Wind River Country

The Wind River Reservation is the Eastern Shoshone homeland that Washakie held onto. A treaty of 1863 had recognized a far larger Shoshone country; at Fort Bridger in 1868, with the railroad coming, Washakie accepted a reservation in the Wind River valley less than a tenth the size. In the spring of 1878 about 950 Northern Arapaho arrived under military escort, placed here by the government. The two nations had fought each other four years before, and the Shoshone, who alone held title, had not wanted them to stay. Both have lived here since, each with its own government. In 1905 Congress ratified an agreement taking 1.5 million acres north of the Big Wind River, and the ceded land was opened to homesteaders in 1906.

South of the reservation the Continental Divide flattens into South Pass, a sagebrush plain some twenty miles wide between the Wind River Range and the hills to the south, a crossing wagons could make without a mountain grade. Returning Astorians under Robert Stuart are believed to have used it in 1812. William Ashley's trappers, led by Thomas Fitzpatrick and Jedediah Smith, crossed it in 1824, and it became the gate through which the Oregon, California and Mormon trails all passed.

Gold lodes were found above the pass in 1867, and South Pass City boomed the next year. Its member of the first territorial legislature, William Bright, introduced the bill that on December 10, 1869, made Wyoming the first government in the world to give women full voting rights. When the town's justice of the peace resigned in protest, the county appointed Esther Hobart Morris in his place, and from February 14, 1870, she heard thirty-four cases, the first woman to serve as a judge in the United States. By 1870 the town was down to fewer than five hundred people and by 1875 fewer than a hundred; the state keeps what is left as a historic site.

What to See in Wind River Country

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

Geology & Rock Formations

Sinks Canyon State Park

Lander

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.

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Historic Sites

Chief Washakie's Grave

Fort Washakie

The Army buried the Eastern Shoshone leader with full honors in 1900; his gravestone praises his loyalty to whites and leaves the rest out.

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South Pass City State Historic Site

Lander

The Carissa lode built the town in a year; the mine outlived the boom by eight decades, and its mill runs again for visitors.

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Scenic Drives through Wind River Country

Stories from Wind River Country

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