A pronghorn standing on a rocky rise among bunchgrass in the Red Desert, pale sky behind
Randy C. Bunney / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Wyoming · Region

Green River Country & the Red Desert

Bridger and Vasquez's trading post and the fort the Mormons burned, the Rock Springs massacre of 1885, and the pronghorn's six-thousand-year road to the Tetons.

5 places to explore

Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez built their trading post on Black's Fork of the Green in 1843 to supply the emigrant trains. In 1855 the Latter-day Saints took it over, buying it, they said, over Bridger's denials, and walled it in stone. In the fall of 1857, as the Army marched on Utah, Mormon militia burned it rather than let the troops have it, and the Army garrisoned the site from 1858 to 1890. There in 1868 Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone and Taghee of the Bannock negotiated the treaty that set aside both the Wind River and the Fort Hall reservations.

The Union Pacific opened coal mines at Rock Springs to fuel its locomotives and brought in Chinese miners, many of them first as strikebreakers; by 1885 about six hundred Chinese worked there beside some three hundred whites. On September 2, 1885, after a fight in one of the mines, a mob of white miners with guns, hatchets and knives attacked Chinatown. They killed twenty-eight Chinese miners, wounded fifteen, burned their homes and drove several hundred out of town. A week later federal troops escorted the survivors back to the mines. A grand jury refused to indict anyone, and no one was ever convicted.

For at least six thousand years pronghorn have walked between winter range in the Upper Green River basin and summer range in Grand Teton, a round trip of about 150 miles, one of the longest land migrations left in the lower forty-eight. In 2008 the Bridger-Teton National Forest protected its northern stretch as the Path of the Pronghorn, the first federally designated wildlife migration corridor in the country, and in 2012 overpasses were finished over US-191 at Trappers Point, where the herds funnel across the highway.

What to See in Green River Country & the Red Desert

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Boars Tusk, a jagged dark volcanic spire rising from a slope of loose rubble against a clear blue sky

Boar's Tusk and the Killpecker Dunes

Rock Springs

The throat of a vanished volcano made of rock from the mantle, standing over a fifty-five-mile river of dunes that crosses the Continental Divide.

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Fossil Butte, a flat-topped ridge banded in pale buff and red, above a sagebrush flat under tall summer clouds

Fossil Butte National Monument

Kemmerer

The floor of a 52-million-year-old lake, packed with whole fish, the oldest complete bats and the only complete freshwater stingrays.

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Historic Sites

The Green River flowing past Expedition Island in the town of Green River, the sun low over a sagebrush bluff and cottonwoods along the far bank

Expedition Island

Green River

Where John Wesley Powell's 1871 survey left for the canyons of the Green and Colorado; where his 1869 trip started has never been proven.

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A white stone marker with a bronze medallion naming Names Hill and the old Green River crossing, set before the pale sandstone cliff where emigrants carved their names

Names Hill State Historic Site

La Barge

The Sublette Cutoff's register cliff above the Green River crossing, where the most famous name, Jim Bridger's, is probably not his.

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Towns & Gateways

The stone-walled entrance of the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, an oval wooden sign over the glass doors

Museum of the Mountain Man

Pinedale

Six fur-trade rendezvous met near here on the Green; the only artist who ever saw one, Alfred Jacob Miller, came in 1837.

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Scenic Drives through Green River Country & the Red Desert

Scenic Byway

WY-530 and UT-44: Green River to Flaming Gorge Dam

South from the railroad town where Powell launched in 1869, along a reservoir that drowned a state-line town and the floors of the first canyons he named, to the dam that made the lake.

82 mi · 2 hrs

Stories from Green River Country & the Red Desert

Geology

The Dry Lake Under Green River

Beneath the sagebrush west of Green River lie forty-two beds of trona, left by a lake that dried out again and again fifty million years ago. A wildcat oil well found them by accident, and they now supply most of the nation's soda ash.

3 min read

Green River Country & the Red Desert rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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