The Magic City of the Plains

On the fifth of July, eighteen sixty-seven, a surveyor planted a stake in the dry grass at a place called Crow Creek Crossing, and by November the Union Pacific Railroad's first train was rolling in. Four months. That is how fast a city could appear on the high plains when iron rails and money were moving west.

They called it the Magic City of the Plains, and the name was not irony. Before the year was out, Cheyenne had thousands of residents, a newspaper, a mayor, and the kinds of establishments that follow a young male workforce flush with wages: saloons, gambling halls, dance houses, and the camps of those who ran them. Observers of the era had a phrase for these rolling frontier settlements: Hell on Wheels. The gambling dens and brothels packed up every few weeks as the railhead advanced, leaving behind whoever had decided to stay.

What distinguished Cheyenne was that people stayed. The fort established to guard the railroad workers, Fort D. A. Russell, established September eight, eighteen sixty-seven, became a permanent institution. The territorial government named the city Wyoming's capital in eighteen sixty-nine, the same year it granted women the right to vote, a fact that stunned the nation and a story we will return to shortly.

The Union Pacific Depot you can visit today dates to eighteen eighty-seven, designed in Richardsonian Romanesque with dual-colored sandstone and a six-story clock tower. It houses a museum now, but the building still carries the proportional confidence of a company that believed this crossroads would matter. It turned out to be right.