Cheyenne Depot: The Magic City of the Plains
Near Cheyenne, Wyoming
When Union Pacific track-laying crews reached Cheyenne, Wyoming, on November thirteen, eighteen sixty-seven, they found a tent city had already materialized around the railroad's surveyed town site. Journalists called it the Magic City of the Plains, conjured from bare prairie in a matter of weeks. Union Pacific's chief engineer Grenville Dodge had announced the townsite that July, beside the planned Crow Creek bridge.
Cheyenne became the railroad's main western hub, and in eighteen eighty-six the company built the station that stands here today, a massive Richardsonian Romanesque pile of warm sandstone completed in eighteen eighty-seven. It was the largest depot west of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The building is now a National Historic Landmark housing the Cheyenne Depot Museum, which tells the story of a city that went from zero to territorial capital in a single frenzied winter.
