Laramie County Courthouse, Cheyenne, 1882, Northwest corner of 17th and Ferguson (now Carey). The Courthouse was razed in 1917. The courthouse and jail cost $$40,000.00. Eight years before, the County was $40,000.00 in debt and the only property owned by the County was one old safe. The impact of the Railroad can hardly be understated. Owen Wister's The Virginian, Horseman of the Plains is set in the period from the mid 1870's to 1890. Twelve years later, in 1902, in his dedication of the novel to his friend and classmate, Theodore Roosevelt, Wister lamented: Had you left New York or San Francisco at ten o'clock this morning, by noon the day after to-morrow you could step out at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain for the reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now. The mountains are there, far and shining, and the sunlight, and the infinite earth, and the air that seems forever the true fountain of youth, but where is the buffalo, and the wild antelope, and where the horseman with his pasturing thousands? So like its old self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you wait for the horseman to appear. But he will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday. You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from Palos with his caravels. Presaging by ten years the comments of Wister above, were the observations of Julian Ralph (1853-1903) in an article in Harper's New Monthly, June 1893, "Wyoming--Another Pennsylvania": The State has a population of only about 65,000, and only one town that is well known all over the country. That, of course, is Cheyenne, long the headquarters of the stockmen of the West, and once a very wild and wide-open city. It is not easy now to see where it stowed its wickedness as one walks its tree-lined streets bordered by pretty homes and trod by a sober and self-respecting population. Cheyenne has 12,000 population, strong banks, good schools, notable churches some large and enterprising mercantile establishments, a fine park, and a great State capital. The town languishes. Not that the people regret the loss of the dance- houses and gambling lay-outs, but because the vim has gone out of business. The range cattle industry is failing, and the railroads have opened up other centres where mining and agriculture are the chief interests. But Cheyenne is like Wyoming itself, in a transition state, and its future is far more glorious than the noisy, profligate, and unnatural past. Julian Ralph was in the late 19th Century a well known travel writer and reporter, achieving attention for his coverage of the Henry Ward Beecher trial, writing for the New York Sun, the New York Herald and the Brooklyn Eagle. He achieved his greatest fame, however, as a war correspondent in the Boer War for the London Daily Mail covering Lord Roberts' raising of the flag over Pretoria. Less optimistic in the assessment of Wyoming's future was Miriam F. Leslie, who wrote describing her 1877 trip across the territory: As we passed through Wyoming, the land became even more desolate, if possible. Only jack rabbits and lizards inhabit this bleak land. Nothing will grow here but sagebrush. Never on earth have I seen such utter loneness. It will be a million years before Wyoming is ever settled. Even the small railside towns like Wilcox and Medicine Bow look all the same: dusty desolation. At the time of the above images, Cheyenne had 7 churches, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregational, Episcopal, Methodist and African Methodist. But the glory of Cheyenne was the new Opera House on the corner of Capitol and 17th Street discussed on the next page. First Congregational Church, c.1873 The Congregational Church was founded about 1869 by the Reverend Jerome D. Davis. The Rev. Davis and his wife personally constructed the parsonage to the left of the church. Davis entered Beloit College but had his education interrupted by the Civil War in which he served as a part of the 52nd Illinois Volunteers, rising to the rank of Lt. Colonel. Although, severely wounded at Shiloh and left on the battlefield for twleve hours, he recovered and participated in Sherman's March to the Sea. Following the war, he returned to Beloit and after graduation took theological studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary. His obituary in the Beloit Alumnus, December 1910, compared his work in Cheyenne to the ordeal he underwent at Shiloh: After completing a theological course Rev. Mr. Davis took a difficult home mission field in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and with the same courage battled for a year or more against the liquor hells and other evils, for which early Cheyenne was so notorious. In Cheyenne, the Reverend Dr. Davis secured from the Union Pacific Railroad land for the first cemetery and helped with the establishment of the municipal water system. In 1871, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (For discussion of the A.B.C.F.M, see Fur Trade) assigned Davis to Japan where he toiled for forty years. There, he established Doshisha University with an initial class of eight students. Today it has over 20,000 students. After being weakened by a journey across Siberia in 1910, he died in Oberlin, Ohio, in October, 1910 16th Street looking east, approx. 1889. Photo by C. D. Kirkland. The building with the porte-cochere at the end of the block is the Inter-Ocean Hotel, formerly owned by Barney Ford, discussed on a subsequent page. The site is now occupied by the Hynd's Building on the corner of 16th and Capitol. Other hotels in the City included the Railroad Hotel, Dyer's Hotel, the Metropolitan, the Western Hotel, Key City House and the Leighton House. A boarding hotel that was popular with hardened cowboys fresh from a cattle drive was the Ames, possibly because of its rates, $7.00 a week. The proprietor was a Mormon with only one wife and quite devout. He would kneel in prayer every evening in the lobby, next to a cage which housed a parrot. Years later,James Peake Royston, a cowboy who rode for the Searight Cattle Co., described an evening when the prayers abruptly ended when the parrot spewed forth a string of obscenities taught to the parrot by the cowboys. Cheyenne Photos continued on next page.