Historic Spots & Monuments

The abundant vertebrate fossils of the Green River formation in western Wyoming have been known to science since the 1860s. Most are fish, buried in lime-rich mud at the bottom of freshwater lakes about 50 million years ago. Fossil Butte National Monument, west of Kemmerer, Wyo. was created by Congress in 1973 to protect a site extremely rich in these fossils.

Fort Phil Kearny, near present-day Story, Wyo., was established by the U.S. Army in the summer of 1866 to protect travelers on the Bozeman Trail from Indian attack. and abandoned two years later, under terms of the1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Indians burned the fort shortly after the army left.

Cantonment Reno, at the Powder River Crossing of the Bozeman Trail in present Johnson County, was renamed Fort McKinney after the death of Lt. J.A. McKinney in 1876. That site was abandoned in 1878, and the fort’s name moved with the troops to a new site west of present Buffalo, Wyo. The fort closed in 1894, and in 1903 the site was taken over by the Veterans’ Home of Wyoming, which remains in operation there today.

Fort Laramie began as a fur-trade post in 1834 near the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte rivers. Soon it changed into a post for the trade in buffalo robes, and for supplying emigrants bound west on the Oregon/California/Mormon Trail. In 1849 the post was purchased by the U.S. Army, and became an important supply, logistics and communications center for the Indian Wars campaigns of the next four decades. In recent decades the post has been carefully restored, and today is a National Historic Site.

In 1869, Fort Fred Steele was built by the U.S. Army to protect workers on the advancing transcontinental railroad at the spot where the rails crossed the North Platte River. The fort was closed in 1886, and the site, containing foundations of the original buildings, was much later acquired by the state.

Fort Fetterman was established by the U.S. Army on the North Platte River near present Douglas, Wyo. in 1867. It served as a staging point for Gen. George Crook’s three campaigns against Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux Indians in 1876, near the end of the Indian Wars. The Army abandoned the post in 1882, and the settlement finally closed down a few years later when the railroad arrived at Douglas, seven miles to the south.

The U.S. Army established Platte Bridge Station in 1862 to protect the Oregon/California/Mormon Trail crossing of the North Platte River and the new transcontinental telegraph. After Lt. Caspar Collins was killed there by Cheyenne and Lakota Indians in 1865, the post was renamed Fort Casper, misspelling his first name. The fort was abandoned two years later, but reconstructed in 1936—and renamed Fort Caspar—with funds from the Works Progress Administration. Fort grounds and a museum are open to the public.

Established by mountain men Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez in 1843, Fort Bridger was an important rest and re-supply spot for emigrants bound to Utah, California and Oregon. Mormons acquired the site in the mid-1850s, and burned it in 1857 as the U.S. Army approached during the bloodless Utah War. The following year the Army took over, and garrisoned the fort until 1890. Today it is a state historic site.

In 1830, a party of fur traders led by William Sublette took wagons to the trade’s annual rendezvous at the headwaters of Wind River that year, east of the Continental Divide. Two years later, Capt. Benjamin Bonneville took the first caravan of wagons across the Divide at South Pass.

The Fetterman Battlefield, southeast of present Story, Wyo., marks the spot where Capt. William Fetterman and all 80 men under his command were killed Dec. 21, 1866 by Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians.