Drive about eight miles north of Kemmerer and you'll find what's left of Sublet — foundations in the sage, a fallen tipple, the bones of a town.
It went up fast in 1907, a company town for the Kemmerer Coal Company mines, feeding coal to the Union Pacific. By 1915 around 524 people lived here — Italians, Austrians, Greeks, Finns, most speaking little English, all chasing the same paycheck under the same ridge. For a couple of decades it was a real, loud, living place.
It was hard living, too. In 1920 a man struck a keg of blasting powder with a mallet and six men died. In 1923 — the same brutal year as the big Frontier explosion — gas ignited by a trolley arc killed 39 more at a Sublet mine.
Then the coal demand dropped, the seams ran thin, and the boom did what booms always do. The last coal came out in 1927, and within a few years Sublet was empty. Walk it today, and you're standing in a classic Wyoming ghost town — proof of how fast a whole community can rise and vanish out here.