Jelm-Frank Smith Ranch Historic District

There is both archeological and historical evidence to indicate that Indians--such as the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Shoshone and Ute tribes--utilized the resources of the Medicine Bow Range for years before white men arrived on the scene. According to written records penetration of the range by white men occurred in the first decade of the nineteenth century, an early date in the history of the region that is today southern Wyoming. Among the first white men in the area were fur trappers such as Ezekiel Williams, Jacques La Ramie, Jim Bridger, Jim Baker, and William H. Ashley. Except for the latter, few left written records of their experiences and explorations in the mountains. Following the era of the fur trade, and prior to an era of permanent settlement, government explorers such as John C. Fremont, Howard Stansbury, and Francis T. Bryan provided informative and readable documents on the topography and culture of the region. After the explorers came emigrants and settlers, and concurrent with the early settlement period came geologists such as Ferdinand Hayden and Clarence King, who conducted surveys of large regions in the Rocky MountainHigh Plains country. Detailed geological reports on specific enclaves within that area were produced in the following years.

Permanent settlement in the Laramie Plains and surrounding mountains was prompted in part by the transportation industry which, in turn, is related to Wyoming's unique topography. In 1862 the stagecoaches of Ben Holladay began to roll along the Overland Trail, an ancient migration route across southern Wyoming that became a main, nineteenth-century travel route in a larger, nationally significant, east-west transportation corridor between the southern and central Rocky Mountain regions. The location of the Union Pacific, the nation's first transcontinental railroad, was also dependent upon favorable topography, and upon the availability of resources such as coal for fuel, lumber for ties and construction, ballast for roadbeds, and water. Ties, in particular, were readily available in both the Laramie Range and Medicine Bow Mountains. From Hayden's report, we know that in 1868 the mountain sides were full of tie-hacks who cut and floated hundreds of thousands of ties down the streams of those mountains. The base of one such tie operation, described in an 1878 property abstract entry as the "Old McGreevey Tie Camp," was located at the site of what later became the mining camp called Cummins City, or Jelm.

Naturally, homesteads were taken by settlers at watering places along the southern Wyoming transportation route, and the ranching industry sprouted and rapidly grew in rich grassland prairies and valleys. Hayden reported that in 1868 a few farmers in the valley of Rock Creek, along the line of the old stage road, succeeded in raising some very good vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, and cabbages, and would have remained there contented, had not the Indians driven them away. "But it is doubtful," stated Hayden, "if these plains will ever become a favorite abode for farmers, though for the raising of stock I believe they are unsurpassed. Horses, cattle, and sheep have already been raised here of the finest kind, and in the beautiful sheltered valleys, they find the most secure retreats from the severity of the winter's cold. Thousands of tons of excellent hay can be cut every year along the bottoms of any of these streams.

Mining efforts, concurrent with the construction of the railroad, and the establishment of ranches, also provided bases for settlement. In 1868, while Laramie City was still a tent town, miners were prospecting for gold and silver in nearby hills. Placer gold is reported to have been discovered in the Medicine Bow Range as early as 1858 by a certain Captain Douglas, a member of Sir George Gore's hunting expedition to the Rockies. But serious efforts at placer mining actually commenced ten years later with the discovery, by Iram M. Moore, of gold in Moore's Gulch, a part of the Upper Douglas Creek drainage system. Eventually, not only Douglas Creek and its tributaries, but also other streams issuing from the Medicine Bow Mountains, were explored and prospected for gold, silver and copper. The earliest recorded mining claim in the Medicine Bow Range was staked on the west bank of Douglas Creek in 1870. Seven years later, in the summer of 1877, the Douglas Creek Mining District was formally organized and Douglas City or keystone, thirty miles west of Laramie, became its first mining settlement.

During the 1870s northern Colorado was also being prospected and mined for precious minerals, and it was during a rush to that region in 1879 that new prospects were discovered in gold-bearing quartz along the Upper Big Laramie River at Jelm Mountain diverting the attention of some of the miners headed for North Park. A report of the incipient "boom" at Jelm Mountain appears in the June 28, 1879 edition of the weekly newspaper, the Laramie Sentinel.