Deer Creek Station stood on the site of present-day Glenrock near the confluence of Deer Creek and the North Platte River and became a familiar landmark along the Oregon-California-Mormon Trail between 1857 and 1866. It began with Joseph Bissonette’s Trading Post, also known as Dakota City, where the mountain man’s store, post office, blacksmith shop, corrals, and hotel-saloon served a variety of visitors. These included photographer William Henry Jackson during his days as a freighter, stage passengers such as British author Sir Richard Burton, a party of Lutheran missionaries who remained in the area from 1859 to 1864, troops en route to Salt Lake City during the Utah War, and, in the winter of 1859 to 1860, an expedition of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers under Captain William F. Raynolds. From 1857 to 1861, the post also served as a trading center for the nearby Upper Platte Indian Agency, located about three and a half miles upstream along Deer Creek. Beginning in April 1860, Pony Express riders exchanged mounts there, but that experiment ended abruptly in October 1861 when the first transcontinental telegraph quickly replaced pounding hooves with clicking telegraph keys. After the Civil War began, Indian-white hostilities escalated, prompting troops from Fort Laramie to erect a military installation across the road from the trading post in 1862 to protect the telegraph line and travelers along the trail. Intensifying conflicts between soldiers and Indians forced Bissonette to abandon his establishment in the fall of 1864, and Indians finally burned Deer Creek Station on August 18, 1866, closing an important chapter of Wyoming’s early history.