Coal, Rails, and the Founding of Sheridan
Near Sheridan, Wyoming
Sheridan did not exist until the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad decided it should. The townsite was surveyed in eighteen eighty-two for John D. Loucks, who had served under General Philip Sheridan. He named it after his commanding general, Philip Henry Sheridan, the Civil War cavalry officer who had overseen the Army's campaigns against the Plains tribes. It was a common practice: towns naming themselves for powerful men in hopes of attracting favor, investment, and the rail line itself.
The railroad arrived in eighteen ninety-two, and with it came coal. The Powder River Basin sits atop some of the largest coal seams in North America, and the Burlington Route needed fuel. Mines opened at Dietz, Monarch, Kooi, and Acme, small company towns strung along the hills north and west of Sheridan. At the industry's peak in the early twentieth century, more than three thousand miners worked the underground seams in Sheridan County. Immigrants came from Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, and Wales, their communities taking shape around the mine tipples and company stores.
Sheridan grew into a regional supply and commercial center. Its brick downtown, much of which still stands, went up in the eighteen nineties and nineteen hundreds on the back of coal money, cattle money, and railroad payroll. The Sheridan County Courthouse, completed in nineteen oh eight, anchored the commercial district.
The underground mines declined through mid-century as surface strip mining in the southern Powder River Basin proved cheaper. The company towns emptied. Dietz is a ghost. Monarch is nearly so. But Sheridan itself held on as a trade and tourism hub, its economic story shifting from extraction to ranching services and, eventually, the kind of scenic Western identity that brought a different class of visitor entirely.
