By Photo: John Margolies, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The story told at Little America begins in the 1890s, when a young sheepherder named S.M. Covey was caught in a blizzard on the open plains of southwest Wyoming and spent a cold night thinking how much a shelter would help travelers. He named his idea after Little America, the Antarctic base of explorer Richard Byrd.
Covey opened a gas station and cafe at the site in 1934, on the Lincoln Highway west of Green River. It sat in the middle of nothing, which was the point. Billboards for hundreds of miles in both directions advertised it, with a penguin as its symbol and the promise of ice cream cones.
The business
Little America grew with the interstate highway system. Its location on Interstate 80 made it a regular stop for truckers and drivers crossing Wyoming, and it added a hotel, restaurant, travel store and fuel island. In 1952 Covey hired a young Earl Holding to manage the Wyoming stop, and Holding and his wife Carol later bought the company and built it into something much larger. Holding’s group opened Little America hotels in Cheyenne, Salt Lake City and Flagstaff, and it acquired the Sinclair Oil Corporation in 1976 and the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho.
Sinclair’s refining business was sold to HollyFrontier in 2022, forming HF Sinclair, while the Holding family kept the hotels and resorts.
Still a stop
The Wyoming location still sells ice cream cones and still serves truckers who drive I-80 in all weather. When the interstate closes because of wind or snow, which happens often in winter, the parking lots fill with stranded drivers, just as Covey imagined.
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