The North Platte River Valley became a major corridor west as routes first used by Native Americans were adopted by fur traders and then by wagon train emigrants, later followed by wagon roads, railroads, and a paved highway that made permanent settlement possible. In the Hartville Uplift, Wyoming’s first inhabitants arrived approximately 13,500 years ago and used local food resources, high quality stone, and red ocher, quarrying stone for thousands of years at Spanish Diggings to make tools and mining red ocher for trade and for utilitarian and ceremonial uses. By the mid-1840s, emigrants from around the world traveled through the valley on the route now popularly called the Oregon Trail, which also carried Mormons to the Great Salt Lake Valley, farmers to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, gold seekers to California, and settlers to many places in between; from 1860 through 1861 the Pony Express used the same trail, and the 1874 gold discovery in the Black Hills led to the Cheyenne-Deadwood Stage Route. Railroads then linked communities and carried cattle, sheep, iron, and coal to market, with the Cheyenne and Northern Railway reaching Hartville Junction near Guernsey by 1887 and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy entering Guernsey in 1913, later becoming the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. The Hartville Uplift also includes the Hell Gap Site northeast of Guernsey, where intact successive occupations provide an almost complete cultural chronology of Paleoindians. After emigrant migration, open range ranches formed the region’s early commerce, then irrigation allowed numerous farms and small ranches to replace large ranches, while iron mines north of Guernsey in the Hartville and Sunrise areas drove the local economy for nearly a century and a railroad yard and branch lines moved agricultural and mining goods to market. The economy broadened in the 1920s and 1930s with Guernsey Dam, facilities at Guernsey State Park, and Camp Guernsey. In 1902 the Bureau of Reclamation began the North Platte Project at Guernsey, extending 111 miles east and watering 390,000 acres through more than 2,000 miles of canals, laterals, and drains for the Pathfinder and Goshen irrigation districts. Copper discovered near Hartville in 1881 led to more important iron ore discoveries, and in 1890 the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company established Sunrise as a company town to support the mine; the Sunrise mine closed in 1980 after producing over 40 million tons of iron ore, and although Hartville lost population after the closure, it remained a small, vibrant community.