Atop the world are the Laramie Plains, an extensive plateau situated on top of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of around 7,000 feet above sea level. They extend some hundred miles north and south from the Colorado line to Laramie Peak, and are some fifty miles wide from the crest of the Laramie Mountains (Black Hills) on the east, to the Medicine Bow Mountains on the west. The plains, along with the rivers and mountains, all bear the name Laramie, from Jacques LaRamie, an early day French trapper who was killed by Indians in 1820 near the mouth of the river that now bears his name. Miss Hebard gave an account of his activities, but nothing about his origin except that he came from Canada as a freelance fur trader after working with the Northwest Fur Company. Mrs. Null of St. Charles, Missouri states that a family of LaRamies live there who might be related to Jacques LaRamie, as the French settlement there dated from the fur trading days when St. Louis was a fur trading center. St. Charles is about fifteen miles northwest of St. Louis and on the north side of the Missouri River. It was a town at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806). She states that Fabian LaRamie, a resident of St. Charles at the present time, told her that his father, now 91 years of age, thinks that Jacques LaRamie could be his grandfather’s uncle, for his forefathers were all fur traders and came through Canada.
Resources of the Laramie Plains
Since the early days, the Laramie Plains have produced a variety of natural resources including fur, game, minerals, timber, and livestock. The fact that the Laramie Plains are perched on top of the Rocky Mountains is well shown on the physiographic map, with the rugged contours of the mountains surrounding the plains on three sides, the east, south, and west, and almost encircling them on the north with a series of broken ranges west of Laramie Peak.
The fact that the Laramie Plains were the battlefield of the northern and southern Indian tribes indicates their desirability as a hunting ground, with plenty of grass for game animals. The Medicine Bow mountains were named in part for the bow woods growing there.
General Ashley, one of the early travelers across the Laramie Plains in March 1825, stated that he “was delighted with the variegated scenery presented by the valleys and mountains which were enlivened by innumerable herds of buffalo, antelope, and mountain sheep grazing on them; and what mostly added to their interest in the whole scene were the many small streams issuing from the mountains, bordered with a thin growth of small willows and richly stocked with beaver.” 1Today, a hundred and thirty years later, we have plenty of willows, beaver, antelope, and deer on these Laramie Plains.
Here on the Laramie Plains is one of the incidents tying up the fattening of travel-weary oxen and an established ranch business carrying cattle over the winter and raising calves on the range. The pioneer ranchers of the Laramie Plains who were the first to engage in the livestock business here were Tom Alsop, Charley Hutton, and Phil Mandel.
Tom Alsop, a prominent cattleman of early Wyoming range days, spent his life on the Laramie Plains and built up a ranch empire. Information about his experience with abandoned oxen has been provided by his son John Alsop, who lives in St. George, Utah. Tom Alsop, born in England in 1832, came to New York State with his parents when five years old. He came to Wyoming in 1860 as the foreman of a string of bull teams for Ed Creighton of Omaha. He had fifty wagons with four to five bulls per wagon and ran these wagons from Omaha to Deadwood and Oaha to Salt Lake City. When returning from Salt Lake City in 1863 he was caught in a snowstorm on Sherman Hill in December and could not turn a wheel. He was forced to turn the oxen loose to shift for themselves and as he and his men rode horseback to Omaha, he fully expected the oxen to die of exposure and starvation in this wintry, snowy country. The next spring he and his men returned to salvage what they could of their wagon train and oxen and were flabbergasted to find the oxen not only alive but healthy and fat on Sand Creek, a sheltered valley some twenty miles west of Sherman Hill. Evidently, Tom Alsop, as well as his employer Ed Creighton remembered this incident, for when they finished up a grading contract on the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868 in western Wyoming near Bridger Station, Tom Alsop and another hired hand, Charlie Hutton, returned to Laramie and with the financial backing of their boss Ed Creighton they started in the ranching business with headquarters at the Stage Crossing of the Big Laramie River, some eight miles southwest of Laramie City 2.
“In February 1871 Haley and Fox slaughtered a four-year-old steer, the first and only one of that age ever raised from a calf here on the Laramie Plains and it is a sight to see the carcass. The meat weighed 982 pounds dressed, the fat on the outside of the meat on the ribs is fully two inches thick. This steer has always run at large on the plains, having no feed but grass, summer and winter, not even having been fed hay in the winter.” 3
The partnership of Creighton, Hutton, and Alsop was dissolved after the death of Ed Creighton in 1874. Alsop took the ranch on the west side of the river while Hutton took the portion on the east side. Then, in 1880, Alsop sold his ranch to Balch and Bacon and his cattle and brand to Dr. W. Harris, who took the cattle and brand to Johnson County. There, in 1892, the Harris ranch, called the TA ranch after the brand, became famous as the headquarters for the “whitecap” invaders when they were besieged by the settlers after the invaders had come into the country with the avowed purpose of executing rustlers and had killed Nate Champion and “Nick” Ray 4.
Tom Alsop was a native of England and, like other countrymen, had an inherent love for, and skill with, livestock. He loved good cattle, horses, and sheep. 5. Besides raising cattle and sheep, Alsop raised high-class Morgan horses to furnish motive power for the streetcars of large cities of that time. Many of the streetcar horses used in Omaha came from Alsop’s ranch south of Laramie. Tom Alsop was one of the first men to have sheep as well as cattle, and in 1870 the partnership of Creighton, Hutton, and Alsop brought to Laramie 3,000 head of sheep from Iowa. In 1870 one of Alsop’s sheep herders found an enormous mountain lion in one of the pits scooped out of the sandrock by the wind and rain. This was undoubtedly one of the pits, close to, if not the one, known today as the “Animal Trap,” just west and south of Chimney Rock. The lion could not be taken from the pit alive, so was shot and skinned. The skin, measuring eight feet seven inches from tip to tip, was hung up as a trophy in the Alsop home. Alsop raised one shorthorn steer that was quite famous. The steer stood seven feet three inches high at the shoulders and weighed 2,360 pounds. This steer never got very fat for he was so high from the ground that he had to stand in low places and graze the higher ones like on ditch banks. He was shipped to Omaha but broke his leg and ended up in the soap factory.
Tom Alsop moved to the Little Laramie around 1880 and purchased land from Charley Chase and others. He planted the grove, the dead trees of which still stand on the Ralph May ranch at the Junction of the Herrick and Sprague lanes, some 15 miles northwest of Laramie. He also built the large barn there for his horses, and it is a typical English-type barn with many box stalls for the blooded horses.
Today some of the box stalls have been removed, but the barn still stands as a typical reminder of the early horse and livestock days of the Laramie Plains. More details concerning Mr. Alsop will be given in the chapter dealing with the Little Laramie ranches as this is the ranch known as the Alsop ranch today.
As mentioned, Charley Hutton retained the ranch on the Big Laramie River for a number of years. It will be described under the ranches of the Big Laramie. Charley Hutton favored Texas cattle, which were cheaper and took less feed, while Tom Alsop favored Shorthorn cattle, known in those days as Durhams, and fine Morgan horses, which took more care and feed but brought more returns.
The third pioneer, Phil Mandel, was a very early settler on the Laramie Plains. Phil Mandel had the first recorded filing on land in the Laramie Plains which was filed in Dakota territory, before Wyoming was a territory, in 1864. He was stage master at the Little Laramie River crossing of the Overland Stage route. The Bureau of Animal Industry Report for 1889-90 mentioned that, “early in the 60’s a man named Phillip Mendall (undoubtedly a misspelling of Mandel) took up a ranch on Lone Pine near the Little Laramie and concluded to try an experiment. He purchased all of the footsore, worn-out cattle from passing freighters, turned them out on the range, and found that they did remarkably well through the winter; but in the early spring the Indians made a raid upon him and captured almost his entire herd”. 6 Phil Mandel spent the rest of his life here on the Laramie Plains and his ranching operations will be described along with the other ranches on the Little Laramie River.
The operations of these three men definitely establish the Laramie Plains as the site of the early operations of the livestock industry in the Intermountain country. They started operations in the 60’s, which is earlier than the Newman ranches started in Nebraska, and Phil Mandel was contemporary with Si Kelly and others on the Chugwater who made a business of caring for and renovating worn-out wagon-train oxen of the freighters during the winter months.
Footnotes:- ASHLEY, Gen., Cited from “Wyoming from Territorial Days to the Present” by Frances B. Beard 1933 Page 33.[↩]
- Laramie Daily Boomerang, January 8, 1889[↩]
- Laramie Daily Sentinel, 2-23-1871, p. 3[↩]
- CLAY, John, My Life on the Range. Mention of Champion and Ray killed by Johnson County Invaders. Privately printed: Chicago, 1924[↩]
- Laramie Daily Sentinel, 6-25-1870[↩]
- B. A. I. (U.S.D.A.), Report for 1889-1890 Page 437.[↩]