The Lost Cabin Mine

A classic Wyoming lost-mine legend that seeded real stampedes

The Lost Cabin Mine is Wyoming's great lost-gold story, and like every good one it comes in many versions. Most begin in the 1860s with a small party of prospectors, often said to be seven Swedes, who struck rich gold somewhere in the Bighorn Mountains or along Badwater Creek in central Wyoming, built a cabin against the coming winter, and were attacked. In the version Charles Clay told in 1894, said to come straight from the survivors, the Swedes left the Black Hills in the late fall of 1865, found nuggets in the creek and then a vein, and lost four men in an ambush and a fifth soon after. Two staggered into Fort Reno on the Powder River with about $7,000 in gold, were arrested at first as army deserters, and could not say where the cabin stood. Another telling names a California forty-niner, Allan or Albert Hulburt, who found the gold in 1863 with partners named Cox and Jones and was the only one to get out.

The return trips went worse. In one story the surviving Swede led a party of twelve back in May 1866 and none were seen again, and in 1895 the newspaper Bill Barlow's Budget reported that cowboys had found twelve skeletons in an aspen grove on Badwater Creek, with soldiers' buttons among the bones. Later finders kept dying at the worst moment. One prospector is said to have found the mine and dropped dead of a heart attack at his wagon; a Buffalo man who wore a live rattlesnake around his neck sat down at the bar to tell all and was bitten by his own snake. There really was a "Rattlesnake Jack" McIntyre working around Buffalo, snake and all. In 1902 the Buffalo Bulletin announced the cabin found on Otter Creek, marked by a rock with the prospectors' names, and men rushed to stake claims that produced only traces.

Historians are doubtful. The Bighorns' geology is not associated with gold, the small amounts found there rarely paid, and there is no record of any attack like the one in the stories. A Swedish geographer, Hans Lonegren, searched military records and newspapers and found no proof, though he still thinks there may be something in it. Prospectors still study the Boot Map, a carving on a granite boulder in the Bighorns that some believe points the way.

The legend did leave a name on the map. The sheep king J. B. Okie built his empire on Badwater Creek, and when he opened a store there in 1895, he supposedly called the place Lost Cabin after the mine. The name was already attached to the area by 1887.