Pre-History
During the last gasps of geologic upheaval and glaciation,
the first humans came to Wyoming. Their cultures are mostly lost, but
numerous artifacts remain as evidence of their long and relatively stable
residence. A group of hunter-gatherers whose diet was built around
blue camas and other root crops camped in Jackson Hole each summer for 6,000
years, leaving behind fire pits and camping sites. Their use of the
valley ended in the fifteenth century when the Shoshone peoples crowded them
out.
Across the
state near Pine Bluffs is another campsite whose use stretches back some
8,000 years. Just east of Worland about 11,000 years ago, the Clovis
hunters regularly used a steep walled arroyo to hunt mammoths and other now
extinct mammals. North of Guernsey, extensive quarries yielded
quartzite, moss agate, and chalcedony for perhaps 10,000 years. Many
smaller archeological sites pepper the state. Although these ancient
cultures have long vanished, their world view remains in the mysterious
Medicine Wheel, hundreds of pictographs and petroglyphs, and other messages
from the past.
The Last 300 Years
Spaniards out of Mexico may have traveled as far north as Wyoming and
Montana in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and French
Canadian trappers Francois and Louis Joseph Verendrye may have traveled
through the Big Horn Mountains in 1742. John Colter, however,
generally receives credit for being the first white man to leave a clear
record of his Wyoming travels. Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark
expedition, left the group as they crossed Montana on their return voyage
and spent three years in Wyoming (1807-1810), trapping his way through the
Bighorn Mountains and Basin, before heading into the spectacular Yellowstone
region. His accounts of the wonders of Yellowstone were widely
disbelieved, leaving him deeply offended.
The Plains Indians who lived in Wyoming when white men first ventured into
the area were themselves enjoying a relatively new lifestyle. When the
Shoshone brought the horse to the northern plains around 1700 A.D., it
rapidly replaced the dog as the primary pack animal. The Shoshone
became excellent horsemen and soon developed a nomadic, buffalo-centered
culture which endured for about two hundred years. At their zenith,
the Shoshone hunting grounds stretched from Idaho across Wyoming into the
Great Plains. But the Shoshone did not remain unchallenged for long.
The Lakota Sioux, Crow, and Arapaho were evicted from their traditional
Midwestern lands and lifestyles by encroaching white settlers. Moving
further west, these peoples quickly adapted to the nomadic Plains Indian way
of life and began to put considerable pressure on the Shoshone.
When white men began to arrive in Wyoming in large numbers in the 1850's,
the Lakota Sioux occupied the Powder River Basin, having just won a fierce
conflict with the Crow over its use. The Crow occupied the Big Horn
basin, while the Arapaho, forced south of the North Platte River by the
Lakota, shared southeastern Wyoming and northern Colorado with the Cheyenne.
The Shoshone were living primarily in the Wind River and Green River
Valleys, having lost control of the Big Horn Basin to the Crow.
Although the Lakota, Crow, and Arapaho fought among themselves, they also
had common bonds. The Shoshone, allied to the Bannock and Ute tribes
to the west, were rightfully concerned about the powerful warriors crowding
in from the east. Intertribal conflicts continued past the arrival of
white men in Wyoming, but were soon overshadowed by a more serious threat --
the complete eradication of the Plains Indian culture.
Fur Trade
Colter's visit in
1807-1810 was the beginning of Wyoming's fur trapping era. Astorians
-- employees of John Jacob Astor seeking to establish cross- continental
routes for the fur trade -- came through Wyoming in 1811 and 1812, and a
small but steady stream of fur trappers and traders followed on their heels.
The fur business became truly profitable in the 1820's, when William Ashley
of St. Louis reorganized the way trapping was done. One of his
innovations was to have an annual
rendezvous instead of
trying to maintain a series of permanent trading posts. Jim Bridger,
the most famous of mountain men, and William Sublette, who established Fort
Laramie, came to Wyoming as part of Ashley's company of trappers. The
Green River Valley soon became famous for its rendezvous, and trappers
ranged throughout Wyoming's mountains. Many of our place names were
bestowed during this era, and although the trappers were actually quite few
in number, they opened the door for future travelers. By 1840, with
eastern fashions turning away from beaver hats, the fur trapping business
was essentially dead -- so were the beavers. The trappers scattered.
Some faded into the Indian tribes they had lived and worked among, while
others stayed in Wyoming to guide and otherwise assist the next wave of
white men, the emigrants.
Missionaries
Hard on the heels of the trappers, but in advance of the Oregon pioneers,
came a group of people with a very different set of motivations -- the
missionaries. Rev. Samuel Parker and Dr. Marcus Whitman were some of
the first, traveling west with a company of traders to attend the Green
River rendezvous of 1835, where Dr. Whitman removed a three-inch arrowhead
from an old wound in Jim Bridger's back. After the rendezvous, Whitman
returned east to recruit other missionaries, while Parker journeyed on west,
preaching the first Protestant sermon in the Rocky Mountains at the head of Hoback Canyon, near present day Bondurant. Mountain man Joe Meek, who
was present for the sermon, described Parker as a fastidious, sober man who
was not well accepted by the rowdy, irreverent trappers. The Indians,
curious about the white man’s god, listened intently to his sermon, but the
trappers exhibited very little pious reverence. When a herd of buffalo
wandered into view, the entire congregation rushed unceremoniously off to
hunt, leaving Parker to finish his sermon alone.
Meek was much more favorably impressed with Dr. Whitman, describing him as
having enough "boldness, energy, and contempt for fastidiousness" to have
made a good mountain man. Whitman kept quiet about the trappers'
lifestyle, preferring to teach by example, and earned respect by his willing
participation in the least pleasant tasks of wilderness life. The
following summer Whitman was at the rendezvous again, this time accompanied
by his new bride, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, and Reverend H. H. Spaulding
with his wife, Eliza Hart Spaulding. These were the first white women
to travel the Oregon Trail, although many would soon follow.
A third missionary, Father De Smet, a Roman Catholic Jesuit, came only a few
years later. In 1840 he celebrated the first Catholic mass in Wyoming
near present-day Daniel, on the west side of the Wind River Mountains.
Father De Smet traveled widely throughout the west, and spent considerable
time in Wyoming. He was committed to remaining friends with both the
whites and the Native Americans, and was called to Fort Laramie to help
negotiate several Indian treaties. Black Robe, as the Native Americans
called him, had a genuine concern for their welfare and they, in turn,
trusted him.
Trails West
In 1843 the first of many waves of Oregon-bound emigrant trains came through
Wyoming. In 1847, Brigham Young led the first group of Mormon pioneers
across Wyoming into Utah. Many Mormon wagon trains and handcart
companies followed, fleeing religious persecution in the east. To help
their members along the route, the church established ferries and way
stations with farms to provide fresh vegetables as well as other supplies
and assistance. When tensions between the Mormon leadership and the
U.S. government came to a head in 1857, these stations were burned by the
retreating Mormons in anticipation of a war that was narrowly averted.
With the advent of the 1849 California gold rush, thousands of gold seekers
joined the Mormon and Oregon settlers trudging the Oregon Trail through
Wyoming. Between 1850 and 1852, fifty to sixty thousand people came
through Wyoming each summer, their wagons literally clogging the trail.
One emigrant reported watching two hundred wagons pass him by while he
stopped for lunch, while another estimated that more than 1,000 teams were
stretched along one 30-mile section of the trail. The wagon trains
continued until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.
Although each group spent only three to five weeks in Wyoming, they left an
enduring record of their passing in the names they carved into Register
Cliffs, Independence Rock, and Names Hill, in the ruts they dug, and the
graves they left behind.
Death on the Trail
While leveling ground in 1961, a rancher on La Prele Creek just west of
Douglas turned up a river stone engraved "J. Hembree 1843". Its story
was soon discovered in the diary of William Newby, a member of one of the
first emigrant trains headed for Oregon. Newby recorded that nine year
old Joel Hembree who was riding on the tongue of his parent's wagon, fell
off the wagon as it crossed over the divide between La Bonte and La Prele
Creeks, and died a few hours later. When the rancher excavated the
grave, he found pieces of wood on top and to the sides of the body, but not
underneath, indicating that the boy was laid to rest on the ground with some
kind of open box, perhaps a dresser drawer, placed over him. A
forensic specialist who examined the body before its reburial found that
young Hembree had died of multiple skull fractures.
From historical records we know that thousands of unmarked graves line the
path of the Oregon Trail -- and sometimes pave the trail itself. Many
trains simply didn't have time to dig deep graves, so to keep wolves and
other animals from digging up the bodies, holes were dug directly in front
of the train. The wagons would pack the earth hard as they rolled over
and also confuse the scent. Ninety percent of those who died succumbed
to diseases such as cholera, mountain fever, scurvy and tuberculosis.
About three hundred people drowned, and many were accidentally shot.
Others were struck by lightning, kicked by horses, and at least one man
drank himself to death.
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