South Pass City, Continental Divide

South Pass City - population 7. Home to around 25 historic buildings hailing from the late 19th century, this former gold mining town is a brilliant piece of living history. As I walk into town, I hear the tinkle of a piano playing a jaunty old-time tune from The Carissa, one of the town’s saloons.

I followed my ears into The Carissa and found a meticulous representation of a working Wild West whiskey house. The bar and the tables were all original, beautiful reddish cherrywood pieces from the Victorian era. I enjoyed wandering around the old wooden storefronts, trying to imagine when this town was a bustling place, home, back in the 1860s, to over 3000 prospectors, miners, saloon keepers and cowboys. I poked my head into the visitor’s centre to  look at life in South Pass when it was booming, and provides CDT hikers with a place to mail supplies, a vital service when hiking the largely uninhabited Wyoming section.

Mark Twain once visited the area and described the amusing peculiarities of contemporary life in a small frontier town. Twain was introduced to the mayor, whom he described as a “hotelkeeper, postmaster, blacksmith, mayor, constable, city marshal and principal citizen all condensed into one person and crammed into one skin”. The man told him that if he were to die as just a postmaster, constable, blacksmith, mayor, or city marshal, everyone would be fine. But if he were to die as all of his roles, the community would be in real trouble. Let’s hope he lived a long life. It was certainly a productive one.

Amazingly, this tiny, isolated outpost is known throughout the USA as the birthplace of the region’s women’s suffrage movement. Here, in 1869, resident William Bright presented a bill to the State Congress, asking it to affirm the rights of women to vote and hold public office in the state. The bill passed and the governor signed it into law that December. Only two months later, Esther Hobert Morris became Justice of the Peace, the first woman in the history of the United States to hold a judicial office.

This is something the residents of Wyoming are intensely proud of, affirming their state’s official nickname: the Equality State. And they should be; it took another 50 years before the U.S. Congress passed the 19th Amendment, granting women the vote. However, the long campaign for women’s suffrage in the USA won its first victory here, in this small, isolated gold rush town.