Series: Georeferencing historic ghost town maps -- Carbon, Wyoming

I became obsessed with this ghost town when I was in grad school at the University of Wyoming. This post features some writing I did back in 2014 along with the interactive ESRI javascript API map below and some other maps and photographs. Enjoy!

Founded in 1868, Carbon, Wyoming was an important coal mining town for the Union Pacific Railroad company, who was racing to complete their transcontinental line. From the scattered ruins and size of the cemetery, it would appear that Carbon was no larger than a couple hundred residents, but at its height, it was probably over a thousand people. Different sources report a few conflicting figures. Census data from 1900 shows Carbon to be about 650 residents, but this was well after its peak population. The 1900 Wyoming Business Directory gives Carbon a round 1,000 residents, as does an 1894 fire insurance map available through the Library of Congress. At its height, there were seven different mines in operation, worked by roughly 600 miners, so it stands to reason that if women and children were added to this number, the total population would be somewhere north of 1,500. Exact population figures from the late 1800s sources are dubious—many of the miners were immigrants who constructed “dugouts” in the hillsides, and were probably not counted in official tallies. Whatever the figure, it is of little doubt that Carbon was an important city in frontier Wyoming. Author Donald Miller claims that it “grew to rival nearby Cheyenne.”

Photo by Nick Swartz

The town expanded quickly, and these dugout or stone structures were built in lieu of wood, which is patently unavailable in the Shirley Basin. As author Mary Lou Pence writes in Ghost Towns of Wyoming that in early Carbon, “reclining against the sage slopes, the stovepipes bobbed upward and outward like inquisitive gopher heads.” Census data shows many of the immigrants were first generation Americans, a large portion of Finnish, Welsh, and Scottish descent. One crude, hand-drawn map I obtained from the museum in nearby Hanna labels one domicile as containing the “town's only negro.”

Coal was the lifeblood of the town. The land around Carbon was leased by Thomas Wardell in 1868 from the Union Pacific company. He then sold the mined coal back to the Union Pacific. At Carbon's peak, 200 tons of coal per day was being harvested. At six dollars per ton, the buyback price set by the lessee, Wardell was one rich fellow by late 1800s standards (or by any standards). The Union Pacific did not appreciate having to buy coal that was mined from land they owned, and eventually ended Wardell's lease. From the town's founding, conflict abounded. The Union Pacific felt it did not exert enough control of Carbon's mineral interests, and the town's labor force was at the mercy of greedy businessmen. This, combined with the harshness of the landscape, Carbon's propensity for accidents and fire, and lack of water, was an unsustainable cocktail. Labor strikes were commonplace, the first occurring 1870, just a short two years after the founding of the town. Strikes also occurred in 1871, 1873, and in 1874, when workers were suspended during the Union Pacific's takeover of mining operations from Wyoming Coal Company. Turbulently, mining continued through the 1890s, when the frustrated Union Pacific shifted its coal interest to nearby Hanna, a quintessential company town, where even the doctors were under employ of the railroad. Like many Western towns, Carbon only lasted as long as its extractable resources. Prophetically, the editor of the Laramie Sentinel wrote in an 1878 profile, “I find that the deposit of coal convenient for mining in this immediate vicinity is likely to soon be exhausted... In several localities in the neighborhood the mines are on fire and the beds of coal are being gradually but surely consumed.” Thus Carbon's reign was short-lived, but during its hurried life, it provided history with a snapshot of the mythical Old West.

Carbon in its short heyday (from Hanna Basin Museum)

For residents of Carbon, life was not easy. For most, it consisted of long days mining coal, under constant threat of fire, explosion, Indian attack or the wild weather of the plains. There are several documented accidents, including horrific mining mishaps, gruesome railroad fatalities, devastating fires, and crippling blizzards. Local newspapers of the day, such as the Laramie Sentinel and Laramie Independent, abound with stories of mining accidents, of “caves” occurring, and of men receiving “fearful lacerations” and of being buried “under 20 or 30 tons of rock and debris.” Medical treatment was crude—one miner died “in consequence of a finger wound from a piece of rust iron.” One man, recently laid off from the mine, drunkenly trespassed into a mining site, “and without knowledge of the premises, walked into the hole. His body was cold when found.” These frightful accidents, it seems, were a bit commonplace, and coverage of them was decidedly blunt. For example, here is an excerpt from an article covering one such ghastly incident:

“This morning at about half past ten o'clock two men, Fassett and Wilpenn, were very badly injured by a premature explosion of a blast in one of the mines of this place. Fassett's face and limbs are mutilated in a fearful manner. It is thought now that both parties will recover... Later reports state that both men will probably lose an eye, and perhaps both.”

It was truly a tough place. In one mining accident involving a German immigrant, it is reported that the family was more concerned with the victim's paycheck than the actual loss of a family member: “yet hardly had the deceased been buried, before they were around to the coal company's office to obtain the wages that were due Vollmert.”

Unfortunately children were not exempt from these coaling accidents. To prevent build-up of toxic and volatile gas in the mines, crude ventilation systems were devised wherein doors would be opened and closed intermittently to clear the mine of vapors with aide of the prevailing winds. Since men were needed for the more demanding jobs “young boys” operated the ventilation systems, according to Donald Miller. Ventilation was of the utmost importance, as headlamps at this point in time were essentially oil-powered, open-flame candle sombreros. Once a child reached adolescence, he was given the dubious honor of working as a “spragger.” A spragger, as Miller explains, shoved “pointed wooden poles into the spokes of ore cars” to decelerate them as they entered the mine, while other teenagers were responsible for quickly removing the “sprags” from the moving cars when they needed to pick up speed. You can imagine that a twenty-year-old man with no burn scars and ten fingers was a rare find in Carbon. All told, 41 miners died in underneath Carbon in its history, according to the Hanna Basin Museum, an average of a little more than one per year. Carbon was spared any huge single mining catastrophe, but the city of Hanna, where many Carbonites were forced to settle after Carbon was abandoned, suffered horrific losses from two separate mining explosions in 1903 and 1908, the first killing 169 miners, the second, 59. On my first visit to Carbon's cemetery, I noted the presence of a headstone with the haunting inscription: “Died in Hanna Explosion. June 30, 1903. Age 19 Yrs. 11 Ms.

Railroad accidents were equally as frequent. News reports were littered with reports of heads being severed, limbs being thrashed, and brakemen losing control. Journalists covered these misfortunes in the same matter-of-fact manner, sparing no gruesome detail, which has a way of shedding light on the ruggedness and what their lives must have consisted of. One blunt headline in the Rawlins Sentinel in 1879 reads simply: “LOST A THUMB.” One 1873 Laramie Independent article about a train wreck survivor states “the fact that he was pressed between the track and the ash pan goes to show that a man may, in a pinch, take up a very small space.” Some even made light of gruesome like this Independent article about a man who was dragged 20 feet by a train:

“everyone present thought him fearfully mangled, from the condition of his clothing, and no one ventured to touch him, so nothing was done until the arrival of Doctor Harris. On examination, he discovered that the clothing was about all that was damaged, and that Mr. Charles Cameron [the victim] could be thoroughly renovated at B. Hellman's clothing store.”

From the 1900 Wyoming Business Directory, an ad for Carbon's 600-seat opera house

While mining accidents were considered tragedies, and victims at least treated with some respect. Many railroad mishaps, it seems, were considered solely the fault of the victim. Perhaps it set readers' minds at ease to think that rail deaths occurred through negligence or drunkenness, rather than bad luck or unsafe conditions. Journalists were particularly tough on those seeking free passage on the rails. An 1873 Laramie Independent chronicles an accident involving a “young man who was stealing a ride between two of the forward cars.” The articles concludes by stating, “the wheels passed over his head, crushing it to a jelly and scattering his brains along the track.” A similar Rawlins Sentinel article from 1875 reads, “just after dark this evening a man was discovered being dragged along under a freight train through the yard at this place... He proved to be James Kelly, a worthless inebriate who has for years been laying around Rawlins and Carbon.” (A final grisly but ironic story: in 1872, a brakeman had his head severed when he was struck by a train at a station near Carbon called “Separation”).

When its citizens weren't being dragged by trains or crushed underneath tons of coal, they had other hazards to contend with, namely fire, the elements, and Indians. Indian raids were somewhat common, and the newspapers, it seems, loved stories of “Bad Indians,” and sought to paint a sinister portrait of Native Americans when at all possible. One Rawlins Sentinel article, about Utes setting fires to white property closed by asking, “is it not time the government took those red devils in hand?” One article stated, “from all appearances a general Indian outbreak may be anticipated,” as if “Indian” were some kind of plague that could sweep through an elementary school like chicken pox. Most actual raids involved the theft of livestock and took place away from the city itself. Some resulted in ranchers being “cruelly beat” or sometimes killed. Though hysteria over Indian encounters abounded, it appears, in Carbon anyway, the threat of Indians was largely hype, and residents were far more likely to lose a limb or two, or a head, by way of their own industrial doing.

Fires were common in Carbon, and because the city's water had to be pumped in from a well two miles away, there was often little to do but congregate with the townsfolk and watch the show. In 1873 a shoe shop was set ablaze, according to the Rawlins Sentinel, who, of course, covered the story with their signature frankness, “the building was nearly destroyed when the fire was discovered, and nothing was saved. A young German man was burned up in the building.” Two larger fires devastated Carbon, the second so badly that it helped set in motion the permanent abandonment of the town. According to the Wyoming Almanac, this 1890 fire was started when a lodger at the Scranton House Hotel, Carbon's largest, knocked over a kerosene lamp while skirmishing with bed bugs. It destroyed almost the whole central business district of Carbon. Ironically, what still stands today are the walls of the stone domiciles that belonged to the cities poorer residents. Because wood was scarce, it was something of a status symbol, but patently more prone to fire and time. So it is the city's working class residents who have the last laugh.

This map shows the variety of building materials used in Carbon.  If you compare this map with the interactive one I made up top, you'll see that the stone structures are the ones that are still visible on the landscape.  Very little remains from the town's main street, which was almost wholly wiped out by fire and time. (Map by Nick Swartz)

One of the remaining stone walls in Carbon (photo by Nick Swartz)

My wife Diana in quiet contemplation 

Escaping the elements was a constant necessity in Carbon, as well as the rest of the state. With no trees and a constant wind, it was often difficult to even get structures to stand upright. Donald Miller notes that there were four churches in Carbon, one of which blew down three times before being completed. Talk about devotion. Winters were brutal. Because Americans' sense of the West is derived from Hollywood, people do not realize that in Wyoming winter lasts eight months and temperatures can, with regularity, plummet to 30 below zero. One Laramie Independent letter-to-the-editor from 1873 reads, “the weather is excessively cold tonight. The mercury has punched the top clear out of our thermometer and started up the other side of the house.” Another story in 1869 recounts the tragic tale of two rail workers, who, in the grips of a blizzard, failed to hear an approaching train and were struck and snagged, “one in the driving wheel of the engine and literally torn to pieces... the other was caught below the pilot of the engine and similarly ground up.”

Considering their circumstances, it is no wonder many of Carbon's residents turned to booze. Alcoholism was rampant on the frontier, and Carbon was no exception. By 1875, there was a temperance society in town called the Sons of Temperance. A letter-to-the-editor from 1875 stated that in Carbon “a good hotel is much needed, and a sober shoemaker would get rich here. In the past our shoemakers have invariably wet their leather too much.” Fights were common. There were numerous saloons. Men were known to get “drunk enough to be ugly and quarrelsome” as one newspaper reported.

There were, however, some bright spots that shown through the coal dust. There were artists—a married couple, the Silvises, “excell[ed] as artists, and receive[d] visitors daily.” There was also music. The Sons of Temperance hosted events where the Carbon String Band would perform. There was also a singing school for children. When I visited the Hanna Basin Museum, I was shown several artifacts of the musical history of both Carbon and Hanna. The curator, a sweet old lady named Nancy Anderson, showed me around and explained that in these lonely coal towns, music provided an escape from bleakness. My research sources are sharply biased in favor of death and destruction— newspapers do not report if someone had a cheerful day and nothing bad happened to him. Headlines do not read: Still Have Both Thumbs. Life surely had bright spots for these people. The fact that they were in such a wild, dangerous place and managed to construct a functioning city and a new way of life must have provided some solace. Business Directory records show that there was a 600-seat opera house in town, where much of the town probably congregated to hear the bands or kids' choir concerts. There was a successful school, run by a devoted teacher and talented artist named Mr. Hilton. There was a billiard hall and numerous churches, some of which have foundations still standing. The people would have had to be close to one another. I can see no other way for such a place to have thrived. The horrific events that I have quoted from the newspapers always contained a follow-up obituary or described how the whole town was given a day off to mourn. One article from 1871 reports the safe birth of quadruplets in Carbon to a happy new mother named Mooney. The odds of quadruplets being born and safely delivered in a town of 1,000 in 1871 must have been astronomical. But Carbon was an unlikely place. The city's most unlikely resident: a cockatoo owned by a local shop owner. The bird was it seems, something of a rascal, as he could be found “pulling pins out of garments, drawing nails out of shingles on the roof, and kissing the ladies and children in a very tender manner.”

So there was a certain duality to Carbon—gloomy, dangerous, bleak, lifeless, yet wild, exuberant, communal, and industrious. One final quote from a Laramie Sentinel correspondent describing Carbon sums up the curious and conflicting nature of the town:

“the little window gardens were there, with beautiful young flowers making the air fragrant with perfume, and pretty cages of domesticated singing birds made music all around. I wish I could have noted the fact that this cheerfulness was general in the town, but it is not. It is confined to a few families.”

By the turn of the twentieth century, mining in Carbon had largely ceased, and the Union Pacific, frustrated by the constant tension between laborers and management, and facing a dwindling supply of coal, moved their mining operations to Hanna. By 1908, Carbon's population was down to 15 souls, and the town contained only one business: John Milliken's “Saloon and Ice Dealer.” Even the Carbon State Bank had moved to Hanna. Like so many other towns in the West, the tide of capitalism had turned, and Carbon was left to fallow.

Like Carbon, this poor antelope did not make it. (photo: Nick Swartz)

Sunset at the Carbon cemetery (photo: Nick Swartz)

Sources:

Meschter, Daniel Y. 1970. A Carbon County Chronology. Self-published, Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Miller, Donald C. 1977. Ghost Towns of Wyoming. Boulder, CO:Pruett Publishing

Pence, Mary Lou and Homsher, Lola M. 1956. The Ghost Towns of Wyoming. New York: Hastings House Publishers.

Roberts,Philip J.; Roberts, David L.; Roberts, Steven L. 1989. Wyoming Almanac. Seattle, WA and Laramie, WY: Skyline West Press.