Last updated: July 14, 2026
Place
Bessemer Bend National Historic Site
Photo/Bureau of Land Management
Quick Facts
Location:
10 mi. southwest of Casper on Bessemer Rd. To visit the Bureau of Land Management’s Bessemer Bend Interpretive Site, drive southwest from Casper on WY-220 for 8 miles. Turn right on Bessemer Bend Road and continue west for 2 miles. After crossing the bridge over the North Platte River, bear right and enter the interpretive site. GPS 42.773779 -106.530797
Significance:
Emigrants used this low-water crossing of the North Platte River in the 1840s-1860s, and the Red Buttes Pony Express was located on private land nearby in 1860-1861. Today, a Bureau of Land Management interpretive site tells the story of this historic location.
Designation:
Historic site on the California, Mormon Pioneer, Oregon, and Pony Express NHTs.
MANAGED BY:
Amenities
3 listed
Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits, Picnic Table, Restroom
At Casper, WY, the North Platte River bends southward toward its headwaters in the Colorado Rockies. To hold their westerly course, emigrants traveling along the south side of the river needed to cross to the north bank. Before Latter-day Saints established the first ferry at present Casper in 1847, most overlanders forded at Bessemer Bend/Red Buttes Crossing, about 10 miles southwest of Casper. Later, as more ferries and toll bridges began operating downstream, some travelers avoided tolls by driving across this free ford. In summer, the North Platte River at this crossing usually flowed about 300 yards wide and 3 feet deep—normally an easy, unremarkable ford. The bend was a pleasant and scenic camping area, as well, with majestic Red Buttes rising to the south. Here emigrants would finally leave the Platte River system that had conducted them hundreds of miles across the Plains.
Rebecca Ketchum, traveling as a single woman with a small wagon party, was relieved to leave it. “I believe we have now left the Platte River for good, and I am glad indeed,” she wrote in her journal on July 11, 1853. “We have been so long on it. There is so little beauty about it, and we are so much afraid to drink it on account of its being unhealthy that I have grown heartily sick of it.” West of the bend, though, the landscape becomes drier and more challenging, covered with sagebrush and greasewood and dotted with poisonous alkali waterholes. The next good water would be Willow Springs, some 20 miles down the trail.
Bessemer Bend/Red Buttes figured importantly in the ordeal suffered by the Martin Handcart Company, caught there in severe weather in October 1856. The company of around 600 starving Latter-day Saints had drawn their carts across the ice-cold North Platte River at the Upper Platte ford on Oct. 19. Over the next four days they staggered a few miles at a time through snow and cutting wind, finally halting and camping near Bessemer Bend on Oct. 23. Unable to move on through the continuing storms, they camped there for 5 days in bitter winter, many without coats or blankets, sheltering in tents and reducing rations to 4 ounces of flour per day. Peter McBride, 6 years old at the time, years later recounted, “We were doomed to starvation. They gave me a bone of an ox that had died. I cut off the skin and put the bone in the fire to roast. And when it was done some big boys came and ran away with it. Then I took the skin and boiled it, drank the soup, and ate the skin, and it was a good supper.” Rescuers from Salt Lake City discovered the camp on Oct. 28 and helped the company begin moving west to meet the supply wagons.
Site Information
Location (10 mi. southwest of Casper on Bessemer Rd. To visit the Bureau of Land Management’s Bessemer Bend Interpretive Site, drive southwest from Casper on WY-220 for 8 miles. Turn right on Bessemer Bend Road and continue west for 2 miles. After crossing the bridge over the North Platte River, bear right and enter the interpretive site. GPS 42.773779 -106.530797)