Chugwater, Wyoming

Chugwater takes its name from a Mandan description of a place where buffalo were driven over a cliff: the water at the place where they chug, referring to the sound of bison hitting the ground below after a jump. Indigenous hunters used this technique for thousands of years. The modern town grew from a very different kind of enterprise.

In eighteen eighty-six, the Swan Land and Cattle Company, a corporation backed by Scottish investors, laid out a town on the east side of the new Cheyenne and Northern Railroad. The company had run cattle here for years. Chugwater remains one of the smallest incorporated towns in Wyoming, home to fewer than two hundred people, a famous chili company, and a creek whose name carries the whole prehistory of the plains in a single strange syllable.