A series where we take a #lookback at the stories and history of our community, brought to you by Mick Pryor, Financial Advisor with Edward Jones.
Long before we were here, elk moved. They summered in the high country of what is now the Teton Wilderness, crossed the Continental Divide, and descended into the upper Wind River Valley to wait out Wyoming’s winters on the sagebrush plains and river bottoms below. It was a migration shaped over thousands of years by weather, topography, and the instincts of the animals themselves.
That migration, and the century-long effort to protect the habitat that makes it possible, is one of the quieter conservation success stories in the American West.
The trouble began in the late 1800s. As agricultural settlement expanded across western Wyoming, the traditional winter ranges that elk had used for generations were fenced off, overgrazed by sheep and cattle, or simply occupied. Elk that had once wintered on the Red Desert and the upper Green River basin found their routes blocked. Forced into ever-narrowing corridors, they concentrated in places like Jackson Hole in numbers the land couldn’t support. Severe winters in 1886, 1888, 1899, and 1909 brought catastrophic losses. In 1914, elk departed the Green River Valley for the last time. Migration patterns which were formed over millennia took only 40 years to dismantle.
The upper Wind River country around Dubois tells a somewhat different story. Elk appear to have only arrived here in the 1920s — likely animals from the Jackson Hole herd that, rather than completing the full migration south, took a shortcut over the Continental Divide and discovered extensive, largely unoccupied native winter range in the Wind River Valley. While elk populations diminished all across the Yellowstone region, the Wiggins Fork herd entered a period of dramatic growth, emerging as a distinct, significant population by the end of the decade.
What happened next was shaped by a notably harsh winter. During 1919-1920, while half the Jackson Hole elk herd perished on the National Elk Refuge despite intensive feeding operations, elk that wintered on native range in the upper Wind River country came through with few losses. The contrast was not lost on observers. It pointed toward a straightforward conclusion: elk on good native range fared better than elk crowded onto feedgrounds.
By the 1930s, sportsmen in the Dubois and Lander area were paying attention. Under the leadership of resort owner Albert Angle and the Izaac Walton League, a proposal took shape to purchase ranches in the Wiggins Fork, Bear Creek, and East Fork of the Wind River watersheds and establish a game reserve running, in their words, “from Black Mountain to Black Mountain.” The federal government declined to fund it, and a subsequent push to have the Wyoming Legislature buy the ranches also failed. A third proposal, to designate land on the Wind River Indian Reservation as a national elk refuge stretching nearly 80 miles along the Owl Creek Mountains, died when sheep ranchers with grazing allotments on the Reservation objected.
None of these proposals succeeded. But the underlying idea — that protecting native winter range was the key to sustaining the herd — did not go away.
In 1941, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission purchased the Emil Swanson ranch in the East Fork drainage, describing it as “the center of the best elk winter range available in the region.” It was a modest beginning. Over the next fifty years, the Commission carried out 25 additional land transactions in the East Fork watershed, eventually protecting nearly 53,000 acres of winter habitat — more than double the size of the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole.
The most significant of these came in 1991, when Director Pete Petera announced the purchase of the Gerry Spence and Ed Moriarity properties in the southern East Fork for $7.8 million, three-quarters of it funded by federal Pittman-Robertson dollars with additional contributions from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. This 37,000 acre acquisition ensured the protection of some of the most important habitat in the rocky mountains – a landmark achievement for conservationists.
The effect extended well beyond the East Fork itself. The protected land tied together migratory habitat from the Buffalo Plateau in the Teton Wilderness, across the Continental Divide, through the Shoshone National Forest, and into the Wind River Valley — a connected corridor of nearly 40 miles. Combined with the Whiskey Basin Wildlife Habitat Area to the south, which protects winter range for North America’s largest bighorn sheep herd, virtually the entire Upper Wind River Valley now functions as critical winter habitat for elk and other wildlife.
The result is something genuinely unusual. The Wiggins Fork Elk Herd is today the largest free-ranging, unfed herd of elk in Wyoming. Unlike the Jackson Hole herd, which has been artificially fed nearly every winter since 1913, the Wiggins Fork elk winter on native range without supplemental feeding. It is simply not needed.
That outcome did not happen by accident. It happened because, starting in the 1930s, a small group of sportsmen in Fremont County looked at what was being lost elsewhere in western Wyoming and decided to try a different approach. The 1991 purchase was the culmination of nearly six decades of effort, failed proposals, incremental land acquisitions, and the steady accumulation of protected habitat.
The elk still cross the Continental Divide each fall. The migration that nearly disappeared elsewhere continues here, largely intact, because the land beneath it was worth protecting.
Author: Michael Baker Dubois Museum
Next up for the Fremont County Museum
May 23, 10am at the Dubois Museum, “Kids Corner: Blacksmithing History” Bailey’s Tire/Pit Stop Children’s Exploration Series
May 30, 2pm at the Riverton Museum, “Draper Raptor Experience” Bailey’s Tire/Pit Stop Children’s Exploration Series
June 6, 10am with the Pioneer Museum, “Mt. Hope Cemetery Trek” Wind River Visitors Council Adventure Trek Series
June 6, 10am with the Riverton Museum, “Mountain View Cemetery Trek” Wind River Visitors Council Adventure Trek Series
June 6, 9am with the Dubois Museum, “Historic Absaroka Ranch Trek” Wind River Visitors Council Adventure Trek Series
June 9, 7pm at the Pioneer Museum, “J.K. Ralston” Wyoming Community Bank Discovery Speakers Series
Daily through December at the Pioneer Museum, “Sweetwater Ranch Life, The Paintings of Jack Corbett” Exhibition Opening
Rare Relics Road Show: Save the Date: Saturday October 10, 2026 Lander, WY Lander Community Center, You Are Invited!
Call the Dubois Museum 1-307-455-2284, the Pioneer Museum 1-307-332-3339 or the Riverton Museum 1-307-856-2665 for detail regarding their programs.
The Dubois Museum, the Pioneer Museum in Lander and the Riverton Museum need your financial support. In the current economic environment, the museums are more reliant than ever on donations from the private sector to continue to provide the quality programs, collections management, exhibits and services that have become their hallmark over the last four years. Please make your tax deductible contribution through the Wind River Cultural Centers Foundation https://windriverccf.funraise.org/ or by sending a check to Fremont County Museums 450 N 2nd Rm 320 or taking it directly to the museum you choose to support.