By Phil Roberts
The town was established because of agriculture. It was named, not for the farmer, investor, engineer or railroad official but for a saloonkeeper and lifelong gambler.
It is said that C. H. “Dad” Worland took a gamble and located his 160-acre homestead where he envisioned freighters and travelers would stop on the way north or south through the Big Horn Basin. He probably never envisioned a town on the barren site.
Just when Worland came to the Big Horn Basin is not known although he was selling fruit trees to the few ranchers in the Basin as early as the 1880s. A native of Missouri, he reportedly had been one of the first men to trail sheep from the Pacific Northwest to eastern markets. He invested in sheep but had marginal luck, losing much of his flock in severe winters.
A prosperous storeowner in Basin loaned Worland enough money to file for the homestead and build a structure on it. From the dugout carved into the side of a hill, Worland dispensed liquor, sundries and incidentals to passersby.
It was a good spot for a store. Located where 15-mile Creek empties into the Big Horn River, Worland’s “Hole-in-the-Wall Saloon” became a natural hangout for a variety of stragglers. For the convenience of his customers Worland established a bank.
The bank was far from conventional, even for those days. In fact, the bank consisted of a cigar box behind the bar. Loans, deposits and check-cashing were conducted on a largely do-it-yourself basis. Each week Worland took the checks to Thermopolis to exchange them for hard cash. Legend has it that not one penny was ever taken improperly by Worland’s customers, and although the banker held large sums of cash at times, he never locked it up. “Dad” Worland trusted people.
C. F. Robertson is generally credited as the town of Worland’s founder. In his book, Historical Review of the Worland Valley (1941), a copy of which is in the Washakie County Library, Robertson wrote that it was “Dad” Worland who convinced him that the site near the Hole-in-the-Wall Saloon was a perfect place for a town.
Robertson had become interested in the area in 1902 when he and two associates agreed to finance a survey for an irrigation system in the Big Horn Basin. The next year the survey crew mapped out plans for the Hanover Canal so named because Hanover, Indiana, had been the hometown of Basin lawyer J. P. Arnott who filed the first water right for the group.
The company established to build the system was named the Hanover Canal Company. It wasn’t the first irrigation project planned for the area. Some 20 years earlier William A. Richards and a syndicate of Colorado businessmen staked claims and began construction of a canal system. No water was diverted from the river. A couple of small ditches were built to irrigate individual homesteads in the intervening 20 years, but nothing of consequence came of the project.
The Richards group still held the land in the area of the proposed Hanover Canal but after complicated negotiations, the Hanover Company and the Richards organization merged. According to records in the Wyoming State Archives, at the time, Richards was assistant commissioner of the U. S. General Land Office in Washington, D. C. He had served as Wyoming governor from 1895 to 1899.
The first four officers of the new company, W. L. Culbertson, D. T. Pulliam, R. E. Coburn and Robertson, were all honored by later having streets named for them in the newly-established town.
But the name of the town founded because of agriculture and water for irrigation, ironically, came from a man who dispensed something stronger than water, C. H. “Dad” Worland saloonkeeper, hotelman, “banker,” and gambler. Worland, Wyoming was off and running.
(Sources for this article also come from the exhibits and collections of the Washakie Museum and Cultural Center, Worland, and from several books written by Worland historian John W. Davis).