Preserving South Pass: Part four of four

With dwindling state funds and the legislature gearing up for what could be a divisive budget session next year, author Will Bagley and the Alliance for Historic Wyoming remind readers of The Underground why preservation of Wyoming's history is important. This is part four of a four-part series authored by Will Bagley.

Photo: Historic South Pass City, legendsofamerica.com

Get Rich Quick at South Pass
Will Bagley

South Pass, the remote gateway where the Sweetwater River cuts through the Rockies between Farson and Sweetwater Station, Wyoming, has always been a hard place to get rich—and a terrible place to get rich quick. A few of the first adventurers to see the pass made fortunes trapping beaver in the Green River Basin, revolutionizing the American fur trade in the process, and a handful of the miners who joined the gold rush to South Pass City in 1867 did well, but for every person who hit the big time, a hundred went bust, lost everything they owned or loved on earth, or died young.

Not every Americans went west in the 19th century with dreams of getting rich, but nobody went without hoping they could build a better life in a new world offering such extraordinary opportunities. With their enormous capacity for hard work and an astonishing ability to endure suffering and hardship, many found that life, including some of the homesteaders who proved up 160-acre claims along the Sweetwater and its tributaries. The toughest of them coaxed enough cattle through the brutal winters to buy out their less resilient neighbors and build viable ranches. These men and women and their incredible families created and protected the landscape that makes South Pass so remarkable today.

A handful of speculators—the fur-trade barons who traded pelts for supplies at a dime on the dollar and the Mormon merchants and ferry owners who started the 1867 gold rush—did get rich promoting South Pass, but the families that survived and prospered at South Pass did not get rich quick. And since nothing changes under the sun, the situation remains the same: the only fortunes being made at South Pass are founded on economic principles as noble as the financial derivatives that over the last decade fabricated enough toxic assets to make a few scoundrels fabulously wealthy while drowning the world’s economy.

Current schemes to get rich at South Pass are based on American free-market strategies as old as P. T. Barnum and Mel Brooks. As Barnum realized, there’s a sucker born every minute, and as Brooks outlined in a Broadway hit, the path to great wealth is seldom straight and narrow. In The Producers, two speculators plan to get rich producing a bomb—a musical called “Springtime for Hitler”—and pocket the 585% of the profits they’ve sold to investors—see Barnum’s “suckers.” Their clever plan goes awry when the show becomes a hit—a fate that gas-patch lore overtook a Texas oilman, scion of a prominent bush-league political dynasty, not far west of South Pass. He and his fellow crooks oversold shares in a Pinedale gas field, banking on not finding any gas. When they hit a bonanza, they solved the problem by pouring concrete down the problematic prospect hole.

Such speculations are still making fortunes at South Pass. Not far west of the pass, a wildcat oil company drilled the world’s deepest dry hole. A couple of summers ago, the Fremont Gold Corporation, the American dummy for Canadian speculators, dug 200 test pits five miles southeast of the pass for a proposed placer gold mine. Placer mining—or “gold washing” as it was known, hasn’t worked at South Pass since the first prospectors cleaned out the creeks and demolished a few hillsides with hydraulic “monitors.” But if you think the Fremont Gold Corporation lost money at South Pass, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you.

The latest get-rich-quick South Pass scam is built of nothing more than air—moving air, what we call wind. A place as windy and remote as South Pass must be an ideal spot for a wind farm, right? Wrong: they are actually industrial wind power plants, benignly called “farms,” which they are not. The impractical wind schemes being pitched for South Pass would require backup coal-fired plants to take over when the wind stopped or roared. Most of the juice generated in Wyoming would disappear on its way to California. The scam only makes economic sense as part of carbon-credit shell game that would actually promote burning more coal.

“The wind in the Pass is usually moderate and silent,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, but “it is an avalanche down the eastern gulches of the range.” Generating power profitably from moving air requires constant and steady zephyrs, not the temperamental winds ranging from gusts to gales that whisper or roar over South Pass. The arctic hurricanes that blast through the great gap every winter might make it less than an ideal location to maintain a stand of ungainly wind turbines—but you can bet your bottom-dollar a few hardy entrepreneurs already have schemes that will get you in on the ground floor of Wyoming’s wind boom. Bank on it: there’s one born every minute.

Author’s Biographical Note: Will Bagley’s dozen books cover the overland emigration, frontier violence, railroads, mining, and the Mormons. He is series editor of the documentary history, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier. His Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows won the Western History Association’s Caughey Book Prize. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he served as a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow. Bagley wrote this series in cooperation with the Alliance for Historic Wyoming.

To get involved with the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, visit http://historicwyoming.org.