Historic Logging in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Southern Wyoming: Investigations of a Historic Logging Landscape

Summary

The historic logging industry began operations in the Sierra Madre Mountains of southern Wyoming in the late 1800s. Logging companies supplied timbers for the booming copper and gold mines in the area, and hand hewn railroad ties for the Union Pacific Railroad Company (Bruce 1959; Grasso et al. 1981; Thybony et al. 1985). Today remains of historic logging camps can be found throughout the Sierra Madre Mountains in the Medicine Bow National Forest. These camps are remnants of historic landscapes developed for the purpose of intensive logging operations at the turn of the century. The purpose of this paper is to present a historic context and preliminary research data for logging camps located along the East Fork Encampment River drainage in the Sierra Madre Mountains (Figure 1). Field data were collected over several seasons by archaeological survey crews of the Medicine Bow National Forest (Laurent 1987; McKee and Rossman 1992). One goal of the project was to investigate the distribution of critical resources including equipment, horse teams, transportation systems, and food for a large logging operation over a defined landscape. A second goal was to describe the variety of logging camp site types in the East Fork drainage. A third goal was to use preliminary data to target a representative sample of logging camps in the East Fork for more intensive sub-surface archaeological investigations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Wyoming Archaeologist 2009

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Contact(s): Marcia Peterson

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