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.

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.

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.

Fur trader Joseph Bissonette built a bustling trading post at the mouth of Deer Creek in 1857—a crossroads of commerce, diplomacy and scandal that hosted Lutheran missionaries, Pony Express riders and a wary military garrison before Indian wars reduced it to ashes in 1865.

In 1857, veteran fur trader Andrew Drips built a post on the North Platte River near present-day Torrington, his last venture after decades in the Rocky Mountain and Upper Missouri trade, including stints helping run Fort William and two different posts both called Fort John. Drips traded here until his death in 1860.

Built in 1841 to outshine its decaying predecessor Fort William, adobe Fort John became the busiest trading post on the North Platte, the “Fort Laramie” thousands of emigrants passed through. The Army bought it in 1849, launching one of the West’s great military posts.