Although Wyoming did not experience the intense and prolonged gold excitement as was felt in the territory outside of her boundaries, South Pass City, a few miles north of the famous South Pass, contributed materially to the sum total of gold mined in the sixties. Gold in paying quantities was first discovered in this camp as early as 1842 by a member of the American Fur Company, though no developing was done until 1857 when forty men prospected the entire length of the Sweetwater. Gold was found everywhere in the stream and its numerous tributaries. In the fall of 1861, when gold was being found in abundance in Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, three-score of men located claims along Willow Creek on which stream South Pass City was located. By 1863 mining was carried on in Carissa Gulch and from that time to the present day there has intermittently been gold developments in this gulch. James Stuart, when at Fort Bridger in August, 1863, found many teams there congregated to go to Bannack camp, having deserted the gold-fields of Pike's Peak. Among the number of those disgruntled were many who tried their luck at South Pass City, as did hundreds of other miners from Montana, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and California. By 1868, this little hustling mining camp boasted of more than four thousand people, which number was greatly increased in the following year. All of the roads in 1869, leading to South Pass City, were full of eager jostling prospectors. But the camp soon experienced a decline after the rich "pickings" had been mined. Today South Pass City camp is a picturesque ghost city containing less than a score of people and a few relics in the way of log cabins, of what was for a number of years the most prosperous mining camp in Wyoming.

The discovery of gold in southwestern Montana during the last days of 1862 gave rise to the city of Bannack (at that time in Idaho) the camp by January, 1863, having a population of from two thousand to three thousand people. Bannack, for a short time, was the capital of the territory after it was organized in 1864, being moved to Virginia City when the scramble for gold was discovered in the new mining camp in Beaverhead Valley. Virginia City was first named "Varina" in honor of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, but the people of the camps soon changed the name to one that did not so constantly remind them of the South and the civil strife then being carried on in the States.

With the discovery of this new camp, the population of Bannack pretty generally moved en masse to Virginia City, which, by 1864, had a population of ten thousand typical mining people. Virginia City remained the capital until 1866, when it was moved to Helena, another camp of unusual promise. Telegraph lines in 1866 were running to both of these camps by the way of Salt Lake, John Creighton operating this line as a branch of his main line along the Oregon Trail. The amount of letters sent from one of these western mining camps was evidence of the number of people in the camps. From Virginia City in one day in 1863, six thousand letters were dispatched to the east by the way of Salt Lake, being an accumulation of ten days when the stage was not in operation.