Living in the high desert can make people complacent. The dry, arid conditions of Fremont County are well known. What isn’t well known is the destructive power of floods, especially the flash floods that can occur without warning in the late summer months.
Europeans arrived in Wyoming in the late 18th century with the Verendrye brothers, but Native Americans lived here for millennia, they knew the danger of the seemingly innocent water flowing in trickles in late summer in the Wind River Basin.
The Oglala called it Mní Šíča (pronounced min-ee shee-cha). It’s still called Badwater today.
When driving today from Shoshoni north toward the Wind River Canyon you cross a wide, sandy basin just before climbing a small crest south of the exit to Bonneville. If you look close at 70 miles per hour you might spot the sign that reads, Badwater Creek.
It’s not because you can’t drink the water, because it’s laced with chemicals, it’s from the Native American description of a seasonally flowing creek that can turn into a raging torrent in just minutes when the conditions are right.
The conditions were right three times in a span of eight years in the early 20th century.
This creek and the Wind River / Big Horn that it drains into were the sight of three of the most disastrous floods in Fremont County history in 1919, 1923.
It was hot that day, unseasonably warm for the usually cool summer climate of Dubois. As the sun dropped behind the Wind River range to the west, heavy clouds began to form, ominous dark clouds, clouds with intent and purpose. The wind picked up, turning into a fierce gale around 9:30. People on the Dunoir reported softball-sized hail rolling along a storm front headed east at high speed.
The floodwaters hit Dubois at 10:30 pm on a pitch-black night.
Dr. Frank Welty, the well-known Fremont County physician, was asleep at his home on Horse Creek when the storm surge sent a wall of water out of the creek’s banks, sweeping the house off its foundations. Dr. Welty drowned. His body was found in a pile of driftwood the next morning by searchers.
When the sun came up on August 10, 1919, the hail was still in drifts five feet deep throughout the little mountain town.
Welty’s home, valued at $7,500 in 1919 dollars, was destroyed. His wife Alice escaped the flood, wading through the initial surge of water to neighbor Frank Amoss’ house, which was built higher up on the bank.
Another house, owned by the Stalnaker family, was lifted off its foundation and drifted 150 feet downstream.
Walter Keefe, a Casper florist, his wife and three young children were staying with the Stalnaker family overnight on a vacation trip to Yellowstone. Keefe and his family took refuge on a large upright piano. They floated down Horse Creek clinging to the piano until the water receded, a harrowing float trip that lasted from 11:30 PM until the piano came to rest on a sand bar at 3 AM.
Cowboys W. Shaffer and Russell Higdon were swept away and drowned in the flood. Their bodies were discovered a few days later. A ranch hand sleeping in the bunkhouse was also swept away, drowned, and never found.
Initial reports were that Don Long, a 12-year-old boy sleeping in the ranch house was drowned, but he walked back to the ranch later that morning.
Long survived by grabbing a barbed wire fence and holding on for over an hour until the water receded.
A new car owned by Stalnaker business partner E. H. Helmer of Lander was swept away and destroyed at an estimated cost of $3000.
The water rolled down the Wind River unabated to Riverton, where it swamped hundreds of thousands of railroad ties waiting to be pulled out of the water at the Wyoming Tie and Timber yards on the south side of the town.
Nine people lost their lives in this flood. All the damage came from a single storm that lasted just a few hours. They were listed in the Lander Clipper as Dr. F. A. Welty of Dubois, Don Long of Dubois, Shaffer, piano tuner, in Dubois on business, an unidentified farm hand employed at the Floyd Stalnaker ranch, three Natives residing on the reservation near Dubois, and Florence and Joseph Appleby children of Ernest Appleby, a rancher living six miles from Lander on Squaw creek.
In July 1923, a storm ended a dream and nearly ended transportation into and out of Fremont County.
Clouds rose high into the summer sky above Cody in the early afternoon of July 25. The sky darkened and rain began to fall in heavy sheets. Hail rumbled out of the clouds, destroying barley, oats, corn, beans and potatoes across the Big Horn Basin as the storm rolled south.
Mountains usually act as giant scrapers, drawing all the strength out of a rainstorm but this one was different. The clouds rolled right over the nearly 10,000-foot-high peaks of the Owl Creeks and dumped rain and hail along the Badwater and Nowood drainages.
Bonneville and Shoshoni were major towns in Fremont County in the 1920s. Both had stations on rival railroads just three-and-a-half miles apart.
The Chicago Northwestern had a passenger station in Shoshoni, along with a freight dock and stockyards.
The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, later known as the Burlington Northern had a busy depot in Bonneville that was the hub for travelers headed to Billings or Denver.
Boysen Dam, the dream of Asmus Boysen was having problems. The dam was completed in 1908, providing hydroelectric power to towns and a few farms in Fremont County and north in Thermopolis, but it was silting heavily.
The silt hampered the flow of water in the Wind River and built huge flumes of sandy silt along its banks. That silt would soon no longer be a problem.
The Wind River Canyon was a place that Native Americans didn’t venture into very often. Before Boysen’s Dam and the modern dam built in the 1950s it was a place where flash floods could rage in an instant from even seemingly insignificant summer cloudbursts.
The July 25, 1923 storm was no simple cloudburst.
The rain hit ground blistered by the sun, devoid of moisture. When soil conditions are like this, fast moving water doesn’t saturate the ground, it rolls over it like a concrete parking lot.
Badwater became a raging torrent. The telephone and telegraph lines linking little communities like Lost Cabin, Lysite, Depass, Deranch and Birdseye, to Thermopolis and Casper, were swept away as the poles were ripped out of the ground by the floodwaters.
The modern Burlington Northern tracks near Bonneville are on a berm high above Badwater Creek; in 1923, they were built closer to the water.
A small Chicago, Burlington and Quincy freight was parked on a siding when the storm hit. The engineer was waiting out the heavy rain before proceeding north on a run. It was a run that never came.
A flashflood boiled down the Badwater with enough force to knock the train off the tracks. A locomotive, six cars, and a caboose were swept under.
The surge continued into the Wind River and onto Boysen Dam.
Observers claimed the floodwaters roared 20 feet over the top of the dam, but that is likely an exaggeration. What is known is that the powerhouse had to be evacuated when two feet of water flooded the room, shorting out the power generation grid.
Nearby Chicago, Burlington and Quincy tunnels dug through the rock on the west side of the canyon were filled five feet deep with water.
The flood continued down the Big Horn River into Thermopolis. The residents of Thermopolis had been hit by the same storm a few hours earlier and were just cleaning up the damage when the river flooded. People living near the Big Horn and Hot Springs State Park had their homes swept away by the flood tide.
The Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy lost three steel bridges and had 20 miles of track destroyed.
The Chicago Northwestern didn’t suffer as much damage but had seven smaller bridges swept away, and many miles of track had to be replaced.
Not all the news from the cloudburst was grim, here is a story from the August 24, 1923, edition of the Wyoming State Journal
Raynold Zelsman, who owns a fine ranch near Hyattville, writes this paper of a most interesting discovery
made near his place while repairing a road that had been washed by the recent rains. He says the flood had cut down about twenty-five feet in the bed of the canyon, and In the bottom of this cut he found a rock, (apparently sandstone) about thirty inches wide, four feet long and about 14 inches thick, that had nine horse tracks imprinted on it. These tracks ranged from a colt’s hoof to a large horse, and going in both directions. Most of these tracks are perfect, but they do not show any sign of a frog like our present-day horse. This stone has undoubtedly covered up for untold ages and was brought to light by the floods. The water was still running over the stone and my little boy discovered one track, and on washing the sand off the rock he found nine. Thia seems quite a curiosity to me, and in my many years residence here, have not seen anything like it. It would be a good place for a geologist to work and I would be glad to offer every assistance. If anything further is found, will report them to you.
Railroad section crews set out from Casper and Greybull immediately.
At Lysite, one of the crews found a ranch family in the branches of a tree near the tracks. They spent the better part of a day in the tree. The rancher, his wife, and two small children were rescued by the section crew as they rolled along checking the tracks.
Further down the line, the section of Chicago Northwester at Neble was washed away. About 500 feet of track crossing the Wind River disappeared in the storm.
The damage was substantial. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy spent $1.35 million in repairs. They also initiated a lawsuit against Boysen and his dam.
The court ruled that Boysen was responsible for the damage to the rail tunnels below the dam and he had to pay compensation. It bankrupted Boysen who was already overextended in personal costs in building the dam.
A few years later, the dam was dynamited and the Wind River / Big Horn system flowed freely again for a couple of decades.
The effects of the flood were felt throughout Fremont County from Dubois to Lysite and north into the Big Horn Basin, as told in newspapers of the era.
Wind River Mountaineer – August 17, 1923
HERD OF CATTLE DROWN
The Thermopolis Record gives the thrilling experiences of folk in that locality when the streams in that locality went on a rampage, in the following story: C. E. Blonde, who was rounding up his cattle in the upper Red Canyon country, estimates that he lost in the neighborhood of 100 head. Up to Saturday more than 40 carcasses had been found, some of them as far down the river as Lucerne and probably
the greater part of them have not been found. The heavy loss is accounted for on the theory that the
cattle drifted before the storm and were caught in one of the deep canyon. The men at the camp took to the hills I without waiting to dress and remained there until morning. The wall of water about 30 feet high did not quite reach the camp, however.
Two stories on the July 25th flood appeared in the same edition of Lander’s Wyoming State Journal.
Wyoming State Journal – August 24, 1923
NARROW ESCAPE IN CLOUDBURST ARIZONA TOURISTS CAUGHT IN CLOUDBURST IN THE BIG SAND DRAW THEIR CAR IS WASHED AWAY
All Members Of Party Escape Uninjured But Car Damaged And Camp Equipment Lost
M. J. Cornell, his sister and her daughter from Arizona had a narrow escape from drowning Tuesday even
Ing when they drove their Hupmobile Into a cloudburst at Big Sand Draw above Bull Lake Tuesday evening. They had crossed one gulch when a wall of water ten feet deep and 200 yards wide came down another gulch just ahead of them. Mr. Cornell got his sister and her little girl out of the car onto higher ground and attempted to save the car but It was swept downstream a quarter of a mile and most of their camp equipment was lost.
W. G. Johnson found them stranded while on his way to town and took them to his ranch for the night, bringing them to town the next day.
They will remain here and will attempt to salvage the car, which Is apparently badly wrecked, but was so covered with sand and debris that they were unable to extricate without more help. The top was torn off end one wheel mashed as It was rolled over and over down the gulch.
The members of the party are all recovering from their terrifying experience and will resume their journey as soon as their car can be brought jn and repaired.
The storm was very narrow, seeming to extend Its entire force In the hills near Bull Lake. Roads were
impassable next day by detouring the two small bridges that were washed out.
State Game and Fish Commissioner F. S. Smith and his chief assistant. Bliss Bayne were here from Cheyenne last week to superintend the repairs on the Dubois Hatchery, for which they are securing 200,000 fry from the Park authorities. The flood of July 25 almost wrecked the Hatchery and killed most of the spawn, so that there will be no fish from there this year.
A front, not a storm, settled across the central portion of Wyoming in September, hampering repairs. It did little damage in Fremont County. In neighboring Natrona County, the destruction was epic.
Mistakenly referred to as “Coal Creek”, the incident occurred at the Cole Creek bridge about 15 miles east of Casper on September 27, 1923. It was the worst railroad disaster in Wyoming history.
The rain started falling lightly on September 25 but didn’t let up for the next three days.
Cole Creek is a tributary of the North Platte, draining into the larger river from the north.
A Chicago, Burlington and Quincy train, Number 30, left Casper for Denver at 8:30 Thursday evening and was just reaching speed when it approached the bridge over Cole Creek. The bridge wasn’t there.
The locomotive fell into the raging waters of Cole Creek that had just swept the bridge away. Of 66 passengers on board, 31 were killed.
Many of the passengers were construction workers headed back to Coloroad after working building tanks at the Clayton Tank Farm near Glenrock.
A CB&Q roadmaster inspected the bridge at 6:15 PM on a freight train, reporting the water was low. Soon after the freight crossed a flashflood roared through, washing away the bridge.
The 200,000-pound steam locomotive, the Colorado & Southern No. 350, plunged into Cole Creek at 9:15. Two pullman cars stayed on the tracks, the others, the mail car, express car, day coach, smoker car, and one Pullman car derailed.
The flagman, riding in the trailing pullman car jumped off the train and ran four miles to the Fry station and called in the wreck, his famous words were “I have lost my train in the river.”
Searchlights from a rescue train arriving at 11 PM displayed the horrific carnage of wrecked cars, dead bodies and the screams and moans of injured people.
When sunrise came, the locomotive had disappeared under the mud. Cars were partially submerged or twisted and broken above ground.
Rescue, repair and bridge crews rolled in from Casper and Alliance, Nebraska. A wrecker crane arrived to pull the cars out of the way and to eventually retrieve the locomotive. The repair work lasted until October 15.
Heroic efforts were made by conductor L.D. Coburn and porter D.L. Littleton, along with a civil engineer from Salida, Colorado, M.A. Robinson who made ropes out of bell cords to guide people off the train. The three men dived into the water to rescue people trapped in a submerged railcar three times.
Bodies of the victims were laid on a platform at the Casper depot for identification. Engineer Ed Spangler’s body wasn’t found until January 22, 1925, when workers were rebuilding the bridge.
The locomotive was recovered from Cole Creek and restored in Denver in 1924. It ran until 1951, when it was scrapped.
Floods have impacted Fremont County periodically over the next century, but never with the impact they had from 1919 to 1923.