The first time I really looked at Worland, I was driving back from the Big Horn Basin on a gray afternoon, and I passed a hulking industrial building on the edge of town with steam or dust rising off it. Kimi asked what it was. I had no idea. I figured it was a grain elevator, or maybe some kind of mine operation. It turned out to be a sugar factory — one that has been turning Wyoming beets into white sugar, in one form or another, since 1917. I had driven past a hundred years of history and mistaken it for scenery.
I’ve written before about the German-Russian families who settled this part of Wyoming and brought their kuchen and sausage and their generations of beet-farming knowledge with them. That’s one thread of this story. But the sugar beet itself — the crop, the water that made it possible, the factory, and the people who stooped over those rows in the heat — is a bigger and stranger story than I expected. And it’s one that pulled in far more people than just the German-Russian farmers.
A Crop That Needed a River Moved
Here’s the thing about the Big Horn Basin: it’s dry. Genuinely dry — a high, sagebrush bowl ringed by mountains that wring most of the moisture out of the air before it ever reaches the valley floor. You cannot grow a thirsty crop like sugar beets there on rainfall. You have to bring the water in.
The first serious attempt came in the 1890s, when a group of investors — including Buffalo Bill Cody himself and a Cheyenne man named George T. Beck — formed the Shoshone Irrigation Company with dreams of watering tens of thousands of acres along the Shoshone River. They got permits for enormous acreage and started digging canals, but the money and the engineering ran out before the water did. Private capital simply couldn’t move a river.
The federal government could. After the Reclamation Act of 1902, the state pushed Washington to take the project over, and in 1904 the Shoshone Project was authorized. Buffalo Bill Dam went up on the Shoshone River and opened in 1910 — for a brief moment billed as the tallest dam in the world. Around Worland, meanwhile, German settlers were digging their own canals off the Bighorn River. Water changed everything. Land that had been sagebrush and jackrabbits became some of the most productive farm ground in the state, and one of the crops it was seemingly designed for was the sugar beet.
The Factory at Worland
A local farmer named J.W. Pulliam is usually credited with the first real Basin beet experiment near Worland — a pilot planting of a few hundred acres of beets and grain in the early 1900s. By 1909 enough growers had joined in that beets were being shipped all the way to Billings, Montana, for processing. Shipping a heavy, perishable root crop across a state line is no way to run an industry, though, and the obvious next step was a factory of their own.
It arrived fast. The Wyoming Sugar Company, out of Ogden, Utah, announced a Worland factory in 1916 and opened the doors on October 17, 1917 — a million-dollar plant that a crew of 150 men reportedly threw up in about a year. On day one it sliced 260 tons of beets. In 1925 the operation was bought by the Holly Sugar Corporation, a major Western sugar company, and Holly ran the Worland factory for the better part of the century. By 1939, the story goes, its beet-receiving station could handle more than 70,000 tons and was billed as the largest in the world.
Holly finally announced it would close the plant in 2001 — the kind of news that can gut a farm town. Instead of letting it die, local growers, landowners, and business people across the Basin and Fremont County pooled their money, bought the factory, and reopened it in 2002 as a cooperative under a revived name: the Wyoming Sugar Company. It’s still running. Every fall, the beets still come in.
The Betabeleros
Here’s the part of the story that doesn’t make it onto the historical markers as often as it should. Sugar beets are brutal to grow by hand. Before herbicides and machinery, the crop demanded armies of stoop labor — thinning seedlings with a short-handled hoe in the spring, weeding through the summer, then topping the beets by hand in the cold mud of the fall harvest. It was, by every account I’ve read, some of the hardest agricultural work in the country.
The German-Russian families did a lot of it early on, and many of them — because land was cheap — climbed out of the fields and into farm ownership. That opened a labor gap, and the industry went looking to fill it. When the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 slammed the door on immigration from southern and eastern Europe but left immigration from Latin America wide open — partly, the record suggests, because the sugar industry lobbied to keep it that way — companies began recruiting Mexican and Mexican-American workers up from the Southwest. In Wyoming they were called betabeleros: beet workers.
There’s a photograph from Lovell in 1923 of a group of them, and it stops you cold. These were the people whose labor actually built the beet economy, and they were rewarded with segregation. In 1927 the Powell Tribune ran a Spanish-language page called La Página Español, sponsored by the Great Western Sugar Company — which operated in the northern end of the Basin the way Holly did around Worland. It ran for a single year, and researchers who’ve studied it describe a community-within-a-community held carefully apart: notices welcoming betabeleros to the movie theater — but only on the west side of the aisle — and to the Fourth of July celebration — but only after four o’clock, once the Anglo festivities had finished.
That community endured anyway. Generations of Mexican-American families in the Basin trace their roots to those beet fields, and some of Wyoming’s artists and historians are only now giving that legacy the attention it’s owed.
Heart Mountain in the Rows
There’s one more thread, and I want to be careful with it because it’s easy to get wrong. During World War II, the government incarcerated more than 10,000 Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain, between Cody and Powell — right in the Big Horn Basin. As wartime labor shortages bit, sugar beet growers across Wyoming and Montana grew desperate; in April 1943 the vice president of the Montana-Wyoming Beet Growers Association wrote to the head of the War Relocation Authority warning that growers would be ruined without workers, because too many of their usual hands had gone off to war.
So the government granted seasonal work releases, and Japanese American incarcerees left the camp to harvest beets in the surrounding fields — the same crop, the same cold, muddy stoop labor. They were essential to bringing in those wartime harvests, and they did it while facing suspicion and hostility from some of the very communities depending on their work. It’s a hard, tangled piece of Basin history, and it belongs in any honest telling of where this sugar came from.
What It All Left Behind
Drive the Basin today and the beet is still everywhere if you know to look — in the factory steam at Worland every autumn, in the trucks piled high with muddy roots on Highway 20, in the flat green fields that only exist because someone dammed a river a century ago. It shaped the towns, the demographics, and the tables. The German-Russian food traditions I wrote about earlier are part of that. So is the Mexican-American cooking that took root in Basin kitchens and never left.
And it’s all connected to the rest of the Basin’s agriculture. The same irrigated ground and short, bright growing season that suit sugar beets also grow the barley and other grains that feed the region — including the grain behind Wyoming Whiskey down in Kirby, just a short drive from the beet country. Water, dirt, and a long agricultural memory: it’s all one system.
Cooking a Little of It Yourself
You can’t really cook with a sugar beet at home — they’re a processing crop, not a table beet — but the humble beet is worth a place in your kitchen regardless, and it’s a nice, quiet way to nod to this history. Roasted red and golden beets, tossed with good olive oil and a little salt, are one of my favorite cold-weather sides. The trick is to roast them whole and wrapped, then slip the skins off after.
A sturdy half-sheet pan is really all you need for roasting, and if you want to serve them thin and shaved into a salad, an inexpensive handheld mandoline earns its keep. And any time a recipe on this site calls for a little sugar, there’s a decent chance — if you’re buying a Western brand — that it started as a beet pulled out of ground that used to be Wyoming sagebrush.
A Sweetness With a Long Shadow
I like that the Worland factory is still running, still farmer-owned, still pulling a crop out of that dry ground that shouldn’t be able to grow it. But I’ve come to think you can’t really taste the sweetness of this story honestly without the shadow behind it — the betabeleros held apart on the west side of the theater, the Heart Mountain workers in the freezing rows. Wyoming’s sugar was built by a lot of hands, and not all of them were treated the way they should have been.
If your family worked the beets — German-Russian, Mexican-American, Japanese American, or otherwise — I would genuinely love to hear your stories. Tag me @wyofood on Instagram or Facebook, or send them my way. This is the kind of history that lives in families long before it makes it into any book.
— Sean