Fort Fred Steele State Historic Site

Colonel Richard Dodge chose this bank of the North Platte in June 1868, where the Union Pacific's rails were about to cross the river, and the fort that went up here, named for the Civil War general Frederick Steele, was one of three the Army built to guard the railroad across southern Wyoming. It began as a tent camp; some three hundred soldiers and hired civilians built barracks, quarters, warehouses, a sawmill and a powder magazine. The last troops marched out in August 1886.

The railroad also needed ties, by the million, and the fort became a collecting point for them. Tie hacks cut them in the mountains upstream and the river carried them down to the yards here. The firm of Coe and Carter was the leading supplier to the Fort Steele yards from 1868 to 1896, and its successor, the Carbon Timber Company, floated more than 1.5 million timbers down the North Platte in 1909 alone. The remains of its tie-processing works stand on private land across the river.

A small town lived on in the old post after the Army left, and the Lincoln Highway ran past it from 1922; when the highway was moved in 1939, the town faded. The state keeps the ruins, the 1881 powder magazine and the bridge tender's house, open from Memorial Day to Labor Day, just north of I-80 at Exit 228.