(Riverton, WY) – Randy Tucker has been hooked on trains since he was a kid. “I’ve been fascinated with trains ever since Grandma would talk about it,” he said.
Tucker, a Riverton author and historian, shared that fascination with about 20 people during an hour and a half presentation on his newest book, “Plains to Trains,” at Honey Fly on Main Street in Riverton Tuesday. Using dozens of historic and modern photos, he traced the railroad that once ran from Chadron, Nebraska, to Lander, and the towns that rose and fell along the way.
The book is the fifth of six Tucker has written. His first, in 1986, was a guide to repairing the Apple II computer. “It was a bestseller,” he joked. “I think I sold 38 copies.”
“Plains to Trains” is dedicated to his grandparents, Eugene and Clara Gasser, who emigrated from Switzerland in the early 1920s and rode the Chicago and North Western to Riverton. Eugene settled near Hailey on Beaver Rim, and Clara, raised in a wealthy Swiss railroad family, spent her first 14 months in Wyoming living in a sheep wagon. “After she’d lived in basically a castle in Switzerland her whole life,” Tucker said.
His father rode a train out of Memphis in 1951 for Navy basic training and set him straight on the romance of steam. “He told me the locomotives from the cowboy movies are not what they claim,” Tucker laughed. “You open the windows, the cinders blow in, catch your clothes on fire.”
The book follows the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad, later part of the Chicago and North Western, as it pushed west from Chadron in 1885. At the time, Tucker said, Lander and South Pass City were the only white settlements in the region not already on the Union Pacific line to the south.
Steam locomotives needed water about every 20 miles, so settlements sprang up at regular intervals along the route. Many are gone now, and Tucker’s photos of abandoned farmhouses, empty trestles and lonely windmills drew as much interest as the historic images. “I call this yesterday’s dreams,” he said of one old abandoned homestead.
Just across the Nebraska state line, Wyoming ranchers drove livestock over the border to dodge the higher rates the railroad charged on the Wyoming side. “Screw you, railroad,” Tucker said, summing up their attitude. When the tracks bypassed the town of Antelope Creek, residents moved their buildings next to the line and became Douglas. “They actually moved the whole town,” he said.
Closer to home, the owner of the Big Horn Hotel in Waltman, west of Casper, sawed his building in half when the railroad went through Arminto instead, hauled it across the desert with mules and put it back together. At Hiland, the station owner used the only freezer between Casper and Shoshoni to hand out free ice cream at the 1926 Fourth of July baseball game, then umpired the game himself.
The railroad reached Shoshoni in August 1906 and Lander that October, where the celebration included Shoshone dancers sent by Charlie Washakie, son of Chief Washakie. That same summer, land ceded from the Wind River Reservation opened to white settlement, and Riverton was founded in the rush. Tucker said a group from Lander rode over intending to jump claims, shots were fired, and cavalry from Fort Washakie escorted the Lander men home.
The town rivalry continued when Riverton built the Teton Hotel in 1920; organizers had Lander’s four-story Fremont Hotel measured and made sure the Teton stood six feet taller, with an elevator and hot running water in every room. At the Fremont, “if you’re on the fourth floor, on the far end, and it’s 20 below that night, you understood it was 20 below,” Tucker said.
Riverton’s poorly placed depot was loaded onto a flatcar in 1928, turned around in Shoshoni and brought back facing the right way. “The ingenuity, is that crazy?” he said.
Lander, which called itself the Apple City for its orchards, learned the railroad could cut both ways when some of the first freight to arrive was cheaper apples from Ohio and Oregon. “They were cheaper and probably tasted better,” Tucker said.
By the end, trains out of Riverton were limited to 12 miles an hour. The rails were pulled in 1988, though pieces of the old grade can still be spotted near Powder River.
Several audience members had their own ties to the places on the screen and the talk turned into a conversation more than once as longtime residents shared memories of Lusk, Manville, Shoshoni, and the old stops along the Casper highway.