Wyoming Towns: Unincorporated Bonneville Is “Peaceful” And “Quiet,” But Didn’t Used To Be

BONNEVILLE — Life here today is little like 110 years ago when the then-growing community became a key Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad link between the Gulf of Mexico and the nation’s Northwest.

But the handful of people who now live here a few miles northeast of Shoshoni on ground that was once rocked by a nitroglycerin explosion as two men left town in 1921 and wrecked by the Badwater Creek’s flood in July 1923 are happy in the present.

Just as in the past, railroad tracks parallel the creek bed, crossing on a rail bridge just east of the townsite. To the west, a rail yard and five storage silos for soda ash sit next to the tracks as they leave town.

The tracks run a couple miles to U.S. Highway 20 and under a bridge, then turn north to Thermopolis and on to Montana, Seattle and Portland, Oregon.

Two foundations in the middle of the town link back to a time when Bonneville had 150 residents and 75 buildings, including a store, post office, hotel, depot, railroad roundhouse and more.

“It’s nice and quiet. I’ve been out here since 1988,” said Ernie Bulow, 63. “It’s just a peaceful place to live, (with) access to hunting. We hunt in our backyard — deer and antelope, birds.”

Six Dirt Streets

The Bonneville of 2024 has six dirt streets — three that run north to south, three east to west — labeled with faded signs on the corners.

Several lots reflect former residents who perhaps once lived in trailers and mobile homes and traveled by pickup. Now those people are gone, and housing and transportation remnants remain.

For many years, Bulow operated a diesel repair shop and backhoe trenching business. His garage is two streets over from his house.

His shop was the only one around, except for a rail business operated by Bonneville Transloaders Inc. that established the terminal on the west side of the townsite in 1985. The transloading of soda ash from semis to rail cars continues under what is now the Bighorn Divide and Wyoming Railroad yard.

Bulow, whose neighbor jokingly refers to him as the “mayor” of Bonneville, said he came to the townsite in search of affordable land.

When he arrived, the Bonneville Bar that operated in the old school building on a hill on the west side had already closed. It has since been torn down. He bought several lots in the former townsite and has since sold some.

The “mayor” lives in a doublewide mobile home with a well-kept green lawn. He has a well that was drilled by an oil firm years ago. It plunges down hundreds of feet.

Across 1st Street is the back entrance to the city that once served as a main road. There is no bridge across the Badwater there today, but when Cowboy State Daily visited, the river was just hard sand and drivable. It wasn’t difficult to go across and up the two-track road to a wider gravel road on the other side.

Bulow said over the years he has pulled out many people who have tried to cross the riverbed in winter or when the sand is soggy.

1923 Floods And An Explosion

While the Badwater is not usually much of a creek in September, Bulow said there are still occasions when it will come over its banks — but nothing like the flood of 1923.

In late July of that year, the river became a torrent and swept through Bonneville. The first rains brought a wall of water that swept homes off foundations and sent railroad cars floating down the river.

Bulow said he was told by an old-timer that part of a rail car could be seen until sand swallowed it completely in the early 1960s.

Then a few months later in September 1923, rains came again and washed away railroad bed repairs.

Bulow’s grandson, Ernesto Barajas, 19, has grown up at the site and has heard the flood story, but said he had never heard about the guys who blew themselves up in the town.

He attends Casper College in the diesel technology program. He, too, calls life in the townsite “peaceful,” adding that, “We don’t get many visitors.”

In 1921, the town had two visitors who were in a truck hauling nitroglycerin, the driver and a hitchhiker.

They got gasoline at a Bonneville service station, pulled back on the street and then exploded in pieces of metal and flesh. No one in the townsite died, but building windows were shattered and foundations cracked.

Now down the street from Bulow’s garage, Shagg and Misty Hedegaard worked in their yard, also green and mowed. They moved to Bonneville in July 2001. They repeat a familiar refrain.

“It’s very peaceful. Good people around here,” Shagg Hedegaard said.

Shootings

Not like in August 1923, when Bonneville made headlines when “Shirt-Sleeve Slim” was shot seven times in a card game. Three men were arrested.

Just a couple of months later in November, Robert Mann was shot at the townsite four times by “Submarine Sears” Gilbert.

“Gilbert was arrested at Burlington station last night by the Chief of Police Alexander Nisbet,” The Wyoming State Journal in Lander reported Nov. 9, 1923.

More than 100 years later, Shagg Hedegaard spent a recent Saturday afternoon splitting wood for the coming winter.

The couple raised two daughters on their property, heat with wood and propane, and like everyone else in town have a septic tank and a well.

“Our well is junk, the water is pretty bad out here,” Shagg Hedegaard said. “It’s only 165 feet. There’s only a couple of good water wells in the whole neighborhood, and that’s from coming in the road all the way through here. Water is tough.”

He recently bought a new filtration system to keep the mineral deposits out.

Raising kids in Bonneville provided them with some unique perks. They said the outdoor opportunities with four-wheelers and collecting various critters such as scorpions and snakes kept them entertained.

Shagg Hedegaard said he enjoys the history of the area and points to the west where the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad once had a roundhouse for locomotives.

Down the road about a mile, Misty Hedegaard said a former old-time resident who has since died described the cottonwoods along the river as the “hobo jungle,” where those hitching rides on freights would camp out.

When the couple moved in, there were a few more residents and over the years, neighbors helped neighbors — but that has changed with the deaths of older residents and few new people moving in.

Groceries And Work

Like others in Bonneville, the couple travel to Riverton 27 miles away for groceries and other supplies, once in a while to Casper.

Misty Hedegaard works at Shoshoni’s Fast Lane truck stop and gas station, the only place in the town for food and gas. Shagg Hedegaard said during the summer he works construction in Rock Springs and stays there during the week and comes home on weekends. In the winter he works in Riverton.

The Hedegaards keep a rain gauge at their house, and so far the area has just 2.5 inches of rain for the year. Last year, clouds shared 24 inches. In the winter, there is not a lot of snow, but it gets cold and wood heat comes in handy.

Down the street toward the tracks, Rod Eckhardt worked with a tape measure outside his well house. He bought his lot from Bulow, next to Bulow’s shop, about 18 years ago.

The shingle-sided and wood structure that is Eckhardt’s home once served as the Burlington railroad icehouse. A retired oil field truck driver, he said he enjoys living here.

One thing he did after buying his property is drill a shallower well. His original well had some unusual properties.

Fire Water

“You could pump it, and you could light the faucet on fire,” he said. “It was a coal-bed methane water well.”

To stay out of the methane, he drilled a shallow well. He uses the water for washing and showers, but gets drinking water from Bulow’s deep well.

Eckhardt has salvaged some old sidewalk from the cottonwood trees about 50 yards away and installed it by his well house. He heats exclusively with wood and, as with the other residents, enjoys the quiet around him.

In a log cabin on Main Street, Christine Arnold shared that she moved to the townsite in the 1990s with her husband, who died a few years ago. She said living in Bonneville requires one to get back to the basics of food, shelter and water.

Her home was built in the 1970s and insulates well in the winter. She heats with wood and propane.

Like Eckhardt, her water well, which she estimates at between 300 to 600 feet deep, has methane and she also can get flames from her faucet. She’s not worried about it.

Arnold enjoys the night skies and sometimes gets out her binoculars.

“I can see the satellites,” she said.

A ‘Stronghold’

Together with her husband, Arnold planted cottonwood trees on the property and built a fence. She calls the property a “nice stronghold.”

In the 1990s, she said some “illegals” showed up at the property having arrived by freight train. She said she gave them food and water and told them in Spanish, “Don’t come through Bonneville.”

Arnold said since then she has not had any encounters with train travelers.

Getting back to basics for Arnold also entails dealing with winter snows by hooking up a railroad tie behind her truck and pulling it up and down her driveway to level it out.

Walk the streets of Bonneville and one can see a broken basketball hoop over a patch of cement halfway down 2nd Street and an old truck in a field off Bonneville Road as you enter the town that was likely used in the oil industry. There are several “private property” and “no trespassing” signs.

When asked about Bonneville’s future, Eckhardt said he sees little changing.

“It’s a good settlement if they want to retire,” he said. “But you still have to go 30 miles to do grocery shopping.”

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.