Rock Springs, Wyoming

An Oct. 4, 2008, New York Times article shows the picture of a well-paid gas-field operator in a Rock Springs, Wyo., strip club surrounded by four $500-a-night strippers stating, “I spend over $3,000 a weekend here.” The article was about the latest of the booms in the Rock Springs economy.

Sometimes it seems that almost every time the town makes the national news, it’s for something negative. Rock Springs was the site of one of the worst ethnic massacres in United States history in the 1880s, and nearly a century later, 60 Minutes depicted the baser nature of Rock Springs in an exposé titled, “Our Town,” about alleged police and government corruption.

The Rock Springs Coal arch, shown here about 1929, has returned in recent years to its original site downtown. Wyoming Tales and Trails.But there’s much more to Rock Springs than scandalous headlines. Its close-knit community of immigrant coal miners from 56 nations laid the foundation of the town’s culture, and this impressive diversity has survived even while this place has endured ongoing evolutions in its economy.

The first documented mention of coal in the Rock Springs area came from an 1850 U.S. Army survey party seeking a quicker way through what’s now Wyoming. The party was commanded by Howard Stansbury and guided by the famous mountain man, Jim Bridger. Stansbury noted, “We found a bed of bituminous coal cropping out of the north bluff of the valley, with every indication of its being quite abundant.”

He was right about the abundance. Millions of years ago, an inland sea deposited what became the seams of coal and trona of the Rock Springs Dome, along with traps for oil and gas of the Overthrust Belt. Stansbury’s reports were widely read, but no changes were made at that time to the routes of the pioneer trails through Wyoming farther north. It was Ben Holladay’s Overland Stage Company that more fully developed the area, creating a stage stop because of the springs, a valuable source of water in the midst of the desert.

Taking over the stage stop and further developing it were Archibald and Duncan Blair—brothers who opened the first coal mine in Rock Springs in 1868—just as the coal-thirsty Union Pacific Railroad arrived.

Front Street, downtown Rock Springs, 1919, showing the U.P. depot and the First National Bank. Wyoming Tales and Trails.The arrival of the Union Pacific Railroad, with its congressional mandate for a transcontinental line, opened the floodgates of economic development in Rock Springs. The railroad’s route across relatively flat southern Wyoming was determined by that flatness—and by a string of good coal deposits. According to Wyoming historian T.A. Larson, the high-quality coal was lucrative for the railroad as the U.P. could use it in engines, sell it at a profitable markup in the open market and charge high freight rates to competing coal companies.

The Rock Springs mines were so important to the railroad in its formative stages that U.P. President Charles Adams said that they were the “salvation of the UP; those mines saved it. Otherwise the UP would not have been worth picking up.” There was once so much coal flowing through the town that winter snows turned black. At one time there were more than 130 mines operating in Sweetwater County in places like Winton, Reliance, Superior, Dines, Lionkol and others that surrounded the hub of Rock Springs.

There were other pieces to the early Rock Springs economic puzzle, especially sheep ranching. The Blair brothers were unable to hold onto their mine because they did not have the financial resources. They did invest in sheep ranching, however; and like several ranchers of the time, were able to establish other businesses in Rock Springs. The Hay family, descendants of the Blairs, developed a successful, still-thriving bank and continue to be leading citizens of the city.

The coal miners of the past shared some similarities with the strutting gas field worker of the Times article: They also would probably have enjoyed a drink at a bar, or even, had there been the opportunity, watching strippers; the town was famously anti-Prohibition and did have a red-light district.

But the town had numerous saloons because of its ethnic diversity at a time when the U.P. hired workers from all over the world to keep the unions weak. Each nationality had its own saloon or meeting place, such as the Slovenian Slovenski Dom, still in existence.