Gebo

Two thousand people and the biggest town in the county, gone with the coal

Gebo grew out of a land fraud, and the fix for that fraud became the first lease of federal coal in the United States.

Samuel Wilford Gebo was born in 1862 in Ogdensburg, New York, and spent his youth working other men's coal mines from Illinois to Washington before he developed mines of his own in Montana and Alberta. In 1905 he came to Big Horn County, Wyoming, chasing word of excellent coal, and freighted 400 tons of it 135 miles by wagon to test it. He called it the finest coal in the West. It burned hot and left only three percent ash.

The law of the day let a person or a company file on two 160-acre claims, nowhere near enough for a big mine. So Gebo and seven partners, four of them New York investors, paid 64 men and women $5 each to apply for claims, among them bartenders and elevator operators in Harlem. Then they filed the whole bundle at the Lander land office on 22 June 1906 in the names of two firms, the Owl Creek Coal Company and the Northwestern Coal Company. Owl Creek's claims came to 4,312 acres more than it had any right to.

The Burlington Railroad pushed south to Kirby in 1906, and company towns grew up at Gebo and Crosby beside the mines, about 11 miles north of Thermopolis. Miners of at least 16 nationalities came, and Gebo reached around 2,000 people, for a time the largest town in the Bighorn Basin. Miners said they could earn more there than anywhere else in Wyoming or Montana. Every worker lived in a house owned by the coal company, the school had about 100 students, and Montenegrin miners played in the Gebo Tamburitza Orchestra.

Filing everything at once drew federal scrutiny. A grand jury in Cheyenne indicted the partners in 1909, and in 1910 the Interior Department cancelled the entries and ordered the mines closed. The local United Mine Workers wrote to Senator Francis E. Warren asking whether the company could lease the land instead. In August 1912 Congress let Owl Creek keep mining in exchange for a royalty on every ton, and Congress built on that system in the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. Each defendant was fined $1,500 in 1913, and Gebo left for Guatemala.

Production at the Owl Creek mine peaked in 1920 at about 500,000 tons a year. Mining ended in 1938. The remains of the town were bulldozed in 1971, though some buildings and the cemetery remain.