Smokey Row

SMOKEY ROW: A COMMUNITY

Original Bath House

The once vibrant community of Smokey Row has disappeared into the murky past. Now part of the Bison Pasture in Hot Springs State Park, it was located just east of the Star Plunge Pool.

The bubbling hot springs filled the air with a distinct rotten egg smell. The early pioneers drank this water for their medicinal health. Tents and private baths dotted the landscape. Dugouts were built into the hillside with dirt floors, sod roofs and stone walls.

The smoke from the camp fires settled into the gulch instead of being funneled up and away from the camp. As a result of this thick cloud, the popular shanty town became known as Smoky Row.

Since the mid-1800’s, trappers and entire families of early pioneers would vacation at the hot springs, making their temporary home in the red gulch. An early visitor had commemorated his visit by etching a stone with a star and the date 1846. Over twenty years before the land was given to the Shoshone tribe as part of the Bridger Treaty of 1868.

Not all was always serene in Smoky Row. During a midnight card game, two masked thieves came rushing into a dirt-floor dugout where they knew that money was exchanging hands.

It was August 1887 and a Friday night when the outlaws barged in, brandishing their six-shooters. It was eerily quiet, without any shouting or cursing from the thieves. No words were exchanged as they gestured for the card players to turn their faces around and put their hands on the stone wall of the dugout.

The outlaws quietly helped themselves to the money in sight and hastily departed. They were robed in bathing costumes and unrecognizable to their victims. With their money gone and lives spared, the card players drifted back to their own dug outs. The Big Horn Pilot reported on the incident, noting that no one was saying exactly how much money was lost.

Another infamous outlaw, Butch Cassidy, is known to have holed up in Smoky Row in-between robberies and working on local ranches. Members of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, Nate Champion, Mike Brown, Jack Donahue and Jack Totty, spent the winter of 1887 at the springs while it was still part of the Wind River Indian Reservation.

The outlaws built a cabin at Smoky Row and put up a stone hut that they used as a bathhouse. They had to go to Fort Brown, present day Fort Washakie, for their provisions which was 75 miles to the south, over Mexican Pass. They kept their horses in Virgil Rice’s pasture on Owl Creek, 10 miles to the north from their cabin site.

There were few visitors at the springs then, according to Totty, but little things like distance and isolation were taken as part of the day’s work by the men who blazed the trail into the country.

When settlement of the area was allowed in 1897, the outlaws were replaced by the law abiding citizens. One such pioneering family, the Gaylors, came to Thermopolis with their two small daughters. They spent the first winter in Smoky Row gulch in a dugout covered with a canvas tent to keep out the cold and snow.

Smokey Row Cemetery

Smokey Row Cemetery First Bath House at the Hot Springs

Smoky Row continued to be an active community. Located behind the Star Plunge pool in the Reserve, it was a series of cabins and simple dugouts. After the families moved on to their new homes, Smoky Row became known as a place full of late night laughter and talk.

One early pioneer said, “Every man carried a gun of some kind but they were seldom called into use and there was little quarreling and fighting. The crowds that were camped at the springs were jolly and willing to gamble that their dollar was luckier than the other fellows.”

Such robberies were taken almost lightly in those early days, according to an editor of the Thermopolis Record in the 1930’s who reminisced about the by-gone days. Jack Hollywood, an early pioneer and businessman, ran one of the first saloons

in the area. It was a simple dugout with dirt floors and a rock wall in Smoky Row.

According to this old-timer, “One night, when all was serene, and the fellows around the table in a dugout ruled over by Stanley Miller, a gambler who was carrying a bullet in one leg as the result of a gambling fracas in Red Lodge, were betting on who held the best card, the door opened gently and the muzzle of a six-shooter preceded a masked bandit. This fellow calmly told the fellows to get up and line themselves up against the wall. He calmly removed all the valuables from the tables and the pockets of the victims and made his exit as unconcerned as he came in. I know about it for I contributed about seven dollars to the collection!”

He added, “Some were disconcerted, others smiled, some laughed and, in the end, it was decided to be quite a joke as the game was brought to a definite close with nothing to play for. The balance of the evening was spent in telling of similar scenes in other places and discussing the wickedness of the world.”

Within just a decade, things had calmed down at Smoky Row and most of the businesses had moved into Thermopolis. It was noted in the Big Horn River Pilot in January 1898, “Every cabin in Smoky Row across the river is inhabited. The denizens of that section amuse themselves nightly playing cards for matches. It is rather amusing to see a man start out to visit his neighbor with two or three boxes of matches in his hand, to spend the evening, but such is the fact, and the ‘boys’ enjoy the amusement.”

Women also visited Smoky Row that winter of 1898. It was shared in the social section of the newspaper, “Quite a number of the fair sex visited Smoky Row Sunday. Cannot guess the attraction unless it was the new barber.”

By the early 1900’s, Smoky Row was abandoned and in 1907, the old stone cabins and dugouts were torn down by construction workers expanding the Star Plunge pools. All that remains is the Smoky Row Cemetery as a reminder of the times of old.

Today, visitors can take the driving tour through the Bison Pastures, hike Monument Hill and tour the Smoky Row Cemetery, walking where “colorful characters” once camped at the Hot Springs more than 175 years ago.