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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Smile: Monday, June 1, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

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Daily Smile: Monday, June 1, 2026

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Employee kate meadows cropped

Kate Meadows

Wyoming Life

BLACK HAWK, S.D. — Six years after a massive sinkhole opened in a residential neighborhood in the South Dakota Black Hills about 55 miles from the Wyoming border, homeowners are still living in financial limbo.

The 85-foot-deep sinkhole — and roughly 100 feet wide and 650 feet long — revealed a sprawling abandoned underground gypsum mine beneath the Hideaway Hills subdivision near Black Hawk, South Dakota.

In the years since, dozens of homes have sat abandoned and deteriorating while property owners wait for answers, compensation and accountability.

Their homes are essentially worthless. Many families are still making mortgage payments on houses they can’t safely live in while a lawsuit over who bears responsibility inches through the court system.

A pending South Dakota Supreme Court decision could determine whether affected residents have any path forward financially.

“We do not yet have an opinion from the Supreme Court,” said Kathy Barrow, an attorney with national law firm Fox Rothschild, who represents the homeowners in the case.

“There is no timeline, unfortunately,” she added. “It could be six months, next year sometime.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"What Lies Beneath Hideaway Hills"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The disaster traces back decades."}]

For more than 50 years, gypsum mining operations carved a network of underground tunnels beneath the area. ‘

In the mid-1980s, the state of South Dakota bought land there for gypsum mining activities connected to a nearby cement plant.

The state later reclaimed roughly 16 acres of mined land and reseeded it for rangeland use before selling the property to a developer in 1994. The land was eventually sold again to other developers, who built the Hideaway Hills subdivision in the early 2000s.

[{"type":"text","text":"Residents began moving into the neighborhood around 2005."}]

Just a few years later, homeowners started noticing cracks in foundations and shifting ground.

[{"type":"text","text":"Then in April 2020, the earth gave way."}]

The sinkhole opened near where resident Albert Reitz had been mowing his lawn.

Authorities initially evacuated residents from 13 homes because of concerns about ground instability.

Subsequent testing revealed the problem was far more extensive than initially believed.

Studies later determined all 153 homes in the subdivision were uninhabitable because of underground instability tied to the abandoned mine workings.

A study led by geological engineering professor Mohammad Sadeghi of Montana Technological University found additional underground tunnels beneath the subdivision and warned of continuing geologic risk. 

Researchers also raised concerns that mine workings could extend beneath Interstate 90.

[{"type":"text","text":"Meanwhile, property values collapsed."}]

“The ground is continuing to deteriorate,” Barrow told Cowboy State Daily.

She said the instability reaches far deeper than anything tied to subdivision construction.

“What the developers did was not the cause,” Barrow said. “The ground instability goes deeper than any ground the developers would have touched.”

In 2024, Hideaway Hills homeowners filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of South Dakota seeking more than $60 million in damages.

The lawsuit argues the state bears responsibility because of its mining activities and because homeowners were never informed about the risks lurking underground.

Barrow argued the land was originally intended for pasture use — not residential development — and said residents had no warning about the underground dangers.

[{"type":"text","text":"The state disputes those claims."}]

South Dakota argues it is not liable because it did not conduct underground mining operations at the site and says the mine collapse would have happened regardless of the state’s activities.

South Dakota Circuit Court Judge Eric Stawn ruled in favor of the state in September 2024, finding the state immune from tort liability claims.

Barrow argues the case was never framed as a tort claim in the first place.

A year after the circuit court ruling, victims asked the South Dakota Supreme Court to hold the state accountable. That decision is pending.

[{"type":"text","text":"Meanwhile, the subdivision remains largely frozen in time."}]

A chain link fences surrounds the sink hole. The concrete is cracked and pale with weeds growing up in the cracks. Uncut grass is brown and long.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Why Wyoming Is Different"}]

The Hideaway Hills disaster highlights a major difference between South Dakota and Wyoming when it comes to abandoned mine reclamation.

Wyoming participates in the federal Abandoned Mine Land program, an initiative designed to protect public health, safety and the environment by identifying, reclaiming and restoring lands and waters degraded by historic mining practices.

The program is funded by fees collected from every kind of coal that is produced, according to Keith Guille, outreach manager for the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality. 

Wyoming, a coal-producing state, maintains a state-administered Abandoned Mine Land program through its Department of Environmental Quality.  

Because South Dakota is not a coal-producing state, it does not administer such a program, according to the South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Guille said Wyoming’s abandoned mine reclamation work is funded through fees collected from current coal production.

“Obviously it’s about public health and safety,” Guille said. “That’s why we do abandoned mines.”

Wyoming’s AML division routinely performs underground reclamation work by grouting abandoned mine tunnels with concrete slurry to stabilize the ground above them.

Some of those abandoned mines lie hundreds of feet beneath existing communities, Guille said.

Rock Springs is one example where underground mine reclamation has continued for years. Similar abandoned mine concerns also exist beneath parts of Gillette and the Hanna area, Guille said.

Because abandoned mines predate 1977, before modern mining regulations existed, maps are often incomplete or inaccurate, making underground reclamation especially difficult.

“It’s a moving target when you talk about underground abandoned mines,” Guille said. “It’s a long work in progress.”

Wyoming residents also have access to the Wyoming Mine Subsidence Insurance Program, which allows homeowners to purchase insurance coverage against ground collapse caused by abandoned underground mines.

South Dakota has no comparable state-administered abandoned mine land program because the federal AML system is funded through coal production fees, and South Dakota is not a coal-producing state.

For Hideaway Hills residents, that distinction has become painfully clear.

Six years after the sinkhole opened, many are still waiting to learn whether anyone will ultimately be held responsible for the ground beneath their homes giving way.

Sinkhole 4 5 31 26

<title>Six Years Later, Black Hills Sinkhole Victims Still Waiting For Relief | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Six years after a massive 85-foot-deep sinkhole opened in a residential neighborhood in the Black Hills, homeowners live in financial limbo. Dozens of homes have sat abandoned and deteriorating while property owners wait for answers, compensation and accountability.

Six Years Later, Black Hills Sinkhole Victims Still Waiting For Relief

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Around Wyoming

EVANSTON — One of the first times Jim Davis walked into the city’s historic Roundhouse and Railyards decades ago, it was like a scene from a movie. 

There was the crumbling railroad roundhouse, with its broken windows and pigeon feathers floating on the air, spinning as his footsteps stirred little puffs of dirt.

The rusted tracks disappeared into darkness. The roof was leaking, and the smell of that decay was everywhere. 

But there were rays of sunlight shining down into that darkness, and he had the sudden sense that all was not lost here. 

This was something special, something worth saving. 

Saving Evanston’s roundhouse has taken $28 million in private money and grants, as well as decades of volunteer time and effort, Davis said. 

But that’s given Evanston something few communities in America have — a completely functioning, fully intact roundhouse that he believes could be a tourism powerhouse, if Evanston ever decides to lean into promoting it. 

Everyone he has ever taken to see the building, without fail, has the same reaction, Davis told Cowboy State Daily. 

“Every single time I open the doors and walk into the roundhouse …. the first words out of their mouth are, ‘Oh my God,’” Davis said. “Their reaction was it was so phenomenal to see that space the way we were able to fix it up.”

 is a 63,000-square-foot, 96-foot-deep curved brick-and-mortar behemoth built around a post-and-beam interior.

The walls are lined with huge banks of wood-framed windows to provide natural light. It has a two-level terraced roof, and the face of the terrace is covered with windows to provide additional natural light. 

Davis likes to go up to the mezzanine level, where there’s a small kitchen area and space for parties.

“It’s just a beautiful space,” he said. “And I really enjoy taking people up there. It’s really well-thought of and the architects were so good to work with.”

Keeping it a roundhouse, Davis believes, is key to its intrigue. 

To think that inside that cavernous, multistory space lit by sunlight still that huge train cars were driven inside on tracks and then rotated by the gigantic round wheel inside to one of 28 stalls is awe-inspiring. 

All the historical photos, meanwhile, help tell a timeless legend of how America was built.

A Roundhouse Corridor That Built Southern Wyoming

Once upon a time, there were dozens of roundhouses like Evanston’s in towns across Wyoming and the West, Davis said. 

They were positioned all along the tracks, about every 100 miles. That’s about how long trains could go in the beginning without having to stop to refuel and repair. 

Over time, they became more and more efficient and roundhouses began to close. Evanston’s was slated for closure in 1926, putting at least 100 people out of work.

“We were the first roundhouse in the state to close,” Davis said. “Engines had become more efficient and they could run from Green River to Ogden without stopping in Evanston.”

It seemed unfortunate at the time, but it set off a series of events that would ultimately help save the facility.

“The city leaders thought we need those jobs now,” Davis said. “So they got on a train to Omaha, which is the headquarters, and begged them to keep the buildings open.”

Union Pacific ultimately did listen, and reopened the roundhouse and rail yard the following year as a reclamation plant, which added 200 jobs to the former 100, making for a total of 300.

“That saved those buildings,” Davis said. “They fixed all kinds of equipment for Union Pacific.”

Other roundhouses in Wyoming shut down: Laramie, Rock Springs, Rawlins, and even Cheyenne.

But Evanston’s, as a reclamation facility, kept going until 1971, after which Union Tank leased the facility from Union Pacific, and then Union Pacific quit-claimed the 21-acre property — depot, roundhouse, machine shop, yard, and related buildings — to Evanston in 1973.

For decades after that, almost nothing was done to maintain it. 

Windows broke and stayed that way. Boards were put up to block most of the rain, but roofs leaked and kept on leaking. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"First Came The Depot"}]

Saving the roundhouse from decades of neglect wasn’t a straightforward process.

What came first was actually saving an entirely different structure, the depot.

Davis had been hired as executive director of Evanston’s Urban Renewal Agency in 1987, charged with revitalizing the town’s central business district. That included not just Evanston’s great historic downtown, but Depot Square as well.

The space, he found, was structurally sound, even if plaster was falling off the walls and years of neglect were etched upon all of its dust-covered surfaces.

What to do about it, how to preserve it, weren’t part of his expertise.

“I had a business degree in general business administration from Arizona State,” Davis said with a chuckle. “I worked in the corporate world until 1984 when I came back to Evanston.”

A chance encounter helped him with that problem. Soon after joining a national economic development board, he found himself standing in the lunch line beside an architect whose family was from Evanston.

The friendship was instant. Better still, Davis’ new friend knew exactly how to proceed with preserving the depot: assuming Davis could overcome his two biggest hurdles — community buy-in and money.

“There were a lot of naysayers,” Davis said.

Not too far in, though, Evanston was gripped by an oil and gas boom that brought big corporate players to town like Amoco and Chevron.

A planner was hired to help the city, who put together a plan for downtown.

“It wasn’t real specific,” Davis said. “But there was one paragraph, about three sentences long, about how the roundhouse could be a key element in diversifying and revitalizing our downtown.”

There was a vision, Davis realized, that could win people over, starting with the Depot.

Fixing the Depot took years, Davis said, but when it was finished, he’d built a core group of people who believed in historic preservation in Evanston. 

“That gave us the springboard to do the roundhouse,” Davis said. “When we finished the depot, we said, ‘Let’s look at the historic value of all those buildings.' And a citizen’s group was formed that wanted to save them because they saw the historic value, the uniqueness of them. 

"There aren’t many roundhouses left in the country, and, in Wyoming, Evanston had the only one still standing. Cheyenne has one section of a roundhouse, but Evanston has the full semicircle, still standing the way it was built in 1912.”

Megan Stanfill, executive director of the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, confirmed the rarity. 

Of roughly 3,000 roundhouses built in America, only 200 survive. Of those, perhaps a dozen are fully intact like the one in Evanston. 

That makes Evanston’s roundhouse a significant piece of history on a national scale.

“It’s one of the most intact roundhouses along the Union Pacific railroad,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “This one still has the working mechanisms in it as well, so it’s a very intact, contextual example of a roundhouse in Wyoming.”

Davis and the citizen’s group decided to start by defining the complex not just as a cluster of old buildings, but as the physical heart of a much larger American story. 

Davis secured a Brownfields Grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to test for contaminants and ensure the project wasn’t a hopeless Superfund site. 

That found asbestos and lead, tough and expensive to remediate, but not impossible.

Around the same time, they landed a grant to re-roof the machine shop.

“That was the first major maintenance that had been done there for years,” Davis said. “That was probably in 1998.”

One year later, Union Tank decided to leave the dilapidated roundhouse to build a new, better site. 

Now the question wasn’t just if Evanston’s Roundhouse and Railyards could be saved, it was how anyone could possibly afford to do it.

Fortunately, Davis was about to meet another person who would become instrumental to the story of saving the roundhouse.

“I had heard of this organization called the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Denver,” Davis said. “And so Bonnie and I went to Denver every six months to market our retail gift store.”

In 1999, after Union Tank had left the roundhouse, Davis made an appointment to talk to someone there about options for saving the roundhouse. 

“I met this lady by the name of Mary Humstone,” Davis said. “And so I told her what we were trying to do. They didn’t have money to do it, but they knew how to do historic preservation.”

Humstone recognized how unique the story in southwestern Wyoming was to American history.

“Our populations in southern Wyoming all came to be due to the railroad,” Davis said. “Because the railroad came through in 1868, and lo and behold, every 100 miles, they needed a roundhouse.”

Wyoming towns grew up around these roundhouses, creating a line of cities that still exist today, from Evanston in the West, to Cheyenne in the East, with Green River, Rock Springs, Rawlins, and Laramie in between.

In all of those communities, the same magic happened. Engines would pull in, turn on great circular turntables for maintenance, then head back out onto the High Plains.

Working with Humstone and others, Davis held forums in Evanston for all of the communities along southern Wyoming’s railroad corridor, bringing representatives from all the roundhouse communities together. 

Out of that meeting, a new organization was formed called Tracks Across Wyoming, devoted to highlighting the state’s shared heritage of railroads, migration routes, and early highways across the state. 

That made the roundhouse more than just a local project. It was the flagship in a statewide vision.

In the midst of that, Davis was tapped by then Gov. Dave Freudenthal to join the Wyoming Business Council (WBC). At the same time, Evanston’s roundhouse made the list for a $3 million grant to tackle restoring Section One of the roundhouse — a portion that today hosts citywide meetings, conventions, and celebrations. 

The WBC grant joined a growing list of support that was pouring in to saving the roundhouse: federal grants, state money, and countless local donations, all braided together by relentless advocacy and careful planning.

More important than just money, though, was getting community buy-in, Davis realized, a point that was driven home by a Halloween spook house put on to raise a little money for the project.

Hundreds of people flocked to the event, eager to see the inside of a space everyone was familiar with, but few had seen in years. 

They paid $1 each for the thrill, Davis recalled. And the curiosity that unlocked would prove instrumental in building community support for saving it.

The spook fest helped show Davis the power of the community’s enthusiasm, but he quickly realized that $1 tickets weren’t going to do much in the grand scheme of saving a building that needed millions of dollars of work.

So the community came up with a concept they called the Renewal Ball, an annual June fundraiser that became a legend of its own. 

In its prime, it drew 300 people to an event that cleared upward of $100,000 in a single night. That funding became crucial local match money for grants. 

“Governors would come to it, and senators and representatives,” Davis said. “And that’s how we built consensus to put money into that project.”

Keeping The Beating Heart Of A Railroad Town Alive

Progress has come in phases, Davis said. First, a common roof to stop water damage, and then windows to finish weatherproofing.

Then the machine shop, roughly 20,000 square feet of space, that was turned into something Evanston didn’t have yet — a convention center, complete with radiant floor heating and towering windows. 

With sun pouring through the glass and warmth radiating from beneath the floor, it feelslike an atrium and an oasis from winter, Davis said.

Conferences, weddings, funerals, statewide gatherings (like for the Lincoln Highway Association) began filling up its calendar. 

Every meeting brought more supporters and more ammunition to use in persuading skeptics that the building was worth saving.

Today the roundhouse hosts dozens of events every year, ranging from weddings to statewide meetings and conferences.

By the time Davis retired from city service in 2014, investments into the roundhouse restoration was around $28 million by his estimate, with roughly 40% from grants and private fundraising. 

Davis, who was this year’s winner of the Mary Humstone Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, continues to bring people to the roundhouse for the very first time. 

He said it never gets old watching their shock and awe when they first enter this building, which once housed the Goliath engines of America’s railroad era.

Today, the semicircle of stalls still curve around the turntable. The machine shop is still warm like a sunroom in winter. And events now spill out into big, open spaces between restored doors and brick walls decorated with photos that tell the history of the space. 

The fight for continued investment and thoughtful use of this unique space will never be over, Davis said. Future challenges remain — including questions about long-term funding and community support. 

But for now, Evanston is home to one of roughly a dozen fully intact roundhouses left in the nation. 

That means it’s not just the beating heart of a railroad town’s story. It’s among the last intact reminders of how the great American West was built.

Evanston Roundhouse Visit Evanston 5 31 26

<title>Evanston Has Spent Decades, And $28M, Restoring Its Historic Railroad Roundhouse | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A century after Union Pacific stopped using it, decades of work has saved and restored Evanston’s historic Roundhouse and Railyards. The $28 million spent so far has made it one of the rare roundhouses in the U.S. that’s still completely operational. 

Evanston Has Spent Decades, And $28M, Restoring Its Historic Railroad Roundhouse

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

John “Josh” Deane was 16 years old when he left his home in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, for the Wild West in 1872, lured there by the adventures he had read about in the 10-cent novels of his day. 

Instead of the excitement he dreamed of, the teenager found life a struggle just to survive.

Deane eventually took a job for $75 a month driving freight, a profession known as "bull whacking." 

By 1876, Deane was 20 years old and landed an opportunity that he considered an advancement in life. 

He was hired as a government dispatch carrier at the princely sum of $125 a month. 

In 1928, Deane told his story to a biographer about he carried one especially important dispatch, related in his own words in the book “The Mayor of Meeteetse.” 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Rumors Of A Fight"}]

Deane had arrived at Fort Brown in the middle of June 1876 and was told by Col. Julius Mason to remain a few days. 

Mason had just arrived himself from Fort Riley, Kansas, and was concerned because there were rumors of a fight with the Indians in the Rosebud country. 

“A little later, he decided to send me to the camp of Custer and Reno and told me to select an Indian to accompany me,” Deane said. “I picked Niogen Doget, a Shoshone, and we started out on the morning of June 24, with our saddle horses and one pack horse.”

The two men had orders to reach their destination as quickly as possible, so they traveled fast and light. 

Crossing Cottonwood Creek, they made our way up the slope of the Owl Creek Range. 

On the summit of the mountains, Deane described pausing to look down for the first time into the Big Horn Basin which would one day be his future home. 

“From my point of vantage, I could see the Big Horn River and could trace its course for many miles, by the line of cottonwood timber along its banks,” Deane said. “Not a human being, nor a sign of human habitation, was visible in all the valley.”

As Deane and Niogen Doget took in the view, they were unaware of the danger that Custer, Reno and the others would be facing the next day along the Little Bighorn River.

Deane said that the Pryor Mountains were dimly visible, and the Big Horn Range, with snow-capped Cloud’s Peak, rising in its midst, was easily discerned. 

Only a few miles beyond the smooth northern slope of the range on which they stood, the men could see the peculiar, brick-red, conical hills of the hot springs region, in which the town of Thermopolis would later spring up. 

They descended the northern slope of the mountains, passing close to the spot where Col. Torrey’s Embar Ranch would soon to be situated, the same ranch that Butch Cassidy and others of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang would be working on in the 1890s. 

He forged unnamed creeks and swam rivers in his haste to reach the camps. 

As the two men traveled with the dispatch from Fort Brown on June 25 and 26, they were completely unaware that the Battle of the Little Bighorn, known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass by the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes, was being fought. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Reno Sick in Tent"}]

On June 27, Deane said that he and Niogen Doget reached the head of what is now called Reno Creek. 

They followed down a long bench, hunting the camp of Custer and Reno. 

“As we drew near the camp, which was on the bank of the Little Big Horn River, I could see dead horses and other traces of a fight,” Deane said years later in 1928. “Sergeant Ned Bowling, whose widow is still living in Lander, Wyoming, greeted me and pointed out Reno’s tent.”

Deane said he hurried over to the tent but was surprised when Reno’s orderly would not let him inside. 

Deane was told that Reno was ill and unable to receive dispatches. 

“I was sent to the second in command to whom I handed over the small locked pouch, used by the government for secret messages, and the sealed envelope containing the key,” Deane said. “As he tore open the envelope, I remarked that I would look around a little and return later.”

Deane was ordered instead to wait while the officer prepared dispatches about the battle to send back to Fort Brown. Deane was then told to start back with the messages at once. 

“My curiosity was now thoroughly aroused, as well as some resentment,” Deane said. “When a man has just covered 170 miles, in two days, it must be a very urgent matter which sends him back over the same route, without at least, one night’s rest for himself and his horse.”

Deane could see that “serious things had been happening.” 

He described how the faces of the officers were grim and haggard; there were dead horses and bandaged men, and Reno was evidently seriously wounded. 

He pulled his friend Bowling to one side while waiting for the dispatches and asked what had happened. 

Bowling told Deane that Custer and Reno had quarreled at Rosebud, and Custer, impetuous and hot-headed, had taken a small group and gone ahead to attack the Indians, without waiting for Reno’s support. 

Deane learned that Custer and his men had ridden forth upon a rolling ridge and were going so fast that the ammunition wagon and Gatling gun could not keep up. Indians, outnumbering his forces 10-1, were in ambush in the timber along the Little Big Horn River, which paralleled the ridge. 

John “Josh” Deane came West looking for adventure — and got more than he bargained for when he took a job as a military dispatch rider. It was 150 years ago that he found himself carrying the first message about Custer’s last stand to Wyoming’s Fort Brown.  

Daily Smile: Monday, June 1, 2026

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