Green River Man Saddened With Decline Of Historic Hotel, Organizes Team To Save It

Growing up, Marty Carollo had a front-row seat to the slow-motion decline of the historic Tomahawk Hotel in downtown Green River.

“My family had a cable television business, so I grew up in that,” he said. “And our office was right across the street from the Tomahawk. So I’ve always been staring at this building.”

One day, he decided to do more than stare at the 1921 landmark. 

He and a couple of partners started Green River Opportunities Wyoming, or GroWYO, and bought the building with a goal bigger than just restoring an old hotel. They wanted to help revive their community’s downtown.

“We wanted to create a place where businesses could come in, cut their teeth, and grow a business,” Carollo said. “Then expand that business community into, preferably downtown, but certainly in our town.”

A Stalled Vision

It was an idealistic approach. One that struggled to take off. An elevator was put in to meet ADA requirements, but the larger renovation remained stalled. 

“There was a paralysis of cohesive goal and a paralysis of the funding mechanism,” Carollo said. “And the most difficult was a paralysis of finding a partner.”

Carollo knew of construction companies that could do a “pretty good” job. But he didn’t want to get locked into timelines that might encourage less-than-perfect fixes for unexpected problems. 

He wanted a higher level of commitment to quality. And a building that was going to last another 100 years.

The right partners turned out to be a couple. 

Josh and Amy Stone, both with engineering backgrounds, initially came aboard for a smaller remodeling project. They fell in love with the building, Carollo said, and he came to appreciate their commitment to doing work that would stand the test of time.

Eventually, they bought out one of Carollo’s original partners. Their commitment from the start was a simple one — but not easy. 

When they found a problem, it would get fixed the right way before moving on. 

Broken floor joists wouldn’t be ignored. Missing studs in a load-bearing wall would be replaced. Leaking cast-iron plumbing would be repaired or replaced.

That’s meant reinforcing or replacing about 70% of the building's physical structure so far. It’s also meant all-new electrical, plumbing, heating and cooling systems.

Room To Grow

The results have been worth it, Carollo said. The hotel’s third-floor guest rooms, designed for extended stays, are already attracting rave reviews. 

An array of office suites and conference rooms are on the second floor, and there’s space for growing new businesses on the first.

Already businesses have moved into the space, outgrown it, and moved up in the Green River world, exactly as Carollo had hoped.

“One of our fairly moderate businesses is called Red White Buffalo, and they have now moved across the street to the old Green River Mercantile,” Carollo said. 

Green River Mercantile was the first expansion of James Cash Penney’s JCPenney department store chain.

Penney opened his first Golden Rule store, the predecessor to JCPenney, in Kemmerer. His “Mother Store” is still operating there to this day.

“There are eight new businesses downtown since we started our project two and a half years ago,” Carollo said. “So we’re very excited about that.”

More announcements about new businesses moving into the space are coming, Carollo added. 

“We really can’t announce what they are until we get them in their room and they can really start touting it,” he said. “But we’re really excited about it because they’re businesses that do exactly what we’re trying to do, which is create movement and flow downtown.”

A Grand Beginning

The Tomahawk Hotel wasn’t named for a weapon. The name is a portmanteau created from the names of the men who built it.

Dr. J.W. Hawk was a prominent Green River citizen and a district surgeon for the Union Pacific Railroad. He’d built a drug store and erected some new business buildings in Green River. 

Eventually he teamed with Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Welch to construct what newspapers of the day noted was an awfully large and upscale hotel for such a small community. 

“While it may seem somewhat large for the city, Green River has a good country back of it, and with the advent of several large new industrial plants now being planned, there will be plenty of business for the motel,” an article in the May 14, 1921, edition of Hotel World proclaimed.

The Green River Star also touted the hotel’s opening night.

“This is an event which means much to the town of Green River as the new Hotel Tomahawk is one of the finest hotel establishments in the west and is furnished second to none,” a May 6, 1921, Star article said.

“The ground floor aside from the lobby is occupied by live wires in the business life of the town who have attractive establishments that add much to the general appearance of the hotel block, while just east of the hotel is located the modern Sweetwater Auto Co. Garage, where the auto tourist can receive every need for the gasoline driven vehicles used by the overland tourist of today," it continued.

Built With Outlaw Gold?

That’s what they said in the papers about the 75-room hotel that sat by the Lincoln Highway, facing the Union Pacific Railroad. The community was whispering about something else. 

Where had the mysterious wealth come from to build this luxurious hotel? 

Not only did it have two floors of hotel rooms, some with upscale baths and showers, but the first floor offered six storefronts and the basement included a hotel bar, a bowling alley, a dance floor and a stage for performances.

That had taken money, and a lot of it for a family of ranchers and a doctor. 

A prominent rumor was that Tom Welch’s share of funding for the hotel had come from the infamous Tipton train robbery.

Welch did little to squelch these rumors, according to an Annals of Wyoming article written by Faith Mullen.

“In some circles he was believed to be the fifth and unknown man who participated in the 1900 robbery of the Union Pacific Overland Flyer in Tipton, Wyoming,” she wrote. 

Dr. Hawk, meanwhile, was said to have periodically treated gunshot wounds for members of the Wild Bunch, who were believed to have been involved in the robbery.

Union Pacific officials have always claimed the haul from the 1900 train robbery near Tipton was a mere $50.40. But historians and newspapers of the day scoffed at this low-ball number. They’ve put the figures at more like $50,000 to $55,000 in gold and banknotes — a whopping $1.8 million windfall in today’s money.

Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and Etta Place are thought to have used their portion of the wealth to buy expensive suits in Fort Worth as well as steamship tickets to a new life in Argentina as they fled from the Pinkertons.

Whether any of that money also financed the bricks and mortar of the Tomahawk is unproven, but it’s an interesting local legend nonetheless.

History Under The Stairs 

The renovation has turned up new mysteries inside the Tomahawk. Beneath a wooden platform in the basement, the renovation crew found another kind of history — bowling cards, coins, small shoes and old bottles.

Carollo likes to imagine that some of the bottles of liquor, which seem to include bourbon, are a stash of stolen booze. They were found under a wooden staircase. 

A historian from the museum has been invited to come and look over the booze, to help determine its history.

“We’ll be finding ways to incorporate all that into the design at some point,” Carollo said. 

Carollo also recovered the building’s original fireplace and has returned it to the building’s lobby, where it now contains an electric insert.

“That was a cool thing, because it helped us define our colors,” Carollo said. “We’re finding places to incorporate brushed nickel and so we’ve taken a few cues that we had and tried to use them the best we can.”

For Carollo, this kind of attention to detail is about more than mere aesthetics. It’s about preserving a thread of Green River history that was in danger of being lost.

“The work we’re doing is going to be history in somebody else’s hands in 100 years,” he said. “So we’re going to do it right.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.