union pacific railroad

The history of Japanese people in Wyoming is most often connected with the World War II internment camp at Heart Mountain. Yet Japanese railroad laborers were in Wyoming as early as 1892—and some may even have helped lay the tracks that delivered the internees to Heart Mountain two generations later.

The Rawlins to Baggs wagon road was a primary freight route from the Union Pacific Railroad south to Colorado. Freighters first supplied Ute people at the White River Agency and later, after the Utes were forcibly removed to Utah, freighters supplied the Euroamerican settlers who took up the Indian lands.

In 1894, newspapers across Wyoming filled with stories of jobless men headed east along the railroads. Coxey’s Army, they were called, named for their “general.” All were unemployed, many were hungry, but they were bound for the center of the nation’s power. It became the first march on Washington.

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.

Freight, mail and stagecoach passengers endured the rough, dangerous road from Rawlins on the Union Pacific through Lander to the Shoshone reservation for 27 years. “God bless the old stage line; she is doomed,” one postmaster wrote in 1906, when a railroad first reached Lander, “but it beat walking.”

It began with a bowl of mush and ended in the murders of two men—one shot through the heart, the other dragged from the jail and lynched by a vicious mob of 300 to 400 people. Afterward, no one would testify to who was in the mob.

Wyoming’s coal mining industry was secure until the early 1950s, when the Union Pacific switched to diesel-powered locomotives. Laid-off miners and their families struggled; little company towns disappeared. Eventually, trona mining expanded and replaced many of the coal jobs—and in the 1970s, coal came roaring back.

From April to November 1868, two ex-Confederate brothers, Legh and Fred Freeman, published the strident, anti-Reconstruction Frontier Index, moving their offices ahead of the still-building Union Pacific Railroad. Rioters finally destroyed the newspaper’s office and presses in Bear River City, putting the paper out of business.

Coal production at the Union Pacific mines at Reliance, Wyo., north of Rock Springs peaked at 1.4 million tons per year in the early 1940s. The mines are closed now but a vast steel-and-concrete tipple remains. Visitors are welcome, with a caveat: Stay out of the interior.

Mountaineer Finis Mitchell shared his love of the Wind River Range through postcards, public talks and a famed, hip-pocket hiking guide. He ran a fishing camp, worked on the railroad, stocked mountain lakes with fingerling trout and served in the Wyoming House of Representatives. Mitchell Peak was named in his honor.