William Frederick Cody, destined to become Buffalo Bill but now just called Will, galloped his pony beside the Sweetwater River through a great canyon where ambush was easy from a thousand crags. The young Pony Express rider’s mail pouch, or mochila, held a large sum of money. Fearing a holdup, Cody had stuffed waste papers into an extra mochila, which he had placed in the regular position while hiding the other under the saddle blanket. At a secluded spot, two holdup men showed themselves and leveled their rifles at Cody, trying to force him to stop and hand over the mochila. Will Cody raised the pouch and hurled it at the head of the nearest outlaw and then spurred his pony, knocking down the other road agent. Before the stunned robbers could shoot, Cody galloped out of range to arrive at his home station, Three Crossings, ahead of schedule and with all the money.
Truth or legend? Suffice it to say that many people have questioned the verity of that incident and the other daring Pony deeds allegedly pulled off by the young Buffalo Bill. Whether Will Cody even rode for that famous short-lived enterprise is debatable (see related story, P. 44). Cody would have been just 14 at the time. William Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell were supposedly looking for “young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over 18. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily,” and Will Cody did seem to fit the bill. Although there is no surviving official list of Pony Express riders from the time it was in operation, Cody said in his autobiography that he had been a rider, and a few others backed his story. Majors, who supposedly hired the lad, did write many years later that Cody’s Pony Express route was 116 miles long, between Red Buttes Station, along the North Platte, and Three Crossings Station of the Sweetwater (in what would become central Wyoming).
Plains Indians, of course, made plenty of Sweetwater crossings before white men passed that way. Arapahos, as well as their Sioux and Cheyenne allies, often made camp just north of Three Crossings. The grass and water were good there, and it was one of their choice buffalo hunting grounds. Supposedly, the river got its name because fur trappers told their boss, entrepreneur William Henry Ashley, that the water left a pleasant, sweet taste in their mouths. One of the first recorded visits to Three Crossings by white men occurred in March 1824, when Ashley and his trappers stopped there during a heavy snowstorm.
In the 1840s, many emigrants bound for Salt Lake City or the West Coast passed the Three Crossings area, in the Rattlesnake Range some 30 Oregon Trail miles past the Sweetwater landmark known as Devil’s Gate. At this location were a large meadow (later called Stampede Meadow) and a narrow canyon where travelers faced three difficult crossings of the river within about 11⁄2 miles (accounts differ as to actual mileage). It could have been worse. Luckily, the Sweetwater was rarely over a foot deep during the summer when the emigrants crossed the continent. On his way to the California gold fields in July 1849, J. Goldsborough Bruff wrote in his diary: “We forded the Sweetwater River. Gravelly bottom and swift current. Now a broad road, clouds of sand and impalpable dust—dimming the atmosphere, and covering and penetrating every thing, over rolling sand hills covered with sage. The river and road now enters a gorge of the mountains, perpendicular rock walls, from 400 to 600 ft. height on our right. This is a very narrow and rugged pass…we crossed and recrossed the stream again in 11⁄2 miles. Whirlwind of sand blowing through with a fresh breeze. The rocks here, wherever accessible, are marked all over with inscriptions, as usual. Thick growth of willows on the banks. Plenty remains of broken and burnt wagons here.” One of the greatest tragedies on the emigrant road—the mid-October 1856 stranding of the Willie Company that led to starvation and the death of 67 handcart-pushing Mormons bound for Salt Lake City—has a Three Crossings tie. Supplies were running out and temperatures were dipping when the Willie party crossed and recrossed the ice-cold winding Sweetwater, causing a bone-deep chill that wouldn’t go away. That night when they camped in the willows at Three Crossings, more than a foot of snow fell. The remaining draft animals scattered, and five people died. The dead were buried in a snowdrift, because no graves could be dug in the frozen ground.
During the Mormon War of 1857, the firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell was busy carrying military supplies from its headquarters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory, to Salt Lake City, so its freight wagons passed by Three Crossings of the Sweetwater regularly. About six miles northeast of present-day Jeffrey City (in Wyoming’s Fremont County), the central trail that they took on their way to and from Salt Lake divided for a short time—one branch went north through the gorge, and the other veered to the west around a hill. The freighters usually took the west branch of the trail because it crossed the river only once, although heavy rains sometimes turned a stretch of thick, heavy sand into quicksand. Most emigrants, though, opted to go north through the gorge, because pulling wagons through the deep sand was exhausting for their teams and because the Three Crossings of the Sweetwater provided water and forage for their stock.
The Mormon War was also a catalyst for weekly mail service to Salt Lake and beyond. Russell and another experienced freighter, John S. Jones, organized the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express Company (Waddell and Majors didn’t want to become involved at first), and in May 1859 they bought the contract of J.M. Hockaday and Company to transport the U.S. mail from St. Joseph, Mo., to Salt Lake City along the Oregon Trail. Financial problems brought Majors and Waddell into the picture that October. In February 1860, a reorganization of the bankrupt express company led to the birth of the Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company, under the old partners, Russell, Majors and Waddell. Stations were of course needed to support the express operation, and Three Crossings would serve as a stage station as well as a Pony Express relay station.
To speed up mail delivery, Russell, Majors & Waddell agreed to oversee and fund a government experiment to have men on horseback rather than stagecoaches do the carrying. The first official Pony Express ride occurred in early April 1860. “Russell, Majors, and Waddell fashioned the first Pony Express stations in the fall of 1859,” historian John McDermott writes in Dangerous Duty: A History of the Forts in Fremont County. “These included Three Crossings, Rocky Ridge, and South Pass Stations.”
But the station seems to have been there already. New York newspaperman Horace Greeley’s An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 was published in 1860; it was based on letters he wrote to The New York Tribune during his journey. Greeley wrote one of his letters from South Pass on July 5, 1859, and it included the following passage:
It was midnight of the 3d, when we reached the mail route station known as the Three-Crossings, from the fact that so many fordings of the Sweetwater (here considerably larger than at its mouth, forty miles or more below) have to be made within the next mile. We had been delayed two hours by the breaking away of our two lead-mules, in crossing a deep water-course after dark—or rather by the fruitless efforts of our conductor to recover them….
The main building of the stagecoach/Pony Express station was constructed of stone, and there were also log houses flanking it, a wooden stockade on the south side and a lookout on the northwest corner. Excellent horses and riders were of course needed so that the Pony Express could cross two-thirds of the continent in 10 days, but the whole complex scheme would not have worked without close to 200 of these relay stations (horses, after all, had to be changed every 10 or 20 miles).
A Mormon couple from England, Edward and Hannah Moore, were probably the first station keepers at Three Crossings. Just four months after the first Pony Express ride, British adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton traveled on one of Russell, Majors & Waddell’s Concord stagecoaches over what was essentially the same route used by the hard-riding mail carriers. On August 18, 1860, he recorded his observations of Hannah Moore and Three Crossings Station:
At 11 a.m. we reached “Three Crossings” where we found the “miss” [Mrs. Moore] a stout, active, middle-aged matron deserving all of the praises that had so liberally been bestowed upon her. The little ranch was neatly swept and garnished, papered and ornamented. The skull of a full-grown big horn hanging over the doorway represented the spoils of a stage of twelve. The tablecloth was clean, so was the cooking, so were the children; and I was reminded of Europe by the way in which she insisted upon washing my shirt….After a copious breakfast, which broke the fast of four days that had dragged on since our civilized refection at Fort Laramie, we spread our buffaloes and water-proofs under the ample eves of the ranch, and spent the day in taking time with the sextant—every watch being wrong—in snoozing, dozing, chatting, smoking, and contemplating the novel view. Straight before us rose the Rattlesnake Hills, a nude and grim horizon, frowning over the soft and placid scene below, while at their feet flowed the little river—splendidior vitro—purling over its pebbly bed with graceful meanderings through clover prairillons and garden-spots full of wild currants, strawberries, gooseberries, and rattlesnakes….We supped in the evening merrily. It was the best coffee we had tasted since leaving New Orleans, the cream was excellent, and so was the cheese….
Burton didn’t have such a rewarding dining experience at the station to the immediate east of Three Crossings. The Split Rock Station, operated by a French Canadian, proved to be a major disappointment. “Chicken and eggs there were none; butcher’s meat, of course was unknown, and our hosts ignored the name of tea; their salt was a kind of saleratus, and their sugar at least half Indian meal,” noted Burton. “When asked about fish, they said that the Sweetwater contained nothing but suckers, and that these, though good eating, cannot be caught with a hook….The breakfast was a little picture of ‘supper’ for watered milk, half baked bread and unrecognizable butter, we paid the somewhat ‘steep’ sum of $0.75.” On the other hand, Ice Slough (or Ice Springs) Station, to the immediate west of Three Crossings, had something out of the ordinary to offer—ice. Near the little station was a grassy swamp that drained into the Sweetwater River. The water under the vegetation froze solid in winter and remained that way until early summer, thus allowing travelers to dig into the earth about a foot to find chunks of ice and cold water.
Pony Express riders would only make their stops at Three Crossings and the other stations for 18 months—that’s as long as the whole experiment lasted. The last ride occurred in October 1861, when the United States was divided by war and the firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell was plagued by financial hardship. The completion of the overland telegraph helped assure the end of mounted mail carriers. Thanks largely to Buffalo Bill Cody’s memory (and/or his imagination) and his Wild West show, the Pony Express would be romanticized and fondly remembered. Cody’s pinpoint mochila toss and narrow escape from the two holdup men is not even his best-known Pony exploit.
Cody’s most legendary ride occurred in the summer of 1860. Young Will was carrying his mail-packed mochila west on his regular route from Red Buttes (just west of present-day Casper, Wyo.) to Three Crossings. He was exhausted and hungry as he neared his home station, but soon he would be passing on the pouch to a fresh rider on a fresh mount, and not long after that he would be enjoying one of Mrs. Moore’s fine hot meals and a good night’s rest. At least that was the usual scenario. But things were different this time. According to Majors’ much later account, Cody arrived at Three Crossings only to find that his relief rider had been killed in a brawl the previous night. With no relief in sight, Cody gulped down some food and drink, climbed aboard a new horse and rode another 70 or 80 miles west to Pacific Springs Station (or, according to other accounts, Rocky Ridge Station). This extra 11 hours in the saddle was bad enough, but there was more bad news at Pacific Springs. No rider was available there to carry the mail that was headed east.
No problem…at least nothing the teenager couldn’t handle. Cody was soon back in the saddle heading east at a full gallop. He made it back to Three Crossings on time and then continued to uphold the challenging schedule all the way to Red Buttes. In all, Cody spent 22 almost continuous hours on the backs of 21 horses and covered 384 miles, more or less. Yes, it could have been considerably less. Christopher Corbett concludes in his 2003 book Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express, “What seems probable is that Buffalo Bill invented this link with the Pony Express based on his brief experience as a messenger [for Russell, Majors & Waddell at Leavenworth, Kan., in 1857].” On the other hand, Cody biographer Robert A. Carter says that while some historians doubt Buffalo Bill’s claim, he concludes “there is enough evidence of his having ridden.”
With or without Cody in the saddle, the Pony Express was doomed to ride off into the sunset before its time. The telegraph connecting California with the East was completed on October 24, 1861. Because the citizens of Denver refused to fulfill promised stock subscriptions, the line was denied that major community and instead strung along the Oregon Trail from Fort Laramie through South Pass to Salt Lake City. Thus Three Crossings also became a telegraph station. “Because of the technology of the time,” McDermott says, “telegraphic relay stations had to be constructed every 50 to 75 miles. These housed a telegraph operator and one or more repairmen. In Fremont County, there were telegraphic relay stations at Split Rock, Three Crossings, Rocky Ridge, South Pass and Pacific Springs.” Several other Western historians say there were two Three Crossings stations—the one owned by Russell, Majors & Waddell and the one built, owned and operated by the Pacific Telegraph Company.
When Russell, Majors & Waddell became insolvent in 1862, freighter Ben Holladay took control of its staging operation. The so-called Stagecoach King obtained other stage contracts as well, and he carried not only the mail but also passengers between St. Joseph, Mo., and Salt Lake City. Three Crossings became one of the principal stage stops on Holladay’s Overland Stage Line. Area Indians tended to resent the stagecoaches’ rolling across their hunting grounds, and in mid-April 1862, a couple of incidents took place. In the less serious one on April 16, raiders took 22 mules and horses, three head of oxen and 10 sets of stage harnesses from Three Crossings Station. The very next day, just three miles from the station, 50 warriors attacked two stagecoaches full of mail and carrying a total of nine passengers. In a heated fight, one of the drivers and at least four passengers were wounded and a mule was killed before the Indians, who also had suffered casualties, withdrew. Under the cover of darkness, the stagecoach group made its way to the station. Holladay later reported his April 17 losses as nine mules and nine sets of harnesses, as well as $500 worth of damage to the two coaches. That May, according to Holladay, the Indians did $500 worth of damage to Three Crossings Station itself.
On June 3, 1862, Colonel William O. Collins received orders to proceed with three companies of the 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry west from Fort Laramie to Three Crossings and beyond. One of his assignments was to protect the employees and property of the Overland Mail Company and of the Pacific Telegraph and to keep the telegraph wire open between Fort Laramie and Sweetwater Station. Detachments of 10 to 20 men were left at some of the stations along the route. In the Sweetwater Valley, Sweetwater, Three Crossings, Rocky Ridge (also known as St. Mary’s) and South Pass (or Upper Crossing) became military subposts. The soldiers built barracks and stables and were kept busy repairing cut telegraph lines all summer. The officers found it dangerous to send out men to repair the line without giving them a strong escort. In late June at Ice Springs, between Three Crossings and Rocky Ridge stations, Indians reportedly stole 160 animals from emigrants. Violent incidents along the trail increased to such an extent that on July 10 the postmaster general of the United States ordered all mail carriers to abandon this portion of the Oregon Trail in favor of the Overland Trail (running on the same ground as the old Cherokee Trail), about 100 miles to the south. Some of the soldiers also went south, where Fort Halleck was built to protect the Overland Trail. The Indians, at least according to some sources, took advantage of the situation by attacking Three Crossings Station and setting it on fire. McDermott and most other historians don’t mention this fire or say that Three Crossings had become undermanned. Certainly, soldiers were still needed along the Oregon Trail to protect the telegraph line. McDermott does write that at some point during the Civil War period, Three Crossing was “reconstituted” by the 11th Ohio Cavalry. Other historians suggest something more—that the station was reconstructed at a different place, about a mile from the old station, and served as a fortified subpost as well as a telegraph station. Wyoming rancher and history buff Jack Corbett, who today grows hay on leased land at Three Crossings, has never found evidence of more than one station site.
Whether reconstituted or reconstructed, the station/subpost saw more trouble in the fall of 1862. On November 24, Shoshones raided Three Crossings. No guard had been posted, but the soldiers were alerted by barking dogs when the Indians attempted to loosen the corral posts. Private Joseph Good decided to climb onto a haystack to get a better view but was killed for his trouble. The Shoshones returned the next day to fire again at the station.
On December 14, 1862, Indians did not attack the station, but another soldier died there that day. Appendicitis took the life of Private Bennett Tribbett, 19, of Company B, 1st Battalion, 6th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry. Tribbett had been sick for three days with what was described as “great pain in is stomach and side, headache, dissiness [sic], and general weakness.” Private Anthony Barleon described the funeral in a letter to the dead man’s sister, Arviley Tribbett of Ohio:
We made a coffin of such lumber that we had which of course were rough boards but we planed them off as smooth as we could. We dressed him up in his best clothes which were new and clean, laid a blanket around him, and we tucked a blanket around the coffin which made it look a little better….When the time arrived for his burial he was bore off by the arms of 6 of his former associates accompanied by an escort of 6 men who performed the usual military escort and ceremony. When we arrived at the grave we put the coffin in and the escort fired 3 rounds over his grave.
Some eight years later, in the summer of 1870, photographer William Henry Jackson took pictures of Tribbett’s grave, with its wooden marker reading, “Killed by Indians.”
In 1864 Brig. Gen. Robert Mitchell, commander of the sprawling District of Nebraska and the Plains, had the difficult mission of trying to protect emigrant and freight traffic on the road to Fort Laramie and beyond. He ordered the defenses strengthened near South Pass, where Oregon Trail wagon trains and stagecoaches had relatively easy passage across the Rocky Mountains. Three Crossings, to the east, became headquarters to more soldiers than ever before. Colonel John Chivington’s attack on a Cheyenne village at Sand Creek, southeast of Denver, in late November, realized Mitchell’s worst nightmare—the Sioux, Arapahos, Cheyennes and other Plains Indians uniting as one and causing death and destruction along the Oregon Trail. Indian depredations in 1865 led to Brig. Gen. Patrick E. Connor’s preparing for his three-pronged Powder River Expedition, designed to chastise the hostile Indian bands in the north. On May 5, Connor sent a company of 3rd U.S. Volunteers to Three Crossings, and twice later in the month those soldiers skirmished with attacking Indians. Due largely to logistical problems, bad weather and poor communications, Connor’s expedition—which began in July and continued well into September—was essentially a failure. Indian attacks also occurred along the Oregon Trail at stations to the east of Three Crossings— such as Deer Creek Station on May 20 and Platte Bridge Station on July 26. Lieutenant Caspar Collins, the son of William Collins, saw duty at Three Crossings and three other stations. Caspar Collins made a detailed map of Three Crossings and wrote that it was “surrounded by a palisade, varying from 12 to 15 feet high, and surmounted by a large lookout and block house that sweeps the surrounding country.” The young lieutenant died in the July Indian attack near Platte Bridge Station.
The Civil War ended in the spring of 1865, and the Indian war in the West ended that winter, a very harsh one that caused many cold and hungry Plains Indians to become receptive to peace. U.S. government officials, having had their fill of war in the East as well as in the West, were equally ready to talk peace. In June 1866, a treaty commissioner, E.B. Taylor, brought presents to a council at Fort Laramie in hopes of making a lasting peace with the Sioux leaders. He did make peace with Brulé Chief Spotted Tail and others, but not with Oglala Chief Red Cloud. Another conflict, Red Cloud’s War, began late that year, with the focus of hostilities the Bozeman Trail rather than the Oregon Trail. In September 1866, the officers and men posted at Three Crossings received orders to withdraw and report to Fort Laramie so that they could be mustered out of service. A telegrapher and guard, according to some sources, stayed on at the station for another year. Peace didn’t really come to the Oregon Trail until the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, but by then Three Crossings Station had been abandoned. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 marked the death of the Oregon Trail.
After Buffalo Bill served with the 7th Kansas during the Civil War (he was mustered out on September 29, 1865), Three Crossings might have again been blessed by his long-haired presence. In his 1940 book Ben Holladay: The Stagecoach King, author J.V. Frederick wrote: “The most far-famed of all the Holladay drivers was Buffalo Bill Cody. For a time, he drove between Plum Creek, Nebraska Territory, and Fort Kearny. He also drove in Dakota territory [present-day Wyoming] on the line between Three Crossings and Split Rock.” Frederick told of an undocumented time (possibly in late 1865 or early 1866, though it might have been earlier in the ’60s, or, more likely, never happened at all) when Indians attacked a stage Cody was driving. “Several horses were wounded,” wrote Frederick, “but the stage kept on, with the passengers directing a hot fire against the Indians until, upon reaching Three Crossings, they were rescued by soldiers who drove back the braves.” Frederick’s source for this incident was most likely The Great Salt Lake Trail, an 1898 book co-written by Cody and Colonel Henry Inman. In that book’s account of the running fight with the Indians, a Lieutenant Flowers was sitting “on the box beside Cody.” Two of the passengers defending the stage were killed, and Flowers, while driving the stage, was badly wounded. “Cody,” the book says, “seized the whip from the wounded officer, applied it savagely, shouting defiance, and drove on to Three Crossings, thus saving the stage.” Cody biographer Robert Carter notes, however, “The story, significantly, is not told in the first person, and Cody never claimed that it had happened.”
Three Crossings Station of the Sweetwater is long gone—only the rocks, the hills, the wind, a few wagon ruts and, of course, the river remain. The site is on private and leased property, and there is no marker. The buffalo-hunting Indians, trappers, emigrants, stagecoach drivers, Pony Express riders, telegraph operators, soldiers and station keepers have been out of the picture for about 140 years. But with a little imagination you can see them all again, especially a young, dutiful, indefatigable long-haired kid galloping through on a fast horse. In our imagination, Buffalo Bill Cody has crossed the Sweetwater 3 million times.
Irene “Kit” Collings lives in Riverton,Wyo., and has a fondness for Wyoming history. For further reading: Dangerous Duty: A History of the Forts in Fremont County, by John McDermott; Historic Sites Along the Oregon Trail, by Aubrey L. Haines; Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend, by Robert A Carter; Guarding the Overland Trails: The Eleventh Ohio Cavalry in the Civil War, by Robert Huhn Jones; and The Pioneer Photographers, by William Henry Jackson in collaboration with Howard R. Diggs.
Originally published in the April 2006 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
