Fort Caspar Museum

Before there was a fort here, there was a crossing. In June 1847 Brigham Young's pioneer company, held up by a flooding North Platte at the place trappers called the Upper Crossing, built a ferry, carried other emigrants over for pay and left men behind to keep running it; Mormon crews came back to work it through the 1852 season. In 1859 the trader Louis Guinard built a timber toll bridge about a thousand feet long, with a trading post at its south end, and the bridge put the ferries out of business. Richard Burton spent a night at the station in August 1860, the Pony Express changed horses there in 1860 and 1861, and the telegraph opened an office in 1861.

Soldiers moved into Guinard's buildings in 1862 to guard the line, and the garrison became Platte Bridge Station. The post was ordered closed in October 1867, and the bridge and buildings were burned soon after the Army left.

The log fort on the site is a 1936 reconstruction by Casper citizens and the Works Progress Administration, built close to the original footprint from a plan drawn by Caspar Collins himself, so what stands is the station he knew rather than the larger fort later named for him. A replica of the Mormon ferry and a rebuilt span of Guinard's bridge were added in the 1980s, and the city runs a museum beside them.