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As would happen decades later across the plains with buffalo, in the mountains and valleys of the West in the late 1830s, the beaver would be thinned almost to extinction, and hunting parties did not earn enough to pay off their creditors. There were fewer and fewer trappers using Brown's Hole as an escape from the harshest winter weather. The locale was not abandoned, though, because some men chose to settle there, often marrying Indigenous women. These families farmed and foraged for themselves and cared little about the doings back east, including a war between northern and southern states.

Jim Bridger reenters the story after the Civil War because he had shown the railroad builders a route through the mountains that would help them finish off the transcontinental tracks. When the railroad reached Rock Springs in Wyoming, suddenly Brown's Hole was not as far off the beaten path as it had once been. And a major figure in bringing civilization closer was John Wesley Powell.

Born in upstate New York in 1834, Powell became one of the most intrepid explorers of nineteenth-century America. Barely out of his teens, he participated in explorations of the Mississippi River valley, spent four months walking across Wisconsin, and rowed the length of the Mississippi from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of several Midwest adventures, Powell was elected to the Illinois Natural History Society at only age twenty-five.

A fervent abolitionist, just weeks after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, he enlisted in the Twentieth Illinois Infantry. A few weeks after that, he was commissioned a lieutenant. And by the end of 1861, he was a captain in the Second Illinois Light Artillery. During the especially bloody Battle of Shiloh the following year, Powell lost most of his right arm when struck by a minié ball while in the process of giving the order to fire. The raw nerve endings in his arm caused him pain for the rest of his life.

He could have sat out the remainder of the war but that was not his nature. As soon as he recovered sufficiently, Powell was back in battle, including the successful siege of Vicksburg in 1863. By the time of the Atlanta campaign in the summer of 1864, he was a major commanding an artillery brigade. After the Battle of Nashville, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, but Powell would always prefer to be called "Major."

After the war, it was back to wandering the West. Though essentially one-armed, Powell led several expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and on the Colorado and Green Rivers, collecting specimens and drawing maps along the way. He and six others became the first white men to scale Longs Peak, in 1868. The following year, with ten men in four boats and packing ten months' worth of food, Powell led an expedition that further explored the Colorado River as well as the Grand Canyon. The participants did not get to eat all that packed food because the journey that began on May 24, 1869, was completed by the end of August.5

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5 Among Powell's legacies, Lake Powell, a man-made body of water on the Colorado River, is named after the intrepid major. He would go on to publish books about his experiences in the American West, work for the Smithsonian Institution, and become director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Powell died at sixty-eight in 1902 in, of all places, Maine and was buried with full military honors in the Arlington National Cemetery.

It was during his 1869 travels that Powell hiked through Brown' Hole, which he renamed Brown's Park. Two years later, he was back, encountering two Texas cattlemen named Harrell and Bacon, who had wintered there with their herd. Over time, this became a common practice. Cattle ranches proliferated in Texas after the Civil War, and some of the owners drove them north to Wyoming and Montana where it was not so hot and there was plenty of water and range land for grazing. Some herds would be late leaving, and rather than risk getting the beeves caught in early snowstorms, they would be sheltered in Brown's Hole.

As Charles Kelly informs, "Previous to arrival of the Texas herds, horses were the only form of property in the country worth stealing, and all pre-railroad outlaws were horse thieves. The arrival of immense herds of cattle, however, changed all that; thereafter, Brown's Hole became principal headquarters for the more profitable cattle-rustling business."

Some cowboys, either because they were budding entrepreneurs or just plain thieves, would cull a few head here and a few head there from the large herds grazing in and around Rock Springs. There were also beeves that had wandered off and could be captured. A good place to hide the cattle until it was safe to sell them was Brown's Hole.

There were also legitimate ranchers in the area. Through the 1870s and 1880s, much of the surrounding range became occupied by large cattle outfits, with some of them having moved full-time from Texas. Their herds grazed on thousands of acres, and to their mind, there was no room for small operations with only a couple hundred head. Not satisfied with enough, they wanted it all. The small-spread ranching families, referred to as homesteaders or "nesters," had just as much right to be there...but not the might.

In some instances, enough pressure was applied that homesteaders realized they had no future in the region, so they picked up and moved on.