Moorcroft, Wyoming

In the eighteen nineties, Moorcroft was the largest cattle-shipping point in the United States. The town sat at the western end of the old Texas Trail, and drovers pushing longhorns north from Texas loaded them here onto Burlington Railroad cars headed east. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad had laid its line through in eighteen ninety-one, and the Lincoln Land Company, a railroad subsidiary, platted the townsite and sold the lots. Moorcroft incorporated in October of nineteen oh six.

The name came from the first postmaster, Stocks Millar, who reportedly named it after his hometown in Scotland. Coal seeps and oil shows had been known in the surrounding Black Hills country since the eighteen eighties, and a brief oil boom touched Moorcroft between eighteen eighty-five and nineteen hundred. What stuck was cattle and coal: the Black Hills Coal Company opened in eighteen ninety-five, and ranching has anchored the local economy across every boom and bust since. The town of fewer than a thousand today still sits where the trail and the railroad crossed.