The Railroad Founding: A Town in a Season
Near Casper, Wyoming
June of eighteen eighty-eight is when Casper effectively became a city. The Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad pushed its tracks west from Nebraska, reached the North Platte, and the town platted itself around the depot practically overnight. By the following spring, Casper had been incorporated as a municipality. By eighteen ninety it was the seat of newly carved Natrona County.
The rival for the county seat was a town called Bessemer. What doomed Bessemer was simple: the railroad ran through Casper's location, not Bessemer's. In the railroad era, wherever the tracks stopped was where commerce happened, where banks opened, where lawyers hung their shingles.
Electric service arrived in nineteen hundred. Telephone service followed in nineteen oh two with forty-nine lines. Andrew Carnegie donated ten thousand dollars for a public library in nineteen oh five. In seventeen years, a railroad depot had become a functioning small city.
