© 2025 Wyoming Public Media
800-729-5897 | 307-766-4240
Wyoming Public Media is a service of the University of Wyoming
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Transmission & Streaming Disruptions

Snowbound on the High Plains #456: H.C. Waltz Papers

Image 1: Watercolor painting of a train in the snow outside Laramie, 1869. Box 2, Thomas Kennet-Were papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
Image 1: Watercolor painting of a train in the snow outside Laramie, 1869. Box 2, Thomas Kennet-Were papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

Winter means cold winds and blowing snow on the high plains of Wyoming. In 1872 when Methodist minister H.C. Waltz found himself trapped on a snowbound train from Laramie to Cheyenne he decided to recount his experiences in an article for the Western Christian Advocate.

Readers of the Saint Louis paper might have been unfamiliar with the train trip along the Union Pacific line, but Waltz got their attention. What should have been a short journey from Laramie to Cheyenne turned into a five-day ordeal.

Fierce winds blew drifting snow over the tracks, and even a snowplow train, specially designed to clear the tracks, struggled. Some two hundred snow-shovelers employed by the railroad walked ahead of the train, clearing snow shovel by shovel. Passengers grew hungry and agitated. A few decided to walk to Cheyenne ahead of the train.

Waltz blamed the management of the Union Pacific. The company had erected an insufficient number of snowsheds and snow fences.

Learn more in the H.C. Waltz papers at UW’s American Heritage Center