Lander: Gateway to Wind River Country

The town of Lander exists because of two overlapping pressures that arrived on the Wyoming frontier at almost the same moment: gold miners and a new Indian reservation.

South Pass, twenty miles to the south, was one of the great western migration corridors. The Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the Mormon Trail all funneled through its gentle gap in the Continental Divide, and the same pass that let wagon trains through also gave access to gold discoveries in the eighteen sixties. When gold was found at South Pass City in eighteen sixty-seven, thousands of miners rushed in. The following year, the federal government signed a treaty with the Eastern Shoshone Nation establishing the Wind River Indian Reservation, covering roughly three thousand four hundred square miles of the Wind River Basin to the north.

Partly to protect the new reservation boundaries and partly to provide military presence near the goldfields, the Army established Camp Augur in eighteen sixty-nine. The camp sat at the confluence of the Popo Agie River and the Wind River foothills, in a sheltered valley that offered firewood, water, and grass. The settlement that grew up around it was renamed Lander in eighteen seventy-five, honoring Colonel Frederick West Lander, a surveyor and Civil War general who had led road-building expeditions through the region in the eighteen fifties.

Lander became the seat of Fremont County in eighteen eighty-four, named for explorer John C. Fremont, who had mapped much of this territory in the eighteen forties. The first oil well drilled in Wyoming territory was sunk near the Little Popo Agie River just southeast of Lander in eighteen eighty-three, a geological footnote that anticipated the state's petroleum future.

Fort Washakie, on the Wind River Reservation thirty miles northwest of town, holds a gravesite long identified as that of Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who guided Lewis and Clark. Her role in the expedition and the location of her burial remain subjects of historical debate, but the Wind River marker has been honored by the Shoshone people since the nineteenth century.