Wamsutter, Wyoming

Wamsutter sits in the high desert of Sweetwater County, Wyoming, founded in eighteen sixty-eight when the Union Pacific needed a service point along the Transcontinental Railroad. The settlement was first called Washakie, but that name kept getting confused with Fort Washakie to the north, so in eighteen eighty-four the railroad renamed it after one of its own bridge engineers, a man named Wamsutter. The town has never been large, but it has never been quiet either.

Sheep ranchers arrived, then wild-horse wranglers, then uranium miners, then natural gas drillers. The Wamsutter gas field made the town a boom-and-bust oil and gas address through the two thousands. Interstate Eighty passes directly through today, and the Union Pacific still runs freight over the same grade that put Wamsutter on the map a hundred and fifty years ago.