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Casper Name
This Natrona County seat took its name from nearby Fort Caspar, an army garrison on the Oregon Trail. Railroad officials later revised the spelling to Casper.
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The name Casper is Persian and means "treasure."
Historical Significance of Casper
Stranded by harsh weather in the winter of 1812, Scottish fur trader Robert Stuart and his group were the first Euro-Americans to approach present-day Casper. Stuart belonged to a collection of pioneer explorers deployed by super tycoon John Jacob Astor. Stuart built the first rock house in Wyoming. His party of seven was also the first to access the South Pass on the Oregon Trail.
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Famous Wyoming explorer John Frémont, aka "The Pathfinder," capsized a boat on the North Platte River in a canyon southwest of Casper in 1842. Frémont lost crucial mapping equipment and journals, but locals gave him a consolation prize by naming the canyon after him.
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In 1847, local Mormons built a ferry to haul travelers and cargo across the North Platte River. The ferry was the region's first true business.
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An 1856 blizzard in the Sweetwater Mountains west of Casper stranded a party of Mormons emigrants heading for Salt Lake City. Known today as the Mormon Handcart Disaster, the event ended with the deaths of roughly 220 Mormons, or about 17 percent of the party. Rescue wagons sent from Utah prevented a more terrible outcome.
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A novel travel experiment designed to reduce expenses, the Mormon handcart employed human effort, not horse, mule, ox, dog, or goat power to provide forward motion. Made of oak or hickory, each cart hauled between 400 and 500 pounds of supplies and required the pulling power of two able-bodied adults.
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In 1859, Louis Guinard built a toll bridge across the Platte River at Fort Caspar. Roughly 810 feet long and 17 feet wide, the bridge stood as a symbol of westward expansion and made Guinard a rich man even though it fell into disuse when the Army abandoned the fort eight years later.
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In 1865, during the Battle of Red Buttes, American Indian warriors attacked a military wagon train outside Platte River Station near present-day Casper, killing all but three of the 25 U.S. Army soldiers guarding the wagons.
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In 1890, oil discoveries at Salt Creek field turned Casper into a classic boomtown. Women once avoided walking on Center Street's west side due to the glut of saloons.
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In 1895, Joel Hurt, a former mayor of Casper, confronted another Casper man, William Milne, on a main city thoroughfare and shot him dead. Sources hinted that Milne had been sexually active with Hurt's wife. A jury quickly acquitted Hurt of murder and he moved to Nebraska after divorcing his unfaithful but still living spouse.
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The Teapot Dome Scandal in 1922 involved a secret land lease deal between oil mogul Henry Sinclair and the federal government. The deal gave Sinclair's oil company the right to drill on a naval oil reserve near Casper and excluded competitive bidders, outraging the nation. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall resigned and served time in prison over the matter.
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Lightning attacked a petroleum tank farm next door to Casper in 1921, starting the most impressive inferno in the history of the city. The fire blazed for 2.5 days and gobbled up 500,000 gallons of oil.
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In 1973, a landmark steel bridge in Casper was the site of one of the most heinous crimes in the history of Wyoming. Two criminal monsters abducted, terrorized, and raped Casper sisters, Amy and Becky Burridge, and then threw them off the bridge into an icy cold river 110 feet below. Eleven-year-old Amy did not survive. Sixteen-year-old Becky miraculously lived and told her heartbreaking story to authorities. The rapists, Ronald Leroy Kennedy and Jerry Lee Jenkins, were sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
True crime journalist Ron Franscell covered the dark episode in his 2007 book Fall: The Rape and Murder of Innocence in a Small Town. Franscell was the 16-year-old next-door neighbor of the girls when the crime took place.
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In 2005, Guy Padgett III, a classmate of slain college student Matthew Shepard, was elected mayor of Casper and became the first overtly gay political official in the history of Wyoming.
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Today, Casper has at least 50,000 residents and is Wyoming's second largest city.
Casper Landmarks
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, nearby Ft. Casper was named for Lt. Caspar Collins, a U.S. Army officer who was killed during the Battle of the Platte Bridge Station in 1865. Lt. Collins, the son of Col. William Collins, had reported for duty at the outpost only one day earlier. He was escorting a wagon train with a modest force when Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota attacked with several thousand Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. The fort was abandoned by the military in 1867. A restoration project based on drawings done by Lt. Collins was launched in 1936.
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The Tom Sun Ranch near Casper reflects life on mid-sized Wyoming ranches of the late 1800s. A French-Canadian pioneer, Tom Sun went on to become an influential cattleman. Today, his legacy is one of Wyoming's National Historic Landmarks.
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A historical marker on the campus on Casper College remembers Casper's National Guard Armory. Built in 1930 to serve the 115th Cavalry Regiment, the Armory had a stable, training area for horses, a blacksmith shop, and a ballroom with a hardwood floor. Authorities razed the building in 1987 to better regulate traffic on campus.
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Designed by golf course architect Robert Trent Jones Jr., the nearby Three Crowns Golf Club was built on land reclaimed from a petroleum refinery that once produced the largest single-site volume of gasoline in the world.
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Located on the doorstep of the Natrona County Library in Casper, Prometheus Unbound is a statue by premier Wyoming sculptor Robert Russin. In mythology, Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire and gave the useful element to humankind. The bold move angered godfather Zeus, who strapped Prometheus to a mountainous rock and hired a monster eagle to eat the Titan's liver, which grew back each day so that the eagle could eat it over and over again.
Prominent People in Casper
Richard "Dick" Cheney, vice president under Pres. George W. Bush, grew up in Casper. The beneficiary of five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, he went on to serve as U.S. secretary of defense. "I had other priorities in the 60s than military service," he later explained.
In 1978, Wyoming voters elected him to the U.S. House of Representative. In 2006, he made national news by accidentally shot-gunning a hunting companion in the face with birdshot while out stalking oxygen-deprived quail on a special ranch in Texas. The companion, 78-year-old Harry Whittington, survived to apologize to the vice president for somehow initiating the horribly embarrassing episode. A former CEO of Halliburton, a mammoth energy company with lucrative government contracts, Cheney once said, "The Iraqi forces are conducting the Mother of all Retreats."
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In 1998, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney attacked and killed Matthew Shepard, a Casper native, in Laramie, Wyoming. Henderson and McKinney were later convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Shepard was openly gay and national media coverage billed the murder as a hate crime. Ellen DeGeneres spoke at his funeral.
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Marshal Phil Watson of Casper ran up against the law he had sworn to uphold when he was arrested and convicted of stealing horses in 1889. Watson was given a sentence of five years in state prison, becoming the first Wyoming public official to do jail time.
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In 1988, Gov. Mike Sullivan selected Casper wordsmith Charles Levendosky as Wyoming's poet laureate. Levendosky worked a columnist for the Casper Star-Tribune.
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Born in Casper in 1960, Tom Browning went on to pitch 11 seasons with the Cincinnati Reds. He won 20 games in 1985, was an All-Star in 1991, and made $3.75 million in 1994. Browning also pitched a perfect game in 1988 and became the only Wyomingite in MLB to accomplish that flawless feat.
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Quaker philosopher Jim Corbett was born in Casper in 1933. Corbett started the Sanctuary movement to provide political asylum to refugees from war-torn nations such as El Salvador and Guatemala. He authored the books Goatwalking and Sanctuary for All Life.
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Casper native son Mike Devereaux, nicknamed "Devo," played outfield for the L.A. Dodgers, Baltimore Orioles, and Chicago White Sox. During his break-through year in 1992, Devereaux made a name for himself as an Oriole by soaring above the centerfield wall at home to steal a game-winning round-tripper from slugger Joe Carter.
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Country singer and rodeo star Chris LeDoux was known for riding a mechanical bull on stage during his musical performances. A former student at Casper University in Casper, LeDoux perished from liver disease in 2005 at the age of 56. He was a good friend to Garth Brooks, who wrote him a posthumous tribute song called "Good Ride Cowboy" that same year.
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In 1965, James Herdt graduated from high school in Casper and went on to become master chief petty officer of the Navy, one of only nine individuals in history to hold that position.
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NBC News justice correspondent Pete Williams is a Casper native. He served for many years on Capitol Hill as a press official. In 1986, with Dick Cheney's approval, he was appointed assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. Williams once said, "There are a lot of sacred cows in Wyoming, and cows are one of them."
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Kristin George was Miss Wyoming Teen USA in 2000. She went on to win the Miss Wyoming USA pageant in 2006. She was born in Casper in 1982.
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Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, was born in Casper in 1941. "We need to think of multiculturalism as looking at all the cultures of the world evenhandedly," she once observed. In the 1990s, Cheney was co-host of CNN's Sunday edition Crossfire.
Industry in Casper
Casper once owned the title of "Oil Capital of the Rockies."
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The city boasts Wyoming's only statewide newspaper, The Casper Star-Tribune.
Invention
Grammarian Bruce Wampler graduated from Kelly Walsh High in Casper in 1970. Wampler is best remembered for inventing a computer program that checked grammar in sentences typed using a word processor. WordPerfect purchased Wampler's company for $19 million in 1992.
Geography
An eastern extension of the Rockies, the nearby Laramie Range stretches from Casper to Cheyenne. The gap between the Laramies and the Bighorn Mountains inspired the creation of the Mormon Trail, Oregon Trail, and Pony Express. The top summits are 10,274-foot Laramie Peak, a famous landmark for pioneers, and 9,414-foot Warbonnet Peak.
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With three nearby bird sanctuaries, Casper is a bird-watchers promised land. Birders have sighted more than 200 different species in the area, including gold and bald eagles.
General Casper Trivia
In 1943, ultimate test pilot Chuck Yeager crashed his plane just west of Casper. Yeager baled out and suffered a fractured spine. His aircraft, a P-39 pursuit plane, was totaled.
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In 1989, Casper aviator Kevin Christopherson flew a glider from Whiskey Peak all the way to Kyle, South Dakota, a distance of 287 miles. The flight set a world record. Located near Muddy Gap, Wyoming, Whiskey Peak is 9,225 feet tall.
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Casper was the hometown of Georgia Davis Skelton, the wife of clown comedian Red Skelton. The couple divorced in 1971 and the ex-Mrs. Skelton killed herself five years later. Smitten by grief, Skelton retired from show business for 15 years, consoling himself by painting portraits of circus clowns.
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Casper was a 1930 shooting location for Our American Girl, a film starring actress and aviatrix Kay Gordon. Not known for her leading lady roles, Gordon almost played a chorus girl, making uncredited appearances in such films as Anything Goes and Comet Over Broadway.
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Striking the "black blood of the Earth" at more than 22,000 feet, a derrick at Hell's Half Acre, a nearby acreage of badlands, marked the deepest oil well on the planet in 1976. Hell's Half Acre went on to become a shooting location for the 1997 sci-fi classic Starship Troopers, starring Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards.
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Casper was a filming location for Hellfighters, the 1968 action movie starring John Wayne as legendary oil well firefighter Red Adair.
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In 1936, Ripley's Believe It or Not! featured a car covered bumper to bumper with postage stamps. The "car that went postal" was owned by Casper resident Ed Hadley.
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In 1889, Casper had a law on the books that prohibited female humans from using foul or abusive language. Women couldn't smoke cigars, pipes, or cigarettes in public places. Male humans were free by law to all of the above.
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In the 1980s, Piotr Chmielinski, an adventurer from Casper, navigated the Amazon River in South America, paddling from 18,363-foot Nevado Mismi in the Andes all the way to Marajó, an island in the river where its mouth touches the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil. The 4,200-mile trip was a first of its kind. Other attempts had encountered failure, frequently fatal. With an explorer from San Francisco named Joe Kane, Chmielinski chugged through a previously impassable segment of whitewater on the Amazon that went on and on for 50 brutal miles.
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