The Wyoming Ghost Town of South Pass City

Hi, I'm Mark Medora. Today's Wild West is in South Pass City, a Wyoming State Historic Site that's an authentic slice of the Old West. We'll show you, coming up, on Today's Wild West. The old-time saloon piano plays again in South Pass City, just like it did more than 150 years ago. If someone were to come back in a time machine, they would recognize this town. Now a Wyoming State Historic Site, the Wild West Mining Town is home to two dozen authentic buildings, including three saloons, with lots of fascinating artifacts. We don't try to disguise that we use replicas, but if it looks old and it looks authentic, it likely came from this very town. Like the furniture, the bar, that kind of thing, date back to the early years of the town, too. There were 14 saloons here, where a few customers probably spent a night or two at the original Sweetwater County Jail. Not a place you'd want to stay. Yes, that's what a real jail was like. And some folks are just willing to put it right back into use again today. After the boom went bust, it became a schoolhouse. Yes, yep. The town sprung up after gold was discovered in 1867. This is the plate, and there's mine workings as small as this that are in upwards of 90 feet deep, historically. At its peak, 2,000 people lived here in the remote Wind River Mountains at an elevation of 8,000 feet, 35 miles south of present-day Lander, Wyoming. And the site is just eight miles north of the famous South Pass of the Oregon Trail, where you can still see the ruts of the wagon trains that carried half a million pioneers west in the 1800s. Back in 1869, South Pass City was the second-biggest town in Wyoming Territory. But the gold strike that triggered the boom soon went bust, and it wasn't long before South Pass City was as deserted as it is today. The boom quickly turned to bust, as it did in hundreds of places across the West. That surface gold, the placer deposits and the diggings on the creeks usually dries up within a season or two or three. But thanks to new mining technology, South Pass City boomed again in the 1890s. We invented this in Colorado in the 1890s, and it revolutionized mining because instead of throwing away your tailing after your first crushing, you could recirculate it over another piece of equipment and produce a concentrate again. You could tour the hard rock mining operation that in today's dollars produced nearly $300 million worth of gold. I usually start with a bunch of ominous type warnings about abandoned mine sites. The underground mine went bust again, then boomed again in the 1920s and again in the 1940s before finally shutting down for good in the early 50s, leaving behind the last generation of equipment, much of it operable. So now everybody in the mine knows level three is tall, and then they signal what they want. If you want to come up one more, hoist me up. And those golf ball sized pieces slide down the chute, they drop into a bucket elevator. Wyoming State Parks offers guided tours in the summer. This is great. People don't know what they're missing if they haven't had a chance to take this tour and see how gold was really mined here. After the tour, you can wander the historic town. If you're looking for the Old West, South Pass City is the real deal. And it really represents an authentic situation. This is not a reconstruction from the ground up. People are looking at 20 historic structures on their original locations. Esther Morris, a Justice of the Peace known as America's first female public official, lived here. And there are homes in town that look just like they did back in the day, thanks to generous donations from relatives of the families who once lived here. That's a family piece too. South Pass City is living history. They'll be baking cookies in here next weekend. You can experience for yourself in today's Wild West. Folks understand that, I think, when they leave this place, that that was the real thing.