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In presentations throughout the day for over 100 students attending the Green River High School's Wyoming History class, mountain men and the fur trade were the topics of a recent Sweetwater County Historical Museum program. Aidan Brady, the museum's Public Engagement Coordinator, highlighted the importance of the mountain man and fur trade era in Wyoming and Sweetwater County history. Every year, from 1825 to 1840, at different locations in Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho, mountain men, trappers, and...
The Sweetwater County Museum Foundation is hosting a special fundraising event to commemorate the 55th Anniversary of the movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" on September 21. The event will be held at the Broadway Theater in Rock Springs and will feature special guests, a catered dinner, and movie showing. Bill Betenson, Butch Cassidy's great-nephew, will reflect on the making of the movie and provide commentary regarding its historical accuracy. Betenson's great-grandmother, Lula Parker...
This year's Pony Express Re-Ride passed through Sweetwater County ahead of schedule Saturday, June 22, stopping to change riders and horses in Granger at 4:15 p.m., the Sweetwater County Historical Museum shared. For 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861, the Pony Express operated from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Lone riders, working both ways in relays, carried mail the nearly 2,000 dangerous miles in an average of 10 days across Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming,...
Dave Mead, Executive Director of the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River, expressed his special thanks to the volunteers, parents, educators, and others who made possible this year's four-day Third Grade History Fair, which took place May 13 through May 16. Over 850 third grade students, teachers, and caregivers from all over the county took part this year. Each received a guided tour of the museum, reviewed special exhibits, and attended demonstrations about ranching, mining,...
March is Women's History Month, and the Sweetwater County Historical Museum is recognizing one of the most groundbreaking women in Wyoming history - Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman governor in the United States. Nellie Ross was born in Missouri in 1876. She became a kindergarten teacher and married lawyer William Bradford Ross in 1902. Later, the Rosses moved to Cheyenne, where Ross established a law practice and served as Laramie County's prosecuting attorney. He became involved in...
The Rocky Mountain fur trade was the topic this week for over a hundred Green River High School Wyoming History students at a special presentation hosted by the Sweetwater County Historical Museum. Aidan Brady, the museum's Public Engagement Coordinator, was the program's presenter, and the era of the fur trade, which peaked during from the 1820s through the 1840s, his topic. The fur trade began flourishing in the early 1820s. When the demand for beaver pelts in the east and Europe skyrocketed,...
More than two hundred people attended the Sweetwater County Historical Museum's special Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) event at the Clock Tower Park in Green River on Saturday. As featured in the animated 2017 Walt Disney film Coco, Día de los Muertos is a holiday for honoring the dead. It originated in Mexico but is now celebrated in many Latin American countries. Celebrants create displays called ofrendas (offerings), using items such as food, flowers, photos, and sugar skulls in r...
Just west of Green River, standing between Wyoming Highway 374 and Interstate 80, is one of the most distinctive landmarks in Sweetwater County - Tollgate Rock. 374 passes along its western base and has seen several designations since the early 1870s. The Sweetwater County Historical Museum recently received a research inquiry about the origin of the promontory's name; specifically, whether or not it was ever the site of an actual toll gate. The answer is "yes." The Green River-South Pass Stage...
This year's Pony Express Re-Ride passed through Sweetwater County right on time Monday, stopping to change riders and horses in Granger at 3 p.m., the Sweetwater County Historical Museum said in a special release. The Pony Express operated from April 3, 1860, to October 26, 1861. Lone riders working in relays carried mail both ways from St. Joseph, Missouri across Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada to Sacramento, California - a dangerous trip of nearly 2,000 miles in an...
The Sweetwater County Museum Foundation and the Sweetwater County Historical Museum are partnering with County School Districts No. 1 and No. 2 to produce a social studies textbook on local history for 3rd grade students. The new work is titled "History of Sweetwater County, Wyoming." Teachers from both school districts received pilot textbooks this week for them to try out in their classrooms. The pilot textbooks cover Unit 1 of the local history curriculum, which includes dinosaurs, fossil...
Application forms for a special letter to be carried along this year's National Pony Express Association (NPEA) Pony Express Re-Ride are now available in Green River at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, the U.S. Post Office, and the Chamber of Commerce and Visitors' Center. The Pony Express was a unique old west express mail service between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. Relays of lone riders carried mail in special saddle covers called mochilas, traveling both ways fro...
A frontier-era handgun recently researched by the Sweetwater County Historical Museum showed signs of extensive use. Museum staff determined the handgun to be a .45-caliber, six-shot Colt Single Action Army single-action revolver, perhaps the most iconic handgun in American history. Museum staff assessed that it was manufactured in 1883. Needing to replace its Civil War era percussion and cartridge-conversion revolvers, the U.S. Army adopted the Single Action Army in 1873. Fitted with a...
Wyoming's state seal was officially adopted just under 130 years ago, but two of the proposed seal designs that preceded it caused quite a scandal. From 1869 to 1890 Wyoming was a U.S. territory, achieving statehood on July 10, 1890. During its territorial years - and for three years into statehood - it had a territorial seal that depicted agricultural and mining implements, an arm holding an upright saber, a scene with mountains and a train, the motto "Oedant Arma Toga," ("Let Arms Yield to...
A Rock Springs soldier was among the Americans killed in Russia in a little-known chapter in U.S. military history. World War I began in August of 1914, with the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia on one side, and the Central Powers of German and Austria-Hungary on the other. Three and a half bloody years later, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered the war on the side of the Entente. By that time, Russia was in chaos. First, the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for 300...
Two men descended from members of Major John Wesley Powell's epic river expeditions of 1869 and 1871 down the Green and Colorado Rivers and the Grand Canyon recently visited the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River. Eric Peterson of San Marcos, Texas, is the 2nd great grandson of Frank Goodman, who took part in Powell's first (1869) expedition. A young Englishman who fought during the Civil War with the New Jersey Volunteers and afterward became a trapper for the Hudson's Bay...
The Sweetwater County Historical Museum is researching Green River’s first cemetery, established in 1862 not far from the site of the Overland Trail Stage Station on the south bank of the Green River. Last week a couple from Colorado, Stuart and Sue Stuller, came to the museum with a remarkable old photograph of a grave and headstone marked “Miss C.H. Kerfoot Died Aug 13th 1865 Aged 16 Yrs and 6 mo.” Stuart is a descendant of Cornelia “Neelie” Kerfoot, a frontier emigrant from Missouri who, according to family history, died on the Overland...
By DICK BLUST Sweetwater County Historical Museum While searching through its photo archives recently, the staff at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River came across a unique holiday image from over a century ago - Christmas Eve at the Rock Springs home of one of the most important, yet largely unrecognized, figures in Wyoming history. Ezra Lowman Emery - known as "Good Roads" Emery - was a groundbreaking civil engineer who mapped out an automobile roadway across southern Wyomin...
Built in 1896, the Wagon Bridge in Green River was the only non-railway span across the entire 730-mile length of that waterway until 1910. The Overland Stage Route, established in 1862, crossed the Green River at the Green River stage station ford at the current site of the Wyoming Game and Fish building on Astle Avenue and a ferry operated downstream, but in the late 19th century Sweetwater County and the Green River's town council agreed to put up $2,000 apiece to finance construction of a br...
A navy warship named the USS Green River was built and saw service during World War II, the Sweetwater County Historical Museum stated in an article. The Green River (LSM(R)-506) was classified as a "Landing Ship Medium (Rocket)," an amphibious assault ship designed to support troops during landing operations. Commissioned in May of 1945, she was 203-feet long and displaced about 1,200 tons. LSM(R)s of her class were crewed by six officers and 137 enlisted men, and armed with a 5"/38-caliber...
For four years, from 1938 to 1942, Green River was home to Camp Green River, a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp, one of thousands like it throughout the United States, the Sweetwater County Historical Museum said in a special release on Saturday. By 1933, the Great Depression was responsible for a 25 percent unemployment rate nationwide; some 15 million Americans were out of work. Just days after being sworn in as President in March, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt called the 73rd Congress into emergency session and proposed what came to be...
