Worland: The Town That Crossed a Frozen River

In nineteen hundred, a wanderer named Charles Worland dug himself a dugout on the west bank of the Big Horn River and started selling fruit trees and running a stage stop. It was a modest beginning for a town that would bear his name.

The real story came with water and railroad. In the following years, engineers surveyed the Big Horn Basin for a major irrigation canal, and the Hanover Canal began channeling river water onto dry desert land, and investors began planting sugar beets on trial parcels. Then the Burlington Railroad announced its line would run down the east bank of the river. The original Worland settlement was on the wrong side. Rather than stay put and watch commerce pass them by, residents moved their buildings across the river to meet the tracks, in some tellings dragging them over the winter ice. The railroad arrived, the sugar beets proved out, and within a few years growers across the basin were under contract to the industry that would define Worland for the next half-century. A town that literally moved itself to survive became the agricultural hub of the Big Horn Basin.