Bonneville Cabins

The board credits the cabins to Bonneville and gives most of its words to the man who came thirty years later. Noyes Baldwin brought his wife, Josephine, five children and a stock of trade goods to the empty cabins in the summer of 1866; a daughter remembered pumpkins growing wild around them. In 1868 he opened on Baldwin Creek in a log cabin bought at South Pass and moved, and in September 1869 his store served as a polling place. The family's stone store in Lander, built in 1884, grew from that post into a modern retail business.

What the plaque says

Bonneville Cabins Five hundred yards northwest of this marker stood the Bonneville Cabins. built by Captain B. L. E. Bonneville in 1835 to store his trade goods. Three cabins were constructed and later two more. They were long known as "The Five Cabins," the first mercantile establishment in central Wyoming. In 1866 Major Noyes Baldwin moved a stock of goods into the cabins to trade with Shoshoni Indians, but vacated the following year because of Indian hostilities. In 1868 he located a trading post on Baldwin Creek two miles northwest of Lander and in 1876 moved to the site of the present M. N. Baldwin Co. store in Lander.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Stephen's Mission — 10 mi
  A Jesuit mission on land the Arapaho leader Black Coal chose, its church painted with Arapaho designs, its boarding school named for what it was.
• Chief Washakie's Grave — 17 mi
  The Army buried the Eastern Shoshone leader with full honors in 1900; his gravestone praises his loyalty to whites and leaves the rest out.
• Sinks Canyon State Park — 19 mi
  A river that vanishes into a limestone cave and comes back a quarter mile on, slower than it should, warmer, and with more water than went in.

More markers nearby

• Site of Fort Thompson or Camp Magraw — 6.4 mi
• Trappers Rendezvous — 14 mi
• Sinks Canyon - Corridor to the Winds — 15 mi
• Sacajawea — 16 mi