There was no “quick” way west from Casper until 1906. Even then, your choices were limited with Moneta, Shoshoni, and Lander, the original Chicago North Western Depots.
The narrative of the August 1, 1901, Natrona County Tribune feature OVER THE STAGE LINE continues:
“Another change of teams is made at Red Springs, where Martin O’Brien holds forth as stock tender. Six miles more you reach Wolton, where you are greeted by Mr. Johnson, the postmaster and general manager of the Wolton Commercial Company’s store. He will talk business to the driver, chat with the passengers, and wait on customers all at the same time, the result being satisfactory all around.
Mrs. Hood and Mr. Holliday need no introduction to the Tribune readers. The cooper dipping plant is located at this point, as well as large shearing pens, and the thousands of sheep which are shorn every spring are also given a bath in the solution which Mr. Holliday says is the best remedy on earth to cure scab in sheep. After being sheared and dipped the sheep are turned out on the range and later shipped east.
After the mail and express is unloaded the passengers climb aboard and the driver shouts “all aboard” and you start for Round Hill and Lost Cabin. The trip between Round Hill and Lost Cabin is the hottest part of the entire pass through which the Thermopolis stage travels.
You arrive at Lost Cabin at ten o’clock in the morning. Here there is a mine and several buildings. The new hotel being erected by Mr. Okie, which is almost completed, is indeed a treat to the traveler. After transacting the necessary business at Lost Cabin the driver again shouts “all aboard” and you start across the country.
The mountains loom up before you and the distance looks twice that which it really is. You soon reach a steep hill where it looks almost impossible for a team of horses to descend with a wagon. The driver stops, rough locks the wagon, makes an examination of the harness, and if everything is all right you take a pitch downward. When you get to the bottom you say to yourself that if you ever go down that hill again you will walk.
This is Moore Hill, a short distance from which J. W. Moore is living on his ranch. Another change of teams is made here and you proceed to Moore’s ranch where his house and valley present a pleasing sight.
After leaving Moore’s ranch you commence climbing the mountain on the other side. You are promised a good supper, but it is already commencing to get dark and after a long ride up the mountain hunger, thirst, sleep and fatigue begin to tell on the weary passenger.
After a long pull of an hour or two you finally reach the top of the mountain. After giving the horses rest you commence to slide down the other side. You strike the head of Kirby Creek and Tom Clark’s ranch at nine o’clock on your downhill pull. Mr. Clark has a nice ranch house and a good band of sheep which run on the range nearby. You are attracted by the lights from his buildings as you glide by on your rapid rush.
It is ten o’clock when you finally reach Mr. Clark’s home ranch where Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Burgess reside. This is the place where you sit down to supper and you are not disappointed, for there is one of the nicest meals along the route. Everything is neat and clean, and Mrs. Burgess seems to know what a weary traveler most desires. She is an excellent cook, and the man who is not satisfied with the meal he gets here is indeed hard to please.
After supper you are allowed to rest a little while, probably ten minutes, if you are on time, and with another team you are off for Thermopolis, which is forty miles distant and will require an all night drive.
It requires sixteen head of horses to run the line and there are at least twenty men employed. It matters not what kind of weather we have, the coaches must be kept on the move, for they carry the U.S. mail, and like old time, it waits for no man. Mr. Clark has conducted this line for ten years, and he has given universal satisfaction to travelers and will again be awarded the contract when his present contract expires.”
Clark had a stone house built near Casper Creek about 20 miles west of downtown Casper in 1897, but its most famous owner purchased the house and the surrounding ranch a year later.
Oakley Kenyon Garvey (O.K.) was born in Rensselaerville, New York, on November 22, 1859. At just 13-years old, he left home and moved to Wyoming.
At 27, he was a cowboy working for the C Y Ranch in Natrona County. That same year he married Nannie Brasher of Milford, Missouri and the young couple built a home in Casper. In 1890, Garvey became postmaster in Casper. He was a very popular young man, and the couple had three children: Ida May (1887), Clarence York (1890), and Esther Susan (1892).
Nannie and O.K. moved their family to Stone Ranch in 1898. The couple lived there for the next 17 years as the children grew up and moved away.
During that time, Oakley Garvey ran newspaper advertisements almost weekly in all three publications printed in Casper, always for lost, stolen, or stray horses. The Stone Ranch was the gathering point for both legitimate escaped horses, and those abandoned by thieves eluding the law. Many of the Garvey horses wandered off as well.
Horses were big business in western Natrona County until 1903, when the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley disbanded and became part of the Chicago North Western with plans to extend the lines 150 miles west of Casper to Lander.
Neither the Chicago North Western nor the future Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroads chose routes that included the Stone Ranch as stops, but the nearby town of Bucknum, named after fellow rancher and horse trader Charles Bucknum, became a stop.
Oakley passed after a sudden stomach hemorrhage on June 8, 1915. He was rushed to Casper, but local physicians were unable to save him. He was a beloved man in the community, and his loss was felt across the state. Less than a year later, his beloved wife Nancy “Nannie” passed from complications following surgery in Denver on April 5, 1916. They are buried side by side in the Highland Cemetery in Casper.
The Garveys moved on, and the ranch moved from horses to sheep and cattle over the following years. The climate changed as well, growing drier with each passing year. The land was no longer suitable for dryland farming and was grazed instead.
Horse theft gradually faded away, but the new highway, U.S. 20/26 going west to Shoshoni, provided the criminal element with more options at the Stone Ranch.
Some of the incidents at Stone Ranch weren’t criminal, but comical if you weren’t the one suffering from it. Lew Barker owned the Stone Ranch in 1927 when he came to Casper with a pronounced limp. He was well known in Natrona County, and rumors spread that he was suffering from gout. Barker pulled aside a Casper Daily Tribune report and related that it wasn’t gout, but he’d been thrown from his horse six years before, and just then, his foot was infected by cactus spine poisoning.
Cacti weren’t the only things with sharp, dangerous points; the area along Casper Creek was a haven for rattlesnakes. Barker found a way to deal with these as well.
Casper Daily Tribune – October 29, 1929
Hundred Rattle Snakes Killed
At Stone Ranch
“If rattlesnakes may be depended upon as weather forecasters, this portion of the country seems to be due for a late fall and a mild winter. The snakes are unusually active this fall at a time when they are supposed to have taken to winter quarters. At the Stone ranch, west of Casper, Austin C. Barker with one or two ranch hands is said to have killed more than a hundred snakes one day last week. The men had started out to round up some stock when they ran into what appeared to be a regular snake convention. Rattlers continued to appear as the slaughter progressed, until all other work was abandoned for the day. A shot gun was procured, and a snake roundup resulted in the complete annihilation of the snakes.”
As America descended into coast-to-coast poverty with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange and the arrival of the Great Depression, crime became commonplace. There were stills and bootleggers all along the highway from Shoshoni to Casper, but they didn’t bother the Stone Ranch much; car thieves were another story.
Barker sold the ranch to William Haggerty in 1930. Haggerty was a friendly man, willing to help anyone in need. He was the one in need after he gave a couple who were hitchhiking east a ride to Casper.
Casper Herald, May 6, 1930
RANCHER GIVES
COUPLE A LIFT,
THEY STEAL CAR
“W. L. Haggerty, owner of the Stone Ranch, has half a mind never to do a good turn for anyone again, in view of the experience he had Monday.
He gave a man and a woman, both cooks who had been working at ranches around the country and are believed to have come here from Upton or Edgemont, S. D., a lift to town. He left them in temporary possession of his car while transacting a little business. That’s the last he’s seen of the car, he notified the sheriff’s office. The car is a blue coach, bearing Wyoming license number 15-392.”
A few weeks later, Haggerty had his car back, and the young man in the incident became a guest of the state at the future Boys’ School in Worland.
Casper Herald, May 19, 1930
Toth Draws Sentence
In Industrial School
On Automobile Theft
“William Toth, apprehended at Spearfish, S. D., last week and returned here Sunday by a local deputy sheriff, was arraigned by County Attorney W. J. Wehrli before Judge Bryant Cromer, of district court, Friday. He pleaded guilty to stealing the automobile of W. G. Haggerty, owner of the Stone Ranch. Judge Cromer sentenced him to serve a maximum term of 10 years at the state industrial institution at Worland, Wyo.
After fleeing from Casper in the stolen car, Toth was obliged to abandon it near Newcastle, Wyo., for lack of fuel. A few days later he was traced to Spearfish and taken into custody there.”
There is evidence that the Stone Ranch operated as a service station in the 1930s and 40s, but that too, soon ended. The ranch became obsolete with improved highways, established trucking and rail shipment on the two railroads, and faster, more reliable automobiles.
The stage station is the only one remaining on the original stage and freight routes operated by King and Clark. It’s a tribute to the design of well-fitted cut rock mortared into place.
As you roar by at 70 or more miles per hour, you might take a minute to remember the events, lives, and changes this lonesome monument to earlier times has witnessed over the last nearly 150 years of Wyoming history.
Today, motorists speeding along U.S. 20/26 follow a corridor shaped first by stage routes, then by competing railroads, and finally by the modern highway. Hidden among the sagebrush and Russian Olives, the crumbling Stone Ranch is one of the few surviving witnesses to that transformation, standing quietly where tired horses once changed teams, and travelers paused briefly on a thirty-hour journey across central Wyoming.
It remains a testament to time.