Tubb Town: Wyoming's Six-Month Boomtown

In the spring of eighteen eighty-nine, a man named DeLoss DeWitt Tubbs arrived from Custer, South Dakota, expecting a railroad to come through this corner of Wyoming and planning to profit from it. He platted a town, and the saloons and brothels arrived first, as they usually did. Tubb Town quickly developed a reputation as the roughest settlement in Wyoming Territory.

The railroad did come, but not quite where Tubbs had hoped. A dispute over land prices caused the Burlington line to reroute two miles to the west. On September tenth, eighteen eighty-nine, the first lots in a new town called Newcastle went on sale. Within forty-eight hours Tubb Town was empty. Residents loaded their buildings and belongings onto wagons and moved en masse down the road. The saloons relocated, the brothels relocated, even the lumber of the structures relocated. The entire town walked away from itself in under two days, leaving nothing but a name on maps and one of the most complete boom-and-bust arcs in Wyoming history: born in spring, dead by autumn, all in the same year.