The first telephone call was made on March 10, 1876, at Alexandar Graham Bell’s home in Boston. He famously said, “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you,” to his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson who had a receiver in another room in the house.
The telephone had arrived. The technology spread rapidly around the world and reached even remote areas like the Wyoming Territory.
Five years after Bell’s breakthrough invention, Cheyenne became the first Wyoming town to embrace the new technology.
A story printed on Christmas Day, 1879, in the Cheyenne Weekly Leader outlined the plans for the capital city.
A story printed nationwide in 1888 reported 585 telephone calls and 136 telegrams were being sent each minute across the United States. It also reported 743 telephone exchanges using 145,732 miles of copper wire with 158,782 accounts and 380,277 telephones rented from Bell Telephone.
A Telephone Exchange.
Thanks to the enterprise of certain gentlemen, Cheyenne is to have the later distinguishing feature of first-class cities, namely, a telephone exchange. The subject has been agitated for some time, and after quiet consideration it was determined by the gentlemen hereinafter named, to establish the exchange.
It took two more years to get telephone service in Cheyenne. Within a decade long distance calls between Cheyenne, Laramie and Denver were established.
Cheyenne Exchange – h/t Wyoming State Archives
In Fremont County, the telephone didn’t arrive until 1902.
Telephone lines followed stage routes, telegraph lines, railroads, and established trails. The Union Pacific provided an easy corridor and right of way for telephone expansion. In other areas, the phone lines began to spread from central locations following the telegraph lines.
Casper and Lander jointly began telephone construction projects in January 1902. Casper was a terminus with other lines heading east to Douglas, north to Sheridan and south to Cheyenne.
The Lander Clipper of March 14, 1902, described the progress.
The contractors who are to furnish the telephone poles for this end of the Casper and Lander telephone line are busy delivering goods these days.
Phone service arrived in the Fremont County seat later that summer. Rocky Mountain Bell Telephone grew from its corporate offices in Denver.
Rocky Mountain Bell Telephone Company was incorporated and licensed by the American Bell Telephone Company in February 1883. It served the states of Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming. In 1911 they merged with Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company.
Shoshoni used the same Casper to Lander Bell line for long distance but established their own exchange for the town. They opened phone service in March 1906, just before the town boomed to 10,000 people for the opening of homesteads on the ceded portion of the Wind River Indian Reservation.
In Lander, phones were eagerly installed at every business, with home expansion in town following close behind.
Advertisements in the Lander Clipper and Wyoming State Journal were quickly edited to include phone numbers for each business.
The phones were connected through a central exchange. Originally, just a site manager/engineer and a couple of operators manned the exchange, but as phones increased, the switchboard grew, and eventually dozens of women were hired as operators during peak times, and a few worked through the night for the stray call that might arrive.
Operators in action at the Lander Phone Exchange – h/t Pioneer Museum 
Riverton arrived in August 1906, but it would take another nine years before they received phone service.
In the meantime, phone lines were extended to Bonneville, Lost Cabin, Moneta, Lysite, Birdseye, and to the mining town of Depass before anyone made a call in Riverton. The lines grew like ice crystals forming on a window on a cold day. The line from Thermopolis to Casper went through Depass, Lost Cabin, and Arminto.
Each had local service, with a single, long-distance line connecting them to the outside world. Waiting to use the long-distance line became a daily chore for some businesses, requiring the exchange to stay open 24 hours a day.
Hudson had phone service by 1911, and an engineering office before the town was established in 1909 that offered telephone services, along with power, hydraulic, steam and electrical work. Richard G. McDonald was a versatile engineer.
Telephone lines were built to connect Lander and Ft. Washakie in 1903 and up South Pass to Atlantic City the following year.
Lines spread to local farms and ranches near Lander. The telephone was the wonder of the age, and anyone with the financial wherewithal soon had one.
People were appreciative of the technology, which depended on the quick hands and diligence of a handful of young women to operate.
Lander Clipper October 26, 1906
The efficiency of the young ladies operating at the telephone central is the most commendable feature of that company.
In the same issue, a front-page story mentioned an older, more established communication technology that had rolled through what would become Fremont County in 1861, the telegraph. The story proudly declared that telegraphic communication was now possible from Lander to anywhere in the United States.
The rise of telegraphs coincided with the arrival of the Chicago North Western Railroad earlier that month.
Telephone central, as the locals called the Bell exchange originally had just 100 lines, each marked above a copper slot. The operator took a call, listened for the requested number then rang the number, and physically connected the two lines. A light indicated the circuit was active. When both parties hung up, the light went out and the operator disconnected the lines.
If someone didn’t hang up their end, it often tied up the line for both parties since the light remained on. It was an engineering problem that was eventually solved with automatic switching but remnants of this problem remained into the 1970s with rural party lines in Fremont County.
Telephone technology was tenuous. While local service was stable, aside from high winds, washouts and power outages, long distance remained a challenge.
The long miles between settlements in the American West offered ample chances for line failure. Even in the 21st century, floods, and natural disasters cut buried fiber optic cable, severing communications for wide areas.
In the early 20th century, the tar-covered, copper wires stretching across desert, mountain and river were down often. The Wyoming wind, thunderstorms, lightning strikes and the occasional automobile or farm animal snapping off a pole created a panic, sending repair crews on search and repair missions across the state.
In 1915, Riverton’s time for telephone service finally arrived.
Though Mayor John Delfelder was absent at the February 1, 1915, meeting of the Riverton Town Council, he had already said he would support a telephone exchange.
Frank Holt applied for a franchise to build a telephone system in Riverton. A motion by Councilman Stratton was made and the council approved Holt’s request on five conditions. First, he had to pay a cash bond of $250, second, he had 15 days to formally accept the franchise, third he would forfeit his bond if formal application wasn’t made, fourth, he had 90 days to begin construction and finally he had six months to finish the project.
Frank and his wife were the only two employees when construction was completed on June 7, 1915. Four women soon hired on as operators to help the fledgling business take hold.
Mrs. W.P Curtis, Fannie Megown, Genevieve Dolan and Laura Allen all worked shifts at the 68 station switchboard. An additional line was built connecting the exchange to the Rocky Mountain Bell Exchange in Lander to the outside world.
By 1916, two additional long distance lines were added to Lander. In 1920, they extended the lines to Shoshoni. This was just a local exchange with connections to the other two principal towns in Fremont County. The Lander lines went through Hudson and were able to connect with the Hudson exchange.
Before 1918, only local calls or long-distance calls to Lander were available. That changed when Holt sold the Riverton Exchange to Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph, which eventually became Mountain Bell.
The telephone office was on Main Street, next to the power company office.
Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company was the brainchild of Theodore Vail, the man Vail, Colorado is named after. He reorganized American Telephone and Telegraph, and Colorado Telephone to create Mountain States.
It was a wild time of expansion, with only marginal control from the Denver office. Regional directors had nearly total control of the operation, from inventory to billing, they held the power. This led to a lot of questionable practices.
Carl Hill started with rival Rocky Mountain Bell as a clerk in Billings in 1906. When he arrived, he found shiny new reels of heavy copper wire being chopped up into three-foot lengths. They were being chopped up to be sold as scrap by the foreman.
Hill called the main office and soon a team of auditors arrived in Billings. They found scant records and every plant manager in town had left just days before their arrival.
None of that type of malfeasance was ever discovered in Fremont County.
Business was good, slow but steady. By 1930 Riverton had 325 phones and Lander 360.
Riverton was late into the telephone game, but with ever advancing technology, it paid off in service. In Lander, users had to crank the phone to send a power surge to light up the indicator in the exchange, in Riverton, the lines were energized. Simply lifting the phone off the hook turned on the light at the exchange.
The exchange installed a red light on top of the Masonic Temple Building in the 1930s. When the light was on, it indicated the police had a message waiting for them at the exchange office. It was just one of the many public services operators provided aside from connecting phone calls.
The arrival of the uranium industry in Fremont County in the 1950s changed phone service forever.
Direct dial phones were implemented for local calls in 1955.
Marian Nelson was an operator for Mountain Bell in the 1940s until the direct dial switch came.
Much like Sarah in the Andy Griffith Show, Marian was both an operator and a message center.
“There were about 1,000 phones in Riverton by the 50s,” Marian said in a 1981 interview. “I think probably several lives were saved by operators in those days. We could get a cry for help, nothing more, and know who was calling and send the police to that location.”
A robbery was thwarted by an operator one night.
Ramona Jones was on duty late one evening when the light for Walt Rhodes’ garage lit up. She could hear activity in the background but no one answered the phone. Ramona called the police.
The Riverton Police apprehended a pair of safe crackers who had inadvertently knocked the phone off the hook as they tried to pry open the safe.
The cozy, hometown connections through the local phone exchange came with frustrations as well.
Original Fremont County Telephones – Pre-1956 – h/t Pioneer Museum
“There was pressure at times. The discovery of uranium in the Gas Hills brought a tremendous demand for long distance calls from prospectors. There was only one long distance line and waits of several hours to put a call through were not uncommon,” Marian said.
The local operator placed long distance calls when the line was open, then called back to the house and connected the caller with their destination.
One day, Marian was asked to find a Billings funeral home for a Riverton family.
“When I called the supposed mortuary a man answered in a husky voice, ‘Body shop,” Marian said. “It threw me into a tizzy before I realized it was a wrong number and was actually a car body repair shop.”
Early “Direct Dial” telephones – h/t Pioneer Museum
The arrival of direct dial phones brought rural areas of Fremont County into the 20th century.
There were no telephones outside towns aside from a few lines connected to rail junctions and larger businesses.
In the 1890s through the 1930s, informal phone networks, often called “Barbed Wire Telephones” sprang up across the west. There were a few in Wyoming.
In 1894, Alexander Graham Bell lost his patent on the telephone and the business exploded with dozens, and then hundreds of local phone companies forming across the nation.
At the same time, wire prices dropped for barbed wire, and thanks to expanded copper mining in Wyoming and Montana, copper prices fell as well.
Farmers began putting in “fence phones.” A fence phone was battery-powered, but had to have a hand crank generate an electric current to ring a phone on the other end of the line. They began nailing insulators and bare copper wire between strands of barbed wire on their fences. A connecting copper line from the house tied into the copper wire and neighbors followed suit, connecting their homes and fences with the same copper wire.
When someone cranked the phone, the bell on every phone connected to the wire rang. To keep everyone from answering each phone call, they developed a system of three rings. Two fast cranks made a long ring, a single crank made a short. Each farm had unique ring, maybe three shorts, or two longs and a short or any of a possible 16 combinations.
It was a brief, but effective local technology and remained as the first phones arrived from centralized exchanges. The one neighbor who had a telephone connection to the world outside the local network often took messages and relayed them to others.
When the direct dial phones came online, the phone company adopted the three-ring system for party lines. The first phone lines connecting Pavillion, Paradise Valley, Missouri, Lyons Valley, the upper Wind River and the Wind River Indian Reservation were all party lines. A party line was a single line shared by up to 16 different homes. When your ring came over the line you had to recognize it, but it rang at every home on the party line. There were many people who picked up the phone when it wasn’t for them, covered the mouthpiece and listened in on their neighbors’ conversations.
Gradually, the party lines dropped from 16 to 8, then to four, and then just two connections.
In 1979, party lines in Fremont County ended with a $2,000,000 switching center installed in Riverton. It was the first switching center west of Casper and was indicative of the strong mining industry in Riverton at the time.
It was still a long-distance call to Shoshoni or Lander from Riverton until the early 2000s. A call to Lander cost 35 cents.
In Shoshoni, the school installed an 856 number since so many calls were being made daily to Riverton from school personnel.
Phone Books a lost technology – h/t Pioneer Museum 
The arrival of digital switching, cell phones and the Internet ended long distance calling.
No more would someone have to make a person-to-person, long-distance collect call just to let their parents, spouse or friends know they had arrived.
The era of instant communication had arrived, just a century after the first phone rang in Riverton.