In September 1868, the Union Pacific Railroad established the town of Bryan, named for Lt. Francis Theodore Bryan, a surveyor. Located eleven miles west of Green River and north of this location, Bryan was intended to serve as the railroad's 1868 terminus beyond the settlement at Green River. Within a few months, it had a twelve-stall roundhouse, warehouses, machine shops, restaurants, a boot maker, gunsmith, bank, and concert hall, and as an end-of-the-tracks town it thrived as a wild hell-on-wheels frontier community. Bryan also became the major jumping-off point for travel north to the Sweetwater Mining District and the gold mines around South Pass City eighty miles to the northeast, with would-be miners and canvas-topped wagons piled high with goods departing daily for South Pass. Its population reached an estimated 5,000 before December 1868, but at the end of that year the crucial water supply from nearby Black's Fork River dried up, causing the roundhouse, other facilities, and much of the population to move back to Green River. By 1872, Bryan existed only as a ghost town.