He arrived just a decade after the town was named Lander, in honor of Frederick W. Lander, an engineer who surveyed the Lander Cutoff, a shortcut to reach South Pass. Lander was organized around a post office in 1875.
In 1885, Jerry Sheehan arrived driving a one-horse cart from Denver. The enterprising young man soon made a name for himself and became one of the founding fathers of Lander in Wyoming’s territorial days.
Sheehan was born in Oneida, New York on August 21, 1857, and came west to seek his fortune at 21 in 1878. He worked in the gold mines of Leadville, Colorado, until the early 1880s when he began working at hotels in Denver, learning the business before heading out to the newly created town of Lander in Wyoming Territory.
In Denver, he met Ellen McMahon and they were married in 1884. The following year he headed 360 miles Northwest with his brother-in-law Tom McMahon.
Jump ahead almost a century, and the fruits of Sheehan’s labor literally went up in smoke as the Fremont Hotel, Sheehan’s creation, went up in flames on Wednesday, February 3, 1971, in the worst fire in Lander’s history.
The four-story Fremont Hotel, with 30 registered guests, was destroyed with one tragic fatality.
Hotels were big business in the final days of the classic American West of Hollywood fame. Most hotels were little more than a few rooms added onto a residence with meals that were sketchy at best, and dangerous at worst.
Isabella L. Bird, an English traveler in Colorado and southern Wyoming in the late 1890s, described the fare found at most way stations and hotels across the Rocky Mountains in her book, “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.”
Here is Bird’s description of a typical dinner meal at one of the many roadhouses serving as both restaurant and hotel.
“Thirty men in working clothes, silent and sad looking came in to supper. The beef was tough and greasy, the butter had turned to oil and the beef and butter were black with living, drowned and half-drowned flies. The greasy tablecloth was also black with flies, and I did not wonder why the guest looked melancholy and quickly escaped.”
The “hotel” room she described wasn’t much better.
“I got down and found a single room of the rudest kind, with the wall at one end practically broken down, holes in the roof, holes for windows and no furniture but two chairs and two unplaned wooden shelves with straw sacks upon them for beds. There was an adjacent cabin room with a stove, benches and a table where they cooked and ate, but this was all. A hard, sad-looking woman looked at me measuringly. She said they sold milk and butter to parties that were camping in the canyon, that they never had any boarders except two asthmatic old ladies, but they would take me for five dollars a week if I “would make myself agreeable.”
The Hilton it was not, but this is what travelers could expect on the stage routes west from Casper through Wolton to Rongis, and the many stops northwest from Rawlins to Ft. Washakie at Bull Springs, Crooks Gap, Rongis, Myersville, Hailey and Derby.
Sheehan had his sights on something much higher.
The Rawlins to Ft. Washakie stage and freight line was newly surveyed and not fully established yet, so Sheehan had to traverse the rugged terrain along the Sweetwater River using a few cavalry routes, the original Oregon Trail, and a line of telegraph poles to reach Lander and the Popo Agie River.
Sheehan took a job at the Bridge Hotel in downtown Lander in 1885.
He was a natural as a hotel manager, friendly, resourceful, outgoing and a people person in an age when the hard facts of survival were always just one meal away for many people.
Sheehan believed in the future of Lander. He saw the potential of the quiet little town set in the red foothills of the Wind River Range long before others did. In 1891, he built the original Fremont Hotel and served as manager.
He built the Fremont Hotel on a budget of $20,000, most of it earned through the restaurant at the Bridge Hotel. Sheehan was an excellent cook, and his cuisine became the favorite of government travelers riding the stage from Rawlins to Fort Washakie, and to tourists destined for Yellowstone.
The news of his excellent meals, with a wide variety of dishes, spread east along the tracks of the Union Pacific.
By the fall of 1887, the first Fremont Hotel, a wooden building, was completed, but it wasn’t the brick monolith that Sheehan built four years later, it bore the name Fremont Hotel, but it was far from it.
Fremont Clipper, October 19, 1887
“It is a two-story frame structure centrally and pleasantly located. Mr. Sheehan started in business here about eighteen months ago, and by his gentlemanly and courteous demeanor has drawn to his place a good class of customers. The bar is always well supplied, the tables are well filled with viands of best quality and prepared in the best style of the culinary art. Mr. Sheehan has made hosts of friends since coming here and is doing a prosperous business.”
The newly constructed Fremont Hotel was a two-story structure with a pool hall, dining room, office, and lobby located on the first floor. On the second floor, a parlor with a balcony opening onto the first-floor dining room served guests in the two suites and the 13 single rooms.
For its day, the original Fremont Hotel was far above the accommodations Isabella Bird found during the same time period just across the border in Colorado.
In 1891, Sheehan designed and constructed one of the finest lodgings in the newly established state of Wyoming outside of Cheyenne, Laramie or Rock Springs. Those three towns were all located on the Union Pacific Railroad through southern Wyoming and benefited from the traffic the UP generated. In 1906, Lander was about to get a taste of what a thriving railroad could bring to the local economy.
The Chicago North Western arrived from Casper on October 10, 1906, in Lander. The newly constructed railroad created Shoshoni, Moneta, Powder River, and Wolton (later renamed Hiland) on the way west, and led to Lander’s biggest rival in Fremont County, Riverton, in 1906 and Hudson in 1909.
Sheehan realized what the railroad meant, and that his simple two-story hotel with basic amenities and only two floors of rooms was inadequate for the potential business that was about to arrive.
In 1906, in anticipation of the advancing railroad, Sheehan closed the Fremont Hotel while the roof was removed and two more stories were added. It was the first four-story hotel in Wyoming, and the tallest building in Fremont County for 14 years until the Teton Hotel was built in Riverton in 1920.
Lander, after decades of relative isolation, had arrived as the western terminus of a vast network of railroads extending back to the Great Lakes and continuing to the east coast. The Fremont Hotel was the pride of the community, the only four-story hotel in Wyoming at the time.
Sheehan offered more than a hotel. He was an excellent businessman, with many other ventures, but perhaps his best-known ability was as a restaurateur. Meals in small towns along the railroad tracks were catch as catch can at the best, and simply horrible at their worst. Sheehan’s hotels, the Bridge, Brookside, and his crowning achievement, the Fremont, all offered affordable, quality meals throughout the day.
The Fremont Hotel had a second-story balcony facing Main Street. It was a favorite spot for campaigning politicians to address crowds assembled on the street below. The dining room was often cleared for dances and other celebrations, and the most popular barber shop in Lander was in one of the first-floor rooms facing Main Street.
Inside the imposing Fremont Hotel were the Fremont Café, the Fremont Bar, and the City Bakery. The popular barber shop was Jim Trimmer’s, with the catchy motto, “Get a trim with Jim at Trimmer’s” Four chairs, four barbers, with showers in the back offering hot and cold running water, it was the place to go for a haircut, a shave, the Police Gazette and to hear all the latest, local news and gossip.
Irene Clay had a similar service for the women of Lander with her beauty shop a few doors down from Trimmers.
Cattlemen, bankers, real estate agents, and businessmen made thousands of deals over the decades in the café, the bar, the meeting rooms, and often in the spacious lobby of the Fremont Hotel.
There was one major drawback to the Fremont: it was largely unheated, and the subzero Lander winters were murderous to the guests on the upper floors. No amount of blankets could stave off the cold on a 25-below-zero winter’s night.
The only heat in the hotel came from a huge pot-bellied stove in the lobby. The air flow technology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries relied on panes above the door that could be adjusted to allow air from the hallway to enter the room. The outside windows had to be opened to facilitate the flow. When the air outside was frigid, few people opened the window, and the air couldn’t circulate.
The lobby was blazing hot and the rooms on the first and second floors along the stairs were relatively comfortable, but most of the hotel, including the entire third and fourth floors, were miserable in the winter.
Sheehan solved the problem in 1909 with a major renovation. Plumbers installed a steam boiler and laid steam pipes to each room. The steam-heated radiators solved the problem for most of the hotel, but when temperatures dropped and demand was high, it was still difficult to heat up rooms on the fourth floor.
During World War II, the Fremont Hotel thrived, but the Prohibition Era shut down the popular Fremont Bar. Speakeasies and private clubs still offered a wide variety of alcohol, but public businesses suffered, as did restaurants.
The Great Depression led to the closing of many rooms at the Fremont Hotel due to a lack of guests. A further blow came in 1943, when the Chicago North Western ended passenger service to Lander.
As the post-war years advanced into the 1950s, improved highways and an abundance of cars led to the building of motels across America, including Lander. The ease of the in-and-out convenience of a motel ended the glamorous era of the large central hotel in a small town.
The Fremont Hotel remained open but began taking on long-term guests.
Throughout its 80-year history, the Fremont suffered a few fires, mostly in the kitchen, with some smaller ones in guest rooms when someone fell asleep smoking and caught the sheets on fire.
On February 3, 1971, the worst fire in Lander’s history began in the Fremont Hotel. It was a cold, snowy, subzero day when someone noticed smoke coming from the room high above the street. The Lander Volunteer Fire Department answered the call at 10 am.
There were about 30 guests in the hotel when the fire began, most were safely evacuated, but 16-year-old Steven Ochsner, a runaway from Idaho, was trapped in a fourth-floor room.
Ochsner woke up coughing on the smoke pouring into his room. He opened a window and started yelling for help. Lander’s fire department didn’t have a ladder truck that could reach the fourth floor.
Ironically, three National Outdoor Leadership (NOLS) instructors, John Cooper, Skip Shoutis and Steve Gipe were in the crowd below when Ochsner called for help. Two years after the fire, the Noble Hotel, across the street from the Fremont, became the new home of NOLS and by default the tallest hotel in Lander.
Shoutis grabbed a garden hose and ran to the Fremont. Gipe was lifted so he could reach the second-floor fire escape and handed the hose. Gipe climbed to the fourth-floor fire escape landing and threw an end of the hose to Ochsner.
Ochsner tied the hose around his waist, and Gipe told him to step out of the window. Ochsner hung in the air as Gipe braced himself against the fire escape and lowered the boy belay-style to the ground.
Ochsner was taken by ambulance to Bishop Randall Hospital and treated for a burn on his leg and smoke inhalation.
Gipe, Shoutis and Cooper joined the Lander volunteer fireman in fighting the blaze. Fire crews from across Fremont County arrived to help, but it was too much, and the Fremont Hotel was destroyed.
As the Fremont Hotel was consumed by flames, plywood was used to cover the windows of the Noble Hotel and Noble Drug Store across the street and to protect the plate glass windows of the First National Bank on the Third Street side of the fire.
There was one fatality. William Mockey had been smoking in bed, which caused the fire. He died in the flames, and his body was discovered a few days later during the investigation.
KOVE, 1330 AM in Lander, reported on the fire live in an all-day broadcast.
The building was completely removed and is now the home of Central Bank and Trust on Main Street.
The 80-year history of the Fremont Hotel came to an end, with just a few photographs and a few more reminisces to mark its passing.
Jerry Sheehan passed away from a sudden illness on September 17, 1909. He was just 52 years old.
The September 23, 1909 edition of the Wind River Mountaineer paid tribute to Sheehan.
“During his twenty-four years residence in this city Mr. Sheehan never accepted political honors, much to the regret of his friends in both parties, although the citizens of the town did force him to serve as their mayor but outside of this he held no office and while the people could not give him their vote they gave him instead that which is far better, their friendship and esteem.
His last sickness was short and no one expected the end. Not until four o’clock of the afternoon was anyone aware of his dangerous illness. From that hour he sank slowly. Surrounded by his wife, his brothers and relatives, he passed into that Great beyond.
The funeral services were held Sept. 21 at 2:30. The Fremont Hose company which Mr. Sheehan had organized, turned out in uniforms and took charge. The band, which he had always loyally supported, played a dirge while the casket was borne to the church. The Women of Woodcraft were drawn up in double file in honor of Mrs. Sheehan.
At the church the simple rites of the Catholic church were performed by the Rev. Fr. Lynch who, in beautiful words, paid a most touching and glowing tribute to the memory of the departed.
After the services the procession wended its way to the last resting place, where it had been his wish to sleep near the city which he loved so well.
It was one of the largest funerals ever held in Lander. By special proclamation of the mayor all business houses were closed from 2 o’clock until 4:30 and all who possibly could followed their friend on his last trip.”