Visitors Get in the Spirit of Things Exploring Wyoming’s Ghost Towns

The saloon’s roulette wheels are ready to spin. Fancy china sparkles in the hotel’s dining room. The menu promises a real bargain: steak and wild game for 50 cents. But there’s nobody here; hasn’t been a customer for nigh on a hundred years, not since the gold fields went bust.

In this part of Wyoming, ghost towns outnumber real ones. In the gold-fevered decades of the late 1800s, a rumor of gold was enough to reel in hordes of footloose miners who came, stripped what they could from the ground, and left. During their brief tenure, towns sprung up to provide for their needs. But once the boom went bust and the miners drifted off toward the next mother lode, the jerry-built towns keeled over and died. Some have been restored to attract passing tourists eager for a real-life glimpse of the Old West.

It’s somehow fitting that South Pass City lived and died in the blink of an eye. (This get-rich-quick burg went bust just eight years after popping up out of nowhere.) People had been tromping through nearby South Pass for hundreds of years, but, like tumbleweeds, few ever stopped in this inhospitable place.

“It was the loneliest land for a grave,” wrote Mark Twain in “Roughing It” after passing by in the summer of 1861.

As Nevada-bound Twain and his group headed toward the city, the “hotel-keeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal and the principal citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted us cheerily, and we gave him good day. . . .. South Pass City consisted of four log cabins, one of which was unfinished, and the gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the 10 citizens of the place.”

Back then the town owed its existence to the nearby Oregon Trail and the famed South Pass, which provided an easy route for horse and man bent on taking the northerly way across the Rockies. Crow and Shoshone, Cheyenne and Arapaho followed the buffalo through here; settlers passed on their way to the promised land, and Butch Cassidy and his wild bunch once thundered past.

Twain called the trail “a suspension bridge in the clouds” and was flabbergasted during summer to see snow on nearby mountain peaks so high they “would have to stoop to see Mt. Washington.”

Despite the migratory stream of people flowing west through the pass, it took gold to settle the area. The glittering metal was discovered in South Pass City--then just sage-covered hillside--in 1842, but isolation and fierce Indians discouraged would-be prospectors. The place remained the merest hamlet, a God-forsaken outpost until 1867, when Henry Reedall hit pay dirt and had the guts to file a claim and settle down.

When news of his strike spread, the rush was on. In a single year, three towns mushroomed on the rugged Wyoming hillsides: South Pass City, Miner’s Delight and Atlantic City.

In its brief heyday, South Pass City boasted 17 saloons. One, the Magnolia, had a live grizzly bear tethered to the bar. Another, the Miner’s Exchange, was well-prepared for the inevitable brawls: It had an adjoining funeral parlor.

The town newspaper, “The Sweetwater Times,” bugled an irresistible appeal to desperate men: headlines proclaimed “Unlimited Opportunity.” The old letterpress still stands alongside trays of type.

Over at the South Pass Hotel, the beds are still made, period clothes hang on pegs and a plaque informs visitors that only the bridal suite was heated. The honeymooners may have paid a bit extra, but warmth was a valued commodity during a Wyoming winter.

Up the road, a mini-museum devoted to Wyoming’s gold-rush days features a slide show and enough various exhibits to give passers-by a sense of what life was like for prospectors. Lucky miners used to pan as much as $25 worth of gold a day; the unlucky chipped hard rock in the mines for a daily wage of $3. But work was steady until the boom went bust in 1872.

Every couple of decades, somebody swept into South Pass with a new gimmick for extracting gold. New hopes gave birth to boomlets, but busts quickly followed.

Now all that remains is a weary huddle of wooden buildings slouching along a drowsy stretch of road. Here and there a dramatic rocky outcrop offers a mute reminder that South Pass City owed its existence to those quirks of geology that bring precious metal within reach of a man equipped with pickax or pan. No longer do the round brown hills echo with the shots and shouts of a whoop-it-up Saturday night.

But a few crusty hangers-on still live in town and pan for gold in the spring runoff.

“It’s 12 hours of pannin’ for 75 cents,” one grizzled old-timer says. Maybe he was just being cagey; another claimed you could pluck thumbnail-size nuggets out of nearby Rock Creek, if you knew where and when to look.

Boom-time prospectors fanning out from South Pass City happened on another lode and founded Atlantic City. It, too, is still more or less a ghost town, even though a handful of people live there.

Where there was once a brewery, a dance hall and an opera house, there is now a shamble of crumbling structures. Most of those buildings have never benefited from a restorer’s efforts, but there are so many boxcar-like mobile homes scattered about that the town looks like the site of a train wreck. Nowadays locals find their gold in tourist’s pockets, and you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a “horse for hire” sign.

Lots of folks find their way to Atlantic City Mercantile, a cozy Western-style restaurant. Old mining tools and fading sepia-toned photographs decorate the walls, and mounted moose, elk and deer cast endless glassy-eyed stares. But the real action is over at the reservations-only Miner’s Delight, a restaurant judged by many to be one of Wyoming’s finest. It’s hard to imagine a lonelier bastion of haute cuisine.

For a peek at what all the ruckus was about back in the old days, mosey up Three Forks Road toward the Old Hermit Gold Mine.

There, amid a rusting junkyard of old vehicles, mining equipment and knock-kneed buildings, underground excursions are conducted by miners who’ve spent much of their life chipping away at veins of copper and gold running through the local bedrock. Should you be lucky enough to find someone in attendance, you’ll get a chance to witness the way old-timers worked a claim and to see modern-day techniques at work.

Young and old alike can try their hand at panning for gold. And if any color shows, it’s yours to keep.