also a threat to their finances.

In response, Simpson expressed his gratitude for their service and attempted to lessen their money concerns by explaining the loss of the exemption would not make for a major change in their tax bills. Especially when spread out over twelve months, the cost could seem even less of a hardship. In many of his replies, Simpson shared results of the data he had collected on the exemptions, and expressed with trepidation his worry that the large veteran’s exemption would attract other veterans to Wyoming, thereby costing the state more dollars.[2] In the end, the 1955 Legislature reduced to $800 the benefit a veteran can derive from the $2,000 property tax exemption, and abolished the $500 property tax homestead exemption.[3] In some cases, this may have been a double hit to a family.

Choosing a route for I-90

In 1956, Simpson faced an issue involving the federal government’s Federal Highway Act. Its goal was to implement a system for quick, reliable and safer transcontinental travel—what we now call the interstate highway system. As part of the act, and to help fund the program, the plan stipulated that each level of government would contribute to the upgrading of the nation’s road network. To achieve this goal, states were required to “hold public meetings to consider the economic effects of the location if a Federal-aid highway involved bypassing or going through a city, town, or village.”[4]

One of the three major routes planned to cross Wyoming was Interstate 90, a major highway from Boston to Seattle. The highway was to enter the northeastern corner of Wyoming, connect with what is now Interstate 25 at Buffalo, Wyo., head north to Billings, Mont., then west to Seattle. Much to the concern of the town of Sheridan, this plan would make Buffalo a control area on the interstate highway between Gillette and Sheridan. That designation would mean more signs would be posted on the interstate about Buffalo than would have been otherwise.

In May, a public meeting was held in Sheridan. Federal and state highway department representatives heard delegations from Sheridan and Buffalo give opposing views.[5]The meeting marked the start of a year-long campaign to move the control area to Sheridan. During the year, delegations from Sheridan attended State Highway Commission meetings, and gave presentations showing that locating the control area in Buffalo would be a significant economic impact for their community. If Sheridan did not appear as a destination on the traffic signs on the route, Sheridan delegates feared, people would be more likely to stay the night in Buffalo before driving on up and through Sheridan on the way to Yellowstone National Park.

In one meeting the Sheridan group proposed that I-90 would follow the existing route of U.S. Highway14 between Gillette and Sheridan, which bypasses Buffalo. In a later meeting, a group of ranchers from Johnson County, where Buffalo is located, protested this idea.[6] At all of these meetings the state commissioners explained that they could only recommend a route, and the federal Bureau of Public Roads would make the final decision.

In a 1992 interview with the New Yorker, Milward Simpson’s son, U.S. Sen. Al Simpson, relates a colorful story of a meeting in the governor’s office between his father and a delegation from Sheridan. As Al eavesdrops on the conversation, the group tells Simpson they would hate to vote him out of office, if he did not step in and recommend their proposed route change. They told him he needed to step in on behalf of the survival of his wife’s hometown. According to the interview, Milward Simpson was deeply insulted by their request and sent them on their way.[7]

In January 1957, the commissioners made their final decision, agreeing with the recommended route, making Buffalo, not Sheridan, the control area.

Combating gambling

Just as the interstate highway issue closed and others came to the fore, one group would show their hand, letting the chips fall where they would. Gambling was common in Teton County, just south of Yellowstone and home to Grand Teton National Park. Tourists were enchanted by Jackson and recalled it as being “like the stories of the Old West.”[8]

A Great Northwest Life Insurance agency from Spokane, Wash., had scheduled their agency convention for Aug. 15, 1956, in Jackson because of the extra attraction—gambling.[9] Even though it was illegal, previous administrations and the public had either ignored it, condoned it or helped keep it alive. Local businesses saw gambling as a tourist attraction; it brought both money and people into the state and community.

Gambling in Teton County existed not so much because of the illegal participants, but by virtue of local and statewide public support. No one complained; that is, until the July 1956 meeting of the Wyoming County Attorneys Association, a meeting Simpson and his Attorney General George Guy attended. Association members expressed concerns about gambling and liquor violations in Teton County, feeling there was a risk that it would spread to their counties.

Following the meeting, guided by state laws, Simpson laid out a methodical plan to clean up the lawlessness in Jackson, his hometown. Simpson and his Attorney General launched an investigation. By the time it was all over, the state filed charges of “misconduct and malfeasance” against the Teton County sheriff.[10]

In addition, the State Liquor Commission charged four Jackson bars with liquor violations regarding hours and gambling. In a legal compromise the sheriff resigned from office, and charges were dropped. To bring closure to the liquor violations, the Liquor Commission passed judgment on the four establishments, revoking their licenses for 45 days each. To prevent more discord in the community the disciplinary measures were staggered, allowing two of the businesses to remain open while the others were shuttered, and vice versa. [11]

“Tricky” Riggle sentenced

Nine months prior to Simpson’s taking office, a Platte County trick roper and county fair act named Herschel Clay “Tricky” Riggle shot and killed his fiancée, Frances Williamson and local ranch hand Walter Akerblade in a Wheatland, Wyo., café. A jury convicted Riggle on two counts of first degree murder, which carried a mandatory death sentence. On appeal, the Wyoming Supreme Court upheld the conviction, and the U. S. Supreme Court refused to review the case. Seeing no other avenue, Riggle’s lawyers sought clemency from Governor Simpson.

In March 1957, just 13 hours prior to the execution time, Gov. Simpson commuted the sentence. In doing so, he made it clear that as long as he was governor, capital punishment in Wyoming was off the table. His action, although granted to him by Article Four, Section Five of the Wyoming Constitution, was motivated by his personal beliefs. As part of the commutation, Simpson added the stipulation that Riggle could not be paroled, and must spend the rest of his life in prison.

This was not the first time a Wyoming governor had commuted a death sentence. In 1923 Gov. William Ross commuted the death sentence of Clifford Mann to life in prison. Mann was later discharged from the penitentiary after serving 27 years. In 1957, James Best was still serving time under a similar stipulation imposed by then Gov. Alonzo Clark., who had commuted Best’s sentence in 1931. Simpson felt confident that future administrations and parole boards would honor the stipulations he had put in the commutation, and that Riggle would remain in the penitentiary. The news of the commutation was captivating. Bold headlines ran in many state newspapers.[12]

In a formal statement, Governor Simpson noted, “I have always been opposed to capital punishment. I doubt that it is a deterrent to crime. Terrible and revolting and indefensible as was Riggle’s crime, taking his life cannot atone for the murders, nor lessen the grief of the victims’ survivors. It merely adds one more life to the toll of the tragedy”.[13]

Simpson knew that since the State Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the U. S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, any chance of reprieve fell on his shoulders. His statement showed his strong personal beliefs: “I feel that the spiritual law transcends the civil and am convinced of the Scriptural admonition ‘Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath; but it is written, vengeance is mine; I will repay saith the Lord. (Romans 12:19)’” The governor added, “Riggle’s punishment is God’s prerogative. Only God can finally adjust the balance between justice and mercy, and I am commuting the sentence of Clay Riggle from death to life imprisonment.” [14]

Reactions to Simpson’s stand

Statewide and nationally, Simpson’s action drew both positive and negative responses. Mail from around the country generally supported a national campaign against the commutation. Wyoming letters expressed a wide range of emotions. Simpson first attempted to answer many of the in-state letters individually, acknowledging agreement or disagreement, but soon came up with a standard response for each side.

In general, Wyoming news outlets accepted the commutation with little criticism.[15] Several papers suggested a change in state statutes regarding capital punishment, ranging from outright abolishment to appointing a board to make the final decision of clemency, rather than leaving it up to the governor alone.

Another commutation, and the possibility of two more

In December 1957 after an appeal for clemency involving a different case, Simpson commuted the death sentence of Ernest Lindsay, with the same stipulation of no opportunity for parole. Linsday, from Harrisburg, Pa., convicted in January 1956 in Converse County for the murder of Herbert A Diestler, had been scheduled for execution on January 4, 1958. His execution date was set by the State Supreme Court when it turned down his appeal. Simpson explained that his beliefs had not changed regarding capital punishment since he had commuted Riggle’s sentence nine months earlier. A third appeal never made it to Simpson’s desk. The State Supreme Court overturned the case.

Late in January 1958, 19-year-old murderer Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Fugate were captured in Douglas, Wyo., after a killing spree that left 10 people dead in Nebraska and one in Wyoming. Simpson soon let it be known he would commute the sentence if Starkweather were sentenced to death.

“How can I dare try the man here, knowing the governor has come out against capital punishment?” Converse County, Wyo., Attorney William Dixon asked. Apparently happy to have the case off his hands, Simpson quickly announced he would sign Nebraska extradition papers “in a jiffy.” Starkweather was returned to Nebraska the next day.

In the 1992 New Yorker interview and others, Al Simpson has commented that his father’s stand on capital punishment cost him his bid for re-election.[16] A closer examination of the numbers, however, shows that may not be the case. Letters to Milward Simpson from around the state regarding his commutation of Riggle’s sentence show most correspondents agreeing with the governor’s actions. Future administrations and parole boards also agreed with his stipulation. Riggle remained behind bars until his death in 1981. By contrast, correspondence relating to the veteran’s exemption shows most letter writers opposed the governor’s doing away with the exemption.

Other factors in Simpson’s failed re-election bid

It is hard to discern the number of votes, if any, the capital punishment issue cost Simpson, as it is impossible to identify the individual pro-capital punishment voter. It is also impossible to identify the discouraged veteran voter, and his or her marital status, as one veteran household could easily mean a loss of two votes. The I-90 delegates from Sheridan appear to have followed through with their threat, however; Simpson won 1,708 fewer votes in Sheridan County in 1958 than he did in 1954.

And he took the gamble and lost in Teton County. Although Simpson won Teton County in both 1954 and 1958, re-election results show that we won 207 fewer votes there the second time around. Also, a third-party candidate, Louis Carlson, who ran on the “Economy” ticket and supported gambling drew 618 votes in Teton County, and 4,979 votes statewide.

Another likely factor in Simpson’s failed bid for re-election was growing support for Democrats nationwide that year. In 1954, Simpson beat Scotty Jack by just over 1,100 votes. In 1958, he lost to Joe Hickey by more than double that number.[17] Also that year in the U. S. Senate race, Wyoming Democrat Gale McGee defeated incumbent Republican Frank Barrett, who had served only one term after defeating three-term Democrat O’Mahoney. Nationwide, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, and elected 24 Democratic governors and only eight Republicans.[18]

The loss of the governorship did not mean the end of politics for Milward Simpson, however. In 1960, Wyoming voters elected Republican Keith Thompson to the U.S. Senate, but he died unexpectedly before he could take office. Gov. Joe Hickey, a Democrat, resigned in January 1961, at which point Acting Gov. Jack Gage appointed Hickey to the senate seat vacated by Thompson’s death. The law stipulated that Hickey face the voters at the general election in 1962. Simpson ran against him and won easily, with 58 percent of the vote. He served the remaining four years of the term that Thompson would have served had he lived. Simpson did not run again.

Resources

Sources

• “Election Summary.” Wyoming State Tribune, Nov. 5, 1958, 1.
• “Gambling Closed in County.” Jackson Hole Guide, August 2, 1956, 1. Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, Cheyenne, Wyo. (Hereafter WSA)
• “Governor Draws Little Criticism for Commuting Riggle’s Sentence.” Wyoming Eagle, March 29, 1957, 1.
• “Governor’s Reprieve Saves Riggle From Gas Chamber.” The Wheatland Times, March 28, 1957, 1.
• Newhouse, J. “Taking it Personally.” New Yorker 68, no. 4, 56-78.
• “Riggle’s Life is Spared by Simpson.” Casper Morning Star, March 26, 1957, 1.
• Simpson, Milward S. Papers. Collection No. 26. Chronological Summary, Box 189, Folder 19; Correspondences, Box 219, Folder 12; Hearing Before the Governor, Olin O. Emery, Box 164, Folder 7; Letter to Governor Simpson, Box 164, Folder 7, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo.
• Trenholm, Virginia Cole, ed. Wyoming Blue Book. Vol. III, 453, 751, WSA.
• Weingroff, Richard. “Essential to the National Interest.” Public Roads 69, no. 5 (March/Apr 2006), accessed July 13, 2020 at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/06mar/07.cfm.
• Wyoming Liquor Commission. Minutes. Nov. 29, 1956. WSA
• Wyoming Secretary of State. Official Vote, General Election Nov. 4, 1958. WSA.
• Wyoming State Highway Department. Commission Minutes, 1956. Administrative Records, Series 1, Box 2, WSA.

Illustrations

• The photo of Gov. Milward and Lorna Simpson and the mugshot of Tricky Riggle are from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the gamblers is from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the ribbon cutting at the new bridge over Powder River, Oct. 14, 1962, is from the Campbell County Rockpile Museum in Gillette. Used with permission and thanks. Shown, left to right, are Wyoming Highway Commission Chairman Harold Del Monte, with scissors a brochure in his coat pocket titled "Better Highways," Buffalo Mayor O. W. Lusher and Gillette Mayor Denzil J. Dalbey. E. W. Record stands on the stage beside the radio broadcast microphone. Everyone else is unidentified.

Come brother, let us ramble
O’er the Black and Yellow Trail.
O’er the Black Hills let us scramble
Into canyons deep and vale.

They put the black before yellow
When they named this glorious route,
Because the Black Hills greet you first
And then yellow stone salute.

Ah, ‘tis indeed a trail of beauty
Where Dakotas used to roam
Where the bear and mountain lion,
And the deer are still at home….

…Health, wealth and adventure you’re seeking you say
In Wyoming you may 
Pick up all three most any day

(Excerpt from “The Black and Yellow Trail,” by Mrs. C.L. Benson (News Journal, Gillette, Wyoming., Nov. 18, 1920)

Places to go, no way to get there

In the 1910s, Model T cars were rolling off the assembly line by the thousands. Henry Ford’s goal was to put an affordable car in every garage, and Americans who had so far been tethered to railway tracks were prepared to explore their country. Yellowstone had been a national park since 1872, but such attractions were available only by passenger train. Now Americans were ready to hit the road, but upon venturing out of town they found only a haphazard patchwork of poorly maintained county roads.

The need for a reliable road system was recognized by “men of vision,” who also foresaw the potential of auto tourism, and groups across the country began a movement to develop “good roads.” As early as 1912, local booster clubs were organized to attract business to small towns. Tourists would require decent roads, service stations for gas, cafes, groceries and safe places to spend the night. Boosters were eager to place their small towns on the route of the newly planned highways.

The vision

One of the earliest interstate roads was envisioned to enable auto tourists to drive from Chicago to Yellowstone National Park via the Black Hills. In February 1912, delegates from more than 40 towns in South Dakota and Wyoming met in Deadwood, S.D., and formed the Chicago, Black Hills and Yellowstone Park Highway Association to develop a highway of the same name. It was soon known as the “Black and Yellow Trail.” The name included not only the major attractions of the Black Hills and Yellowstone National Park, it also described the black- and yellow-banded posts that would mark the route. The association planned an extensive publicity campaign to raise interest and funding.

A “good roads” convention was held in Buffalo, Wyo. in June 1912 to decide the route of the highway through Wyoming. Delegates lobbied to have their hometowns included and eventually laid out a route that would pass through Beulah near the South Dakota-Wyoming state line, then continue west to Sundance, Moorcroft, Gillette, Buffalo, Ten Sleep, Worland, Basin, Greybull and Cody, and finally arrive at the East Entrance of Yellowstone National Park—“a Wonderland all the way.” Travelers follow a similar route today when they drive I-90 from Beulah to Gillette, U.S. 14-16 from Gillette to Ucross, and U.S. 16 on through Buffalo, over the Bighorn Mountains and through the Bighorn Basin to Yellowstone Park.

The Black and Yellow Trail, like many early highway routes, tended to parallel existing railroad lines wherever possible. Railroads usually represented the shortest distances between towns, and roads laid out along tracks required less disturbance of valuable farm-ranch land and had fewer problems in obtaining access for right-of-way. Making this route a reality would require a combination of improving existing county roads—varying widely in quality—and raising funds for new construction. 

Many delegates at the 1912 state convention in Buffalo were skeptical that an auto road could successfully cross the Bighorns. To prove that it could be done, one of the delegates, Basin businessman Anson Higby traveled to the convention across the range in an old Studebaker. Higby and others who ventured over the mountains followed a system of established logging and mining roads and old mail routes. Within a few years (1915-1917), the first official construction would begin on the challenging route across the Bighorns.

The route

In the spring of 1913, the Chicago, Black Hills and Yellowstone Park Highway Association held a second annual convention in Deadwood, S.D. Delegates from interested towns along the route decided to map and mark the Black and Yellow Trail with black and yellow striped posts at all key points. The convention was followed that summer by a “Pathfinder and Booster Tour” organized by the Association, with Ben W. Wood as chairman. His party traveled the proposed route and held booster meetings along the way to stir up local enthusiasm. Chairman Wood issued a bulletin and described the Wyoming portion:

In Wyoming the highway was traveled through the counties of Crook, Campbell and Johnson, via the cities of Sundance, Moorcroft, Gillette, Sussex to Buffalo. This road is a prairie road. It goes through a most interesting country.  Evidences of considerable improvements were found along the line. In Crook County the road was undergoing a change in many places to avoid steep grades, etc. New culverts and bridges were being installed…. From Cody to the east entrance of the park, the destination of the Pathfinder Tour, the road traverses through the famous Shoshone river canyon. It is beyond our ability to describe this picturesque stretch of the road. It is a government highway and upon it the government of the United States has spent thousands of dollars. It will measure up with the best highway in the country.

The portion of the existing road between Gillette and Buffalo originally detoured far to the south to pass through Sussex, east of Kaycee, Wyo., a 135-mile trip. A proposed realignment due west from Gillette shortened the trip by 50 miles. Clason’s Guide, Map of Wyoming (1916) depicted the route of the trail generally following the right-of-way of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad from Moorcroft west to Arvada, a more direct route than the old road through Sussex. However, the 1920 survey by the State Highway Department suggested a route that would pass through Spotted Horse to the north—the route of today’s U.S. 14-16. Thus, for several years the Black and Yellow Trail was an evolving route.

Meanwhile, the number of auto tourists was growing rapidly. Early motorists tended to be “a relatively homogeneous community of upper-and-middle class, urban, white Americans” who would occasionally meet up with traveling salesmen, migrant workers, and tramps. Auto trips demanded planning, time and money. Local businesses started offering auto camps, often supplying tents, beds and camp chairs. These evolved into tourist camps that provided small cabins, groceries or a café, and laundry facilities (picture Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night). Later, migrant workers could stay in safe, clean government camps, like Steinbeck’s Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.

Federal aid to the rescue

From about 1912 to 1917, most construction was financed by individual counties (or in the case of the Bighorn Mountains, the U.S. Forest Service). Piecemeal progress depended on local fundraising. Wyoming was home to three of the early interstate highways—the east-west Lincoln Highway, the south-north Yellowstone/National Park-to-Park Highway from Denver to Yellowstone and, in the northern part of the state, the Black and Yellow Trail. Although local booster clubs envisioned the routes and started construction, the time was ripe for state and federal governments to help. 

In 1917, the Wyoming state legislature created the Wyoming Highway Department. It was administered by a state highway commission; a key proviso authorized the acceptance of federal aid on a matching basis under the Federal Aid Act of 1916. The matching funds were raised through a bond issue of $2.8 million approved by the voters in 1919 and a second issue in 1921. Qualifying for federal aid were the Lincoln Highway, the Yellowstone Highway and the Black and Yellow Trail.

Improving on efforts underway earlier in the 1910s, portions of the trail were divided into several “FAPs” (Federal Aid Projects). Various segments of the highway were often surveyed and under construction simultaneously. FAPs were assigned a variety of project numbers, some of which changed over time, resulting in a complex series of contracts. (The reader interested in specific FAPs is referred to the Biennial Reports of the State Highway Commission of the State of Wyoming, available at the Wyoming State Library.)

Fine-tuning the route

In the eastern portion of the state, the trail originally ran from Spearfish, S.D., passed through Sundance, Wyo. then trended southwest to Moorcroft. This route included today’s State Route 113 along the south side of Keyhole State Park, clearly marked as the “Black and Yellow Trail” on the Moorcroft U.S. Geological Survey Quadrangle, surveyed in 1914 and 1915 and issued in 1918. However, with the creation of the Wyoming Highway Department and the designation of the Black and Yellow Trail as a Federal Aid Project, the route was changed to swing through Carlile, Wyo. to the north, then head southwest to Moorcroft. The new route, though more indirect, was wisely located near Devils Tower, a tourist bonus. The original route of the trail along today’s State Route 113 was eliminated from the state highway program, and the route through Carlile became official.

This stretch was designated the Custer Battlefield Highway, and the FAP included about 10 miles of road construction northeast from Moorcroft toward Carlile. In 1919, the Custer Battlefield Highway Association was organized by W.D. Fisher, the secretary of the Sheridan Chamber of Commerce and a “good roads” advocate. This group promoted a more northerly route across South Dakota, entering Wyoming just west of Sturgis, S.D. It was to follow the general route of today’s U.S. 14-16 to Sheridan, and then north into Montana to the Custer Battlefield. The probable motivation for this road was the earlier decision for the Black and Yellow Trail to bypass Sheridan in favor of Buffalo. As a result, the Black and Yellow Trail and the Custer Battlefield Highway shared the same route in this area.

By the late 1910s and early 1920s, the Federal Aid Projects were carried out using uniform specifications. Generally, roadways were constructed 24 feet wide with corrugated metal pipe culverts and reinforced concrete culverts. For the Custer Battlefield Highway, grading began in July 1920, and the entire project was finished in April 1922, with gravel surfacing on five miles. Due to the shortage of steel at the time, the bridge design for the Belle Fourche River crossing was changed from steel to a 100-foot reinforced concrete structure at a cost of $29,000.

The remaining 16 miles of highway between the end of the above project and Carlile were completed under Federal Aid Projects in two phases that included grading, culverts and shale surfacing (completed in 1921), plus grading and construction of a roadway 24 feet wide covered with an 18-foot wide shale surface with culverts and bridges (completed in 1923). The segment from Moorcroft to Carlile was originally designated as Route 12.

Gillette to Buffalo 

In 1919-1920, a survey was completed of the projected route between Gillette and Buffalo via Spotted Horse, Clearmont and Ucross. “This covers investigation and survey of 47 miles of an entirely new road from Gillette via Recluse to Arvada and the platting of complete plans for nine miles.” This new route deviated from the former proposed route of the Black and Yellow Trail that paralleled the right-of-way of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad between Gillette and Arvada. It was longer, and it is unknown why this more circuitous route to the northeast through Spotted Horse was chosen by the surveyors. Funds were also allocated for the construction of a nine-mile segment in the vicinity of Spotted Horse Creek between Gillette and Arvada, “being the heaviest construction on the 47 miles between Gillette and Arvada. The structure across Spotted Horse Creek is a reinforced concrete bridge 100 feet long.” The plans specified a 24-foot road surfaced 16 feet wide with “selected material” surfacing. 

Under another Federal Aid Project, state work forces were employed on a 29-mile segment north of Gillette. According to the 1919-1920 Biennial Report, “About 25 miles have been built on a newly located line complete, but the old road and old bridge are used to cross Rawhide and Wild Cat Creeks”:  

The grades on our new location are reduced to 7% and distance is shortened two miles. The new roadbed is twenty-four feet wide and was built for the most part with State tractor outfit and blade graders. The necessary corrugated iron culverts were installed with rubble masonry endwalls, and six timber cattle passes were built. Work was started in July, 1920, and is primarily a connection between Gillette and Project C1-6 [vicinity of Spotted Horse].

Another difficult section was between the Sheridan County line and Spotted Horse, about 10 miles, and demanded cutting down heavy grades and placing corrugated iron culverts. By the end of 1922, the section required additional appropriations estimated at over $10,000.  

The entire 47-mile segment of highway was described in the Biennial Report for 1922-1924:

We find but one route in this county (Campbell) which, however, bears two numbers, viz: numbers 12 and 13, No. 12 indicating the route through the State known as the Custer Battlefield Highway, and No. 13 indicating the route known as the Black and Yellow Trail. These two highways coincide from Moorcroft in Crook County to Ucross in Sheridan County. Although this route has been improved throughout the whole county as a tractor graded road, the necessity is constantly arising of raising the fills through the low places to eliminate snow hazards, the installation of additional corrugated iron pipe culverts and the construction of gravel surface where the local material is bad.

The next Biennial Report (1924-1926) indicated that two Federal Aid Projects spent a considerable amount of money grading, surfacing and draining the new road from Gillette to Arvada. The first project required $75,246 and the second required $67,557.  From 1926 to 1928, an additional $57,720 was spent on grading and draining.

Crossing the Bighorns

The most challenging segment was the crossing of the Bighorn Mountains between Buffalo and Ten Sleep. In 1915, before the era of Federal Aid Projects, August Hettinger of the Buffalo District of the Bighorn National Forest met with local officials to offer an allocation of $15,000 to construct a portion of the road within the forest boundaries. Work began that summer on a two-mile stretch of an existing county road in Mosier Gulch west of Buffalo and was completed by October. Given the difficult nature of the route, engineers speculated that it might be possible to construct 20 miles of road the following year.

In 1917, a $10,000 survey was completed for the forest road from Buffalo to Ten Sleep. The portion that was located in the forest qualified under the Section 8 Fund of the Federal Aid Act, which provided federal funding for forest roads. In 1918, $20,000 was spent on building five miles of this 75-mile roadway.

Construction was divided into two sections: the 22-mile Buffalo-Sourdough Section, which was the approach up Clear Creek from Buffalo, and the 53-mile Sourdough-Ten Sleep Section. In May 1919, a Cooperative Agreement between the State of Wyoming and the Secretary of Agriculture enabled the Buffalo-Sourdough Section to be built by the Forest Service at an estimated cost of $105,000. (The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture.)Wyoming’s share was $25,000. The next section west, Sourdough to Ten Sleep, would be built by the Forest Service at an estimated cost of $210,000, of which the state would pay $85,000.  

Wyoming divided its cost among the three counties involved: Johnson, Big Horn and Washakie.  By 1920, 90 percent of the Black and Yellow Trail had been completed in the Johnson County portion, but only 35 percent had been completed in Big Horn County. (The county line runs along the mountain crest.) It appears, then, that the road was generally built from east to west. The entire Buffalo-Ten Sleep Road was finally completed by September 1922—a graded gravel road without an oiled surface, constructed with a combination of horse-drawn equipment, Caterpillar trucks, graders and dump trucks.

The final destination

Auto tourists who crossed the Bighorns via the Black and Yellow Trail proceeded west from Ten Sleep to Worland, where they joined the Yellowstone Highway. This road was conceived at about the same time as the trail. A “good roads” club convention was held in Douglas to promote a north-south route to Yellowstone National Park from Denver, Colo., and delegates from Buffalo were sent to encourage a linkup of the two highways. The Yellowstone Highway (today’s U.S. Route 20) passed through Douglas, Wyo., Casper, Shoshoni, the Wind River Canyon (after 1924), Thermopolis and Worland (where it joined the Black and Yellow Trail), then north through Basin, Greybull and Cody, and on to Yellowstone. The two routes, therefore, were the same from Worland to the East Entrance of Yellowstone National Park.  

Yellowstone was subject to early legislation prohibiting steam vehicles within park boundaries; this was meant to bar steam trains but was later interpreted to include all power vehicles including cars. Some Yellowstone personnel felt that autos would ruin the park. However, the numerous “good roads” clubs were determined that auto tourists have access to Yellowstone, and they had a strong influence on park policy. Also, officials realized that allowing access to cars would greatly increase visitation. Auto tourism in Yellowstone was inevitable, and the park welcomed the first cars at the East Entrance in 1915. This policy led to improved roads, both within Yellowstone and leading to the park, such as the Black and Yellow Trail and the Yellowstone Highway. 

But this “devil’s agreement” would haunt some Yellowstone officials far into the future. Almost two decades after the first cars passed through the East Entrance, Sanford Hill, landscape architect for the New Deal’s Emergency Conservation Work (ECW), lamented in his 1934 report: 

In the early days of the Park the stage coach and pack outfits were the means of transportation. The stories told by these early adventurers are indeed very interesting, and it seems that the pleasures and thrills they enjoyed were lasting memories in their lives.  They were fortunate, however, in seeing the Park in its natural state…The progress of man has changed this picture until now people rush through the Park seeing only a few of the many wonders…High speed highways and automobiles have no place in the picture painted by Mother Nature…the writer strongly recommends the return of the stagecoach and pack outfits…

Today, with yearly visitation exceeding three million, one can foresee a future when the park could prohibit private auto travel, granting Sanford Hill’s wish. 

Marking the roads

The Black Hills and Yellowstone Park Highway Association set May 16, 1921, as the day for the Boy Scouts, the Good Roads Club and other civic groups to erect signs along the Black and Yellow Trail. In July, a group of two hundred Boy Scouts from Clinton, Iowa, traveled the route in 60 automobiles, passing through Buffalo and over the Bighorn Range en route to Yellowstone National Park.

In 1925, the federal government recognized the need for a national system of highway marking. The new system designated east-west routes with even numbers and north-south routes with odd numbers. The standard U.S. route marker became a shield bearing the number of the route, the letters “US,” and the name of the state in black on a white background. The Black and Yellow Trail was designated U.S. Route 16.            

Paving the Black and Yellow Trail

During the mid-1920s, the Wyoming Highway Department made a concerted effort to “oil” the major roadways with gravel and crushed rock surfaces. Early efforts proved unsatisfactory as the surface disintegrated within a few months, creating a very rough roadway. Starting in 1927, a new oil formula proved more durable. Known as the asphaltic oil treatment or more commonly known as “blacktop,” it was soon in use on roadways across the state.

By the end of 1926, the highway department had improved the trail from the Wyoming-South Dakota border westward to its connection with the Yellowstone Highway in Worland. However, the highway consisted of segments of varying conditions, ranging from unimproved to surfaced or paved highway. In 1930, the trail from Buffalo over the Bighorn Mountains to Ten Sleep was described as an “all-weather” road that was not paved or oiled. In 1931, $128,000 became available to regrade and oil 11 miles of the road from the North Fork of Clear Creek to the crossing of Sourdough Creek. The 1932 Highway Map of the State of Wyoming depicted U.S. Route 16 as a gravel or crushed rock surface from Gillette to the Sheridan County line. 

Federal Aid Projects reconstructed the road between Ten Sleep and Worland in 1936. As a result of this upgrade, portions of the original roadway were relocated, and a new truss bridge (still in place today) was constructed over the Nowood River just west of Ten Sleep. In the 1960s, U.S. Route 16 was reconstructed between Ten Sleep and Worland, generally north of the 1930s highway. The trail became a county road (580A) and included the truss bridge over the Nowood River.

In the mid-1930s, two highway projects began applying asphaltic oil treatment to the trail between Buffalo and Ten Sleep. A 2-1/2” oil mat was laid over a 3-1/2” gravel base, completed by September 1940. This work also involved grading and overall improvement of the roadway surface. From 1939 to 1941, the trail from Gillette to Arvada was improved in a similar manner.  Other improvements involved grading, widening, overall upgrading of the roadway surface, new concrete bridges and some major realignments of the right of way. 

The portion of the Black and Yellow Trail over the Bighorns did not receive any further improvements until after World War II. In the early 1940s the road had suffered from neglect due to the war effort. However, in 1946, the first five miles of the roadway up Mosier Gulch was reconstructed with reduced grades, gentler curves and a wider road surface. By the end of the summer of 1946, a heavy asphalt mat was laid on the new road.

Finally, the construction of Interstate 90 in the 1960s fundamentally changed traffic patterns between the Wyoming-South Dakota state line west to Buffalo. It provided a more direct link between Gillette and Buffalo, and The Black and Yellow Trail (U.S. Route 14-16) through Spotted Horse, Arvada, Clearmont and Ucross became a secondary route. The northward curving section of the trail between Sundance, Carlile and Moorcroft suffered the same fate, although a portion of it is used today to access Devils Tower National Monument. Today’s U.S. Routes 14 and 16 split at Ucross. U.S. Route 16 generally maintains the original route of the Black and Yellow Trail over the Bighorn Mountains; U.S. Route 14 continues northwest to Sheridan, Wyoming, then crosses the Bighorn Range via Dayton and Burgess Junction to Lovell in the Bighorn Basin. Both routes ultimately access the East Entrance of Yellowstone National Park.

Due to the wide-open and undeveloped nature of the Wyoming landscape, the adventurous can still find and explore remnants of this historic road—so Go Ramble!

(Editor’s note: Special thanks to Peabody Caballo Mining, LLC, which made possible the publication of this article.)

Resources

Primary Sources

• Benson, Mrs. C.L. “The Black and Yellow Trail.” (poem). The [Newcastle] News-Journal, Nov. 18, 1920, 4.
• “Black and Yellow Trail Meritorious.” The [Sundance] Crook County Monitor, Oct. 16, 1913, 1.
• “Black and Yellow Trail Officials Visit Gillette on Tour to Park.” Gillette News, Aug. 8, 1919, 1.
• “Good Roads Convention.” The Buffalo Voice, June 21, 1912, 1-2.
• “Interstate Highway.” The Buffalo Bulletin, Feb. 8, 1912, 1.
• “Mark Black and Yellow Trail.” Buffalo Bulletin, May 12, 1921, 4.
• “Regarding the Black and Yellow Trail.” Gillette News, June 27, 1913, 1.
• “Road Work Resumed.” Worland Grit, March 19, 1936.
• “Road Work to Start Soon.” Worland Grit, March 5, 1936.
• “A Trail Blazed by the Immortal Custer: Building the Custer Battlefield Highway.” Sheridan Post, Jan. 25, 1920, 9.
• “200 Clinton, Iowa Scouts Visit Buffalo.” Buffalo Bulletin, July 14, 1921, 3.

Secondary Sources

• Gallup, James D.  “A Brief History of the Black and Yellow Trail from 1912.” WPA #237. Wyoming State Archives and Records Management Section, 1936. Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyo.
• King, Elizabeth. National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form: Historic Motor Courts and Motels in Wyoming, 1913-1975. 2017. Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, Cheyenne, Wyo. (Hereafter SHPO).
• Larson, T.A. History of Wyoming. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
• Massey, Rheba. Wyoming Comprehensive Historic Preservation Plan. 1989. Prepared for Archives, Museums and Historical Department, SHPO.
• ____________. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Log Cabin Motel. 1992. SHPO.
• Murray, Robert A.  Class 1 Historic Resource Study, Vol. 1. Narrative History. 1978. Bureau of Land Management, Casper District, Casper, Wyo.
• ______________. Multiple Use in the Big Horns: The Story of the Bighorn National Forest (Vols. 1-2). 1980. Bighorn National Forest, Sheridan, Wyo.
• Rosenberg, Robert G. Historic Context: History of the Trail System in Yellowstone National Park. 2015. Yellowstone National Park and SHPO.
• ________________. Historic Evaluation of Sites along the WYDOT-Spotted Horse-Gillette, Horse Creek Section, Campbell County, Wyoming. 2004. Offices of the Wyoming State Archaeologist and Wyoming Department of Transportation. SHPO.
• _________________.  Report of Historical Investigations, Historical Site Evaluations, Keyhole State Park, Crook County, Wyoming. SHPO.
• ________________.  Report of Historical Investigations, WYDOT Project 0302090/PE21, Structure CLH, Buffalo-Gillette Rawhide Creek, Campbell County, Wyoming. 2017. SHPO.
• _________________.  Wyoming Cultural Properties Form, Site 48JO1479, the Black and Yellow Trail. Wyoming Department of Transportation/Office of the State Archaeologist, Worland-Buffalo-West, Project No. 036-2(15). 1998. SHPO.
• _________________.  Wyoming Cultural Properties Form, Site 48WA1220, Black and Yellow Trail; Report of Historical Investigations, Truss Bridge FML, County Road 580A, WYDOT Project No. N361A02, Washakie County, Wyoming. 2014. SHPO.
• Wyoming State Highway Commission, State of Wyoming. First to Thirteenth Biennial Reports of the State Highway Commission of the State of Wyoming, 1917-1942. (Each report covered a two-year period extending from October 1 through September 30).

Illustrations

• The images of the maps, the autos entering Yellowstone and the view of the Black and Yellow Trail in the Bighorn Mountains are from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The early photo of Spotted Horse, Wyo.is from the Campbell County Rockpile Museum in Gillette, Wyo. Used with permission and thanks.
• The wagon photo is from the authors' collection, courtesy of the Olin Oedekoven family. Used with permission and thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from the authors. Used with permission and thanks.

In 1913, the nation’s first transcontinental highway followed Wyoming’s southern rail corridor. A well-publicized effort led by eastern automakers, the Lincoln Highway introduced tourists, especially women, to the wonders of Wyoming. It also spurred businesses in the state. Although its official life lasted little more than a decade, the route lived on as U.S. Route 30. Since the construction of Interstate 80, the Lincoln Highway has become a touchstone of nostalgia for a friendlier, more easygoing type of auto touring.

An idea and a marketing campaign

"The highways of America are built chiefly of politics, whereas the proper material is crushed rock, or concrete," wrote Carl G. Fisher in 1912. Fisher (1874-1939), a manufacturer of automobile headlights, had just developed the Indianapolis Speedway. Now he wanted to build a “coast-to-coast rock highway” from New York to San Francisco. He argued, “The automobile won't get anywhere until it has good roads to run on.”

Fisher recruited other industrialists into an association to promote the idea. They decided to name the road after Abraham Lincoln, one of Fisher’s heroes. Lincoln had been dead less than 50 years, and needed remembering. The marble memorial in Washington, D.C. did not yet exist, and a nationwide highway might be closer to the people.

Henry Bourne Joy (1864-1936), president of the Packard Motor Company, agreed to serve as president of the Lincoln Highway Association. Joy insisted that the highway take the shortest, most direct route across the country. It would not detour to national parks, nor to cities such as Denver that lobbied for it.

The association raised $2 million in its first year. But Henry Ford refused to contribute, saying that governments, not automakers, needed to pay for roads. At the time, roads were built by county governments, which had no incentive or method to coordinate linked interstate routes. Many state constitutions prohibited the state from paying for roads. The federal government, much smaller in those days, was reluctant to take on a new role. After all, railroads had been privately built, although heavily subsidized.

Meanwhile, driving cross-country required so much time and money that it was a rich person’s pastime, akin to having a private plane today. Why should it receive huge subsidies from taxes paid by all? Yet many local businesses wanted the benefits of increased tourism that would come with cross-country travel.

Leaders of the Lincoln Highway Association soon realized that Ford had a point. It could not afford to build highways. Instead, it would relabel existing roads. In today’s terms, it did software, not hardware: Its signs, guidebooks, and marketing would improve the user experience of driving cross-country. But the physical infrastructure would be provided by others. This was a particular challenge in Wyoming. Compared to other states, it had fewer existing roads and smaller populations to pay for new ones.

The association ended up spending most of its money on publicity. By painting the Lincoln Highway as a nationwide patriotic movement, it could persuade local, state, and federal governments to pay for road construction. It spurred the “Good Roads movement”—the tax-and-spend, big-government corporate-welfare idea of its time.

Choosing a path

Wyoming’s relatively easy routes through the Rockies have made it a leading setting for many forms of trans-mountain transportation: the Oregon, Mormon, Pioneer, and California Trails, Overland Trail, Bozeman Trail, Union Pacific Railroad and the Burlington route. The first transcontinental auto road, prioritizing a short, direct route, would similarly choose Wyoming.

In the initial construction of the Union Pacific railroad from 1867-1869, the government was paying by the mile. So surveyors tended to plot leisurely routes that followed the terrain on low grades. Beginning in 1898, the Union Pacific spent $160 million on upgrades, often to shorter routes with steeper grades that could be handled by new, more powerful locomotives. It then abandoned the old route. For the Lincoln Highway, that abandoned right-of-way was usually the best, and sometimes the only, east-west path available.

Thus the creation of the Lincoln Highway wasn’t really about building roads—it was more about marking them on a map. Some of the roads were major city streets or county-built market roads. Many were abandoned railroad rights-of-way. And some were mostly theoretical paths across the prairie. But not entirely so: people had already driven this route across the country. The first was Alice Huyler Ramsey in 1909; she did it in a Maxwell, at age 21, accompanied by a year-old baby.

Public right-of-way was an important factor in choosing the route. For example, west of Laramie, the highway used the old Union Pacific right-of-way in a route through Rock River and Medicine Bow, roughly today’s U.S. 30. Residents of Elk Mountain lobbied for a more southerly route, today’s I-80. But in addition to the weather concerns associated with it, the Elk Mountain route would have forced drivers to open and close 32 private-land gates.

Staying so close to the rail line meant that the Lincoln Highway had about 100 crossings of train tracks through the state. Of course there was no money for bridges. These at-grade crossings proved especially dangerous. The tracks were often higher than the surrounding landscape, so the road would crest at the crossing. But a Model T Ford, with gravity-fed gas lines, could stall out atop that crest.

Despite such drawbacks, the Lincoln Highway Association was quickly able to establish its route across the state. The association was created on July 1, 1913—and the highway was formally dedicated on Oct. 31 of that same year. Organizers encouraged every town along the nationwide route to celebrate with bonfires, fireworks and street dances. They also encouraged preachers to mention Lincoln and/or the highway in sermons the following Sunday. Many communities were happy to oblige, as the association predicted that tens of thousands of families would make the journey every year.

An ever-changing route

Today, when we look back on the Lincoln Highway, we have a romantic image of a two-lane road gliding through the landscape. We feel nostalgic for an era when driving offered a more intimate relationship with surroundings than does a massive interstate highway.

For example, Wyoming 374 west of Green River is one of those gorgeous old-fashioned drives, adjacent to the river and under Tollgate Rock and sandstone palisades. The view is so iconic that it’s on the cover of the 2013 edition of Brian Butko’s book Greetings from the Lincoln Highway: America's First Coast-to-Coast Road. And although this is indeed the Lincoln Highway, it’s only one version—the 1924 route.

The original 1913 Lincoln Highway crossed the Green River close to town on an old wagon bridge. It then ascended Telephone Canyon through drylands south of Wyoming 374. Like Laramie’s Telephone Canyon, this one was named because it provided the route of the first telephone wires. The first Lincoln Highway followed these wires, not the scenic riverside. That’s because there was only one decent bridge across the river, until the state built a new bridge, 286 feet long, for what is now Wyoming 374 a few miles upstream.

Indeed, most of Wyoming contains three or four alternative Lincoln Highways. Investments in new roads allowed for straightening, or better bridges, or flatter grades, or fewer railroad crossings, or less mud or better relations with adjacent landowners. Often the old route still exists as a two-track dirt path, though sometimes it enters private lands. But in the case of Green River’s Telephone Canyon, the only evidence of the old road is the old maps identifying it. One of the most fascinating aspects of Gregory Franzwa’s 1999 book The Lincoln Highway in Wyoming is its 118 maps—7.5-minute USGS topographic quadrangles, one inch to about 2.6 miles—charting the multiple parallel paths of the migrating highway.

To choose the right path, most travelers carried a current Complete Official Road Guide to tell them the way. The road was also marked with the red, white and blue Lincoln Highway insignia, featuring a large L. Travelers could also get the logo on pennants and radiator emblems for their vehicles.

Tourist experiences

Many people recorded their experiences on the Lincoln Highway—especially women, even including an 11 year-old girl. For example, the first full-size hardback book to discuss transcontinental travel was the 1915 Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway by Effie Price Gladding (1865–1947). Driving west to east, she noted, “The Wyoming desert has a sharper and more vivid coloring than that of Nevada. The tableland is more rolling and the mountains are farther away.”

Gladding’s automobile was unique on the landscape. “We see white canopied wagons in the barnyards of almost every ranch house,” she wrote. The dirt ruts she drove on were often full of “chuck holes made by the indefatigable gophers or prairie dogs.”

Gladding had many pleasant experiences. For example, in Lyman, “The village street looked like a pathway of lavender.” But in Lyman she was also troubled to learn of an extralegal “‘dead line’ over which sheepmen are not allowed to take their sheep”—evidence of continuing tension between sheep herders and cattle ranchers.

Before becoming an etiquette doyenne, Emily Post (1872–1960) wrote in 1916 of a 27-day trip By Motor to the Golden Gate. “If you think Cheyenne is a Buffalo Bill Wild West town, as we did, you will be much disappointed,” she wrote. At the time, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was still alive. But progressive, up-to-date Cheyenne was lacking in the board sidewalks and yipping coyotes that Post associated with him.

Post’s friend Celia and her son/chauffeur Edwin “looked distinctly grieved at the sight of smooth laid asphalt, wide-paved sidewalks, imposing capitol and modern buildings. Even the brand-new Plains Hotel was accepted by both of them in much the same spirit as a child who thought it was going to the circus and instead found itself at a museum of art.” Having been warned about primitive conditions west of Cheyenne, Post then turned off the Lincoln Highway and headed for Denver and the Southwest.

In 1920, Grace Carmody (1909–2009) of Trenton, Neb., was a child traveling the Lincoln Highway with her family. In an early-1990s letter to Wyoming’s Randy Wagner, quoted in Franzwa’s book, Carmody explained some of those primitive conditions. West of Medicine Bow, the towns of Carbon and Hanna had no places to stay. It was getting dark, and thus dangerous to drive. They pulled into Walcott, where the only apparent lodging was a saloon with flyspecked windows. Carmody’s mother refused to stay there. Carmody wrote, “Then a railroad man directed us to a nice clean-looking house and said the people were not at home but to go in and upstairs to find a room.”

None of these chronicles mentioned encounters with Indians in Wyoming. The Lincoln Highway followed a railroad corridor that had existed for almost 50 years. One way for tribes to avoid conflict was to locate reservations far from railroad lines. For example, the Eastern Shoshone tribe chose the Wind River Reservation in part because the Wind River Range blocked these lands from the rail corridor. Although exposure to native cultures would have enriched travelers’ experiences, the absence of Native people likely contributed to a perception of safety that made women and their reading public comfortable traversing these spaces.

Growth of businesses

Increased auto travel was a boon to existing establishments such as Cheyenne’s Plains Hotel and Medicine Bow’s Virginian Hotel. But additional gasoline, auto repair, restaurant and lodging emerged to serve travelers’ needs. For example, the 1921 Hotel Tomahawk in Green River was said to be one of the first Lincoln Highway-related buildings in that town. It was named after its owners, Tom Welch and J.W. Hawk.

The Black and Orange Tourist Cabins and Garage Camp were constructed in Fort Bridger in 1926. These were basic overnight accommodations, with outhouses. But each cabin featured a doorless garage for your automobile. Restored by Wyoming State Parks in 2009, the cabins are artifacts rather than lodgings, now part of Fort Bridger State Historic Park.

In 1919, future president Dwight D. Eisenhower participated in a military convoy of 73 vehicles with 258 soldiers and 39 officers on the full length of the Lincoln Highway. It was intended to test the readiness of road infrastructure for transcontinental travel by military vehicles. The convoy not only shattered bridges and culverts but experienced 50-mph winds. Years later, Eisenhower’s vivid memories of the trip drove his interest in founding the interstate highway system.

Attention paid to the convoy further increased the highway’s profile, while prompting improvements to its infrastructure. Traveler volumes increased as automobiles became more popular. Businesses thrived. And the federal government became increasingly ready to fund road construction.

The end of the road

The Lincoln Highway is generally recognized as the first east-west transcontinental automobile route. But soon it had many imitators. By the mid-1920s, the nation had more than 300 named roads. The clutter of roadside signs could be confusing.

A logical system was needed, and the federal Bureau of Public Roads proposed a numbering system. North-south roads would be odd-numbered; east-west would be even-numbered with those going coast-to-coast ending in zero. Bureau leaders made an early inquiry to the headquarters of the Lincoln Highway Association, in hopes that the granddaddy of named roads would bless the scheme.

The association had always been composed of automobile moguls. They viewed the Lincoln Highway as a method of promoting the Good Roads movement—getting governments, rather than auto manufacturers, to build roads. If the cost of getting federal money to build roads was abandoning the name “Lincoln Highway,” they could see that as a huge victory.

The road-numbering authorities initially suggested that the Lincoln Highway become U.S. 30 from the east coast to Salt Lake City, where it would merge with U.S. Route 40 to San Francisco. U.S. 40 has equally historic associations; it was built atop older trails including the National Road and the Victory Highway.

But Oregon and Idaho complained: Their only transcontinental route would then be U.S.

Route 20, impassable through Yellowstone Park in the winter. In a compromise, U.S. 30 North left the Lincoln Highway near Granger, Wyo., heading northwest into Idaho, where it then picked up the old proposed U.S. 20 to Astoria, Ore. U.S. 20 terminated at Yellowstone, while U.S. 30 South followed the Lincoln Highway to Salt Lake City, then angled north to rejoin U.S. 30 North at Burley, Idaho.

But soon U.S. 30 South was renumbered as U.S. Route 530. The Lincoln Highway lost a bit of numeric unity. Decades later, alterations made things more confusing: U.S. 530 was eliminated, U.S. 40 was terminated near Salt Lake City, and U.S. 20 was extended, crisscrossing U.S. 30 in Idaho to land on the Pacific at Newport, Ore. Only with the coming of the interstate system would a number, I-80, roughly correspond to the full Lincoln Highway.

With the 1926 implementation of the numbering scheme, however, the Lincoln Highway was finished. Within two years, the association formally disbanded. In a final act of marketing, it cast 3000 concrete posts, each seven feet long and 275 pounds. Colored concrete formed the red, white and blue logo, to which was attached a thin bronze medallion of Abraham Lincoln himself. The association arranged for a nationwide event on Sept. 1, 1928, in which Boy Scouts set the posts in holes, about one per mile.

The Lincoln Highway had lasted for 13–15 years. This was much longer than the Pony Express (1860–1861), but not as long as the Oregon Trail (1830s–1870s) or open-range cattle trails (1860s–1890s). The Lincoln Highway carried far more people than any of these, but whisked them through Wyoming more quickly. And because they tended to be vacationers rather than migrants or workers, their journey may not have felt as life-changing. Still, it was at the forefront of long-distance automobile touring, a huge chapter in the state’s development.

A highway that won’t die

Even a road without a marketing organization can still be driven on. It can still create memories. After 1928, natives and travelers alike still referred to U.S. 30 and U.S. 30 South as the Lincoln Highway. Cheyenne, Sinclair, Pine Bluffs, and other cities retained street names of Lincolnway or Lincoln Avenue or Lincoln Highway.

Thus, for almost the past 100 years—though especially after the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1960s—the “Lincoln Highway” has come to stand for a nostalgic, earlier form of automobile transportation. It’s the scenic two-lane, the free camping in a downtown park, and the sometimes kitschy roadside architecture.

Indeed, when Wyoming Public Radio did a series for the 100^th birthday of the Lincoln Highway in 2013, all four of the “roadside gems” it chose post-dated the dissolution of the Lincoln Highway Association: a concrete tipi in Egbert (1930s), the Wyoming Motel in Cheyenne (1936), the Springs Motel in Rock Springs (1968) and Pete’s Roc and Rye saloon in Evanston (1947).

Likewise, the mostly-dinosaur-bone “Fossil Cabin” east of Medicine Bow dates to the 1930s. The Little America gas/food/lodging complex east of Granger Junction was built in 1952, replacing a 1934 version that was located on County Highway 2, south of the town of Granger. Robert Russin's 13-foot-high bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln at the summit of I-80 between Laramie and Cheyenne was dedicated in 1959. It was moved to its current location from the summit of U.S. 30/Lincoln Highway, about a mile away, in 1969.

A nearby memorial to Henry Joy was donated by his widow in 1938. It was moved to the I-80 summit in 2001 from a remote spot near Wamsutter, Wyo., where in 1916 Joy had experienced the most incredible sunset of his life.

The Lincoln Highway has outlived its organizational structures and definitions. In fact, its popularity has increased in the last 35 years. Drake Hokanson’s 1988 book, The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America, which helped revive nationwide interest, referred to the highway in the past tense. But especially since Hokanson, Franzwa and other enthusiasts revived the Lincoln Highway Association in the 1990s, the highway now feels much more alive.

Wyomingites rightfully celebrate the Lincoln Highway. But what exactly is being celebrated? Where exactly is it?

Living history

The website of the Lincoln Highway Association recommends that to do a modern tour, a person can mostly take the Interstate. After all, today’s maps label much of I-80 as “the Lincoln Highway.” The website does advise getting off the Interstate and onto city streets in Cheyenne, Sinclair, Rawlins, Rock Springs, Green River, Lyman/Fort Bridger, and Evanston. Most importantly, it urges people to take U.S. 30 from Laramie through Medicine Bow to Walcott Junction.

This nearly-100-mile stretch may be the most famous Wyoming “Lincoln Highway.” As the name of one website of gorgeous photographs says, it was “bypassed by I-80.” It’s almost as if, when we celebrate the Lincoln Highway, we celebrate the act of being bypassed.

In other words, when most people talk about the Lincoln Highway, they mean old U.S. 30. Other than that 100-mile stretch and the “business routes” through cities, people understand that what was bypassed may often now be a frontage road. In a few places, such as the summit between Cheyenne and Laramie, the old road may be as much as a mile from the newer road. In some places it may still be maintained, and drivable, where in other places, it may have faded to nothingness or been obliterated by its replacement.

But “old U.S. 30” is also a moving target. Like the Lincoln Highway, it too was frequently moved, straightened, or improved between its creation in 1926 and the coming of I-80 in the 1960s. For example, in 1935, U.S. 30 between Pine Bluffs and Cheyenne was relocated to reduce distance by five miles and eliminate all railroad crossings. If you want to follow the actual route that Eisenhower did in 1919, you can’t take that “new” U.S. 30, on the route of today’s I-80. You have to take what are now county roads to the north, through downtown Egbert, Burns, and Hillsdale, Wyo.

Likewise, the new U.S. 30 no longer passes through Elmo, Latham or Frewen, Wyo., as the 1931 version of U.S. 30/Lincoln Highway did. The newer roads no longer pass through the heart of Fort Fred Steele, as the 1922 Lincoln Highway (before its rechristening as U.S. 30) did; nor through Baxter, as the 1916 Lincoln Highway did; nor through Blairtown or a stage station south of Bryan named Lone Tree, as the 1913 Lincoln Highway did. You may not have heard of most of these places—but a stickler would say that’s precisely the point. By the 1940s they’d all been “bypassed by U.S. 30.”

Why do we care more about the act of being bypassed by I-80 than by U.S. 30? It’s more recent, in the memory of most baby boomers. It’s more substantial, cutting off that 100-mile stretch. And the construction of the interstate system—with its divided traffic, limited access and limits on commercial activity—feels more momentous than a mere road improvement and relocation. Thus the most important date in today’s conception of the history of Wyoming’s Lincoln Highway may not its dedication on Oct. 31, 1913, but the opening of I-80 on Oct. 3, 1970.

When we study history, we tell stories that feel relevant in the present day. That’s why history can be so controversial—we’re arguing about what we value today. On the surface, the Lincoln Highway isn’t very controversial, although once you dig in, the story proves ever more complicated. That placid surface reflects a societal agreement: We’re particularly interested in the shift away from the Lincoln Highway, from two-lanes to interstates. As with the shifts away from the Pony Express and open-range cattle drives, we could choose to accomplish our goals with greater speed, efficiency, safety, and comfort. Yet we’re still pondering the change in our shared values implied by that choice.

Resources

Primary sources

• Gladding, Effie Price. Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway. New York: Brentano's, 1915. Accessed April 5, 2021 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33320/33320-h/33320-h.htm.
• Post, Emily. By Motor to the Golden Gate. New York: Appleton and Co., 1916. Accessed April 5, 2021 at https://ia600304.us.archive.org/14/items/bymotortogoldeng00postiala/bymotortogoldeng00postiala.pdf.
• Ramsey, Alice Huyler. Veil, Duster and Tire Iron. Covina, CA: Castle Press, 1961. Republished as Alice’s Drive, with an introduction by Gregory Franzwa. Tucson, Ariz: Patrice Press, 2005.
• Round, Thornton E. The Good of it All. Cleveland: Lakeside Printing Co., 1957.
• Twiss, Clinton. The Long Long Trailer. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1951. Later made into a Lucille Ball movie.
• Van de Water, Frederic Franklyn. The Family Flivvers to Frisco. New York: D. Appleton, 1927.

Secondary sources

• Albany County Historic Preservation Board Tour Guides Project, “The Old Lincoln Highway: A Remarkable Ambition.” Accessed April 5, 2021 at https://visitlaramie.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/The-Old-Lincoln-Highway-Tour-2017.pdf
• Albany County Historical Society. “Telephone Canyon, new name, old route,” accessed April 5, 2021 at https://www.wyoachs.com/new-blog-1/2019/1/3/telephone-canyon-new-name-old-route.
• Butko, Brian. Greetings from the Lincoln Highway: America's First Coast-to-Coast Road. Centennial edition. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2013.
• “By-Passed: The Lincoln Highway across Wyoming.” Website of historic info and excellent color and historical photographs, accessed April 4, 2021 at https://bypassedbyi80.com/about/.
• Davies, Pete. American Road: The Story of an Epic Transcontinental Journey at the Dawn of the Motor Age. New York: Henry Holt, 2014. Covers the 1919 military motorcade.
• Franzwa, Gregory M. “The Lincoln Highway in Wyoming,” Annals of Wyoming 65, no. 2/3, Summer-Fall 1993, accessed April 5, 2021 at https://ia902802.us.archive.org/35/items/wyomingann6512341993wyom/wyomingann6512341993wyom.pdf, pp. 4-5.
• _________________. The Lincoln Highway in Wyoming. Tucson, Ariz: Patrice Press, 1999. This meticulous guidebook is a major source for this article.
• Hasman, Gregory R.C. “Hotel Tomahawk.” Alliance for Historic Wyoming website, accessed April 4, 2021 at https://www.historicwyoming.org/profiles/hotel-tomahawk.
• Hokanson, Drake. The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988.
• Manning, Tom. “100 Years on the Lincoln Highway.” Wyoming PBS, accessed April 5, 2021 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIW2-bH84u4. A well-done hour-long documentary.
• McConnell, Curt. “A Reliable Car and a Woman Who Knows It”: The First Coast-to-Coast Auto Trips by Women, 1899-1916. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000.
• Pyatt, Kayne. “Standing the test of time: Taggart has owned Pete's Roc n Rye for 50 years.” Uintah County Herald, Oct. 23, 2018, accessed April 5, 2021 at https://uintacountyherald.com/article/standing-the-test-of-time.
• “The Lincoln Highway in Wyoming.” Lincoln Highway Association, accessed April 4, 2021 at https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/info/wy/.
• Wallis, Michael. The Lincoln Highway, Coast-to-Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate: The Great American Road Trip. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
• Weingroff, Richard. “From Names to Numbers: The Origins of the U.S. Numbered Highway System.” Federal Highway Administration Highway History, accessed April 5, 2021 at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/numbers.cfm.
• _______________. “The Lincoln Highway.” Federal Highway Administration Highway History, accessed April 5, 2021 at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/lincoln.cfm.
• Wyoming Public Media. “Revisiting The Lincoln Highway's Mid-Century Roadside Gems.” Visits to four sites along the route, for its 100^th birthday, accessed April 4, 2021 at https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/revisting-lincoln-highways-mid-century-roadside-gems#stream/0.

Illustrations

• The photo of the stuck car is from the B. Smart collection at the Laramie Plains Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The map of the Lincoln Highway is from the Federal Highway Administration. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Lincoln Highway marker is from Wikipedia.
• The photo of Andrew Anderson at the Coyote Springs filling station is courtesy of Nancy Anderson. Used with permission and special hanks.
• The image of the Warhoop, the souvenir-stand tipi in Egbert, Wyo., is an early postcard featured in a 2013 story by Erin Dorbin on Wyoming Public Media. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the dedication of the Henry Joy monument is from box 96, folder number 6, Payson W. Spaulding papers, 1886-1980, collection number 01803, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.
• The 1980s photo of a weedy U.S. 30 paralleling I-80 is by Drake Hokanson. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the dedication of the Henry Joy monument is from box 96, folder number 6 of the Payson W. Spaulding papers at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the unveiling of the Lincoln bust is from the University of Wyoming photo service. Used with permission and special thanks to Marlene Carstens.
• The color photo of the fossil cabin and Texaco pumps at Como Bluff is from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• Doc Thissen’s photo of the Black and Orange cabins at Fort Bridger is from the Uinta County page of his great website, “By-Passed: The Lincoln Highway across Wyoming.” Used with permission and thanks.

In a 1913 article, the CheyenneState Leader sang the praises of good roads. It noted that the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental road, had recently chosen a route through Cheyenne. In fact, the newspaper said, Cheyenne was now on four major roads.

In addition to the Lincoln Highway, there was the “Gulf of Mexico to Yellowstone National Park Highway.” And the “AAA Coast-to-Coast road.” And the “National Highway of America, from NY to Washington to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and thence through Kentucky and Kansas to Denver thence to Cheyenne where it joins the Lincoln Highway.”

The Lincoln Highway has been the subject of several books, and its Wyoming section has a thorough history on this website. The other three named roads are so obscure that they don’t even have any Google results. (As of May 2021, the “Gulf of Mexico to Yellowstone National Park Highway” and “AAA Coast-to-Coast road” generate zero results, and the “National Highway of America” generates four, none referring to this road.)

That’s not surprising. Named roads were a fad that once covered the nation and were then largely forgotten. The named-road era was a fascinating and important time in Wyoming history. People were discovering the wonders of auto travel. Marketers were discovering how to appeal to them. The result was wide-open competition in a new sort of gold rush, where the treasure was the automobile tourist. Nostalgia for the roads and their names still plays out today.

Why roads got named

The years from 1910–1930 were a frontier for the automobile. Previously, railroads had dominated long-distance travel. Cities were born, and fortunes made, based on the route of the train. How else could farmers send out products or receive mail-order essentials? Railroad monopolists became both wealthy and politically powerful.

Then arose independent car ownership, a potentially democratizing alternative. But as autos became dependable enough to take you more than a few miles, questions arose. Which routes should you travel? How would you know how to find them? Would they offer sufficient food, lodging, gasoline, or repair services?

The Lincoln Highway presented one model for answering those questions: an automaker-funded national association chose a coast-to-coast route, developed a logo, marked the route with signs, and wrote a guidebook. But soon competitors discovered that any such long-distance road had value to the communities it passed through—which meant that those communities might be willing to fund it.

A road association could collect advertising fees for a map or booklet, use some of that money for signs and related activities, and still have some of that money left over for the promoter’s profit. Thus the named-road business became a sort of Wild West: an unregulated frontier where an entrepreneur’s success depended on some combination of brains, romanticism, organization, chutzpah, wealth, and honor (or lack thereof).

What’s left a century later is mostly the romanticism: a fun collection of stylized logos and evocative road names. Many of these roads passed through Wyoming. After all, the state boasted both relatively easy routes through the Rockies and the raw materials for romantic dreams.

Trails to Yellowstone

Cody, Wyo.’s Gus Holm (sometimes spelled Holms or Holmes or even Holm’s) was the “chief good road booster of all Wyoming,” according to his hometown Park County Enterprise. In the summer of 1913 he drove a Studebaker 1,963 miles on the proposed Black and Yellow Trail and the Billings-Cody Way.

Based in Deadwood, South Dakota, the Chicago, Black Hills and Yellowstone Park Highway Association was knitting together a Black and Yellow Trail across the Bighorn Mountains. Promoters in central South Dakota hoped that Chicagoans would spend money in their towns on the way to the national park. Holm volunteered as a “pathfinder” to help select the Wyoming route and upgrade its conditions.

But the Black and Yellow Trail faced competition. The Twin Cities–Aberdeen–Yellowstone Park Trail, organized at a conference in Lemmon, South Dakota, in 1912, soon lengthened its route “from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound,” and shortened its name. The “Yellowstone Trail” would take Chicagoans, and others, across the northern reaches of South Dakota, and then into Montana, following the Yellowstone River to avoid crossing the Bighorns.

Holm—along with Cody Studebaker dealer Jacob M. “Jakie” Schwoob—wanted to position Cody on both routes. In addition to his work for the Black and Yellow Trail, Holm organized the Billings-Cody Highway Association to encourage construction of the Billings-Cody Way, an auto route that followed the1901 Burlington Rail route from Montana south to Cody via Powell.

In February 1913, Holm led a Cody contingent to a Yellowstone Trail conference in Miles City, Montana. They proposed that instead of following the Yellowstone River along the Northern Pacific railroad tracks to Livingston, Montana, and the north entrance to Yellowstone Park, the Trail should enter Yellowstone via Cody. Apparently the conference-goers were impressed. But at the next conference, in Forsyth, Montana, in June, representatives from Livingston responded, and carried the argument.

But Holm had another option as well. That same year, promoters led by M. R. Collins of Douglas, Wyo., were sketching out a totally different road called the Yellowstone Highway. It ran from Denver through the newly established Rocky Mountain National Park to Yellowstone. (It too ran through Cheyenne, but was not announced until after the State Leader article was published.) When this Yellowstone Highway published an "Official Route Book” in 1916, the text was copyrighted by the organization’s president, “Gus Holm’s.”

All the attention to Yellowstone was rather ironic. When Collins made his pathfinder trip to Yellowstone in 1913, he had to stop at the east entrance to the park. Automobiles were not allowed to enter.

Steve Mather’s endorsement

At the time, almost all Yellowstone visitors arrived by train. Many took the Northern Pacific to Gardiner, Montana, where an elegant station designed by Robert Reamer, architect of the Old Faithful Inn, stood opposite the entrance arch. Some travelers took the Oregon Short Line, a subsidiary of the Union Pacific, from Salt Lake City to West Yellowstone. And others took the Burlington Route to Cody. All then toured the park on stagecoaches. To transport tourists and supplies, the park managed a herd of more than 7,000 horses.

Yellowstone first admitted automobiles on August 1, 1915. It had spent three years strengthening bridges, installing culverts, building retaining walls, and otherwise upgrading its road system to handle automobiles. The money—one estimate was $2,265,000 to reconstruct the entire system—came from the Army, which was then managing the park.

A month later, Steve Mather and Horace Albright came to visit. Mather was a mercurial millionaire industrialist and Sierra Club member who had agreed to help the Department of Interior organize what would become the National Park Service. Young Albright was his hyper-organized right-hand-man.

After formally dedicating Rocky Mountain National Park, the two men took a train from Loveland, Colorado, to Cody. There Mather decided to take a stagecoach, rather than an automobile, to Yellowstone’s east entrance. He was curious how the mix of vehicles was working out. As Albright later wrote, “We were traveling right along, bumpy and uncomfortable but moving at a pretty good clip, when we came on a string of autos. They were having a terrible time trying to get up a steep grade; the road was just one big muddy mass of ruts. Our stagecoach was passing them neatly.” Albright found it quite amusing.

It turned out that the cars were from the Park-to-Park Highway Association, a successor to the (Colorado-and-) Yellowstone Highway group. Mather and Albright had met with them in Denver, and now they’d driven all the way here. Rather than amused, Mather was embarrassed at the condition of the road. He had pushed for autos to be allowed into Yellowstone, but what was the point if you couldn’t even get there?

In a conference in Yellowstone later that week, Mather encouraged the automobilists. He wanted to boost and coordinate long-distance highways so that people would visit national parks and support them politically. His annual reports regularly highlighted the activities of named roads that went to or near national parks. Mather also teamed with publicists for railroads. He marketed the national parks as effectively as he had marketed the product that made him a millionaire, 20 Mule Team Borax.

With follow-up meetings in subsequent summers, the promoters of the Yellowstone Highway teamed with other groups to connect 13 national parks in the National Park-to-Park Highway. Mather called it the nation’s “greatest scenic drive.” On August 26th, 1920, a party of twelve motorists formally inaugurated the road with a 76-day tour beginning with the Denver-to-Yellowstone trek through Wyoming.

Accompanying infrastructure

To accommodate automobiles, Wyoming needed to build and improve roads. However, to accommodate automobile travelers, Wyoming also needed hotels, restaurants, retail stores, gas stations, and repair shops. Furthermore, where such establishments had previously catered to a local clientele, the arrival of early auto tourists demonstrated that many of these facilities failed to meet national standards.

For example, in July, 1916, Mather and Albright returned to Wyoming as Congress debated the National Park Service bill that they had co-written. On July 21, Mather, his wife Jane and some friends arrived in Thermopolis by train. Mather and the Yellowstone Highway Association were eager for their road to come through Thermopolis and make its hot springs an attraction as big as those of Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.

Albright, who arrived early to scout it out, later recalled his disappointment in Thermopolis’ “odd wildlife ‘zoo’ (with aroma arising from a handful of moth-eaten elk, deer, bison, a mother bear, and two cubs); the raw, hot, dust-laden wind that blew incessantly; and the bug-ridden hotel.”

The party then motored to Cody, where their experiences at the Irma Hotel were even worse. Its kitchen was “about the dirtiest, most unsanitary place I had ever seen,” Albright wrote. Jane Mather found bugs crawling in her bed and decided to sleep in the lobby. Steve Mather found two men sleeping in his bed. When he complained, the clerk told him to “make your bedfellows move over.” Meanwhile Albright was “awakened by some strange man crawling into my bed, falling asleep immediately, and giving off the loudest snores I had ever heard.”

The next day they stopped for lunch at Pahaska Tepee, which like the Irma was owned by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. It was, Albright wrote, “horrible, greasy, inedible food served by loud, boisterous, grimy, but glitzy waitresses.” When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West visited Washington the following year, Mather chewed out the celebrity for the “sad conditions” of his establishments, and Buffalo Bill vowed to remedy them.

The good news about that 1916 trip was the condition of the road. They could take a car rather than a stagecoach, and not get stuck in mud. Albright wrote, “The road to Yellowstone was amazingly good compared to 1915.”

A plethora of roads

The National Park-to-Park Highway, Lincoln Highway, and Yellowstone Trail were all supported by powerful, well-funded marketing organizations. These roads thrived in the public imagination. The attention spurred physical improvements, which allowed them to thrive in real life as well.

A second tier of roads was slightly less famous but still successful. This tier included the Black and Yellow Trail and the Custer Battlefield Highway. This latter route, established in 1919, went from Omaha, Neb. (later Des Moines, Iowa) to Glacier National Park, also passing through its namesake national cemetery. It thus traversed northeast Wyoming, from Beulah to Parkman. Just as the Black and Yellow Trail competed with the Yellowstone Trail with a route across central rather than northern South Dakota, this route, based in Mitchell, S.D., competed with both by taking an even more southerly route, corresponding to today’s I-90. Passing through Sheridan also represented a new route for a Wyoming portion of a national highway.

Several other second- or third-tier named roads originated in Yellowstone, although they did not traverse any other part of Wyoming. These included the National Parks Highway (different than the Park-to-Park highway, this was North Dakota’s competitor to the Yellowstone Trail, and was sometimes known as the Red Trail), the Geysers-to-Glaciers Trail, the Yellowstone-Glacier Beeline Highway, the Regina-Yellowstone Trail, and the Utah-Idaho-Yellowstone Highway.

In a third tier, roads were announced, named, and sometimes even platted, but never gained much momentum. For example, the Atlantic-Yellowstone-Pacific Highway was announced in 1923 in Sioux Falls, S.D., as yet another Chicago-to-Yellowstone highway. But its route was apparently only ever blazed from Chicago to Sioux Falls, thus giving it the unfortunate status of never reaching any of the three destinations in its name.

The George Washington National Highway, based in Omaha, Neb., ran from Savannah, Ga, to Seattle, Wash. In 1916 its president Percy A. Wells made the dubious boast that it was “the only highway that intersects every other highway.” A 1916 postcard and 1922 map show it coinciding with the Black and Yellow Trail through Buffalo, Worland, Greybull, and Cody, Wyo. I.S. Bartlett’s 1918 History of Wyoming celebrates Moorcroft, Wyo., “at the junction of two noted automobile routes—the George Washington Highway and the Black and Yellow Trail.” But then this highway largely disappears from the historical record.

In 1919, the mayor of Bearcreek, Mont., Dr. J.C.F. Siegfriedt (1879–1940), sought to build yet another road to Yellowstone—the Black and White Trail. Its Wyoming portion would have roughly followed the route of today’s U.S. 212, the Beartooth Highway from Red Lodge, Mont. through Wyoming to Cooke City, Mont. But Siegfriedt was trying to build a road from scratch, rather than re-labeling and marketing an existing route. He sold “subscriptions” but soon ran out of money. The Black and White Trail became a series of abandoned switchbacks up the side of a neighboring mountain. Does it count as a named highway if no tourist ever drove it? Does it count as Wyoming history if intended to traverse Wyoming but never did?

End of an era

In the mid-1920s, the explosion of named highways led to confusion. At chokepoints such as Cheyenne, Moorcroft, and Cody, signposts for competing highways crowded the roadsides. The purpose of named highways had been to help drivers select the best road, but there were now so many options that the purpose was no longer being served. Furthermore, merchants would get hit up by several competing promoters. In the East, the situation was even worse, especially around Chicago where all the competing Dakota routes funneled into the same corridor.

The market had failed to sort itself out in an orderly fashion. Competition begat chaos. Furthermore, the federal government was now funding most long-distance road construction, and it wanted to exert top-down control. It laid out the numbered system of U.S. routes. Several road promoters protested that not only could they lose their livelihoods, but numbers lacked the romance of road names. (Today, fans of the famed Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles might disagree.)

The numbers got assigned based on logic and politics rather than romance or commerce. Thus parts of Wyoming’s U.S. 14 and U.S. 16 are the old Black and Yellow Trail and parts of each are the old Custer Battlefield Highway. U.S. 30 follows the old Lincoln Highway but departs it at Granger Junction. The old Parks-to-Parks Highway is now I-25 from Cheyenne to Casper but U.S. 20 from Casper to Yellowstone.

Numbers are now an official standard. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials has a Special Committee on U.S. Route Numbering, to go along with its standards for design, construction of highways and bridges, materials, and many other technical areas. The standards ensure consistency across jurisdictional lines for not only tourists, but also first responders.

Winning nostalgia

In 1988, Cody tourism businesses wanted to promote a route to Yellowstone’s northeast entrance (in addition to its well-known route to the east entrance). Wyoming State Highway 296 through Sunlight Basin, though only partially paved, provided dramatic views. It also roughly followed the route of the 1877 flight of the Nez Perce. Cody wanted to call this 47-mile stretch the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway. The Wyoming State Highway Commission (now the Wyoming Transportation Commission) agreed to back the plan.

The Chief Joseph hooks into the Beartooth Highway, perhaps Wyoming’s most famous named road. This summer-only scenic drive reaches nearly 11,000 feet but passes no year-round settlements in its 38 Wyoming miles. Ironically, however, its name is only informal. The highway was built as U.S. 12 in the early 1930s and was briefly labeled U.S. 312 before becoming U.S. 212 in 1962. Furthermore, the enabling legislation didn’t make clear who should be responsible for its reconstruction and maintenance, a status which continually keeps it in the news as the “orphaned highway.”

In 1998, the federal highway bill contained new language to provide funding for national scenic byways. It’s not much money, says John Davis of the Wyoming Department of Transportation. “But a little federal money for signage and safety can serve as a catalyst to improve these roads and aid tourism in surrounding communities.”

Counties, tribes, agencies, and other organizations nominate potential named roads to the Federal Highway Administration. For example, in 2002, the Beartooth Highway finally received an official name, the Beartooth All-American Road. (Furthermore, since 1997, a steering committee of interested parties has coordinated to provide for the orphaned highway’s upkeep and improvement.) In 2021, the Flaming Gorge– Green River Basin Scenic Byway became Wyoming’s second All-American Road.

Meanwhile, 20 smaller scenic byways and backways dot every region of Wyoming, from the Big Spring Scenic Backway north of Kemmerer to the Wyoming Black Hills Scenic Byway north of Newcastle, and from the Seminoe-Alcova Backway north of Sinclair to the Red Gulch-Alkali Backway south of Shell.

Like the original named roads, the purpose of scenic byways is to promote tourism. These aren’t trucking routes, or clogged with commuter traffic. Instead, rural promoters hope that tourists will enjoy the drive and spend money on the way. It’s nostalgia in the best sense of the word, reclaiming the joy of recreational auto travel.

You could thus think of scenic byways as a retro fashion. But there are two or three times as many named byways today as there were named highways in the golden era. And with population growth, they surely carry far more traffic. Named roads provide an example of nostalgia for a thing becoming a bigger phenomenon than the thing itself ever was.

Resources

Sources

• “Atlantic, Yellowstone, Pacific Highway,” Encyclopedia Dubuque. Accessed April 1, 2021 at http://www.encyclopediadubuque.org/index.php?title=ATLANTIC,_YELLOWSTONE,_PACIFIC_HIGHWAY.
• “Flaming Gorge – Green River Basin Scenic Byway Designated as All-American Road,” SweetwaterNow, February 19, 2021. Accessed May 18, 2021 at https://www.sweetwaternow.com/flaming-gorge-green-river-basin-scenic-byway-designated-as-all-american-road/.
• “National Park to Park Highway Association,” Better Roads and Streets, Volume 6, September 1916, pp. 42-44. Accessed April 1, 2021, at https://books.google.com/books?id=6bG8b_-ER2sC&pg=RA7-PA38&lpg=RA7-PA38&d
• “Northwestern Association’s Fourteenth Annual Meeting,” The Hotel Monthly, vol. 24, August, 1916, accessed April 6, 2021, at https://books.google.com/books?id=BV5GAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA7-PA43&dq=%22george+washington+highway%22+omaha+savannah&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj369ej_OnvAhXPrZ4KHbdyC5sQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=%22george%20washington%20highway%22%20omaha%20savannah&f=false, pp. 42-43.
• “Report of the Director of the National Park Service,” Washington DC: Department of the Interior, Nov. 12, 1918, p. 819, accessed April 8, 2021 at https://books.google.com/books?id=_R1IAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA819
• Albright, Horace M., and Marian Albright Schenck, Creating the National Park Service: The Missing Years. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
• Bartlett, I.S., editor, History of Wyoming vol. 1. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1918. Accessed April 1, 2021 at https://sites.rootsweb.com/~wytttp/history/bartlett/chapter33.htm.
• Carr, Ethan, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
• Clayton, John, “Origins of the Beartooth Highway,” in Stories from Montana's Enduring Frontier. Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2013.
• Culpin, Mary Shivers. The History of the Construction of the Road System in Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1966. Historic Resource Study, Volume I. Denver: Rocky Mountain Region, National Park Service, 1995. Accessed April 8, 2021 at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/yell_roads/hrs1-5.htm.
• Franzwa, Gregory M. The Lincoln Highway in Wyoming. Tucson, AZ: Patrice Press, 1999. Our quote of the Cheyenne State Leader is taken from p. 9. Although Franzwa gives neither title nor date of that article, it is apparently from early October, 1913.
• Iowa Department of Transportation, “Historic Auto Trails: Custer Battlefield Highway,” Accessed April 1, 2021, at https://iowadot.gov/autotrails/custerbattlefieldhighway.
• Kulbacki, Michael, Bert McCauley and Steve Moler, “An Orphaned Highway,” Public Roads, Vol. 70 No. 1, July/August 2006, accessed May 14, 2021 at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/06jul/03.cfm.
• Official route book of the Yellowstone highway association in Wyoming and Colorado. Chicago: Wallace Press, 1916, accessed March 28, 2021at https://archive.org/stream/officialrouteboo00yell/officialrouteboo00yell_djvu.txt,.
• Ridge, Alice A. & Ridge, John William. Introducing the Yellowstone Trail: A Good Road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound, 1912–1930. Altoona, Wis.: Yellowstone Trail Publishers, 2000.
• Shankland, Robert, Steve Mather of the National Parks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970.
• Wade, Brandon (dir), Paving the Way: the National Park-to-Park Highway. Depth of Field Productions, 2009. Available from https://pavingtheway.tv/.
• Weingroff, Richard F. and Sherry Hayman, “Wondrous Rides Through Nature’s Wonders,” Public Roads, Vol. 80 No. 3, November/December 2016, accessed April 1, 2021 at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/16novdec/03.cfm.
• Weingroff, Richard. “From Names to Numbers: The Origins of the U.S. Numbered Highway System,” Federal Highway Administration Highway History, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/numbers.cfm
• Whiteley, Lee and Jane. The Playground Trail:The National Park-to-Park Highway. To and Through the National Parks of the West in 1920. Boulder: Johnson Printing, 2003.
• Wyoming Department of Transportation. “Scenic Byways,” accessed April 29, 2021 at http://www.dot.state.wy.us/home/travel/scenic_byways.html.
• Wyomingtourism.org. “Wyoming Road Trip: Western Heritage Along Our Scenic Byways,” accessed May 18, 2021 at http://www.dot.state.wy.us/files/live/sites/wydot/files/shared/Public%20Affairs/photos/Scenic%20Byways%20brochure%202013.pdf.

Illustrations

• The photos of the first cars entering Yellowstone, Gus Holm, the cars crossing the bridge in Casper and the cars by the Buffalo Bill Reservoir are all from the Park County Archives, Cody, Wyo. Used with permission and thanks to archivist Brian Beauvais.
• The postcard of Buffalo Bill with the named highways at his feet is from the Henry Ford museum. Used with permission and thanks. The author notes further that the image is fascinating for how it shows the town linking itself to Yellowstone and Buffalo Bill. It’s signed by noted Cody artist Olive Fell, who was just 20 years old in 1916. This particular card is of historical interest because Buffalo Bill himself sent it to Henry Ford.
• The 1918 national map of transcontinental routes and the1925 map of the Custer Battlefield Highway are from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks.
• The 1922 map of the Park-to-Park highway around the West is from americanroads.us. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Jake Schwoob standing beside his Lincoln is from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and special thanks to archivist Nora Plant.

After the Civil War, gold and then the Union Pacific Railroad began drawing large numbers of Euro-Americans to what soon would become Wyoming Territory. In 1867, prospectors found big nuggets near South Pass; the following year the boom brought 2,000 or more miners to dig in the gulches around South Pass City, Atlantic City and Miner’s Delight.

About the same time, Cheyenne was founded when the tracks first reached it; they were completed across Wyoming by the end of 1868 and the following spring linked up with the Central Pacific in Utah, making the railroad transcontinental. Briefly, South Pass City was larger than all the brand-new railroad towns except Cheyenne, which soon became the territorial capital.

Also at this time, a treaty signed in 1868 between the government and the Eastern Shoshone Tribe vastly reduced that tribe’s holdings and proposed to move its Indian agency—where Eastern Shoshones would receive their treaty-obligated, annual payments of government goods, or annuities—from Fort Bridger up to the warm Wind River Valley, north of South Pass and down at a more livable elevation. Partly to have troops near the new Indian agency, and partly to protect the miners at South Pass from raids by other tribes, in 1869 the Army built Camp Augur on a site that six years later would become Lander, W.T. In 1870, the post was renamed Camp Brown, and in 1871 Camp Brown was moved 16 miles northwest to the current site of Fortt Washakie, on the reservation.

Old trails had to be improved and new roads had to be built in order to supply these new settlements with mail, goods and people. This is the story of the roads that served those places.

The first road used to connect the railroad to these new settlements ran from Bryan, on the railroad, over South Pass, following the old Oregon Trail for much of that distance. Beginning in 1874, the terminal for these new settlements’ mail was switched 12 miles east from Bryan to Green River City. But since the government had constructed a large freight warehouse in Bryan, supplies for both the Army and the Indians, as well as most of the freight for the new settlements continued to be shipped from Bryan until late July of 1879.

The mail would continue to use the South Pass route through 1885. But after 1879, the road from Rawlins, on the railroad 125 miles east of Green River, to the Indian agency at Fort Washakie by way of Lander became by far more important for freight and passengers. It followed an easier grade than the earlier road over South Pass, covered about the same distance from railroad to destination, and kept to lower elevations and thus milder weather.

It didn’t always make for a happy trip, however. On April 6, 1886, for example, the Laramie [Wyoming] Daily Boomerangreported, “N.B. Apple, a well-known commercial traveler from Omaha, came in this morning having just made a trip to Lander, and other points in upper Wyoming. … He took the stage at Rawlins—it was an open vehicle, with a severe storm prevailing part of the time … The accommodations along the route, if they could be called such, were detestable. It was impossible to get anything fit to eat at the stage stations, and the horses fared worse than the men. … The men working at the stations all seemed to be drunk. … ‘I’ve made a good many trips that I thought were tough,’ said Mr. Apple, ‘but this one took the cake.’”

Mail contractors bid low

In October 1873, the Post Office began advertising for bids on new contracts to carry mail from the railroad to interior points in Wyoming. Bids for the route over South Pass to Camp Brown ranged from $16,000 to $3,900. Given that the previous contractor had been paid $9,666 for the route, $3,900 was absurdly low. Nobody could provide satisfactory mail service for this amount of money, but the Post Office awarded the contract to the low bidder, J.W. Ellis. Even after the departure point for the route was changed from Bryan to Green River, in 1878, low bidding would continue.

A new route to Camp Brown

In early 1878, the federal government began exploring better options for hauling freight. On Feb. 2, 1878, the Rawlins-based Carbon County News reported, that the Carbon County commissioners had been asked to locate a road from Rawlins to Camp Brown as soon as possible, to estimate the number of bridges needed and “other work necessary to make a good practicable road.” Among other advantages, a route starting from Rawlins would save the government the cost of hauling freight from the East an additional 123 railroad miles west to Green River.

At first, the county commissioners were reluctant to commit any funds to this project. Nevertheless, in March, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began surveying the route. The survey party arrived in Rawlins March 9. Second Lt. Foster of the 5th Cavalry reported to the News that the proposed road was 158 miles long, going by way of “’ Muddy Gap,’ and some other cut-offs he mentioned, which we have forgotten.” (In fact, the road ended up going through Crook’s Gap, south of present Jeffrey City.)

In June of that year the Carbon County commissioners realized this route would benefit Rawlins businesses, and solicited bids for the roadwork. August Lankin, the low bidder at $550, got the contract.

On Dec. 30, 1878, meanwhile, Camp Brown was renamed Fort Washakie to honor Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshones.

Construction continued through the first part of 1879, with Army troops working on portions of the road while Lankin’s men were also building it. “This road will open Rawlins up to a large country, which has heretofore been cut off for lack of a road,” an unidentified person wrote to the Cheyenne Daily Leader. “[T]here is every reason to expect that all government freight and Indian stores of which there is annually about 3,000,000 pounds of freight to be moved. Beside [sic] the local business to be gained, we can see why the prospects of Rawlins are regarded with such confidence in business circles.”

On July 20, 1879, the Cheyenne Daily Sun reported, “George P. Brown, the contractor for carrying government freight from Rawlins to Fort Washakie and old Camp Brown went north on Wednesday morning to direct the first outfit over the new road. … Freight carried here by the UPRR will now be arriving in Rawlins and forwarded over the new route continually.” The Sun went on, “On Monday last, 40,000 pounds were started over the new Camp Brown (Ft. Washakie) road.”

Shoshone and Arapaho freighters

In 1878, about 900 members of the Northern Arapaho tribe also took up residence on the reservation. In the summer of 1879, to save administrative costs and provide a way for Indians to abandon traditional ways and work for wages, the government began replacing White teamsters with Shoshone and Arapaho drivers. According to local folklore, they had trouble controlling their horses, but apparently newspaper accounts don’t mention this.

“Mr. McCabe from Fort Washakie came in Monday, accompanied by about sixty Shoshone Indians, and thirty freight teams,“ the Rawlins-based Carbon County Journal reported June 25, 1881. “The Indians at the Washakie agency now do their own freighting, using pony teams hitched four to a wagon. They average from eighteen hundred to two thousand pounds of freight on their wagons. … The freight they are now taking out consists of provisions, clothing, hardware and iron. . . . The Arapahoe freight teams are expected to arrive here in about ten days, they having already made one trip this season.”

The contents of their loads varied, as indicated by a report in the June 3, 1883, Cheyenne Daily Leader: “There were forty-five Indian freighters from the Shoshone Agency, under Mr. Charles Yarnell’s instructions passing through Lander today on their way to Rawlins. They are going after the new boiler, engine and other machinery for the new mill out at the agency.”

The Indians were also paid less than White freighters. The Aug. 11, 1884, Carbon County Journal reported, “[T]o Agent Martin’s credit, that seeing the immense discrimination of pay between hauling between Indian and White freighters—the Indians getting but $1.12 ½ per 100 pounds, while the white freighters get more than double that, he wrote to Washington a strong, pointed, and argumentative appeal.”

The Indian freighters often brought along others from the reservation, so that a wagon train might be longer than just the freight wagons. They also hauled goods from the reservation to sell, as the Sept. 20, 1884, Carbon County Journal reported. “About eighty teams with Indian drivers left Fort Washakie last Friday for Rawlins. They will load out with annuity goods. The Arapahoe train of freighters, 51 all told, left Fort Washakie today in charge of Frank Wurtz, as wagonmaster. They take down a large lot of buffalo robes, buck, elk and other skins for the eastern market.”

Corruption on the Green River mail route

Although the Rawlins freight road had been established in 1879, contractors continued to deliver mail to South Pass City and Lander from Green River until March 1, 1885. The route was plagued with problems, especially corruption among the contractors. Low bids were part of their practices; sometimes the winning contractor sold his contract to an unsuspecting target and pocketed the difference. Perhaps more frequent were the “dummy” contractors, the lowest few bidders who probably weren’t real people. The swindlers had submitted both the lower and higher bids and, by running the route awarded to the supposed lowest bidder, then declaring the effort a failure after a few months, they forced the postal authorities to accept progressively higher bids.

Crooked contractors also cheated by underfeeding their horses, and by not fulfilling the terms of a contract. For example, the Post Office might order mail service for daily deliveries instead of three times per week, with a corresponding rise in the contractor’s fees. Then the contractor would continue the less frequent service, knowing that no inspector was likely to visit and discover the ruse.

The situation became a scandal. On July 11, 1881, The New York Times described how the swindles worked. The Times also quoted from a letter to the postal department by whistleblower J.W. Wolff: “Some months ago I repeatedly called your attention to abuses on this [Green River to Fort Washakie] route, and showed that the Government was paying for a daily service 150 miles long over a desert for the benefit of less than 500 people. I was met by the excuse that there was no money with which to pay agents to make an examination. … Want of funds seems to be a very lame excuse when the correction of this one fraudulent contract would pay for all the agents needed in that whole region, leaving a large margin of surplus, and enabling the Government to detect and cure many similar frauds.”

The blizzard of 1883

Corruption was not the only problem plaguing the route from Green River to South Pass—at around 7,500 feet in elevation. Disaster struck the stage line with a blizzard that began Jan. 30, 1883. Three men and a young woman froze to death while traveling on stages between South Pass City and Green River City. Two other men, stage driver Al Dougherty, and W. J. Stewart, superintendent of the stage line, managed to survive, though both were crippled. Dougherty, a notorious brawler and blasphemer, continued to drive stages for decades afterward.

James Sherlock, nephew of Maggie Sherlock, an 18-year-old girl who died in the snowstorm, wrote years later that open sleighs had been substituted for stagecoaches to make travel possible through the snow. “When the sleigh set out from the Dry Sandy station,” he wrote, “the snow was so thick the driver lost his way, returned to the station, and started out again. Again he lost the road and though making little progress, continued for hours. … The snow, which the wind now blew at a terrific rate, had piled into huge drifts, through which the horses drawing the sleigh floundered with great difficulty.”

By now it was night, the temperature was dropping but the snow was thick and wet. “Under these frightful conditions, the team driven by Mr. Ryder became exhausted,” Sherlock wrote, “and when he drove into a depression filled with snow, he was unable to urge the team forward. There the sleigh remained until the storm was over.”

Contractors took such dangerous chances because they faced fines if the mail was late; a large fine could bankrupt an honest contractor. Sure enough, the postal authorities did levy a fine of $267 on two contractors for failure to deliver the mail on time that January.

After that, many people in and around Lander were afraid to ride on the Green River stage—especially if the weather was even slightly inclement. Residents of Fremont County sent many petitions to Washington, D.C. trying to get the mail and stagecoach route changed to the Rawlins-Lander road. These petitions and the sharply declining population in the South Pass mining region were probably the main reasons the Green River route was ended.

Passenger stagecoaches from Rawlins to Lander

On Aug. 4, 1883, about four years after the Rawlins route had been established for freight, the first actual stagecoach ran between Rawlins and Lander. (For a month previous, mail and passengers rode in a lumber wagon.) On Sept. 1, Carbon County Journal editor John Friend published an account of his recent trip:

“Last Wednesday morning we boarded the coach of the Rawlins and Northwestern Stage Line, our destination being one of the most beautifully situated towns in Wyoming. Promptly at nine o’clock the driver Mr. C.W. Slade mounted the box and we bowled away. At Bell Springs the first change of horses was made. This is also an eating station kept by Mrs. Hayes. After partaking of a hearty dinner, we were soon on the way, the writer taking a seat upon the box beside the driver, whom we found to be a very gentlemanly and entertaining sort of person. … Mr. Slade is a first class stage-man, and makes his time with apparently little effort to himself and the stock, holding his ribbons with grace, and applying the silk with an aesthetic ease astonishing to see. … [The road] is smooth and level, with no heavy hills to weary and fag a team. Near Lost Soldier there are several miles of rocky road, round washed boulders as large as a man’s head. A little money expended here to pick the loose ones out of the road would be a great improvement. Still, this road is not rough and rocky like the old stage road is between Cooper Creek and Medicine Bow. At Signor’s we stopped for the night. This is considered the half-way station, and is as far as the coach runs—a spring wagon running from here to Lander. Signor keeps an eating station for the line, and also has a small general store—tobacco and liquors being the principal items stocked.”

The Rongis stage station and bar

The bar at Signor’s, owned by brothers John J. and Eli Signor, in fact had an unsavory reputation. The small settlement there, Rongis, (“Signor” spelled backwards) was located on the Sweetwater River about three miles west of present Jeffrey City. After its first three years in Rongis, in June 1886, the Rongis post office was moved nine miles south to the “Hutchinson Ranch,” located in Crook’s Gap. This explains why many maps drawn in the late 19th and early 20thCenturies show Rongis to be located in Crooks Gap. Over the years, the Rongis post office was moved back and forth between the town of Rongis and a variety of ranches in and around Crook’s Gap.[*]

Reporting on a typical violent episode at the Rongis bar, the Sept. 22, 1888, Carbon County Journal mentioned Charlie Davis, a ranch hand who

“began drinking, and drank freely and became exceedingly noisy, and kept his companions corralled at the bar, forcing them to drink with him. He made the remark to [Eli] Signor during the morning when remonstrated with in regard to his conduct, that he (Signor) better keep quiet, or he would 'get it.' Signor, not desiring any trouble, left the bar and went over to the blacksmith shop to help set a tire, leaving one of his men to take charge of the saloon. … Soon, Davis jumped on the billiard table and scuffed up the cloth, then threw the billiard balls around the room, and also broke some of the chairs and other furniture. The man in charge of the bar finally sent for Signor to come and take over before Davis destroyed everything. In the meantime, Signor had put a pistol in his pocket before he went back in the saloon. As he stepped in the door, Davis met Signor and told him to come and take a drink. Signor refused, telling Davis he didn’t want him breaking up any more furniture and instructing him to behave himself.”

In the ensuing scuffle, Signor shot Davis, apparently in self-defense. The report continued,

“The act was clearly justifiable. Davis had been flourishing his pistol all morning, and kept the crowd in the saloon against their will. Signor made no effort to escape after the shooting. The coroner was sent for and Davis’ body left lying where it fell. A jury was empaneled, and their verdict was ‘justifiable homicide.’ Davis bore a poor reputation, and … [was] considered a bad man. Signor’s reputation as a peaceful, law-abiding citizen has always been first class.”

Owen Wister on the route

Despite Friend’s positive account of his stagecoach ride in 1883, service from Rawlins had apparently deteriorated by 1888, as described by Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, in a diary entry from July 22 when he was on his way to Fort Washakie to pick up a guide and go hunting in the Wind River Mountains:

“The stage company may not make any living for itself, but it assuredly swallows the livings of other people. There were three of us, and we had 400 pounds of extra baggage. For the journey of 150 miles we paid $86.20. Moreover, you have four horses and a wide Concord stage no longer. Two horses, and a narrow stage, and half our baggage left behind to follow us the next day. The express boxes from Chicago [Wister traveled west on the train] had now caught us up … and here we left them behind again, along with all our blankets and all our ammunition …”

“Altogether, the time between our rising and our departure was a black period. We left Rawlins five in number. The balance [of the party] stayed with our baggage to come when it could. … About six [o’clock] we stopped nowhere in particular with a hot axle. … So we grew more and more behind time, and the next driver, who came on about nine or so, when all warmth had gone and the moon shone cold and brittle, was a crank who lost half an hour for each one he drove. My turn on the box outside came about twelve-thirty or later, and that stage was bitter. The driver said he was numb under his coats, and I had no coat. I do remember that the world looked very beautiful in the moonshine, all lines being soft and uncertain and the sagebrush very silver-like—but it was too damned cold for romance and nature. The look of my own shadow sticking out of the shapeless black cast by the stage seemed to lower the temperature.”

Mail from Rawlins

Though the Rawlins-Fort Washakie freight route was established in 1879, mail was still carried from Green River to Lander until March 1885, even though the population of the South Pass area mining district was declining. For some time Post Office officials experienced political pressure to continue carrying mail to South Pass directly from Green River, but finally saw no point in keeping South Pass on the main route. In addition, Carbon County commissioners were more willing to spend money on a road than were Sweetwater County commissioners.

The hazards of Beaver Hill

Beaver Hill, now known as Beaver Rim, is about 33 miles southeast of Lander, where the road climbs steeply from the Wind River Basin up to the plateau along the Sweetwater River. It was a dangerous spot on the route. Unless a coach was lightly loaded, passengers had to walk both up and down the steepest stretches. Before starting down the hill, drivers rough-locked the rear wheels to keep them from turning, which slowed the coach, but the descent was still hazardous.

On July 7, 1888, the Carbon County Journal wrote, “The Lander Mountaineer reports: ‘Beaver Hill on the Rawlins-Fort Washakie stage road is so steep that horses going down the steep declivity, unless they are attached to wagons, fall over on their necks. Thursday, as Major Baldwin’s outfit was going down the steepest part of the hill, an animal following behind fell and broke its neck. It was one of the Major’s mules, and a good one. The roads need attention from the county all the way from Beaver Hill to Lander.’”

Stagecoach and mail service between Rawlins and Lander ends

Mail and passenger service continued from Rawlins to Lander and Fort Washakie for 23 years until June 30, 1906. On July 11, 1906, the Rawlins Republican published a letter from the Rawlins Postmaster, written to be sent out on the last coach to make the journey.

To Postmaster Brown,
Lander Wyoming:

“Goodbye; this office has handled your mail for nearly 20 years. [sic] I am glad you are soon to have a railroad. It will be an agreeable change for you. … God bless the old stage line; she is doomed, but it beat walking.”

“With the best wished for you all, goodbye.”

Perry L. Smith P.M.

In 1906, the Chicago and North Western Railroad completed a new line from Casper through Shoshoni to Lander. Vastly reducing the use of the stagecoach, this and other railroad spurs facilitated mail, passenger and freight service to the area served via the Rawlins-Fort Washakie route for almost a quarter century. All along, government funds had fueled the development of Wyoming thanks to the need to supply military posts and the reservation—and to keep the mail running more or less on time.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Powell, William Henry. Powell’s Records of Living Officers of the United States Army, 107, accessed June 5, 2021 at https://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/william-h-william-henry-powell/powells-records-of-living-officers-of-the-united-states-army-hci/page-107-powells-records-of-living-officers-of-the-united-states-army-hci.shtml.
• United States Congress, House of Representatives. Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Third Session of the Forty-Fifth Congress, 1878-79, Vol. 17. Wyoming Territory, Offers for Carrying the Mails, 420, accessed June 5, 2021 at https://books.google.com/books?id=dJoFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA420&dq=offers+and+contracts+route+37109+green+river+city+camp+brown&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV_dGFjuzsAhWRtZ4KHY1zCbEQ6AEwAXoECAcQAg#v=onepage&q=offers%20and%20contracts%20route%2037109%20green%20river%20city%20camp%20brown&f=false.
• United States Congressional Serial Set, Vol. 1693. Allowances Made to Contractors, 1310, accessed June 4, 2021 at https://books.google.com/books?id=XlNHAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA1310&lpg=PA1310&dq=1875+allowances+to+contractors&source=bl&ots=HgjSuBy-yR&sig=ACfU3U1ep4nfmYm3y_YgrbMWqj2Rr_EyYA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiVt63Mg-zsAhXkLX0KHeBxCVgQ6AEwDHoECAkQAg#v=onepage&q=37105&f=false.
• United States Military Academy-Association of Graduates of the United States Military Academy-Class of 1877. Fred Waldron Foster, 47, accessed June 4, 2021 at https://books.google.com/books?id=ZUzpYpePl6AC&pg=RA1-PA46&lpg=RA1-PA46&dq=lieutenant+fred+waldron+foster&source=bl&ots=qYndRVUO9G&sig=ACfU3U085hgDAgiOdTh35p41OTAzOL7rEA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjg6JDw9-vsAhVYJzQIHWypBacQ6AEwDHoECAsQAg#v=onepage&q=lieutenant%20fred%20waldron%20foster&f=false.
• United States Post-Office Department. Official Register of the United States 1876. Post Offices in Wisconsin and Wyoming Territory, 1206, accessed June 5, 2021 at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t9b57br0r&view=1up&seq=1228&q1=Lander.
• United States Surgeon-General’s Office, Circular No. 8. A Report on the Hygiene of the United States Army: With Descriptions of Military Posts. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875, accessed May 10, 2021 at https://books.google.com/books?id=gaVd2s1AnZwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=Maghee&f=false.
• “Useless Postal Routes.” The New York Times, July 11, 1881. Newspapers.com. Database available to patrons at the Natrona County Public Library, Casper, Wyo.
• Wister, Fanny Kemble, ed. Owen Wister Out West: His Journals and Letters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, 64-67, 90-91, 172-175.
• Wyoming Newspapers, accessed June 4, 2021, June 5, 2021 at https://wyomingnewspapers.org:
  • The [Laramie] Daily Boomerang, April 6, 1886
  • Carbon County Journal, Sept. 1, 1883, Aug. 11, 1884, Sept. 20, 1884, Sept. 22, 1888
  • Carbon County News, Feb. 2, 1878, March 16, 1878
  • The Cheyenne Daily Leader, March 25, 1879, June 3, 1883
  • The Cheyenne Daily Sun, July 20, 1879
  • The South Pass News, Oct. 27, 1869
  • Wind River Mountaineer, July 6, 1906

Secondary Sources

• Garrett, T.S. “Some Recollections of An Old Freighter.” Annals of Wyoming 3, no. 1 (July 1925): 86-93.
• Guenther, Todd. “The Burnt Ranch Saga: A History of the Last Crossing of the Sweetwater.” Overland Journal 5, no. 4 (Winter 1999-2000): 2-32.
• Jost, Loren. “Fremont County, Wyoming.” WyoHistory.org, accessed June 14, 2021 at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/fremont-county-wyoming.
• Sherlock, James D. South Pass and Its Tales. Basin, Wyo.: James D. Sherlock, 1978, 131-144.

Illustrations

• The 1872 photo of John Silvis presenting the Bryan Stage is from the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River. Used with permission and thanks.
• The 1878 newspaper ad and the map of stage routes are from the author’s collections. Used with permission and thanks. The newspaper ad was collected from Wyoming Newspapers and the map from Joe Ellis, superintendent at the South Pass City State Historic Site.
• The photos of Al “Peggy” Dougherty and the four-horse mud wagon are from the Fremont County Pioneer Museum in Lander. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the two-horse mud wagon at Bull Springs is from the American Heritage Center. Used with permission and thanks.

Invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in the 1830s, the telegraph was already maturing when it crossed what soon became Wyoming in the 1860s. From the early days of settlement and through the railroad period, Wyomingites—and the nation—relied on it.

In 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph followed the route of the Oregon-California trail. Later, in May 1869, the main transcontinental telegraph line was shifted to the southern edge of the new Wyoming Territory, to run along the route of the Union Pacific Railroad.

The telegraph signaled the demise of previous methods of communication. Before then, a message could be delivered only as fast as a horse could run or a ship could sail. A message took 45 days by steamship from New York to San Francisco, and more than 20 days by overland stagecoach from St. Louis to San Francisco. The Pony Express took 11 days from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento.

Just before the start of the Civil War, Congress offered a subsidy to any company agreeing to build the transcontinental telegraph. Western Union submitted a bid for $40,000 to build the entire line. In the winter of 1860-61, Edward Creighton surveyed the proposed route between Omaha and California to be built with the financial support of Western Union. He dug the first post hole for the telegraph line on July 2, 1861. (Creighton and his brother John were prominent Omaha merchants; their endowed local university still bears their name.)

Creighton, who during the construction phase became Western Union’s general agent, organized two teams of builders, one to work on the line from the West, the other from the East. The eastern line, built by a subcontractor named the Overland Telegraph Co., reached Fort Laramie on Aug. 5, 1861. On Oct. 18, 1861, the workers reached Salt Lake City, completing the eastern section of the line. The western section, shorter but covering more difficult terrain, was finished by the Pacific Telegraph Co., another subcontractor, on Oct. 24.

Some 27,000 poles were set every 75 yards over 1,086 miles from Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory, to Fort Churchill, Calif., in the four months it took for construction. Poles were to be found “en route—" not so easily accomplished on the treeless plains. Western end materials were shipped around Cape Horn to San Francisco.

Furnishing the poles for a short stretch of the Wyoming segment led to the first civil lawsuit ever decided by the Wyoming Supreme Court—the case of Western Union Telegraph Co. v. Monseau. The case finally reached the territory’s highest court in 1870. Monseau had contracted to furnish 754 telegraph poles at $2.50 each. Western Union claimed the man who made the deal with Monseau was not authorized to do it on the company’s behalf. The three-member Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling in Monseau’s favor. (E. P. Johnson, for whom Johnson County, Wyo., would later be named, represented Monseau).

Galvanized iron wire “of the best quality” and insulators, iron holders embedded in glass and enclosed in wooden forms, kept the wires off the ground. Batteries, needed to power the signal, were shipped as powder in containers with electrodes. Water was added later to bring the batteries to charge.

Stations were located every 20 miles because batteries were usually only strong enough to relay to the next station. Some stations had once served (or were still serving) the overland stage lines. Each telegrapher sent off to the next station, etc., from these “relay stations.” Cost to send a message was $7 for 10 words, seemingly expensive, but cheaper and quicker than the Pony Express. Once the telegraph connected the United States, the Pony Express stopped running.

Eventually upstaged as a technological and engineering wonder by the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, the telegraph line was completed on Oct. 24, 1861, to national acclaim. The Civil War had begun in April of that year. Just a few months after the war’s outbreak Stephen J. Field, chief justice of California and brother of Atlantic cable promoter Cyrus Field sent a message to Abraham Lincoln assuring him of California’s loyalty to the Union and promising that the telegraph line would “be the means of strengthening the attachment which binds both the East and the West to the Union.”

Through the Civil War years, Western Union, builders of the transcontinental line, continued to grow and prosper. By 1866, the year after the war’s end, the Western Union monopoly controlled a staggering 90% of the telegraph traffic in the United States. Congress tried to nationalize the telegraph and place it under the post office, but failed.

Western Union was challenged eventually by the telephone. By about 1890 telephone engineers expanded the range of audible conversations to a few hundred miles, culminating in the establishment of transcontinental telephone service in 1915.

That, combined with airmail service, radio communication, and teletypes in the 1920s and 1930s, brought about the telegraph’s decline. By 1990, all that remained of the once-dominant monopoly was its money transfer services. The internet, of course, has furthered even that decline.

(Editor’s note: Special thanks to the author, who recently rediscovered a draft of this article originally meant for his syndicated column, Buffalo Bones: Stories from Wyoming’s Past, which ran in Wyoming newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s.).

Resources

For further reading and research

• “Invention of the Telegraph” and “Impact of the Telegraph.” Samuel F. B. Morse Papers at the Library of Congress LOC: 1793-1919, accessed Nov. 20, 2021 at https://www.loc.gov/collections/samuel-morse-papers/articles-and-essays/collection-highlights/invention-of-the-telegraph/ and https://www.loc.gov/collections/samuel-morse-papers/articles-and-essays/collection-highlights/impact-of-the-telegraph/.
  The second of these includes a great map of the network of telegraph stations in the United States and Canada in 1853.
• Nonnenmacher, Tomas. “History of the U.S. Telegraph Industry.” EH.net, a publication of the Economic History Association, accessed Nov. 20, 2021 at https://eh.net/encyclopedia/history-of-the-u-s-telegraph-industry/. A brief yet thorough history of the business of telegraphy.
• Johnson, Hervey, and William E. Unrau (ed.). Tending the Talking Wire: A Buck Soldier’s View of Indian Country. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1979. Hervey Johnson came to present Wyoming with the 11^th Ohio Cavalry in 1863 to guard the telegraph line. The 100 or so letters he wrote home to his mother and sisters make this book a superb primary source. The book is in many Wyoming libraries.
• Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: the Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers. New York: Walker Books, 1998.
• “Women Telegraph Operators in the Civil War.” Signal Corps Association, accessed Nov. 20, 2021 at http://www.civilwarsignals.org/pages/tele/pages/women.html. Details on the lives of five women telegraphers in the 1800s.

Illustrations

• The engraving of the Pony Express rider passing the telegraph-line builders was first published in Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 2, 1867 and is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the stump of a telegraph pole is by Jason Vlcan, of the staff at the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper, Wyo. Used with permission and thanks.