Beginning with a trip Pikes Peak in 1859, and sandwiched around his service during the Civil War, Sharp traveled across the American West and British Columbia until 1868. He was a prospector and railroad worker. He also supplied meat to mining camps in California and Oregon with an Anglo-Native American named Old Tex. By 1867, he was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he supplied telegraph poles to the Union Pacific Railroad and was a deputy sheriff.