History

Archive for the ‘History of Wyoming’ Category

1834   Fort Laramie was established as a supply depot on the Oregon Trail fur trade route. It became an army post in 1849, and remained in use until 1890.

1840s-1850s   Emigrants went west over the Oregon Trail through what is now central Wyoming. In 1850, more than 40,000 emigrants passed through Fort Laramie.

1843   Fort Bridger was established.

1861-1868   The Dakota Territory was established. It included all of  present-day North and South Dakota and most of Montana and Wyoming. In 1867 all of the Wyoming portion was

included in Laramie County, which was divided early in 1868 by the creation of Carter County (later renamed Sweetwater County).

1867-1869   The transcontinental Union Pacific Railway was built through southern Wyoming. The towns of Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, Rock Springs, Green River, and Evanston sprang up along its route.

1868   Wyoming Territory was created, primarily from Dakota Territory. It included small portions from Utah and Idaho territories.

1876-1880s   The Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians were moved to the  Wind River Reservation. With the defeat of the Sioux soon afterward, northern Wyoming was opened to cattle grazing. The cattle boom reached its height in the 1880s.

1890   Wyoming became a state.

1895-1910   The Carey Act of 1894 provided for the reclamation and  homesteading of desert land, and stimulated new settlements in northern Wyoming. Mormons established towns in the Big Horn Basin.

Until 1811, when fur traders first opened a trail through the area, Wyoming was the domain of the American Indians. Between 1825 and 1840, about 200 mountain men bartered with the Indians at rendezvous in the region.

In the 1840s and 1850s, many thousands of emigrants traveling the Oregon Trail to California, Utah, and other western states passed through the North Platte and Sweetwater valleys and South Pass in central Wyoming. In the 1860s, as Indian troubles increased in the north, many emigrants preferred the more southerly Overland Trail through Bridger Pass. Until the railroad came, very few emigrants stayed in Wyoming.

The discovery of gold in 1867 at South Pass brought many immigrants to western Wyoming. A greater stimulus to settlement was the building of the transcontinental railroad in the late 1860s. Many Irish and Mexican laborers and Civil War veterans helped build the railway. Settlers from the Midwest followed the railroad into Wyoming, and built Cheyenne, Laramie, and other towns along the route. In the 1870s and 1880s, cattlemen from Texas drove herds into northern Wyoming.  Many Idaho Mormons came into Star Valley in the 1870s and 1880s. There were Mormon colonists in the Big Horn Basin by 1895, but the main body of Mormon settlers came there as an organized group from Utah and Idaho in 1900. A helpful source of information on these settlers in the Big Horn Basin is Charles A. Welch, History of the Big Horn Basin.