Glendo: Where the Emigrant Road Crossed the Platte

Glendo, Wyoming sits where Glendo Reservoir now fills the North Platte valley, but before the Glendo Dam was completed in nineteen fifty-eight, the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails passed just south of here. Emigrants heading west in the eighteen forties and fifties followed the North Platte for much of the journey from Missouri to the Pacific, a wide, shallow, and sometimes treacherous river that had to be forded or ferried upstream near present-day Casper. The town itself was incorporated in nineteen twenty-two as a ranching and railroad supply point on the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley line. Its current population is under four hundred.