Time

6:00AM

Open Continental Breakfast/Questions?
 

6:30AM

Bus leaves from Casper, Wyoming

History of Casper City, Wyoming
"Before there were people, there was the river—the North Platte River begins its meandering journey in the mountains near Casper, running east across the Great Plains to merge with its sister river, the South Platte, to become simply the Platte River. Water, mountains, and plains were a lure from the beginning; evidence of human occupation dates back more than 12,000 years with the Clovis peoples, followed by the Folsom and the Eden Valley peoples. A mix of hunting and gathering tribes occupied the area until approximately 500 A.D., eventually morphing into Native American tribes more familiar in today's world.

The original residents of Wyoming were nomadic Plains Indians, including tribes as disparate as the Arapaho, Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota, Blackfeet, Kiowa, Nez Perce, and Shoshone. The tribes relied on the land and the roaming buffalo herds for sustenance; when European explorers and hunters began a wholesale slaughter of the buffalo, coinciding with an interest in herding native peoples to a containment area in Oklahoma, armed conflicts escalated in the clash of cultures and interests. In 1812, fur trappers had followed beaver and buffalo populations to the northern Rockies. The Oregon Trail had been scouted out in 1823, and its ever-deepening ruts reflected the entrenched U.S. belief in its manifest destiny to expand westward.

The Western Civil War
By 1847, a network of travel routes converged at a spot just west of present-day Casper; here the Emigrant Trail crossed from the south side to the north side of the North Platte River. When the first Mormon wagon train passed through this area on its way to what would become Utah, Brigham Young arranged for a ferry to be set up for the use of future travelers. The Mormon Ferry soon faced competition as more emigrants passed that way and decided to cash in on a good idea. One entrepreneurial French-Canadian trader named John Baptiste Richard decided to build a bridge across the North Platte and charge a toll for crossing it. The area was now not just a way-station but an encampment.

Local residents established a trading post along the Emigrant Trail in 1859, taking advantage of the growing stream of wagon trains. As the local population grew along with the number of emigrants, friction developed with local tribes of Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne Indians. As a result, the trading post was transformed into a fort by the military, and two pitched battles between the army and the native tribes took place in 1865. In the first conflict, Lieutenant Caspar Collins was killed while attempting to rescue another soldier. Lt. Collins' father already had a fort named after him in Colorado, so the military named the Wyoming fort "Casper" in his honor, inadvertently using a misspelling that had been transmitted by telegraph. The seeds of present-day Casper had been planted.

Black Gold, Texas Tea
Casper in 1888 was a true Wild West town; a railroad had been built through the town in an effort to ease travel to riches of gold in California and fertile land in Oregon. Isolation and lawlessness attracted a rough crowd of renegades and outlaws, and the original township developed a main street lined with saloons on one side. By necessity, the first public building in Casper was a jail. Lynchings were not an uncommon occurrence.

Oil was struck in nearby Salt Creek Field in 1889, an event that has come to define Casper as the "oil capital of the Rockies." The city was flooded with an influx of claim jumpers looking to capitalize on the promised wealth. In 1895, the first oil refinery was constructed. Oil workers known as "roughnecks" followed, along with gamblers, prostitutes and corrupt businessmen. Cattlemen went to war against the sheepmen. The local law struggled to keep up with the shenanigans of the populace, passing laws to prevent women from walking on the saloon side of Main Street and to make illegal the discharge of firearms within city limits.

Local municipal leaders were set on Casper becoming the state capital and a centerpiece of the West. As the economy continued to thrive, construction was begun on some of the tallest buildings in Wyoming during the early 20th century. But, a city that lives on oil can die on oil.
Nearly a Ghost Town
Few communities escaped the repercussions of the Great Depression, and Casper was not an exception. In 1929, the city's population diminished by 50 percent; the struggle continued until World War II spurred renewed demand for oil and gas supplies.

The city has experienced cycles of boom and bust beginning in the 1960s, riding the wave of oil and gas prices. Today, Casper is profiting from U.S. conflicts with oil-producing nations and has additionally seen the growth of more consistent industries in the areas of health care, social services and tourism. Figurative fisticuffs have taken the place of literal gunfights as the oil industry negotiates its place in a city that is increasingly conscious of its finite and infinitely beautiful natural resources."

Author: Wyoming State Historical Society
Source: Wyoming State Historical Society
Educational Material/Non Commercial

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Bonneville Cabins Trading Post
N.42.54.020 W.108.35.299

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map
 

South Pass History:
"South Pass (elevation 7550 ft) is a mountain pass on the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Wyoming. The pass is located in a broad valley between the Wind River Range to the north and the Antelope Hills to the south, in southwestern Fremont County, approximately 35 miles (54 km) SSW of Lander. The pass furnishes a natural crossing point of the Rockies and has historically been the route for the Oregon Trail, California Trail, and Mormon Trail during the 19th century. The pass is a broad open saddle with prairie and sagebrush, allowing a broad and nearly level route between the Atlantic and Pacific watersheds. The Sweetwater River rises on the east side of the pass, and Pacific Creek rises on the west side.

History

South Pass signThe discovery of the pass as a natural crossing point of the Rockies was a significant but surprisingly difficult achievement in the westward expansion of the United States. It was unknown to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which followed a northerly route up the Missouri River, crossing the Rockies over difficult passes in the Bitteroot Range in Montana. South Pass, by comparison, was known only to Native Americans until 1812, when Robert Stuart and six companions from the Pacific Fur Company (the Astorians) crossed the Rockies here on their return from Astoria, Oregon:

"In 1811, the overland party of Mr. Astor's expedition, under the command of Mr. Wilson P. Hunt, of Trenton, New Jersey, although numbering sixty well armed men, found the Indians so very troublesome in the country of the Yellowstone River, that the party of seven persons who left Astoria toward the end of June, 1812, considering it dangerous to pass again by the route of 1811, turned toward the southeast as soon as they had crossed the main chain of the Rocky Mountains, and, after several days' journey, came through the celebrated 'South Pass' in the month of November, 1812.

Map of southwestern Wyoming showing location of South Pass at the headwaters of the Sweetwater River.Pursuing from thence an easterly course, they fell upon the River Platte of the Missouri, where they passed the winter and reached St. Louis in April, 1813.  The seven persons forming the party were Robert McClelland of Hagerstown, who, with the celebrated Captain Wells, was captain of spies under General Wayne in his famous Indian campaign, Joseph Miller of Baltimore, for several years an officer of the U. S. Army, Robert Stuart, a citizen of Detroit, Benjamin Jones, of Missouri, who acted as huntsman of the party, Francois LeClaire, a halfbreed, and André Valée, a Canadian voyageur, and Ramsay Crooks, who is the only survivor of this small band of adventurers." (Letter of Ramsay Crooks to the Detroit free Press, June 28, 1856)

The 20th Century saw Oregon Trail boosters mark the trailway with monuments as patriotic pathways of Manifest Destiny. Ezra Meeker erected this boulder near Pacific Springs on Wyoming's South Pass in 1906.[1]Despite Stuart's meticulous journal of the trip, which was presented to Astor and President James Madison, and published in France, the knowledge of its location was not widely known, so for over a decade trappers used a longer, more northern route which included an extra mountain range and offered a shorter season for crossing. In 1824, Jedediah Smith rediscovered the pass. In 1832, Captain Benjamin Bonneville and a caravan of 110 men and 20 wagons became the first group to take wagons over the pass. In July 1836, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding were the first pioneer women to cross South Pass. Between 1848 and 1868, it furnished the convenient crossing point for emigrants westward, most of whom followed the Sweetwater River across Wyoming to its headwaters, following the Central Route. Before the railroads offered an easier crossing in 1869, perhaps half a million would trek through South Pass.

Gold had been discovered in the gulches near the pass as early as 1842. It was not until 1867, when an ore sample was transported to Salt Lake City, that an influx of miners descended into the region. The gold rush led to the establishment of booming mining communities such as South Pass City and Atlantic City. The placer gold in the streams was exhausted quickly, however, and by 1870 the miners began leaving the region. In 1884, Emile Granier, a French mining engineer, established a hydraulic drilling operation that allowed gold mining to continue. Gold mining was revived once again in nearby Rock Creek in the 1930s. From the 1960s through 1983, a US Steel iron ore mine operated in Atlantic City.

Author: The Museum of the American West and others
Source: The Museum of the American West an others
Educational Material/Non Commercial
 

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Indian Reservations and Federal Lands in Wyoming
Map

Yes