Encampment River

About

Encampment River, Wyoming — 1902-1908 Copper Boom. Long before any of that, the Encampment flowed through the ancestral territory of the region's Indigenous peoples, who used the river as a travel corridor, a hunting ground, and a gathering place. That older order was undone by the cession framework of the nineteenth century — the treaties of the 1800s, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the allotment era that stretched from the 1840s into the 1890s.

Commercial extraction reached the watershed early. From the 1830s through the 1920s the Encampment's forests were logged to feed the regional timber industry and the railroad expansion that ran through the second half of the nineteenth century. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations worked the drainage until the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910. State forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s closed the era of large-scale cutting.

The copper boom overlapped those last logging decades. The Grand Encampment Mining District — also called the Encampment Mining District — took shape in 1897 and became the site of Wyoming's largest copper boom. The 1902 Boston & Wyoming Smelter, Power and Light Company processed ore drawn from the district's mines, and production peaked across 1907 and 1908, when 3,000 people lived in the district. Falling copper prices drove the bust between 1908 and 1912. The Encampment Forest Fire followed between 1912 and 1915, burning 50,000 acres of the river's watershed and reshaping the forested slopes above the water.

The river's flows drew their own scrutiny. USGS survey work in the 1870s and gauging stations established in the following decades produced the first comprehensive hydrological picture of the Encampment, later extended by state geological streamflow assessments and, after 1972, by Clean Water Act monitoring aimed at more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impact. That work continues. Since 2010 the Wyoming Department of Natural Resources, in partnership with local watershed groups, has pursued streambank stabilization, native fish restocking, nutrient reduction, and water-quality improvement through the drainage.

The Encampment runs roughly 30 miles from its headwaters in the Sierra Madre Mountains to its confluence with the North Platte at the town of Encampment, draining about 250 square miles of Carbon County. Its 2009 Wild and Scenic designation protects 16.3 miles and stands among the reasons the river is counted one of the most pristine in Wyoming. The appeal for the Wyoming Wildlife Federation and Trout Unlimited, which led that campaign, lay in the fishery: the Encampment is a popular trout stream, and its upper reach carries Gold Medal designation. Downstream, its cold, clear flows join the North Platte just above Saratoga, feeding the trout water that has long made that town a fishing destination. The river is managed by the Bureau of Land Management; USGS gauge 06623800 tracks its flows, which run best between 60 and 170 CFS against a long-run average near 114 CFS.