A Quick History Lesson
With the popularity growing for automobiles in the early 1920s, a demand was made for accurate maps and highways to popular destinations. Thus, the historic Route 20 was born. In 1925, Route 20 was mapped out and designated as one of the first official U.S. Highways and was nicknamed the Yellowstone Highway. Motorists could now drive 3,365 miles along America’s longest highway – from Boston to Yellowstone to the Pacific Ocean. The Wind River Canyon Scenic By-Way is an important part of that route. Drive along its 34 miles of high desert plains, rugged beauty, towering cliffs, and breath-taking waterfalls.
It was a gold rush! Wyoming Governor Brooks said, “One of the greatest rushes ever known by mining men took place in Central Wyoming when seven hundred miners flocked into the Owl Creek range of mountains.” The scenic by-way travels along their original path to these abandoned gold mines. Along the route, the highway crosses the Badwater Creek, named after the flash floods that claimed the lives of early Indians and settlers alike. The vegetation is sparse, but antelope and other wildlife make their home here on the plains.
Gold Rush
At the frontier town of Shoshoni, the Wind River Canyon Scenic By-Way begins its trek north. Founded on high hopes of a gold and land rush, Shoshoni sprung up overnight as a tent city. In 1904, the news was spreading of a railroad, a gold and copper mining boom, and a dam for electrical power.
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Sprawling off to the West is the Boysen Reservoir. The Boysen State Park was created in 1956 after the completion of the second Boysen Dam. The original Dam was the dream of Asmus Boysen. He had joined the gold rush into Wyoming and knew that a dam was needed in the proposed Wind River Canyon mining district.
Those against the Dam protested that it would prevent a railroad from being built through the Wind River Canyon and would threaten the safety of the Town of Thermopolis. Despite these objections, Boysen was able to build his Dam. Over one thousand men worked for him, and it was transmitting power by 1911.
Severe floods in the 1920s washed water over the railroad tracks, and Chicago Burlington & Quincy had to shut down operations. The Dam lost its last few customers and was eventually torn down. Remnants of the old Dam and the town of Boysen can still be seen at the Lower Wind River Campground.
In December 1952, the new Dam was completed. While construction of the first Dam was on-going and after years of litigation and multiple surveys, work began on the Railroad through the canyon in 1909. Seven work camps were established from one end of the canyon to the other. During the winters of 1909 and 1910, temperatures dipped 55 below zero, and still, the work went on. Steam shovels and dynamite crunched and blasted the cliffs. Men were suspended from ropes and boson’s chairs over the canyon rim.
Picks and shovels were used extensively. Hand and mule pulled wagons hauled out rock and dirt. The rock was harder than granite and took as many as two wagon loads of dynamite a week to blast through. It was dangerous work. Tent hospitals were set up on either side of the canyon. Men died from dynamite explosions, sickness, accidents, and even murder in the case of a cook and his angry helper. Wooden crosses once dotted the side of the mountain, but today, only a small untended cemetery remains of their sacrifice.
By May 1911, the first line had broken through the canyon; however, disaster struck. A cloudburst washed out 4,000 feet of track, and work could not be resumed until July. By September 1914, a through train was running between Denver and Billings. The C, B, & Q line was now complete from Montana to the Gulf of Mexico.
Automobile Era
When Yellowstone Park opened to automobiles in 1915, Good Roads Booster clubs began promoting a highway from Denver to Yellowstone. In response, the road over Birdseye Pass was improved and was among those marked with yellow painted stones. However, the former stagecoach route was still a rough, steep road only passable half the year and took several hours to navigate. Wyoming state officials and Good Road activists supported a highway through the Wind River Canyon as a safer alternative.
By 1920, preliminary surveys were being made, and the projected cost of the new road was estimated at just over $400 thousand dollars.
It was expected to be one of the most expensive and difficult construction projects in the entire West. 450 men, 5 steam shovels, and many team of horses were employed.
The highway project was plagued from the beginning with earth slides and weather. Men were injured by slides, premature dynamite blasts, and burns from the steam shovel. Lives were lost in drownings and falls off the cliff. By March 1923, the number one tunnel had been completed, and the end was in sight. Three months later, flooding washed out the railroad bridges and damaged the new road. Behind schedule, the construction continued, and on January 1924, one hundred people in 21 passenger cars navigated turns and ruts of the new highway for the informal opening dedication of the road. Laborers had to clear rubble ahead of the first official caravan as the cars slogged through from Thermopolis to the south end of the canyon.
Afterwards, engineers opened the road on Sunday afternoons for eager sightseers, but by April, these jaunts were shut down due to heavy snows. In July of 1924, the official opening of the Yellowstone Highway through the Wind River Canyon was celebrated with rodeos, ballgames, and boxing matches.
Ancient Rock
The by-way itself is a geological journey through time. The Owl Creek Mountains in the West and the Bridger Range to the east were once part of the same anticline, now sliced in two by the erosion of the Wind River. At the tunnels on the south end of the Wind River Canyon, the tour begins with the 2.9-billion-year old Precambrian rock.
The rocks grow younger as the by-way travels northward until you are in the red Chugwater formation, which are only 200 million years old. It is a unique opportunity to see the exposed rock that can be seen in few places in the world.
Rocks that were created in magma and others that were left behind by an ancient ocean. The Sandstone was formed by sand dunes that covered the ocean’s shoreline. Mudstone in the Gros Ventre formation resulted from mud and silt. Trace fossils of “worm borings” can be found in the rock. The Madison limestone and Bighorn Dolomite were formed in deep ocean waters. The red Chugwater formation consists of Sandstone and siltstone, ending the journey through time.
Early Tourists
Throughout the canyon, settlers homesteaded deep canyon ravines and old gold claims. A schoolhouse, gas station, and a bar were once part of the commerce alongside the scenic by-way.
In 1925, the Railroad built an excursion platform at Dornick, a former railroad camp, for their passenger trains. This stopover in the Wind River Canyon was widely publicized and offered tourists a view of Chimney Rock. The following year, a stir was created in Thermopolis when it was learned that one of these tourists would be Queen Marie of Romania along with her children, Prince Nicholas, and Princess Ileana.
Queen Marie was on a friendship tour of the United States and wanted to see “real Americans,” thus her train ride through the Dakotas and Wyoming. Her special train was called the “Royal Roumanian,” and the New York Times reported that it was “one of the most beautiful and elaborate trains ever placed on rails.”
The passenger trains continued to carry tourists and sightseers through the Wind River Canyon, but the competition of the Yellowstone Highway proved too great. In 1967, the passenger route was discontinued, and the railway became a freight-only route through the scenic Wind River Canyon.
Two Rivers
The river that runs along the Wind River Canyon Scenic Byway begins in the Absaroka Mountains, 90 miles northwest. It flows through two mountain ranges and joins the Yellowstone River before the waters reach the Gulf of Mexico.
Early explorers who had found the river to the south named it the Wind River. In 1811, William Price Hunt wrote in his journal that it was called the Wind River because “in the winter, the wind blows so constantly that it prevents the snow from lying on the ground.”
Other explorers arriving in Montana named the same river, the Bighorn after the bighorn sheep found alongside it. The two names were well established before people realized it was the same river. The debate, then, was when did the river change its name and what would they call the canyon. Mountain Man Jim Bridger called it the Bighorn Canyon and first saw the area in the fall of 1823. Two years later, Bridger was returning from the Rendezvous with $50,000 worth of beaver furs. He entered what he called Bighorn Canyon and made a homemade raft of driftwood, and braved the turbulent waters, making the first recorded float of the river through the canyon.
Eventually, the Wind River Canyon retained its name, and the name of the Bighorn Canyon was given to another canyon in the Pryor Mountains. The confusion of when the river changed names continued until1955. The U.S. Geological Survey Board officially marked an area at the north end of the Wind River Canyon as to where the name changes, one of the few places in the world where a river changes its name in midstream.
Hot City
In 1868, the Shoshone Reservation was formed and within its boundaries were the Wind River Canyon and the mineral hot springs on the north side of the canyon. Since the hot springs were not open to settlement, the town of Thermopolis began to be built in the 1880sjust outside the reservation boundaries and downstream from the town’s present site. Squatters, however, moved in. They lived in tents and dug-outs near the mineral waters. Entrepreneurs wanted to develop a resort, but to do that, they would need a title to the land. John McLaughlin of the Indian Services reached an agreement with the Shoshone and Arapaho chiefs to transfer the springs and land to the federal government for $60,000. On April 21, 1896, the land was officially signed over.
Within a year, the federal government gave the hot springs to the state of Wyoming for a state park and opened up the remaining 99 acres for settlement. Thermopolis was officially founded in its current location in 1897. Its name was derived from the Greek words for hot bath and town, loosely translated to be “Hot Town”.
The Big Spring, thought to be the world’s largest mineral hot spring, attracted visitors for its medicinal value as well as tourists who came to relax and play. The original bathhouses were merely holes dug into the mineral formations and filled with water from the springs. By 1903, these were replaced by a state-built bathhouse in the Reserve.
Other frequent visitors to Thermopolis included numerous outlaws, including Butch Cassidy and the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, as well as the lawmen, like Joe LeFor, who pursued them. Thermopolis continued to grow, centered around the hot springs from which it had been named. Sanitariums, hotels, pools, and parks were built.
Today, Thermopolis remains as a tourist destination. The Hot Springs State Park is the most visited state park in Wyoming, and bison can be viewed within the park boundaries. Here ends the Wind River Canyon Scenic Queen Maria of Romania tours the By-Way. It welcomes and awaits you.