Jackson Wyoming

At times I have people say to me, “Jackson, that’s not even Wyoming, I hate it when people come to Wyoming and only visit Jackson Hole, Yellowstone, and the Tetons.” Or something similar to that. I could not agree less. Jackson is Wyoming through and through. Cowboys, wildlife, horses,  mountains, rushing rivers and hard working people, sure reminds me a lot of Wyoming.

Still some Grizzlies around the Jackson Area. Stay far back

David Edward Jackson - So, who was this Jackson fella, the town was named after? He was David Edward Jackson and reportedly his friends called him Davy. He was one of the first white men to visit the area, a trapper, and partner with the firm Smith, Jackson, and Sublette. This Sublette was William, responsible for building Fort William, later to become Fort Laramie, and about as far from the Jackson area as one can get in Wyoming. Jackson after John Colter and perhaps one or two others, spent an entire year, including one of Jackson’s, legendary winters, in the area.

The story of David Edward Jackson is one that would make a terrific mini-series. It is one of those rags to riches family stories. Although I have spent all of my Wyoming years on the eastern side of the state, this story is one I told in my history classes for years.

Jackson's grandparents John Jackson and Elizabeth Cummins were convicted of crimes in London and sentenced to serve seven-year indentures in America. The two met on the ship and were married six years after arriving in what would become the United States. By 1778 the couple migrated west and by 1770 they lived in western Virgina and were acquiring large tracts of good farm land. The couple had eight children, the second was Edward Jackson, who became the father of six children, three of them boys, the second being, David, the namesake for Jackson and Jackson Hole. Their third son was Jonathan, the father of Civil War legend Thomas (Stonewall), Jackson.

Shenandoah – Yep, just like the song - David Jackson was born in the Shenandoah Mountains in what is today West Virginia. Jackson moved with his young wife, west to Missouri for cheap and good land to take up farming in the early 1820s. But then everything changed when he saw Colonel Ashley’s newspaper add. He joined the Ashley-Henery party and headed west. And the rest, they say, is history. Jackson went on to work as a businessman in the West for nearly twenty years traveling into New Mexico and as far west as California, before failing health sent him home to Missouri where he died in 1837 at age 49.

Beauty and History Too - Next time you visit, Yellowstone, The Tetons, or the Jackson Hole area, remember, there is also a lot of history to explore in the area.

Milton Sublette - The Lost Mountain-Man

Milton Sublette was one of five men who banded together and formed the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. They were able to buy out his brother William, Jedidiah Smith and David Jackson. But there is more to this story.
William Sublette started Fort Laramie in 1834 known then as Fort William. The name was changed to Fort John in 1841 when it became part of the American Fur Company. In 1849, it became Fort Laramie. From 1849 to its end forty years later it remained Fort Laramie a United States Army Fort.
Now back to the subject of this post, Milton Sublette.
In 1826, he took either an arrow or a hatchet to a leg in an Indian battle in the southwest. At the time, he was only 25 years old. The leg wouldn’t heal and eventually he had part of it taken off. A year or so later another piece was taken. It is possible that he had other surgeries on the often infected leg.
He lived on using a leg made of cork and used a one mule wagon to get around when he could. He died at the ripe old mountain-man age of 36 in 1837. He was buried on the grounds of Fort Laramie in a grave that was soon forgotten. But his brother Solomon came through and put a proper marker on the grave in 1843.Years after Fort Laramie was out of business Milt Sublette’s grave and the entire Fort William and Fort John cemetery were lost. In modern times, during an attempt to stabilize the ruins of the post hospital on the hill in the northwest part of the fort. Guess what?
The hospital had been built over the old post cemetery. In the process of work on the old walls and foundations, a few bodies were discovered. One with an amputated leg – Milton Sublette.  What a perfect resting place for the old mountain-man, the most famous fort of his era. 

The old Fort Hospital - Milton Sublette's Final Resting Place

The Two Laramie's

The two greatest roads for westward expansion, the Oregon/Mormon Trail, and the Transcontinental Railroad both passed through Laramie. But not the same Laramie.

Fort Laramie of trapper and Indian wars fame sits on the Laramie and North Platte Rivers in east-central Wyoming.

Fort Laramie

Laramie the city, once actually called, Laramie City, is in the southeast corner of the state.

University of Wyoming - Game Day

Today the two Laramie’s are often confused in print. Most of the confusion results from people thinking that Fort Laramie and Laramie, the home of the University of Wyoming, are one and the same, but they are not. Every once in a while I run across something that confuses the two.

I lived and taught at Laramie High School for many years retiring from teaching in 2012. Now I live just minutes away from Fort Laramie, where I used to live before moving to Laramie City. That should help clear everything up.

Easy to remember which is which – wagons to the west passed through Fort Laramie and Rail cars to the west passed through Laramie City.

Why the name? I have posted here before about early Wyoming trapper and explorer Jacques La Ramie. La Ramie was a free trapper in and around Fort William, later to become Fort John and then Fort Laramie. He either died, was killed or was lost and never heard from again in 1820 or 21. Many things are named after him in the southeast part of the state including the small river running through Laramie the city and Fort Laramie.

Laramie River near the Fort

I have posted other parts of Jacques La Ramie legend from time to time, but this is the first I have blogged about the confusion with all things Laramie.

So where did all this start? A recent book where a man, riding the all-new transcontinental RR, got off at Fort Laramie. Oops!

Break time in the park

Fort Laramie and the Plains Indian Culture

Until 1834 Americas vast buffalo plains were wild and untouched by eastern society and business. All that changed when William Sublette built the small, Fort William, on the Laramie and Platte Rivers of today’s Wyoming. Society and eastern business came west and stationed itself behind the 18 foot high stacked earth and cottonwood walls of the fort the trappers already called Laramie.

Much of the fur trade in America’s northwest and south were already controlled by far removed big business and now the great free trappers and traders of the plains and Rocky Mountains had eastern business in their midst.

White men had hunted and trapped this area for two decades, living, dressing, eating and hunting like their nomad brothers of the plains. Many married into the tribes, happy with the roaming freedom of the plains Indians.

Over the Laramie River from the Fort

With the building of Fort Laramie came a separation of cultures. The walls of the fort kept the Indians out and let the white men in. When allowed inside, Indians were treated more like intruders than guests, a most opposite approach from the tribes who had welcomed whites into their world a few years earlier.

Trapper and Trader at Fort Laramie

In the year 1834 and the west was going through a huge change, a change that would bring bloodshed to the plains for more than a half century. The east had come west.

The Three Williams, John and a Fort Called Laramie

The famous Fort Laramie of the west was once Fort William. In June of 1834 the foundation log was laid at the fort on the North Platte and Laramie Rivers. William Anderson and William Sublette got into a gentlemen’s argument over what the fort should be named. Anderson wanted to name it Fort Sublette and you guessed it, Sublette thought Fort Anderson sounded like pure poetry on the plains. Anderson even offered a bottle of champagne (likely the only one for miles around) to sway Sublette.

Didn’t work, they continued the argument while downing the champagne. Tired of listening to the argument, although he did get a fair share of the champagne, William Patton offered a suggestion, “Let’s call it Fort William, all of our first names.” The name stuck and Fort William It was.

By 1841 the fort was named after John Sarpy a fur trader at the fort. By Gold Rush time it was Fort Laramie a three year old military post. The new name was given to it by mistake in Saint Louis when a not very efficient clerk, addressed something to Fort Laramie instead of Fort William on the Laramie. And that name stuck.