South Pass City

History & Significance

South Pass City sits at the base of the Wind River Range in Fremont County, Wyoming, near the famous South Pass of the Rocky Mountains that had served as the primary crossing point of the Oregon Trail since the 1840s. Gold was discovered in the area in 1867, and South Pass City grew rapidly from a prospecting camp to a mining town of several thousand people who were working the placer deposits and hard-rock lodes in the surrounding hills.

The South Pass country had been Shoshone, Arapaho, and Bannock territory, crossed for millennia by Indigenous travelers and more recently by the streams of emigrant wagons that made the Oregon Trail the most heavily traveled overland route in American history. The Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868, negotiated in the same year as the gold rush began, established the Wind River Reservation for the Eastern Shoshone, effectively opening the surrounding territory to American settlement while restricting the Shoshone to a much smaller area.

Wyoming Territory was created by Congress in 1869, and its first legislature met in Cheyenne in the fall of that year. Among the first acts passed by that legislature was a bill granting women the right to vote in Wyoming Territory, signed by Governor John Campbell on December 10, 1869. Wyoming was the first government in the world to enact women's suffrage. The bill's passage had been driven partly by Esther Hobart Morris, a South Pass City resident who had lobbied the territorial legislature's representative from the district before the session, and by Herman Nickerson and other legislators who may have calculated that women's suffrage would attract women settlers to the territory and generate favorable publicity in the East.

South Pass City's gold deposits were substantial but not inexhaustible. The placer gold was worked out relatively quickly, and the hard-rock mining that followed required capital investment that several companies attempted with varying success. By the 1870s the population had declined significantly, and by the 1880s South Pass City was largely a memory.

South Pass is a broad, elevated valley crossing the Continental Divide at an elevation of about 7,550 feet, low enough and gradual enough for wagon trains to cross without the brutal ascents that other Rocky Mountain passes required. It had been used by Indigenous peoples for centuries and was brought to American attention by fur trappers and explorers in the 1820s. By the 1840s it was the standard crossing point for the emigrant trains heading to Oregon, California, and Utah, and between 1840 and 1869 an estimated 400,000 people crossed the Divide at or near South Pass.

The visual experience of crossing South Pass disappointed most emigrants. They expected a dramatic mountain pass with towering peaks and precipitous drops, and instead they found a wide, treeless valley that seemed hardly different from the sagebrush plain they had been crossing for weeks. The significance of the crossing was largely invisible to those who made it: the water flowing east went to the Atlantic, the water flowing west to the Pacific, and the line between them ran across an unremarkable swale.

The discovery of gold in 1867 brought a different kind of traveler to South Pass, one less interested in the landscape's geological significance than in its economic one. The prospectors who flooded in after the initial finds transformed the quiet emigrant road crossing into a mining district, and the infrastructure they built, the flumes, the stamp mills, the commercial buildings of South Pass City, were superimposed on a landscape that had been shaped by two decades of emigrant travel.

Esther Hobart Morris arrived in South Pass City in 1869 with her husband and sons and quickly became one of the most prominent figures in the mining community. The story that has been told most often about Wyoming's women's suffrage bill credits Morris with persuading the South Pass City area's representative to the territorial legislature, William Bright, to introduce the bill. Whether the conversation attributed to her actually took place as reported is not established in contemporary documentation, but her advocacy for women's rights was genuine and documented in other ways.

Wyoming's women's suffrage bill passed the territorial legislature and was signed by Governor John Campbell on December 10, 1869. The bill gave women in Wyoming Territory the right to vote in all elections, the right to hold office, and the right to serve on juries. In February 1870, Esther Morris was appointed as justice of the peace in South Pass City, the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States. She presided over her court in the mining town for eight months.

The connection between the mining community at South Pass City and the national suffrage movement was immediate. Susan B. Anthony and other suffrage advocates celebrated Wyoming's action and used it in their arguments for federal women's suffrage for the following fifty years. When Wyoming was admitted to the Union in 1890, it retained its women's suffrage provision despite pressure from Congress to remove it, reportedly responding that Wyoming would remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without women's suffrage.

South Pass City Historic Site is operated by the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office and preserves approximately thirty surviving original structures from the mining town's peak period in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The site includes the assay office, the hotel, several saloons, private homes, and commercial buildings, all maintained in the condition they reached as the town was gradually abandoned rather than restored to a hypothetical original state.

The Fremont County deed records from the South Pass City era document the rapid property transactions of a mining community: claim staking, sale, consolidation, and eventual abandonment following the pattern typical of placer mining districts. The territorial government records include the justice of the peace proceedings from Esther Morris's tenure, a documentary record of the first woman to exercise judicial authority in American legal history.

The geological survey records for the South Pass district, some of the earliest systematic mining geology done in Wyoming, document the ore deposits and the assessment of their commercial potential that drove investment decisions in the early 1870s. The combination of surviving structures, land records, territorial government archives, and geological surveys makes South Pass City one of the better-documented ghost towns in the American West, a community that was briefly significant and then quickly abandoned, leaving its record intact.