Uinta County, Wyoming

Uinta County lies in the southwestern corner of Wyoming. Formed in 1869 as one of the five counties of Wyoming Territory, Uinta County originally stretched from Utah to Montana. In 1911, it was reduced to its present size, when Lincoln County was carved from Uinta County’s northern reaches.

Geographically, Uinta County encompasses two separate watersheds: the Bear River and the Black's Fork of the Green River. They are separated by a series of low mountain ranges known throughout the state as the Three Sisters; their local name is simply the Divide.

Evanston, the county seat, along with the Town of Bear River, lie in the Bear River Valley. The communities of Fort Bridger, Mountain View and Lyman are the major population centers in the eastern part of the county, in the drainage of the Black’s Fork of the Green River, which is known as the Bridger Valley.

The county was named for the Uinta Mountains to the south. The name itself is said to mean pine tree or pine forest. The American Indians who made this part of Wyoming their seasonal home were primarily Eastern Shoshone, along bands of the with Ute and Bannock tribes. Some families in the county still tell stories of their grandparents and great-grandparents seeing Indian encampments on the hills west of Evanston during the annual migrations of the Shoshone through the area.

Trappers

The first whites to enter the area of present-day Uinta County were fur trappers in the first decades of the 19^th century. Henry's Fork and the Black's Fork of the Green River-- both major streams in the eastern part of the county--were named for Andrew Henry, William Ashley's partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and Daniel Black, another member of the organization. The first Rocky Mountain fur trade rendezvous, created by Ashley, was held in June 1825 beside Henry's Fork in what’s now the far southeastern corner of the county.

Other fur trappers, including John Robertson and Jim Bridger, became permanent residents of the county. Robertson, known locally as Jack Robinson or Uncle Jack, built a cabin on the Black's Fork in 1834. The small community of Robertson in the Bridger Valley still bears his name.

From the mid-19th century to the present, the history of Uinta County has been shaped by four major economic forces: trails, rails, ranches and resources.

Trails

The great American overland migration of the mid-19th century created a braid of trails across Wyoming—the Oregon, California and Mormon trails. In the early 1860s, another more southerly route was established, used by stage companies along with emigrant wagon trains. Eventually, the transcontinental railroad, the Lincoln Highway and, ultimately, Interstate 80 followed this southerly route. All of these trails and routes passed through what’s now Uinta County.

The Oregon Trail originally traversed the Black's Fork Valley before heading north toward Fort Hall, Idaho. In 1843, fur trapper Jim Bridger set up a trading post on the Black's Fork to serve travelers on the Oregon Trail and later the Mormon, California, Cherokee Trails. At Bridger’s Fort, travelers could trade their weakened animals for rested ones and obtain needed food and other supplies. In 1855, Bridger and his partner, Louis Vasquez, sold Bridger's Fort to the Mormons who were operating Fort Supply a few miles to the south to serve emigrants on the Mormon Trail. In 1857, Mormon militia burned Bridger’s Fort to prevent its capture by the U.S. Army in the so-called Utah War. In 1858, the Army took possession of the post and renamed it Fort Bridger. The fort remained an army post until 1890 when it was abandoned.

By the early 1860s, conflicts between emigrants on the Oregon-Mormon-California Trails and native tribes led the government to establish a new trail through Colorado and Wyoming known as the Overland Trail. The Overland Trail, which had been mapped by Howard Stansbury of the U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1851, ran through southern Wyoming. Ben Holladay, who carried the U.S. mail on his Overland Stage Company, began using this route in July 1861. The western portion of the Overland Trail through Wyoming passed through Fort Bridger.

Rails

In 1868, the Union Pacific Railroad entered Uinta County along the route of the Overland Trail, laying tracks that passed a few miles north of Fort Bridger, then south, crossing the Aspen Hill summit before turning north along the Bear River.

As elsewhere during railroad construction, temporary camps and end-of-the-tracks towns sprang up in Uinta County. The most notorious was Bear River City, also known as Beartown. In November 1868, it was the site of a violent vigilante riot, during which the shantytown was burned and the printing press of the Frontier Index, the newspaper chronicling the construction of the railroad, was destroyed.

Another end-of-tracks town, Piedmont, was a site of a labor strike in early May 1869. Workers held up the special train carrying UP Vice President Thomas Durant, traveling to the golden spike ceremony to mark completion of the transcontinental railroad in Utah Territory, and demanded payment of back wages. A hastily composed telegram produced the results the workers wanted, and a day and a half later, they allowed the train to pass through.

Of the temporary camps, Carter, Piedmont and Evanston evolved into permanent settlements. Carter, named for Judge William Carter who served for many years as sutler at Fort Bridger, became a major shipping point on the railroad for sheep and cattle in the Bridger Valley. Piedmont was a service point for locomotives on the long grade between Carter and Evanston until the completion of the Aspen Tunnel in 1901 allowed the tracks to bypass it.

Evanston was established in November 1868, and named after James A. Evans, the UP surveyor who surveyed the eastern half of the line through what’s now Wyoming. The town’s streets were platted by UP chief engineer, Grenville Dodge. Dodge, ever the railroad man, laid the streets out parallel with the tracks rather than on a north-south orientation. The stone roundhouse, built in 1871, was replaced in 1912 with a 28-stall brick roundhouse. That structure, the last surviving full roundhouse on the original UP-Central Pacific line between Omaha and Sacramento, is now a National Landmark and is being renovated for community use.

The county seat, Evanston became a division point on the railroad between Ogden, Utah, and Green River in 1870 and the largest community in the county.

In the first decade of the 20th century, yet another transcontinental route passed through Uinta County as automobilists attempted to cross the continent by car. In March 1908, the Great Automobile Race from New York to Paris brought six automobiles through the county. By 1913, the Lincoln Highway, a route comprising existing roads and trails between New York City and San Francisco, became the nation's first transcontinental automobile route. Like the 19th century trails, it traversed Uinta County. The route became the basis for U.S. Highway 30 and, eventually, I-80 through this part of Wyoming.

Ranches

John Myers established the first ranch in the Bear River drainage in 1858 and filed the first water right in what became Wyoming Territory. The Myers ranch, still operated by family members, is located where the Mormon Trail crossed the Bear River south of present-day Evanston.

After the railroad was completed in 1869, cattle and sheep ranching developed quickly throughout the county. Stock grazed in the high meadows of the Uinta Mountains in the summer and fed on locally grown hay in the winter. While many of the railroad section camps throughout the county had small corrals, the largest shipping point for livestock in the Bridger Valley developed at Carter. Ranchers in the Bridger Valley also raised hay and some grain crops. Beginning in the 1890s, extensive irrigation canals and ditches were built to aid their efforts.

Between 1880 and 1900, the population of the county grew quickly. The 1880 census showed 28 farms in Uinta County. A post office was established at Mountain View in the Bridger Valley 1891. In 1899, Lyman was founded nearby as a Mormon agricultural colony. Other, smaller communities sprang up where ranchers took up homesteads along the Henry's Fork and Smith's Fork Rivers.

By 1900, the number of farms had grown to 940, with the census showing 13,600 horses, 125,000 cattle and 914,000 sheep--the largest number in any Wyoming county. In 1915, the University of Wyoming established a 200-acre experimental farm in the Bridger Valley just east of Lyman. The most recent agricultural census in 2007 counted 344 farms in Uinta County, listing 44,500 cattle and 41,200 sheep. Livestock ranching continues to be an important part of the county's economy.

Natural Resources

One of the inducements for the Union Pacific to build its tracks through what’s now Wyoming was the presence of large tracts of coal along its right of way. By the late 1860s, coal was being extracted from a series of mines dug into a ridge above the Bear River north of Evanston. The community that sprang up around these mines was called Almy. In addition to the white miners, many others were Chinese, brought to the area by labor contractors for the Union Pacific Coal Company. After a series of disastrous mine explosions in the 1880s and 1890s in which dozens of white and Chinese miners were killed, the Almy mines were permanently closed by 1900.