Laramie, Wyoming: The Trapper Who Didn't Come Back

Laramie, Wyoming, takes its name from a river, and the river took it from a trapper who went up it alone and was found dead at his cabin. His name was Jacques La Ramie, and by the 1890s even the old-timers who’d heard of him couldn’t say exactly when he died.

A river named for a missing man

The federal place-names record for Laramie keeps it short. The town was named for the Laramie River, “which was named for Jacques LaRamie, French-Canadian trapper killed by Arapahoes on the river around 1818.” Henry Gannett’s 1905 survey of American place names calls him “Jacques Laramie, a French fur trader.”

C. G. Coutant’s 1899 History of Wyoming tells the longer story. La Ramie led a band of free trappers, men who worked for themselves instead of a big fur company. About 1820, Coutant says, he announced he’d trap the Laramie River, which other trappers knew as dangerous ground. His friends tried to talk him out of it. He told them he’d go alone and trust the tribes he was on good terms with. When the trappers met for their next rendezvous, he wasn’t there. A search party went up the river, found the cabin he’d said he would build, and found his body there.

After that, Coutant writes, his friends called the stream “Laramie’s River,” and later trappers shortened it to Laramie River. “This is the origin of the name Laramie River,” he says, “from which comes Laramie Plains, Laramie Range, Laramie Peak, Fort Laramie, Laramie County, Laramie City and Little Laramie River.”

The parts nobody could pin down

Here’s where it gets fuzzy. “The story of Jacques Laramie has been hard to trace,” Coutant admitted. He’d asked a long list of pioneers about him, and while all of them knew the tradition, “none could speak positively as to the time when Laramie was killed.” The killing was blamed on the Arapahoes at the time, but Coutant notes that the tribe strongly denied it and said other Indians were responsible.

So you’ll see two dates depending on where you look: around 1818 in the federal record, about 1820 in Coutant. And Coutant hedged his own date: “it might have been three or four years earlier.” Both are guesses. Even the spelling drifted. In 1918, I. S. Bartlett’s History of Wyoming wrote the trapper’s name as “La Ramie” and noted that the places named for him use a form “somewhat differently written and pronounced.”

The fort, the clerk and the railroad

The name reached the old trading post on the river long before it reached the town. Robert Campbell first called that post Fort William, for his partner William Sublette. Bartlett says Campbell “soon after named it Laramie, in honor of a brave French trapper who was killed on the river which also bears his name.”

Coutant has a funnier version. He says a forgetful shipping clerk at Campbell’s store in St. Louis was supposed to mark the bales “Fort William, on Laramie River,” and one day just wrote “Fort Laramie” instead. Campbell, the story goes, decided the clerk had “blundered correctly,” and the name stuck. It’s a good story, but Coutant is the only one of these sources that tells it, so take it as one.

The city came much later, with the railroad. Bartlett says the Union Pacific platted Laramie in April 1868, and about four hundred lots sold within a week. One odd detail: the city of Laramie isn’t in Laramie County. Bartlett lists it as the seat of Albany County, while Laramie County’s seat is Cheyenne. Not bad for a trapper whose death date nobody could fix: a river, a fort, a range, a county and a city, and they don’t even line up on the map.

Sources & further reading

• C. G. Coutant, The History of Wyoming from the Earliest Known Discoveries, vol. 1 (1899). La Ramie and the free trappers, the trip up the river about 1820, the cabin, “Laramie’s River,” and the list of places named from it (pp. 297–299); “hard to trace,” the pioneers who couldn’t date his death, the Arapahoes’ denial, and “about 1820, but it might have been three or four years earlier” (p. 299); the shipping clerk and “Fort Laramie” (pp. 301–302).
• I. S. Bartlett, ed., History of Wyoming, vol. 1 (1918). Fort William renamed Laramie by Robert Campbell for the trapper (p. 306); “La Ramie,” the name “somewhat differently written and pronounced,” the Union Pacific platting the city in April 1868, and Laramie as the seat of Albany County (p. 586); Cheyenne as seat of Laramie County (p. 547).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 181. Laramie county, city, peak and river, “named for Jacques Laramie, a French fur trader.”
• GNIS feature 1590526 (U.S. Geological Survey). Named for the Laramie River and Jacques LaRamie, killed by Arapahoes around 1818; first settled in 1867.