Joy That Long Endures and its sister historical novel in the Irish Blessings Series,
Walls for the Wind, are available at
the South Pass City store and
the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River.
South
Pass City
Much of the action in the second
novel of my Irish Blessings series, Joy
That Long Endures, takes place in the gold rush town of South Pass City,
Wyoming Territory.
Although Lewis and Clark traveled
overland and reached the Columbia River in 1805 and John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur
Company established Fort Astoria on the Columbia in 1811, it wasn’t until
Captain Bonneville took a company of 110 men and 20 wagons across South Pass in
1832 that the tide of white North American expansion west of the Rocky
Mountains began to turn from British and Spanish occupation in favor of the
tide of persistent Americans.
The pass had been in continual use
by Natives for thousands of years. In the mid nineteenth century, they were witness
to steadily increasing traffic of hundreds of thousands of wagons and emigrants
headed for Oregon, stagecoaches, and mail coaches. By 1861 the telegraph
crossed the continental divide, and in 1861 a detachment of soldiers from Fort
Bridger in pursuit of horse thieves stopped on their return trip and panned the
gravel of Willow Creek. With the showing of a bit of color in the pans, some of
the men decided to return to the area after their enlistment was up. In the
fall of 1866 a few thousand dollars worth of gold had been extracted from
crushed rock. By 1867 there were 2,000 people in South Pass City. In 1868 and
1869, newspaper articles and railroad itineraries broadcast cries of “gold!”
drawing thousands to try their luck against harsh Territorial conditions and
severe winter weather, all hoping to strike it rich.
The Sioux kept constant vigilance
after the breaching of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 by gold seekers in the
Black Hills. In 1870 Camp Stambaugh, a sub post of Fort Bridger, was established
with one company of cavalry and one of infantry near the three Sweetwater
District towns of Atlantic City, South Pass City, and Miner’s Delight.
Advertisements from the newspaper
for local businesses in the South Pass News
of October 27, 1869 include: two lawyers, three hotels, seven restaurants and
lunch counters, two clothing emporiums, one mining machinery distributor, one
mining tools purveyor, one druggist and one doctor, two sign and house
painters, two billiard halls selling liquor and cigars, two additional sellers
of liquor and cigars, one watchmaker, a railroad ad, one tin and hardware
dealer, three groceries and one meat market, one livery and sale stable, one
dealer in firearms and ammunition, one barber with baths, and the newspaper
advertising itself as a job printer. Only one saloon paid to advertise, although
one source lists at least fifteen saloons in addition to the wholesale liquor
dealers and general mercantiles that also sold liquor. It’s reported there were
horseshoes, a croquet court, an Episcopal Church, and for a short time, Esther
Morris’s ladies’ millinery store. There were numerous mines in operation, two
newspapers, two breweries and at least one bank. In other issues of the South
Pass News, a butcher took out an advertisement as did a blacksmith. Main Street
was called South Pass Avenue, and there were A, B, C, Smith, Dakota and Custer
Avenues, and Washington, Jefferson, Colfax, Price, and Grant streets. The
houses were built of logs with pole roofs of dirt, with well in front of each
and an outhouse in back.
For a few short years, South Pass
City was a busy, optimistic little town. Yet almost from the beginning there
were rumblings from those labeling the Sweetwater District a humbug. By 1875 most
everyone had moved on or given up and gone home. There were only about 100
people left in South Pass City and the population continued to dwindle. Today
the town is a Wyoming State Historic Site, open seasonally to those who would
like to visit what remains of an authentic Western gold mining town.
All images
from Wikimedia Commons.
For further reading:
South Pass and Its
Tales ©1978 James L. Sherlock
South Pass 1868: James
Chisholm’s Journal of the Wyoming Gold Rush ©1960 University of Nebraska
Press
South Pass City and
the Sweetwater Mines ©2012 John Lane and Susan Layman
The first novel in the Irish Blessings Series, Walls for the Wind.
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