Laramie Range

The Laramie Range lay across routes connecting the North Platte valley with the Laramie Plains. Arapaho seasonal journeys linked winter camps along the river with summer hunting grounds on the plains, leaving trails through the mountains. These movements gave the range a place within an Indigenous geography of hunting and travel before fur traders began recording the region in European names.

Jacques LaRamie, a French Canadian trapper associated with the Northwestern Fur Company, reached the area around 1817. He disappeared in the winter of 1820, and his fate remains uncertain; his name subsequently attached to the river, plains and mountain range. The region's early nineteenth-century fur trade thus developed along a landscape already crossed by established routes, while the naming of its features preserved the memory of a trader whose own story was incompletely recorded.