TORRINGTON – Around thirty people gathered in the Community Room at the Platte Valley Bank on Tuesday, Jan. 24, to listen to Dean McClain and Wayne Tatman’s presentation on Rock Creek. McClain is familiar with Wyoming history and researched the topic, while Tatman grew up in the area and has heard stories about the town.
Mary Houser, the Goshen County Historical Society (GCHS) president started the night by welcoming everyone, offering a word of prayer, and then led the group in the Pledge of Allegiance. The mic was then offered to McClain and Tatman.
Rock Creek
Rock Creek was located between Medicine Bow and Laramie, about 10 miles north of Rock River. As its name would suggest, it was close to the creek in that area. Rock Creek is a mostly forgotten piece of our past, with only the remains of structures left behind to remind us of its presence.
Rock Creek lived and died by the railroad.
“When they put in the original transcontinental railroad in 1868, the original railroad wound around all over the place,” McClain explained. “The reason they did this all across Wyoming was that they didn’t really have grading equipment. Train scores have to run on a pretty flat track because they can’t take much of a grade.”
The result was winding train tracks leading around in different directions only following the easiest ground and flat prairie. Small towns were established along these routes, spaced out about every 20 miles, to supply those traveling by rail with basic necessities, like water.
Rock Creek was established in 1868 when the railroad built a station in the area and appointed a crew. It wasn’t long before the town began to grow in size. Eventually, it had two eateries, two stores, two hotels, a blacksmith, a barber shop, a school, a post office and five saloons. One of the stores was run by the son of a Wyoming governor, Governor John Thayer.
Within the first several years, Rock Creek became a major stop along the Union Pacific Railroad.
“The train apparently would only stop for about 20 minutes or so,” McClain said. “They’d stop there and put water and coal on the train. So, everybody would bail off of the cars and run and get something to eat. The standard deal was a biscuit because it was quick, and you could carry it. The waitress got the nickname the ‘Biscuit Shooter’ because they would hand out probably 1,000s of biscuits a day.”
Its Heyday
However, in no time at all, the railroad was not the only thing making the town boom.
By coincidence, Fort Fetterman in Douglas was built around the same time as the town of Rock Creek was established. In order to supply the fort by rail, they created a freight road from Fort Fetterman to the closest train station, the one in Rock Creek.
“Freight was a huge deal,” McClain explained. “These freight wagons were huge with wheels about six to eight feet tall. Each wagon would weigh 6,000 pounds and be pulled by ten oxen or bulls. There were 175 freighters that operated out of Rock Creek through the years.”
It took the freight wagons four days to cross the 80 miles of treacherous road between Fort Fetterman and Rock Creek.
“Perhaps even more significant was the stagecoach line,” McClain told the audience. “The military insisted on a stagecoach line for passengers, payroll people, officers and deliver small packages. They paid for a stagecoach line out of Rock Creek to Fort Fetterman. Then later to Fort McKinney and all the way to Custer or Junction City, Montana.”
This stagecoach route was the largest route in the United States at the time, spanning 400 miles with 23 stops.
The next booming industry in Rock Creek was cattle. While the cattle industry was booming all over Wyoming at the time, Rock Creek was unique because of the railroad. At one point, Rock Creek was the largest shipping point on the Union Pacific Railroad. If a rancher wanted to ship by rail, they shipped out of Rock Creek.
Not only did local operations, like the Swan Cattle Company, ship out of Rock Creek, but many others also trailed cattle great distances to do it as well.
“There were cattle who came all the way from Oregon,” McClain said. “If you had cattle in Oregon, they either had to put them on a ship or trail them to Rock Creek. They would start in the spring from Oregon, trail them slowly, fatten them on the way, and get to Rock Creek in the fall at shipping time.”
Within the first year of the railroad’s completion, there were 150,000 people who came through Rock Creek. Ten years later, that number had grown to one million people.
Throughout the town’s existence, many famous people traveled through Rock Creek, such as President Ulysses Grant, Jim Bridger, Tom Horne, Calamity Jane, Mark Twain, Owen Wister and Alfred Packer.
Stories
There are many stories about events and people in Rock Creek.
McClain said in 1899, there were five “prospectors” who camped on the outskirts of town, supposedly waiting on a shipment of dynamite. While they seemed suspicious to the residents of the town, they were not breaking any obvious laws. Shortly after they received their shipment, there was a train robbery at Wilcox. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid blew up the railroad car to get a safe full of money.
“(According to the story), they had the dynamite and tried to get the guy to open the door on the car, but he refused,” McClain said. “The bandits supposedly hollered at the guy, “Open the door or we’re going to blow it up. We’ve got enough dynamite here to blow Christ off the cross. So just open the door and let us have it.”
When the bandits blew up the safe, they completely destroyed the train car and sent everything flying into the wind. Authorities attempted to track down the train robbers but didn’t have much luck.
According to the story, they did track down at least one of the robbers because of raspberry stains on the money. When the bills went flying around the train car, apparently, they got stained by raspberries that were also on the car. Authorities found these uniquely stained bills and tracked down the person spending them.
Alfred Packard, the Colorado cannibal, evaded the law in Rock Creek as a freighter operating under a fake name. Packard had guided some prospectors up into the Colorado mountains where they got snowed in by a bad winter. He was the only one who came back in the spring. Later, they found out that he had actually killed the other guys and resorted to cannibalism.
Packard was finally captured at Fort Fetterman ten years later.
Tatman said water was a major issue in this part of the country so the cowboys trailing cattle would stick to the springs and small creeks as much as possible. There used to be a lady who lived on Seven Mile Spring, known as Grandma. According to stories she had an eatery and fed those going down the Fort Fetterman trail.
“The barber in Rock Creek was a big black guy who was missing his two feet,” Tatman said discussing the town’s cemetery. “People just loved him. He loved to be there and so did his wife. She baked pies for the Taylor house and her eatery. They had a little boy who went rabbit hunting and either had an accident or froze. He’s buried in the cemetery.”
His parents were later buried alongside him.
Busy to Ghost Town
Things began to change for Rock Creek in the late 1880s and 1890s.
McClain said Fort Fetterman closed down in 1882 and with it the freighting operation. In 1886, the stagecoach line followed, closing down when the railroad was built in Douglas.
Also, in 1886, the livestock business was wiped out in the area by a horrendous winter. Wyoming being an open-range state, cattle fended for themselves without additional food or water. This led to a massive portion of the herds starving or freezing to death.
Around the 1900s, the railroad began to straighten out its tracks. As a result, many towns were abandoned. Four towns in the area disappeared with the track, this included Sherman, Rock Creek, Carbon, and Piedmont.
“When they pulled the rails that was it,” McClain said. “There was one family, the Taylor family, that continued to live in the area and did quite well ranching. Other than that, most people drifted away or ended up in Rock River.”
Along with the people, Tatman said it is rumored that some of the buildings from Rock Creek also ended up in Rock River.
Tatman said the old buildings left over from the town stood at least until the mid-1970s.
“The original bar was still there,” Tatman recalled. “There was the old school house that still had school papers from the kids that went to school there. In the back of the mercantile store was a post office. It was just a little room, and it had little wooden boxes with pigeonholes. The names were still on the pigeonholes.”
“What really spelled doomsday for Rock Creek was when they ran an article in the Sunday Denver Post sometime in the mid-70s,” Tatman said. “People showed up from everywhere. (Everything disappeared.) Someone came in and burned down all of the buildings.”
Now the only things left of the town are rubble, foundations and a steam pump.
