It started much better than it ended. In its final days, the Shawver Hotel was a boarded up, crumbling brick eyesore on the corner of the highway. It was once a bustling Main Street business district in the little desert town.
The Shoshoni Capital Gazette was one of the biggest boosters of the town. In a story titled “The Coming Metropolis of Central Wyoming,” published January 1, 1909, the editor extolled the virtues of the town.
Shoshoni, Wyoming, while one of the youngest towns of the state, Is perhaps as promising, if not the most promising of any in the central part of the state, when the Shoshone reservation was opened for settlement in 1906, the Chicago and Northwestern railway made a station where the town of Shoshoni now stands so that the town is a little more than three years old. Among the business houses here may be found two general stores, carrying large stocks of staple goods, two grocery stores, one hardware store, one harness and saddlery shop, one drug store, one jewelry store, a bank, lumber yard, one barber shop, meat market, three restaurants, two hotels, two rooming houses, and numerous others.
There are two blacksmith shops and one livery barn.
The religious orders have two churches, the Congregational and Episcopal while other denominations hold services occasionally.
The educational facilities are among the best in the state, a large and commodious school building of concrete affording ample, accommodation for the pupils.
A third hotel, one that stood the test of time, lasting until the 21st century,ju was soon to arrive.
Accommodations were primitive to say the least when the Chicago North Western finally reached Shoshoni. The Voss Hotel and the Elkhorn were the best the town could offer the thousands of people heading to Shoshoni for the opening of the ceded portion of the Wind River Reservation to homesteading in August 1906.
The Voss, built by John F. Voss, claimed to have 16 first-class rooms, a parlor and dining room, and a 16×18 foot kitchen, but it was far from a four-star establishment.
Shoshoni’s Main Street was wide, built to the requirements Mormon pioneers had established in new towns across Wyoming, Idaho and Utah. The street had to be wide enough to turn a four-horse team, Shoshoni’s was easily.
On the west side of Main Street was the impressive First National Bank of Shoshoni, built by Charles H. King soon after his arrival in the summer of 1906. Next to it was King’s Lumber Company and other businesses stretching to the train station on the south end of the street.
On the east side of Main Street. Were the Telephone Building, the Wind River National Bank, the Davidson Building, Edward Burke’s Saloon, William’s Saloon, a Barber Shop, Hargrove’s Pool Hall, Hotel Maria, H.D. Ballard’s Hide House, the Ballard and Beck Restaurant and Johnson’s Saloon, Ballard’s Restaurant.
A pre-dawn fire started in Edward Burke’s Saloon. It quickly spread, destroying the entire east side of Main Street.
One man’s tragedy can be another man’s triumph.
Lewis Andrew Shawver was born in Knoxville, Illinois, on December 7, 1872. The second child and first son of John Andrew and Angeline Fox Shawver. He married his wife Ethel Mabel while working for his father as a watchmaker and jeweler on October 12, 1899. The young married couple headed west.
“I left Illinois, my native state, in the fall of 1899,” Shawver said in an October 1927 interview in the Shoshoni Enterprise, “I moved to Alliance, Nebraska, and took charge of the Burlington watch inspection for Mr. F.E. Hollister and had charge of his jewelry department for seven years.”
Working for someone else wasn’t for young Lewis.
“Realizing I was making only wages, I decided to go into business for myself, figuring that if I could make money for my employer, I could for myself,” Shawver said.
He looked west in the summer of 1906. He and Mabel read breathless descriptions of a town called Shoshoni, on the eastern edge of the Wind River Reservation, a place of promise with one of the last homestead rushes in the lower 48 states, ample mineral reserves, a new hydroelectric dam under construction and a major railroad about to arrive.
“Shoshoni was being placed on the Wyoming map by the building of the Chicago and North Western Railway from Casper to Shoshoni,” Shawver said. “So I staged it from Casper, arriving in Shoshoni in February 1906. The Big Wind River Irrigation Project, Copper Mountain mining, and numerous other enterprises contemplated, looked good to me, so in the following May, moved my family here and have been in business in Shoshoni ever since.“
His family was his wife, Mabel, and their only child, a son, John Winsor.
Shawver worked as a jeweler and watch repairman for his first three years in Shoshoni.
In 1909, he saw an opportunity and decided to build a first-class hotel on top of the burned-out remnants of the Wind River National Bank, located directly across the street from Charles King’s First National Bank of Shoshoni.
The location, at Main Street and the gravel road heading east to Casper and west to Riverton that would eventually become U.S. Highway 26 was ideal. The railroad station was just two hundred yards to the south, and restaurants, hardware stores, grocery stores, and saloons were springing up all around the location.
Shawver was determined to build the best hotel in Fremont County, and one of the best in all of Wyoming. Construction began early in 1909, with the only holdup being a shortage of bricks. The lack of bricks continued to be a problem with rival hotels in Riverton and Lander constructed in the decades to follow.
His hotel was a two-story brick building with electric lights, steam heat, and large first-floor rooms suitable for businesses.
Lewis didn’t forget his foundation as a jeweler. He continued as a watchmaker, watch and clock repairman, and jeweler while operating his hotel.
The world-famous Yellowstone Drugstore of Shoshoni began in the northwest corner of the Shawver Hotel. Its soda fountain was renowned by passengers stopping at Shoshoni as the locomotives of the Chicago North Western took on water and coal as well as among local cowboys and early oilfield workers.
The Shawver Hotel was special. Few Wyoming hotels offered electric lights or steam heat; the Shawver advertised both. He had also offered hot and cold running water in four communal baths, something that only the finest East Coast hotels were able to provide.
The Shawver had 25 rooms. Guests shared two baths per floor.
“The floors were bare, no carpet. Shared bathrooms and no running water to the rooms, tin wash basins instead,” longtime Shoshoni resident Mary Ann Holmquist said.
The Chicago North Western was the lifeblood of the hotel. Shawver was a shrewd businessman. He knew that many hotels failed when their attached restaurant couldn’t deliver meals in alignment with the quality of the rooms.
Shawver just eliminated the restaurant. He advertised his hotel as following the “European Plan.” In most American hotels, the restaurant was part of the business. Shawver’s later rivals in Riverton at the Lapeyre and Teton Hotels were constantly opening and closing their restaurants, changing management, cooks and staff. Shawver didn’t worry about it. The European Plan was hotel only, with guests taking meals at nearby restaurants, and there were plenty of those within short walking distance of the Shawver.
Lewis Shawver had his fingers tightly on the pulse of Shoshoni and the surrounding area.
In 1914, the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad cut across the expanse of central Wyoming, a true coast-to-coast railroad to compete with the Union Pacific 120 miles to the south. The Chicago Burlington and Quincy moved northwest toward the Wind River Canyon through the newly constructed town of Bonneville, three miles north of the Shawver Hotel.
Passenger service was about to increase dramatically at Bonneville, and Shawver’s Hotel was the only first-class establishment near the little railway station. He began offering rides from his hotel to Bonneville.
Passenger travel on the Chicago North Western was limited since the railroad ended 50 miles to the southwest at Lander. The Bonneville station connected passengers to Denver, Chicago, New York City, and New Orleans to the east and Billings, Spokane, and Seattle to the west. The Shawver was right in the middle of this new, highly competitive railroad.
With the Yellowstone Drugstore bringing in customers on the first floor, another business, the general merchandise store inside the Heyer and Berger Building to the south, and new businesses replacing those that burned down in 1907, the future was bright.
Lewis began renting spaces to traveling doctors, dentists, and optometrists with carefully planned advertising in the Shoshoni Enterprise, Riverton Chronicle, and Wind River Mountaineer, bringing in patients.
He opened a laundry in one of the first-floor rooms and continued to advertise his hotel throughout the region. A beauty shop in one of the rooms brought in local women who often shopped at the drugstore.
The July 20, 1917, edition of the Wyoming State Journal, printed in Lander, described a strange weather pattern that ended at the Shawver Hotel.
“A cyclone in miniature passed over Shoshoni last week. A thin, swirling, rushing, funnel-shaped column of dust and paper mixed with other debris, extending from the ground nearly a thousand feet into the air made a very imposing sight. The little twister came in front the north side of town, progressed slowly with a weaving motion, passing in the rear of the Blackwell hotel and the Enterprise office, finally crossing Second Street and colliding with the brick structure of the Shawver Drug Store. The impact caused the disintegration of the column which gradually vanished in a cloud of smoke.”
A year later, a young criminal failed miserably to forge a check at Shawver’s establishments. In the February 22, 1918, edition of the Riverton Review they related the story.
YOUNG FORGER LANDS IN JAIL
“Shoshoni. Wyo. Monday of last week was a day set aside for the passing of worthless checks in Shoshoni by Harry Boyle, who first appeared here about four months ago but had been a missing link for some time lately until Monday when he appeared as forger, using the name of J.H. Farlow. He first tried to cash a check at the Shoshoni State Bank but refused as such party had no deposits there. He later succeeded in getting the check cashed at the Shawver Drug Store, but shortly afterward the worthlessness of the check was discovered and the guilty party relieved of his ill-gotten gain. Not to be outdone he proceeded to the Shoshoni Store where a hard luck story got him $15.00 for his worthless paper. The following morning Mr. Smith headed towards Bonneville in his trusty Ford met Mr. Boyle, headed for freedom, but this was not Mr. Smith’s wish, so with his Ford and an ax handle Mr. Smith directed Boyle toward his field of check forging. Mr. Boyle desired to return Shoshoni beside Detective Smith in his trusty Ford, but the only accommodation he received in this way was an occasional lift by the radiator, urging speed on the part of Mr. Boyle, and in this manner, he was turned over to Marshal Smart, who escorted the young man to Lander, Tuesday night to await trial. The young man admits he was in Class 1 of the draft and forged the checks in an endeavor to lodge military service. —Shoshoni Enterprise”
The opening of the highway through the Wind River Canyon in 1924 gave the Shawver another economic boost, but bad times waited in New York with the collapse of the Stock Exchange in 1929.
Times were hard during the Great Depression, but World War II brought military trains rolling through Bonneville with officers and federal officials staying at the Shawver Hotel.
In the interim, Lewis took on other adventures. He opened the Shoshoni State Bank, specializing in real estate, agriculture and energy loans.
The hotel took on new life in 1947 when the second Boysen Dam project began 13 miles north of Shoshoni. The boom continued until the dam was completed in 1953.
Lewis wasn’t able to witness this rebirth; he passed away on August 8, 1947. Mable passed in 1954, and the Shawver Hotel was sold.
By the 1960s, business had diminished, though the tourist traffic headed west to Yellowstone kept the hotel full during the summer months.
Local Shoshoni historian David Manchester remembers the Shawver Hotel well.
“I remember staying at the hotel once, with Mom and Dad,” Manchester said. “It was on the top floor and we were not used to indoor plumbing. Other than that, I remember when Palmer had the Drug Store in the bottom in the 60’s when I went to high school. I can remember getting a pass to leave school during my study hall to go down there and get a birthday card.”
Burlington Northern (former Chicago Burlington and Quincy) stayed at the Shawver Hotel on shift change.
“Dad, a railroader based in Greybull, regularly stayed at the Shawver,” veteran Wyoming journalist and editor Pat Schmidt said. “In the early 1970s, when I was at the Riverton Ranger, we’d drive over to visit him. Second floor. Other railroaders stayed at the motel on the west end mostly.”
In 1979, a fire on the far end of Main Street destroyed Nick’s Bar and heavily damaged Sid’s Gambles, ending the business.
The fire destroyed the business district on the east side of Shoshoni’s Main Street, just as another fire had done 72 years before.
The Shawver Hotel hung on for a few more years but soon stopped taking reservations. The upstairs portion of the hotel continued as apartments into the early 21st century, but the handwriting was on the wall.
A woman began a restoration attempt in the 1990s, but the cost was too much and she had to abandon the project.
In October 2018, the wrecking ball arrived on Main Street. The Shawver and every other building on the east side of the street was leveled with a city park replacing the decaying buildings.
The Shawver was ahead of its time, but time eventually passed it over. A great place to stop on the way west became just an open space.