7/26/2023 0 Comments Plain old west train sketchOne barkeeper, James McDaniels, was known as the “Barnum of the West,” according to Larson, who stated McDaniels’ flamboyant attractions included a free museum, live theater and a zoo stocked with “porcupines, parrots, monkeys, apes, snakes and bears.” Entertainment included dance halls and saloons. Larson explains town citizens endured “disorderly behavior,” such as shootings, thefts and stabbings. Eventually, a bond issue and even the sale of desks and tables owned by the city would become necessary. When Dakota Territorial District Judge Ara Bartlett ruled in March 1868 that only businesses named in the charter were required to pay license fees, city finances suffered. Early day revenues accumulated in city coffers from business licenses and fines. Corlett to win election as the town’s first mayor on Jan. By July 1868, just a year after the first settlers arrived, the paper noted a population of “not less than 5,000." Growing rapidly, Cheyenne soon gained another name, “The Magic City of the Plains.” The Cheyenne Leader reported 200 businesses in town by November 1867. The building was finished in 1890, the year Wyoming became a state, and expanded further in 1915. Gibbs drives past the Wyoming Territorial Capitol, under construction in 1888. Larson also credited Fort Russell as being “a stabilizing force in the Cheyenne economy.”Īrchitect David W. Larson noted that Cheyenne spent six months as an end-of -tracks town, “a much longer period than was allowed to any other Wyoming town.” Cheyenne merchants, he explained, supplied goods to railroad camps on Sherman Hill and also to Colorado towns as the Kansas Pacific Railroad built toward Denver. A combination of construction challenges and the shrewd efforts of enterprising businessmen helped the town endure and grow. The first tracks reached Cheyenne on Nov. The life of this place was tied to the railroad. The capitol was still unbuilt grounds for it take up four square blocks near the upper-right corner of the map. Bird's-eye view of Cheyenne, looking north, 1882, with views of prominent buildings. has played a big role in the city's politics, economy and culture ever since. The first Union Pacific locomotive to arrive in Cheyenne was this small work engine, 1867. Russell, a military post to protect the railroad, began a couple of weeks later. On July 25, 1867, the first frame house was erected at the corner of Ferguson and Sixteenth streets. By July 22, an office had opened to sell lots. The townsite, in what was still Dakota Territory then, was four miles square. First referred to as Crow Creek Crossing, the name of Iron City was reportedly considered for the place, which the railroad had already publicized as “one of the most important cities to be built between Omaha and California.”ĭodge and some of his friends are said to have renamed it Cheyenne for the Great Plains Indian tribe. Three married couples and three men arrived on July 9. Grenville Dodge had established the first Union Pacific Railroad townsite in the area at Crow Creek on July 4 of that year. But after the railroad arrived in November 1867, skeptics questioned whether the town would last, as so many other end-of-tracks communities had died once the graders and tracklayers moved on. Union Pacific locomotives still rumble through Cheyenne, as they first did 150 years ago.
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