Laramie: Hell on Wheels, Then the Law

When the Union Pacific Railroad reached this valley on May fourth, eighteen sixty-eight, Laramie did not gradually become a town. It erupted. Within weeks, a thousand people were living in tents with almost no government, no law, and a very active population of gamblers, prostitutes, and criminals whose entire business model was separating railroad workers from their wages.

This was what the newspapers called Hell on Wheels, the rolling boomtown that followed the transcontinental railroad's construction crews westward across the plains. Laramie was one of its most notorious incarnations. Murders happened nightly. The freshly formed town government resigned after three weeks on the job.

What came next was the West's signature response: vigilantism. In October of eighteen sixty-eight, a committee of storekeepers and railroad workers declared war on the criminal element. They hanged an outlaw known as The Kid, touched off a gun battle in the streets, and ultimately strung up four men, three from the rafters of a log cabin and one from a telegraph pole. After that, the killing stopped. Laramie got its law.

Within two years, the territorial legislature had convened here, and in December of eighteen sixty-nine, Wyoming became the first government in the United States to grant women the right to serve on juries. That happened in Laramie. The courthouse where women first sat as jurors still stands downtown.

Laramie also carries a more recent wound. In October of nineteen ninety-eight, a University of Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard was beaten and left tied to a fence post on the outskirts of town. He died five days later. The crime drew international attention and ultimately helped drive the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Junior Hate Crimes Prevention Act in two thousand nine. Laramie's name became permanently linked to that reckoning, a reminder that the distance between a town's progressive history and its daily reality is never guaranteed.