It was often the site of the Fourth of July celebration for weary travelers headed west. The Ice Slough west of Jeffrey City was first mentioned in a diary from 1849. Youngsters on the Oregon Trail went out to dig for water and quickly discovered a six-inch layer of ice. The seasonal ice became a landmark on the trail in late June and early July. Some years it was over a foot thick, and at other times just a few inches.
“We were told we would come to ice spring this evening. We were told that we would find it in a low swampy place and that by digging a little below the surface we would find plenty of ice. The story appeared incredible and we paid no attention to it,” Thomas Eastin, an immigrant headed for California wrote. “
There was another wagon train camped there when Eastin’s party arrived, and they were camped eating ice.
“They took us to the place where they got it and with a spade we dug down about 12 inches beneath the surface and there sure enough found as pure ice as I ever saw about 10 inches thick, “Eastin wrote. “We took up a bucket full. The story I fear will hardly be believed but it is nevertheless true.”
The ice was covered by a layer of peat. The ground was spongy, allowing children to bounce on it like a trampoline. Similar covered bogs are found in the Wind River Mountains to the west.
“The Ice is found from 8 to 10 inches beneath the surface,” James Pritchard wrote on June 16, 1849. “There is from 4 to 6 inches of water above the Ice, and a turf or sod of grass apparently floating on the water, upon which you can walk all over it. You can stand and shake for 2 or 3 rods square.”
Overgrazing has destroyed the covering vegetation that made this natural wonder possible.
The ice is gone from Ice Slough, but the demand for refrigeration continues on.
The Chinese first cut ice off frozen lakes 3,000 years ago and stored the ice in underground or heavy wooden structures lined with straw or covered in sawdust. The practice spread to Europe by the late Middle Ages and was popular in the American colonies beginning in the 17th century.
It was the use of ice houses, especially by early Oregon Trail immigrants from Illinois, Ohio and upstate New York that made the discovery of the Ice Slough so special.
In the Great Lakes Region and throughout the Northeaster States, harvesting ice from local rivers, ponds and lakes in January was a common practice. The ice was stored on farms, in stores and by large companies in cities across the region.
Chicago, New York City and Philadelphia ice was notoriously dirty, often leading to disease if people consumed it as it melted.
In Fremont County, ice harvesting on the Sweetwater, the Popo Agie, and the Wind Rivers was popular beginning in the early 1870s. Dinwoody Reservoir, Trail Lake and eventually Boysen Reservoir were all busy in the winter months with crews sawing blocks of ice, sliding it onto wagons and shipping it to farms, ranches and towns nearby.
As railroads headed west, the demand for year-round ice followed. Refrigerated railcars “Reefers” began shipping sides of beef in the early 1870s, coinciding with the Texas cattle drives that brough an estimated four million head of Longhorn cattle to the cow towns of Cheyenne, Abilene, Wichita and Kansas City.
Evanston had one of the largest ice houses on the Union Pacific Railroad, an immense structure packed each winter with ice from the nearby Bear River.
Lander Clipper January 29, 1897 –
“Evanston has a new icehouse 400 feet long, built by the railroad company, and they are putting in ice 21 inches in thickness.”
In 1867, Thomas Moore invented a railcar that used ice packed in overhead compartments that was able to transport meat up to 1500 miles along the rails. He knew that cold air was heavier than warm air and used a ventilation system at the base of the railcar to allow cold air to drop while warm air was forced out of the ends of the car.
Gustavus Swift, added salt to the ice to keep the car colder in the mid-1870s. The founder of the Swift Meatpacking Company revolutionized rail transport and was the standard until the 1920s when diesel powered refrigerated cars began to take over the old ice cooled reefers.
Compressors, diesel engines and eventually electric powered refrigerators eventually ended the era of ice cooled railcars, but the technology remained on the farms, ranches and smaller towns of Wyoming well into the 1950s.
Ice was the key to preserving fresh meat and vegetables. Soldiers, sailors and pioneers lived on canned meat, canned vegetables and salted beef and pork from the Civil War onward. While it preserved food, it wasn’t the best tasting thing on the menu.
Ice became such an integral part of railroad transportation that the first commercial ice house on the Chicago and North Western Railroad was built before the advancing rails were within a 100 miles of Fremont County.
Lander Clipper – January 13, 1905
“W. J. Tighe, who recently returned from Montana, came in Tuesday from a s brief visit to the mouth of Poison Creek on Big Wind River. The much talked about townsite at that point has not materialized to date. The only indication of a boom, so far in that locality, is the building of an ice house by John Burnett of the Arapaho Agency, Mr. i Burnett has a couple of men and teams at work on the construction of the building and outside of that there is nothing doing as a couple of poor fellows found out who walked all the way over from Thermopolis only to find no work and undergo the pleasure of sleeping out in the sage brush two nights and no food for three days.”
It was a gamble for Tighe and it didn’t pay off as it could have when the Chicago North Western line turned south towards Riverton, Arapaho, Hudson and Lander a mile before the location on Poison Creek, but he continued to supply ice via horse and wagon to the new railroad for 20 years.
One of the first, and most prominent Fremont County families was heavily involved in the ice business. A.A and Zeke Farlow, relatives of Stub Farlow, the man riding the bronc Steamboat on the Wyoming license plate, both had ice storage and shipping businesses in Lander.
They had the advantage of cutting ice from the Popo Agie, one of the clearest, purest sources of water in the county.
Wyoming State Journal – December 24, 1909 –
“Zeke Farlow has a crew of ten men at work filling up his big new icehouse in the Trosper Addition. They are handling about 100 tons a day of the finest ice ever put up in Lander. Each cake is inspected and if not up to standard in quality it is rejected. The house is 17x34x50 and has a capacity of 700 tons. Mr. Farlow will put on a wagon in the spring for the delivery of the ice to his customers.”
Lander Eagle – February 24, 1911 –
“A.A. Farlow is taking advantage of the present cold snap to harvest his second crop of ice. Farlow’s lake is a busy place just now, and the way the big chunks of pure ice are being hustled into the icehouse is a caution to mint juleps. A big force of men is at work cutting and skidding.”
Ranches and farms near Dubois, then known as “Never Sweat” and Lander were the first places to build icehouses and cut ice from nearby streams and lakes.
There were several designs for icehouses. One was to dig into a north-facing hillside, put up a heavy log roof and line the interior with straw. Another was to construct a heavy log building with just a single, north-facing door and no windows. It two was lined with straw.
Ice cutting involved large handsaws, pikes, and slides into horse-drawn wagons. The ice was cut into chunks ranging from two cubic feet in 12-inch thick by 24-inch square cuts, or larger blocks. The ice was rarely uniform from year to year since it depended on the thickness of the ice on the water for one face. In extremely cold years, blocks of 24x24x24 inches were cut. These monsters weighed 500 pounds and required tongs and pulley to stack, but they lasted a long time the following summer.
After a home was built, the icehouse and a smokehouse were usually the next two buildings constructed on farms and ranches from Nowood to South Pass and east to Crooks Gap.
Wyoming State Journal – March 2, 1927 –
“Lawrence Sams and George Flagg helped J. Jacobs put up ice in the Fletcher Ice House at Rongis on Thursday. The ice is very fine this year.”
That ice came from the Sweetwater River, at the ghost town of Rongis, about four miles northwest of present-day Jeffrey City.
Icehouses were used commercially by bars and restaurants and became a feature of local hotels before the arrival of the railroad.
Cold beer was one of the main reasons for hotels and bars to store ice nearby before carrying it to coolers within their buildings.
Ice boxes became popular in the 1880s and were used in towns until electricity began to arrive near the turn of the 20th century.
Lander was the first community with electric refrigeration, but Hudson had it soon after.
When the railroad arrived, the game changed. Ice became a commodity used heavily by the Chicago Northwestern and later the Chicago Quincy and Burlington Railroad.
Lander became an ice-supplying hub on the Chicago North Western Railroad.
A.A. Farlow found a lucrative market for Popo Agie ice in Casper, where the Chicago NW operated a huge ice storage facility.
Farlow began selling ice to the Wyoming and Northwestern Ice House in January 1919.
The first major use of ice came in Lander a year after the railroad arrived at the prestigious Fremont Hotel.
Lander Clipper December 27, 1907
“J.H. Sheehan has moved his old icehouse from the rear of the Fremont Hotel to the pond above town where he is putting up his summer supply for the hotel and bar. It is his present intension to build an addition to the Fremont in the spring to extend to the alley. This will add fifty or more rooms with baths and other conveniences.”
O.W. Leedy ran a profitable icehouse in Lander. He established the business in 1910, cutting ice from the Popo Agie, but fierce competition in the following years led to early examples of corporate sabotage.
Copper Mountain Miner – January 14, 1916
“Someone started the report around town the other day that O.W. Leedy was putting dirty ice in his ice house. This is a falsehood pure and simple, and anyone who wishes to verify any such story needs only to look at the loads of pure ice he is hauling every day.”
In a haunting story printed on August 8, 1919 of the horrible flash flood on Horse Creek in Dubois that drowned renowned local physician Dr. Welty, an icehouse drew attention.
“An ice house was demolished and the ice, about 10 tons, floated down Horse Creek sailed over the Wind River and rested on the opposite bank intact.”
The 1920s were the heyday of ice cutting, ice storage, and ice hauling in Fremont County.
The Fletcher Ice House opened in Dubois in 1921.
In 1922, Walt Millard opened an icehouse in Hudson.
St. Michael’s Episcopal Mission at Ethete started storing ice cut from the nearby Little Wind River in 1920. That same year, Boysen Reservoir was the source of ice at Bonneville used on the Chicago Quincy and Burlington railroad.
The Riverton Review reported in a story from January 15, 1925 – “Earl Pogue. Elmer Golliher and M. J Gilpatrick are in town with a contract for cutting Ice for Fred Anderson’s ice house at Morton and government ice at Pavillion. The Ice will be cut from the Pilot Butte reservoir.”
Pilot Butte Reservoir was just a year old at the time.
Ice houses were springing up all over Fremont County by 1927. Jake Weisheim built one at Arapahoe just a few hundred yards from where H.H. Heise already had one. Both were near the Arapahoe railroad depot.
W.C. Boyd and W.G. Johnson both began filling icehouses in Lander in January of 1928.
The quality of ice was a popular topic. Barbershops replaced bars during prohibition as gathering places for local men and the Wind River Mountaineer took note with a story that might be a little far-fetched set just across the Utah border from Wyoming in Beaver City.
Wind River Mountaineer – Jan 20, 1928 –
“The crop of ice which is now safely harvested at Beaver City Is not only the largest but also the best ever cut in that locality. When the work first started the Ice was 12 inches thick but increased to 19 to 20 inches and is as clear as plate glass. On a test a newspaper was read through a cake 18 inches thick. W. T. Kelley has put tip 350 tons and T. J. Kinsman 350 tons in their uptown ice houses. Mr. Kinsman also stored 250 tons in his ice house on the banks of Beaver Creek, from which the Ice was harvested.” – Beaver City, Utah
Refrigeration was fast becoming an item at local schools, where fresh produce and meat were arriving several days a week by train. Here is a story about the students at the “Indian Training School” at Fort Washakie.
Wyoming State Journal – January 18, 1928 –
“The school force under John Pop have been helping the agency put up ice last week and their summer’s supply is now in store. As soon as weather conditions permit these forces will join together and stock the school Ice house. The Ice taken from Ray Lake is of exceptional quality, clear and of good thickness.”
As electricity arrived with the Pilot Butte Power Station, the powerplant at Warm Springs in Dubois, the Sinks Canyon Powerplant on the Middle Popo Agie and the diesel and coal powerplants in Riverton and Hudson. The messiness and work of keeping food cold in an ice box was replaced by the convenience of electric refrigeration.
There was a brief transition period when water-cooled refrigerators took the place of ice boxes. They weren’t true refrigerators, but water-cooled, evaporative devices that need a flow of water into the system and a drain on the other end. They were a stopgap at best and lasted just a decade before true refrigerators dropped enough in price for the average consumer to afford.
A similar system for cars and trucks used evaporation in burlap bags hanging from the front of a vehicle to keep water cold. They served a dual purpose. Radiators weren’t always the self-contained efficient systems of today, with many motorists spotting a hot engine light on the dashboard just before their car or truck overheated. The water bag carried up to two gallons and could be used to replace lost fluids and keep the engine cool. They also kept water cool for the people inside the car. These, too, began to disappear in the 1950s, and by the 1960s, with the advent of air conditioning in almost every vehicle out of Detroit, they disappeared altogether.
Many rural families chose to keep meat and frozen vegetables in town at electrically powered cold storage facilities. Rural stores in Hiland, Moneta, Pavillion, Kinnear and Crowheart offered cold storage for their customers.
The last of these, Riverton Ice operated until the early 1980s when discounted freezers and refrigerators replaced the demand for remote cold storage.
Once the RVEA arrived in 1938 and began laying powerlines to rural customers a few years later. The era of ice cutting, the icehouse and the ice box came to an end.