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What Started It
Laramie did not grow from a fur trade post or a mining camp or an agricultural settlement. It grew from a railroad survey. In July 1867, Union Pacific Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge chose a site just north of an existing army fort on the Laramie River for the railway's next major station. In February 1868, surveyors laid out the streets and lots of the new town. In April the lots went on sale. In May the track arrived, and by the end of that month Laramie was a functioning community — or at least a functioning collection of tents and hastily-built frame buildings occupied by the particular mix of railroad workers, merchants, gamblers, and opportunists that the Union Pacific's advance generated at every stop across the plains.
The newspapers of the era called these railroad towns "Hell on Wheels," and Laramie qualified. When the Union Pacific rolled in, the town was overtaken with vice — saloons, gambling dens, and the attendant violence that followed easy money and rootless men. The provisional government collapsed within weeks of incorporation; by midsummer of 1868 rowdies controlled the streets and the respectable citizens were organizing a Vigilance Committee. On the night of October 28th the Committee moved, raiding the Belle of the West — a tent saloon that locals called the "Bucket of Blood" for its reputation — and making its point with the directness that vigilante justice employs when patience has expired.
The Hodgeman Addition, 1880
By 1880, Laramie had shed most of its Hell on Wheels character, though it had not entirely shed its roughness. The Hodgeman Addition — the saloon and entertainment quarter that served the railroad workers, cowboys, and drifters who moved through town — occupied the lower end of the commercial district near the tracks, the kind of place that a permanent town tolerates at a necessary distance from its respectable neighbourhoods. Close enough to be accessible, far enough to be deniable.
A man in the Hodgeman Addition in 1880 would have found himself in a world of wooden storefronts and unpaved streets and the particular mixture of the ordinary and the dangerous that the Wyoming frontier generated. The saloons were real saloons: not the romanticized versions of later western mythology but working establishments that served cheap whiskey to hard-used men who needed somewhere to be when they were not working. The railroad brought new faces constantly — track workers, cattle drovers, immigrants passing through on their way west — and the Hodgeman Addition absorbed them all, briefly, before the next train moved on.
Laramie Today
Laramie is the county seat of Albany County and the home of the University of Wyoming, the state's only four-year university, which opened in 1887 and has defined much of the city's character since. The campus occupies a substantial portion of the city's eastern side, its red-brick Collegiate Gothic buildings visible against the high plains sky. The city's population is about 33,000 — large by Wyoming standards, and shaped by the university in ways that most Wyoming towns are not: more educated, more demographically diverse, more politically mixed than the surrounding rural counties.
The Laramie Plains that surround the city are high, dry, and windswept — the kind of country that tests people before it accepts them, open grassland running to distant mountain ranges in every direction. The Snowy Range of the Medicine Bow Mountains rises to the west; the Laramie Mountains bound the plains to the east. The elevation is 7,165 feet — the town sits higher than most people realize when they first arrive on the Interstate, and the weather makes that elevation felt. Th
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