Claim jumpers, fist fights, drunken brawls, midnight raids, and the cavalry to the rescue. Another classic western? No, just life during the first month that Riverton came into existence in the summer of 1906.
On August 15, 1906, two weeks before Chicago and North Western construction crews reached Riverton, 1,600 homesteads in the Wind River Valley were opened for 7,240 claimants who won the right to draw for them.
Business and residential lots were opened at the Riverton townsite. The infamous Wyoming Central Irrigation Company had laid out the grid for the new town previously.
Moving into the townsite on the morning of the 15th by wagon from Shoshoni and Lander. Settlers claimed their lots, recorded their claims with the government agent, and began unloading their belongings, putting up signs, and establishing businesses.
Riverton was a tent city set among sagebrush and prickly pear cactus with the only water from the nearby Wind River.
Lumber from Charles H. King’s lumberyard in Shoshoni was in high demand. It was among the first shipments by wagon, and then beginning in September, by rail. A construction locomotive with cars containing ties, gravel, and steel rails was at Riverton when the townsite opened, but commercial transportation was still weeks away.
The first commercial building in Riverton began construction on the opening day of the land rush. David Hays and his son Roy began clearing sagebrush off a corner lot that would eventually become the northeast corner of the intersection of Main Street and Broadway.
Within a couple of months, the Hays Wholesale and Retail Merchandise Store, better known as simply the Hays Store, was in operation.
David Hays rode into Riverton from Shoshoni on a construction train. As the tracks continued southwest to Lander, he and Roy began building the store on the newly cleared land.
“The townsite was opened August 15, and we stake out the lots where the store is now located,” Hays said in a 1941 interview. “We started building as soon as the lumber was available and opened for business in October 1906.”
The construction of a rail depot began as soon as the construction team crossed the river to the southwest.
All was not sunshine and roses in the opening days of Riverton; the days of the frontier remained alive and well.
Fremont County didn’t have enough claim jumpers in 1906 to earn a nickname as the “Sooners” did in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Grab but there were two groups who encroached or squatted illegally on land in the newly ceded homestead lands before the legal opening. One group was centered in Shoshoni and the other in Lander. Neither were welcomed by legal homesteaders, and the fireworks soon began.
Riverton Republican Publisher – J. A. L. Chenery wrote of Riverton’s first days in a special feature of the Riverton Chronicle published on February 12, 1926.
Here is Chenery’s description of the homesteading process.
Opening of the Reservation
The opening of the Shoshone or Wind River Reservation to settlement brought many fortune seekers to this part of the state. Shoshoni was the chief scene of activity. About ten days prior to the opening, drawings had been made for the land, and those holding the numbers spent their time between the drawing and the opening in an inspection of the lands that they were to receive. Practically every quarter section in the Big Bend Valley (now Riverton Valley), the Missouri Valley, and around Pavillion was filed on.
The present townsite of Riverton was set aside for townsite purposes, to be squatted on by settlers who desired to have town lots.
An advanced party of homesteaders set up camp in the middle of the Wind River on a seasonal sandbar they called Stratton Island on the afternoon of August 13, 1906, two days before the official opening.
Jack Chenery, Goyne Drummond, William Joslin, and W.S. Adams and his family camped in the middle of the river that night. The location was teeming with mosquitoes, but rumors of marauding bands of claim jumpers entering the area illegally led them to set this as a defensive position.
Joining them were members of the townsite company, W. W. Willis, George Gregory, Thomas Williams, F. M. Gill, and the manager, George Gaddie.
Jack Chenery – February 12, 1926
“Other than the members of this party, there was no one to be seen as far as the vision could reach in any direction. On the morning of the 14th at daybreak, they made camp on the property now occupied by the Sunset Lumber and Hardware Company.
Mrs. Adams was the first woman to set foot on the townsite of Riverton and also had the distinction of preparing the first meal.”
That location is at 103 North Third East today.
Adams and Drummond were civil engineers and experienced surveyors. They began to survey future home and business sites with Chenery and Joslin working the rod, running the tape, and driving stakes as the two engineers recorded the measurements.
The original townsite was much smaller than Riverton is today, and the crew of four completed most of the survey in a single day.
The entire ceded portion of the former Wind River Reservation opened for homesteading with great fanfare at sunrise in Shoshoni on August 15, 1906. A surge of thousands of homesteaders set out across the Wind River and onto their new farms, businesses, and homes.
Jack Chenerey – February 12, 1926 – “When they resumed their work on the morning of the 15th, they were the only people here. About ten o’clock in the fore noon a few stragglers began to arrive and by the middle of the afternoon there were not less than 500 people present.
They came in wagons, buckboards, on horseback and afoot. They followed up the surveyors, squatting on every lot as fast as it had been measured off. This survey, made under many difficulties, is said to have been one of the fastest surveys ever made on a townsite, and when later checked up proved to have been remarkably accurate.”
What should have been a day of celebration and triumph turned ominous when a party of squatters from across the valley in Lander arrived and began jumping claims. They pulled up stakes argued with the already established homesteaders and had a few fist fights, with guns drawn but no one was shot.
Adding to the drama was the claim from Indian Agent William T. Keith at Ft. Washakie that the filings were early and invalid. They weren’t; they were to the letter of the law.
He dispatched Troop B of the 10th Cavalry and declared martial law on the embryonic settlement.
The cavalry arrived, took position on the west end of the townsite, and drove everyone out of town.
For 10 days, Troop B camped along the banks of the Wind River. They only allowed the survey party back into the townsite during their stay.
The survey party aligned with Shoshoni speculators. As soon as Troop B headed west, back to Ft. Washakie, a group of 18 men came across the valley from the Southwest in Lander to lay claim to lots in the new town. They arrived, began to pull up survey stakes, and started their own survey.
On the corner of the barely discernible Broadway and Main, the site of the future Masonic Temple Building, Bill Mooney stood with a loaded Winchester lever-action rifle. He was defending his lots.
“The first gentleman that steps on these lots is a dead man,” Mooney said.
The 18 men from Lander backed off, but they didn’t leave.
The Lander men began to pull stakes and replace them with their own, but it didn’t last long. The 500 men who had traveled from Shoshoni nearly two weeks prior were still ther,e and they were heavily armed and not inclined to let the Lander group have their way. They pulled the new stakes and replaced them with the original, and the Lander party road back home defeated.
In a similar story, Joe Nevins relates how his mother defended their claim with a 45-70 rifle.
“We moved up with a bunch of other squatters to claim our lots. Dad unloaded Mother and me. Then he went back to get the rest of the camp. He left his rifle and two dogs with us. Mother asked if the gun was loaded, Dad said, “No, but I don’t think you will have any trouble. If you do, just pump the action on the gun and stand up and tell them to get, and nobody but a complete idiot will argue with a woman that has a gun and two dogs.”
The world is of course, full of idiots. The Nevins had two 25×150 foot lots. A squatter came up and tried to take them. Mrs. Nevins stood her ground. The stranger said, “By what benefit do you expect to hold these two lots?”
Mother answered, “By the benefit of two dogs and a 45-70!” Then she pulled out the gun from under some canvas. She went through the motions of jacking a shell in, and as Dad had said, the stranger didn’t stay to see if she would pull the trigger or not.”
Another stranger witnessed the entire confrontation and drove up in a buggy and told Mrs. Nevins that the man she drove off had been correct; she didn’t own these lots.
“Mother recognized him as one of the fellows from the bank in Lander where we traded beef stock, which we brought with us, for some dairy type shorthorns. He asked her where Dad was and she told him that he had gone up town to look for work. The man form Lander said, “We’ll, I have decided not to stake any lots down here but I will stake these two and relinquish them to you if you pay the filing fees,” Nevins said.
The man was Ed Farlow. The Nevins family ended up with four lots.
Riverton’s Main Street business is characterized by narrow street access and long interiors. That came about early in Riverton’s development.
The original plan called for 50-foot-wide street-access lots, but the demand for storefronts was so great that the planners cut it to 25 feet. They kept the filing fees at $2.50, though, effectively doubling their money.
By early 1907, Riverton began to take on its modern shape.
E.T. Glenn opened the first store in Riverton, starting with a wagon, then moving to a tent before building a permanent store on Main Street.
The Adams Hotel was built next, also along Main Street.
One of the first homes in town was built by a widow, Mrs. Patterson. She dug an eight-foot-deep hole, then covered it with a canvas tent supported by lodge poles. She covered the canvas with dirt, added a door made of a 100-pound grain gunnysack, and had a home.
By mid-September, the Chicago North Western railroad arrived with regular freight service to Riverton. The construction crews continued toward Lander.
The original station was named Wadsworth, leading to the misconception that this was the original name of Riverton. It never was; the two were separate entities.
William P. Judkins applied for a postal permit at the new townsite, choosing the name “Riverton.” It stuck, and the town took its name from the post office.
The Chicago North Western quickly discarded the name Wadsworth and listed their depot as Riverton from 1907 onward.
Hans Berlin drew the first number in the land drawing and built a home in Riverton. David Hays, William Mooney, Ed Ryan, Goyne Drummond, and E.T. Glenn were also lucky enough to draw early permits and made the new town their home.
The interest in the newly opened homesteading area, one of the last in the continental United States, drew interest from many directions, most in the Rocky Mountain Region, but many over a thousand miles away.
The first dozen filers for lots in Riverton were:
- Hans Berlin, Laramie, Wyoming
- Edwin F. Buck, Basin, Wyoming
- Thomas Bly, Fair Play, Colorado
- Wm. Brunning, Cheyenne, Wyoming
- Charles F. Overkamp, Lyons, Iowa
- Robt. L. Barley, Silex, Missouri
- James A. Morrow, Lewistown, Missouri
- Orion N. Gibson, Trenton, Missouri
- Bernard Frommel, Thermopolis, Wyoming
- Henry Schoel, Cheyenne, Wyoming
- Wm. St. Clair, Butte, Montana
- John Sundin, Aspen, Colorado
Some called the new town home for the rest of their lives, while others made a few dollars speculating and selling their plots to future immigrants.
It was a shaky start, full of the drama of the “Old West” with claim jumpers, guns drawn, and the cavalry to the rescue, but within a few years, Riverton was an established community that surpassed Shoshoni and rivaled Lander. A rivalry that remains until this day.