When Gen. Grenville Dodge arrived at the site of what would become Cheyenne, he beheld a mostly empty landscape – a small creek and a handful of trees in the middle of a vast expanse of windswept plains.
In fact, even nine years after Cheyenne was established, a woman named Nennie Steel wrote in her diary that the entire town had just 12 trees total. Today, there are roughly a quarter-million trees that grace the city’s parks, neighborhoods and open spaces.
But the transformation wasn’t swift, nor was it possible without the vision of several of the city’s earliest citizens. As the city prepares to celebrate its 150th anniversary, new visionaries are stepping forth to renew the push for tree planting in Cheyenne.
Unique challenges and early adopters
To understand why Cheyenne’s trees are so remarkable, it helps to know how Cheyenne’s founding differs from so many other cities and towns up and down the Front Range.
“We founded a town where nobody in their right mind normally would have put a town,” said Shane Smith, founder and director of the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. “Virtually every other community, town and city in the region could look at some sort of prior Native American habitation. There was no reason to stop and stay here: there was no natural protection, no minerals and very little water.”
On top of that, Smith said Cheyenne’s climate poses its own issues. Not only is the city located in a semi-arid zone that gets barely 16 inches of moisture a year, it’s also the fourth-windiest and most hail-prone city in the country.
“We probably have one of the worst garden climates in the lower 48 states; and it’s not just wind. It’s lack of winter snow cover,” Smith said. “That’s why, if left to its native environment, you might see a few trees growing along Crow Creek in Cheyenne, but that’d be it.”
Smith said it only figures that people audacious enough to found Cheyenne where they did would also be willing to populate it with trees. And that’s exactly what happened, over many decades.
Perhaps the single most important personality involved in Cheyenne’s early forestry efforts was James Floyd Jenkins. He arrived in Cheyenne in 1876 to work as the chief clerk of the commissary at Camp Carlin, a quartermaster depot just south of Fort D.A. Russell, now known as F.E. Warren Air Force Base.
“He was from Wisconsin, and when he came here, there were very few trees; the only place native trees grew was along waterways,” said Mark Ellison, assistant director of Cheyenne Urban Forestry. “Many of the settlers who came here brought trees with them, which is why we have a lot of Midwest tree species. But most of them planted the cottonwoods that had been growing along the streams and lakes.”
It was Jenkins who kicked that effort into high gear. His efforts began ahead of Arbor Day in 1882. By that point, Jenkins was co-owner of a shoe store in town, and with his business partner and next-door neighbor, he launched a campaign to raise funds to build a park along four blocks of land given to the city by the Union Pacific Railroad.
The campaign was successful, and the result was the city’s first municipal park, which was planted on the site where the Wyoming Supreme Court now stands at 2301 Capitol Ave. The park remained until the 1930s, when the city granted it to the state. Several of the original trees still stand on the grounds.
“In his memoirs, Jenkins talked about planting the first tree in Cheyenne in 1878,” Smith said. “I think he’s bragging, but I think he rightfully is the father of our parks. He pretty much founded Lions Park, and he made it his mission to beautify Sloans Lake.”
Ellison agreed that Jenkins planted thousands of trees across Cheyenne, including on the land that would become Lions Park, the crown jewel of the city’s parks system.
“He planted probably thousands of trees and was the major person behind the planting of Lions Park – a lot of the initial planting efforts along the streets,” Ellison said. “We’ve been doing research ourselves, and I found information about the city’s first tree committee in 1902. The City Council appointed Jenkins to raise money from business owners around town, and you’ll see a lot of prominent names in there: Carey, Dinneen, Warren.”
Trees planted outside of city, too
Fort D.A. Russell also launched its own efforts to transplant trees to the area, starting in 1885, when the War Department ordered the base to be expanded to accommodate eight infantry companies.
“They built these beautiful red brick structures out there and also planted thousands of trees,” Smith said.
As the century wound on, Cheyenne also became an important contributor to the botanical science of the High Plains with the opening of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cheyenne High Plains Horticultural Research Station in 1928.
“An attorney in town by the name of George Brimmer was a real mover and shaker, and he had this idea that what Cheyenne needed to be a great city was this big ag station,” Smith said.
Smith said the High Plains were effectively the last part of the continental United States to truly be settled, and even by the 1920s, there hadn’t been much work done to figure out what sorts of plants could thrive in the cold, windy, semi-arid environment.
“They found their mission after it was built, in a way. They realized that to settle the High Plains, we’ve got to get people to want to live here,” Smith said. “And to do that, we’ve got to build communities that have a similar look and feel to communities back east.”
Smith said that while two other competing ag stations did research primarily on farming, Cheyenne’s station was different in that it served as a sort of testing ground, gauging the hardiness of a huge variety of plants and cultivating the survivors to thrive here.
“These guys were looking at roses, at lilacs, at what makes a nice shade tree; and they were receiving plants from all over the world because by that point the USDA had developed a contingent of plant explorers,” Smith said.
Plant explorers, he said, were essentially the botanical equivalent of Indiana Jones – rugged scientists who would travel the world in search of exotic plants to bring back to Cheyenne to test.
“They’d get off the train, go to the farmers markets, look at what fruits and vegetables people were eating, then they’d go north and ask, ‘Do you still have this apple here?’” Smith said. “Eventually they’d find a place where they didn’t have any apples there anymore, at which point they’d know to go back to the second-most northerly station, because they were probably growing the most hardy version of that apple there.”
Smith said some of the plants brought back to the research station have since become staples, including the alfalfa hay grown in Wyoming and the wheatgrass that stabilizes the sides of highways all across the state.
“The Cheyenne station released plants that wound up all over the High Plains,” Smith said. “It’s hard to drive into a High Plains community and not find something that the High Plains station was responsible for.”
Located just a few miles northwest of Cheyenne proper, the research station’s mission continued through 1974 before it switched to studying water conservation and later grassland research. While many of the trees and plants cultivated out there are long since gone, some of the hardiest remain to this day in what is now known as the High Plains Arboretum.
Cheyenne Botanic Gardens
While the High Plains research station played a critical role in developing Cheyenne’s plant life, it’s the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens that has served as the showroom for much of that work.
The Botanic Gardens began its life just three short years after the High Plains research station ended its horticultural mission. It started as the Cheyenne Community Solar Greenhouse, eventually expanding to its current location in Lions Park in 1986, the same year it became a full-fledged division of Parks and Recreation.
“You never would expect to see a full-service, fully staffed botanic gardens in a city of this size. So still in our DNA, we’re still doing what we shouldn’t do,” Smith said. “That’s my theme for Cheyenne’s 150th. We do things we shouldn’t be able to do for a city of our size, but we do it anyway.”
In fact, it was in 1982 – exactly 100 years after Jenkins launched the first full-scale tree planting efforts in town – that Cheyenne was formally designated a “Tree City USA” by the Arbor Day Foundation. The designation recognizes the city’s forestry division and its efforts to develop and maintain urban canopy throughout the city.
Ellison said in the decades since then, trees have not been getting the attention they once enjoyed in Cheyenne. Some of the city’s oldest trees are beginning to come up against their lifespan, while others are in danger of being killed by parasites like the emerald ash borer beetle. But despite those concerns, new trees have not been planted to replace those at risk.
“We understand we had a tree-planting history when our city was founded, and we’ve gotten away from that. So we want to get that restarted,” Ellison said.
He’s aiming to do that through a new program called “Rooted in Cheyenne,” which has pulled volunteer stakeholders together to launch a grassroots effort at planting a new generation of trees here.
“We’ve got a lot of newer neighborhoods, too, where there weren’t many trees planted,” Ellison said. “So we’re going to try to partner with homeowners to pay for about half the cost of a tree, and we’ll also plant it for them. Homeowners would be able to apply for up to two trees a year, which would be planted in the public right of way or adjacent to it on public property.”
Those interested in learning more about the program can visit the “Rooted in Cheyenne” Facebook page or call Urban Forestry at 307-637-6428.
