Say the word ‘gold’ and strange things happen.

Take, for example, the gold rush that swept through the dusty streets of Shoshoni in 1906, the year the city was officially founded.

Women ran through the city with aprons full of dust and well-dressed hotel owners bent over willingly to shovel piles of dirt into a dustpan and brush.

The Shoshoni Gold Rush is a Wyoming story of the West, built on small traces of gold that initially seemed promising enough to quickly turn a makeshift tent city into a bustling frontier town. It dried up almost as quickly when grand mining ambitions failed to match the reality of what lay buried beneath the ground.

The story of Shoshoni’s early years was unearthed by Thermopolis historian Jackie Dorothy as part of research celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wind River trek, which made its first stop in Shoshoni.

Dorothy found the story in the Wyoming Semaphore, a newspaper published in the early 1900s, under the headline “Rich Streets of Shoshoni” with a subheading “Gold in the Streets of Shoshoni! And This Is Literally True.”

It was early September and the air was getting crisper. It promised that cold snow would soon fall on Wyoming’s newest small tent camp, the “hell on wheels” set up by the Pioneer Townsite Company.

The nickname referred to the many rough and noisy towns that sprang up along the newly built railroads, some of which grew into permanent settlements, such as Cheyenne, Laramie, and Shoshoni.

The Pioneer Townsite Company was a subsidiary of the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad and was later acquired by the Chicago and North Western Transportation Company.

People flocked to this small railroad town, excited by reports of valuable metals in the area: gold, silver, copper.

One of these plans was bound to succeed and those who got in early had the best chance of getting rich.

Among these hopeful early entrants was Asmus Boysen, who had made a fortune by taking big risks in banking, mining and real estate.

Feverish pitch

To understand how so many townspeople could be enticed to scour the streets of Shoshoni for gold, it helps to realize how high the fever was at the time.

The Wyoming Derrick, another newspaper of the time, had reported in 1905 that copper and gold were lying freely on the ground at Copper Mountain, near Shoshoni, and that the ore “seemed to improve as the tunnel was dug, the gold ore increasing in value, until it is now fabulously rich.”

The Thermopolis Record, meanwhile, reported in its June 3, 1905, newspaper that it was the “almost unanimous opinion of experienced miners that this district (Copper Mountain) would become one of the richest mining prospects ever developed in the Rocky Mountain region.”

Shoshoni was ideally situated to serve this new mining area, and newspaper advertisements of every kind promoted Shoshoni as America’s “Garden Spot,” with thousands of acres of land available free to settlers.

There was a “home for anyone who asked” and for only 35 cents a home seeker could purchase a map and guide to “God’s own country.”

People of the time also knew that Boysen, a man famously and fabulously wealthy, was hanging around with his own mining claims on Copper Mountain, and that he planned to build a dam that would provide the cheap electricity that copper mining—and one day gold mining—would need to be economically viable.

These cumulative reports and excessive advertising resulted in nearly 2,000 hopeful souls coming to Shoshoni in 1906.

In the 23 bars of the tent city, where drinking was as liberal as the whisky, it was suggested that the future looked bright for everyone in this new hell on wheels.

There was undoubtedly wealth to be found on the other side of the hill.

An unfortunate accident and a rush

It was in this vicinity that a prospector named Houtz happened to bring some of his gold dust from the mountains to town to have it appraised. He was showing it off in front of one of Shoshoni’s hotels when he accidentally dropped his precious dust on the street.

He knelt down, desperately trying to scoop up the gold dust before the wind blew it away.

“Passersby asked what he was doing,” Dorothy said.

When he said there was some gold dust on the street, the news spread faster than a lightning strike — but it was like a game of tin telephone. What ended up happening was that people thought there was just gold on the surface of the streets of Shoshoni itself.

Housewives and hotel owners brought out brooms and dustpans to sweep up the dust from the streets. If nothing else was available, hands and aprons or pockets would do just as well.

There was a lot of money to be made here on the streets and no one wanted to be left out.

“Bets were being taken as to whether the sand really contained gold,” Dorothy said. “And when the shiny metal began to make its appearance at the bottom of (Houtz’s) pan, the excitement shot up to 130 in the shade.”

That even brought skeptics out into the streets, some with picks and shovels, while others made do with whatever soil they could find to fill their pockets or aprons.

“A woman scooped up as much fabric as she could from the front of a new silk skirt,” Dorothy said.

That load of dirt must have weighed at least 20 pounds, Dorothy said.

Finding Gold on Tough Creek

According to Dorothy, the subsequent report in the local newspaper did nothing to quell the gold rush that was sweeping through the town and now literally turning the streets of Shoshoni upside down.

That report stated that the “richest discovery made in this part of the country” had been made on Tough Creek, 7 miles northeast of Shoshoni, in the direction of Copper Mountain.

According to the newspaper article, gold mining had been going on at Tough Creek for some time, but not in any paying quantity.

“The story of the rich strike so near the city comes from sources whose veracity is unquestioned,” the newspaper article said. “The estimated value of the ore has not yet been ascertained, but it is said to be extremely high. A large crowd of prospectors, including women, set out for the scene of the crime on Thursday morning.”

The reports at Tough Creek only added fuel to the rumors of gold in the Shoshoni streets.

Even the governor had gold fever

The residents of Shoshoni were not the only ones suffering from the fever.

Governor Bryant Butler Brooks told the American Mining Congress that there were already more than 500 mining claims near Copper Mountain.

“Just yesterday,” Brooks said, “one of the greatest mining stampedes ever witnessed occurred in central Wyoming, when 700 miners flocked to the Owl Creek Mountains, which have just been opened to mining with the opening of the Indian reservation.”

With such talk abounding in Wyoming, it wasn’t long before Shoshoni grew and filled with hopeful businesses looking to stake their own claim on Main Street. They hoped to gain their own share of the gold and riches by supplying a burgeoning mining town with lucrative goods and services.

A wide main street was created with two general stores, two supermarkets, an ironmonger’s, a harness and saddlery, a drugstore, a timber yard, a barber shop, a butcher’s shop, three restaurants, two log cabin hotels, two boarding houses, three restaurants, two blacksmith shops and a livery stable.

The Voss Hotel, which in photographs looked like an exceptionally long log cabin, had 16 “first-class rooms,” as well as a fine drawing room, a handsome dining room, and a spacious kitchen measuring 16 by 18 feet.

There was also the CH King Lumberyard and the Wind River National Bank, established by several hopeful investors who had supported the Stockgrowers National Bank of Cheyenne, and many other traders hoping to make money.

The beginning of the end

A rock-drilling contest at Shoshoni helped capture the town’s excitement about its future. The photo, dated 1908, brought what seemed like the entire town to the town square for a celebration—a town that was beginning to look quite civilized.

But that was the height of fortune favoring mining interests for Shoshoni, according to historical records. From there it was all downhill.

The gold did not turn out as hoped. There was some gold, but it was not at all economic.

There was still hope for copper, but as the gold rush waned, entrepreneurs moved to other towns, such as nearby Riverton.

The Boysen dam, which was needed to make copper mining economically viable, became embroiled in litigation, dashing those hopes as well.

The dam was ready for use in 1908, but it was not until 1913 that it began generating electricity reliably.

Until 1930, five years after the dam had silted up and the power plant had been decommissioned, lawsuits against the dam continued.

Boysen, who had come to Shoshoni at the age of 38, lost his entire fortune—more than $3 million. He returned to Chicago penniless.

His fortune may have been lost, but his vision was ultimately vindicated.

The Wyoming Bureau of Reclamation removed what was left of its dam in 1948 and built a new dam at a slightly different location. The new dam, completed in 1952, was named for Boysen.

Boysen’s vision will long be remembered by history, even though he turned out to be just one of thousands of speculators who came to Shoshoni, Wyoming, with burning dreams of gold and a willingness to do anything to get it.

They discovered to their sorrow that dusty streets are rarely paved with gold and that fate does not always favor the brave.

Renee Jean can be reached at [email protected].