Improvements
- Main house
- 1,702 sq ft
- 5 beds / 2.5 baths
- Built in 1977
- Fully furnished basement
- Ranch hand house
- 1,100 sq ft
- 2 beds / 1 bath
- Built in 1930
- Metal workshop/garage
- Large metal storage shed
- Horse barn & tack room
- Horse corrals at headquarters
- Large Quonset barn & corrals
- Background lot, loading chute, and a good set of working pens
- Open front livestock shelter
- 2 upright metal storage tanks for feed
- 24 livestock wells, drinking tanks, and water holding dirt ponds
- Over 50 ponds across the deeded and leased grazing lands
Location
- 29 miles west of downtown Casper, with year-round access to the headquarters and all of the other access points from Poison Spider Road.
- Riverton – 100 miles
- Alcova – 40 miles
- Thermopolis – 110 miles
- Laramie – 150 miles
Locale
The short grass prairie region west of Casper is a historic ranching area comprising farms and ranchland. With elevation at 5700 ft, this ranch supports year-round grazing operations, with the ability to graze out with supplemental protein during the winter months.
History
Located at 5,150 feet above sea level, on the banks of the North Platte River on Wyoming’s high plains, Casper is the seat of Natrona County. The town began when the tracks of the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad arrived in June 1888, and was named for nearby Fort Casper, by then a ruin. The fort had been named for Lt. Caspar Collins, killed near the fort by Indians in 1865. The Army misspelled his first name when they renamed Platte Bridge Station not long after his death.
Today, Casper has rebounded from a boom and bust ‘Oil City’ to a more diversified workforce, including retail, medical, and energy industry service hub for the surrounding region and for much of Wyoming, and has continued to grow and diversify in the 21st century. Interstate 25 and the Casper/Natrona County International Airport are the town’s major connections to greater Wyoming and beyond.
Five counties were organized into the Territory of Wyoming by legislation in November 1869. The area that was to become Natrona County was part of Carbon County at that time. As lands were opened to settlement under the Free Homestead Act, signed by President Lincoln in 1862, hundreds moved into the area. In the early 1870s, cattle companies financed in the East and the British Isles saw the opportunity for quick profits. By the 1880s, the local ranges were dominated by great cattle companies (e.g., Searight’s Goose Egg Ranch– ten miles west of Casper, “CY” – the Carey Ranch where Casper now stands, VR – on Deer Creek near present-day Glenrock, and Fiddleback – near present-day Douglas). The Goose Egg house, now demolished, was celebrated in Owen Wister’s novel “The Virginian” as the place where babies were exchanged at the dances. “The Virginian” was the prototype of “Western” stories.
On June 8, 1888, John Merritt and C.W. Eads established the town of Casper at the intersection of McKinley and A Street. One week later, on June 15, 1888, Casper’s 100 residents celebrated the arrival of the first passenger train (the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad) connecting Casper with the East. Since railroads were the most dependable connection to civilization, rural communities, like Casper, grew around these early train stations.
By the close of the 1880s, private land owners became sufficiently established to largely supplant the bigger cattle companies, though it took the 1892 Johnson County invasion of “nesters” to convince everyone that small stockmen were here to stay. During the years in which railroads were being constructed, pioneering stockmen were introducing to the area what was soon to become the county’s major industry, sheep. In 1888, the first band of sheep, numbering 3,000, was trailed in the county.
