Next stop …

by Doug Crowe
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 1:33 PM MST

My wife's family comes from the Lander/Riverton area. In fact, she has ancestors who came into the Lander Valley back in the 1860s.

For many decades, her grandmother lived in an old adobe house just west of Lander on Baldwin Creek. When she passed on, one of the intriguing things we found amongst her belongings was an 1896 "Directory of Lander, Lander Valley and the Mines and Other Useful Information."

In addition to the names and addresses of Lander area residents, this little book is sprinkled with advertisements for a number of products and businesses. One of these advertisements, for the Niobrara Stage and Transportation Company, is reproduced here.

As you can see, stages left Casper on Tuesdays and Fridays for Bessemer, Johnstown, Tom Sun's Ranch and Split Rock. Today, little or no evidence of these four Natrona County stage stops remains.

The first was about 12 miles west of Casper at the town of Bessemer. It was situated at a bend on the North Platte, where emigrants on the Oregon Trail had discovered an easy place to ford.

By the late 1800s, the town sported a fine hotel, The Searight House, the Goose Egg ranch headquarters (where Owen Wister penned much of his famous book, “The Virginian”) and a stage stop on the Casper to Rongis route.

At the time, Bessemer was in a neck n' neck competition with Casper to become the Natrona County seat. However, the railroad selected Casper as its terminus and Bessemer's hopes were dashed.

When the old Goose Egg Ranch house was torn down in 1960, the last vestige of what had once been known as the "Queen City of the Plains" was gone.

The second station was situated in the soda lakes area between Bessemer and Devil's Gate along the old Oregon Trail route. The Syndicate Improvement Company out of Chicago set out to mine sodium here during the late 1800s. The Latin word for sodium is Natrona, hence the name of our fair county.

Machinery was installed and many men were employed briefly at the new city of

Johnstown. Within a few years, however, the project collapsed, with explanations that costs of extraction and shipping exceeded the market value of the product.

The third stop, Tom Sun's ranch, is a place well known to Wyoming historians. Thomas de Soliel was a French Canadian who first settled on the Sweetwater River, building a cabin just up stream from Devil's Gate in 1872.

He Americanized his name to Tom Sun and by 1882 he and his partner, Edwin Johnson, had trailed 3,000 cattle from Oregon into the Sweetwater Country to begin the Hub and Spoke Ranch.

Much of the history of the American West from the earliest trappers and explorers, the Oregon/Mormon Trail pioneers, the Pony Express and the Niobrara

Stage passed by this site. Old Tom and his progeny occupied the ranch for well over 100 years before selling out to the Mormon Church.

The last stop along the Natrona County portion of this route was Split Rock Station, located on Charles Countryman's Bar H6 Ranch. Mr. Countryman, with his wife and six children, had, in 1886, taken up a homestead in the shadow of the famous Split Rock landmark along the Oregon Trail.

In addition to the stage stop, a post office was located on this site. Although the Niobrara Stage and Transportation Company was a short lived venture, the post office continued to operate until 1940, when the U.S. Postal Service initiated rural delivery in the area. It marked the end of an era.

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