South Pass City

Hey all!

One of the side trips for this vacation was to take a kind of pilgrimage to South Pass City Wyoming.  This historic little town was a sister community to Atlantic City (not the one with the seaside boardwalk) in a fairly prolific mining area.  The town was also the south pass (hence the name) of the Oregon Trail to cross the Great Divide.

The town also has some dubious claim to fame as the seat of the women’s suffrage movement in Wyoming as well as being the home of the first female judge in the country.

The town is now a combination of private residences on one side of the main dirt road and Wyoming Historic Site on the other.

We were pulling Piper south along on Wyoming highway 28 when somewhere around Roundtop mountain we saw a sign saying Atlantic City/South Pass City to the left and turned onto Dickinson Avenue.  This is a dirt/gravel road that is wide and smooth enough that I had no worries about towing Piper on it.  After winding our way down and through the hills, we came to the town of Atlantic City.  This place is a little eerie and forlorn.  There is a general store nestled in the middle of town and an RV park as well as a gun shop.  We did not stop as we went through town on our way to South Pass but we saw no humans out and about.  The 2010 census says this town had 39 residents…one wonders what they do for a living and where.  This is definitely a (living?) ghost town.

Anyway, we pull through there and up a canyon to where we see the Carissa Mine and make a left down the hill to the town of South Pass City.  My last visit to this town was in 1979 with Dad and Mom.  The look of the place is different through my older eyes and many things have changed.  The State has turned all the buildings into displays behind plexiglass to preserve them.  I remember touching and sitting in chairs as well as going into all the buildings.  Dad and I even played checkers in the saloon and we ordered Sarsaparilla sodas.  There is a photo of that as well as the one I brought along that has dad leaning against the door jamb of an outhouse pretending to button his fly.  One goal is to find that particular outhouse and take a similar photo.

We got the combo parked in the large gravel lot and walked into the little office/gift shop and bought our 6 bucks worth of entry fee and I asked the ranger if she could identify the outhouse in the photograph (she couldn’t).  Off we went into the old townsite to get a feel for yesteryear.  You can experience blacksmithing, cooking, life and even pan for some gold in the creek running through town. 

The old store is preserved behind glass and undergoing a renovation.  The storehouses, school, community hall (the exhibit includes a story of an admiral who was born in South Pass), blacksmith shop and rooming house are all there for the curious to see.  E says that the hotel/rooming house looks just like her great aunts old rooming house in upstate New York.  All of the pieces and parts are there and the outhouse was located outside the old hotel.  I check the photo from 1979 and even though I am not really dressed the part, set up a mirror image photo and have E snap some shots. 

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That mission completed, we head back to Piper after reading more history of the town and head back down the dirt road to civilization.

It is amazing that just a couple miles off the main road is this time capsule of history.  How many people drive by on the highway and never think about driving down the dirt road to find evidence of their past?  I know that there are times when we look at a sign or some piece of information telling of another “historic town” and we consider not going because we have seen “hundreds of them”.  Every one we don’t visit I feel a loss for as we have missed out on that story and legacy.  Every time we take a less travelled road or visit one of the thousands of lost or forgotten “ghost towns” that dot the west I leave feeling a little more educated and enriched for the experience.  People struggled here, laughed, cried, loved and died.  Heroes were born here.  Stories were told and lives were lived.  These towns and stories deserve to be visited and remembered, lest the living and dying of these hearty folk be lost to time forever.

REMEMBER, just remember

BFD

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