People & Peoples

Built in 1850 along the North Platte River in Goshen County, Ash Point was a modest one-room post that briefly traded horses before burning in 1852. Its later owners went on to establish a well-known post at Fort Laramie.

Joseph Bissonette relocated to LaBonte Creek in 1854, just weeks before the Grattan Fight ignited the First Sioux War. Raided twice and stripped of trade by military restrictions, his least successful post reveals how quickly the North Platte’s independent trading era collapsed.

In 1841, the obscure firm of Lock and Randolph built a log post near Fort Adams on the North Platte, the smallest player in a crowded market. Known mainly from a note about borrowed axes, the venture failed, followed by bankruptcy at Fort Vasquez.

Seth Ward and William Guerrier built Sand Point Post at Register Cliff, the first stop west of Fort Laramie, where they pioneered livestock exchange and open-range wintering that launched Wyoming’s cattle industry. It operated for sixteen years, doubling as mail and Pony Express station.

The Moncravie House was a small trading establishment constructed in 1856 on the Laramie River approximately twelve miles upstream from Fort Laramie, in what is now Goshen County, Wyoming.

After the Grattan Fight forced Platte River traders to Fort Laramie in 1855, Seth Ward and William Guerrier built a trading post just across the river. Ward became the fort’s sutler in 1857, anchoring one of the corridor’s most successful trading partnerships until 1863.

In 1862, veteran Fort Laramie trader James Bordeaux built a short-lived trading post at Rawhide Buttes. Almost nothing is known about the post itself, but the buttes remained a landmark for travelers long after Bordeaux left, later becoming a station on the stage road to the Black Hills gold rush.

Henry Gilbert and William Garrish built a trading post at the ninth and last crossing of the Sweetwater River in 1858, a Lander Cutoff’s stopover marked by a road-builder’s murder, a Pony Express run, and a military garrison before it became known as Burnt Ranch.

Traders known only as Merchant and Williams built a post near Devil’s Gate in 1861, on ground already steeped in trading-post history, and, within a year, tangled up in Civil War troop movements, a Mormon militia company, and the site’s violent Native and emigrant past.

Less than three years after French painter Louis Daguerre shared with the world how to make pictures on polished sheets of silver-plated copper, Lt. John C. Fremont attempted to photograph the land we think of as Wyoming. The early photographers of Wyoming adapted new technology to rough terrain and unforgiving elements.