In the third week of March 1936, laborers working to reconstruct old Fort Caspar dug up a set of human leg bones. Expert analysis, the CasperTribune-Herald reported, would soon show whether the legs belonged to an American Indian or a white man, and the search for the rest of the skeleton would continue.

But Natrona County Sheriff Jack Allen was certain there was no need to look any farther. The legs “undoubtedly” belonged to Matt Canfield, Allen told the paper, “a Negro homesteader … whose legs were once amputated at the knees.” Canfield was a former slave who later became a barber in Casper, Wyo. He took out a homestead claim on land west of town near the North Platte River, where the old fort had been. Canfield’s legs froze one winter during a blizzard. After that, he got wooden ones, Allen said.

The paper chewed around on the question for two or three more days. There turned out to be bones of just one leg, not two. Humans have two leg bones below the knee; perhaps that was the source of the confusion. The leg, the paper decided, belonged to Louis Guinard, a trader who had built the bridge that crossed the river by the old fort more than 75 years earlier. One night Guinard had fallen off the bridge and drowned, and only his leg, still inside a boot, had been recovered. His Shoshone wife had supposedly mourned the leg for some time after the death. After that, she must have buried it. This solution to the leg-bone mystery was now “believed certain,” said the reports.[1]

The real Mathew Campfield

And what of Matt Canfield, the barber and homesteader? His name was in fact Campfield, and his first name was spelled more often with one T than two: “Mathew,” not “Matthew.” He was born a slave in Georgia and served in the Civil War in the Union Army in a regiment of black soldiers recruited in Arkansas, the 57^th U.S. Colored Volunteer Infantry. He enlisted in the fall of 1863 at Helena, Ark., and was mustered out with an honorable discharge after the war when the rest of the regiment was disbanded at Fort Leavenworth, in northeastern Kansas, in December 1866. In the Army he held the rank of musician and later principal musician—leader of the regiment’s band.[2]

Afterward, he ran a saloon for a while just off the military property near Fort Leavenworth and gave music lessons there as well. By January 1868 he was working in western Kansas as a servant to Col. Edward Wynkoop, Indian agent for the U.S. government to the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

Frozen feet

Campfield was driving a team of horses from Fort Harker to Fort Larned through a snowstorm on the night of January 8 and early morning of January 9. According to at least one account, he may have been one of a party sent into the snow to hunt deserters.[3] He got lost, and before he found his way to safety both feet were badly frozen.

Twenty months later, in the fall of 1869, an Army doctor named Alfred Woodhull found Campfield in the hospital at Fort Larned. He had lost parts of his feet from the freezing “and the stumps were imperfectly healed,” the doctor remembered 25 years later.[4] The doctor did a proper amputation, taking off both feet at the ankles, so that Campfield could later be fitted for artificial limbs. By 1870, the U.S. Census shows, Campfield was back in Leavenworth, working as a barber.

Barbering would have allowed him to make a living without having to move around much. Whether he sat on a tall stool to work or stood on his wooden feet all day isn’t clear. Years later friends remembered that he could “stump around on [his wooden legs and feet] but has to use a cane all the time.”[5]

Sometime in the 1870s, Campfield married Fannie Davis, who had been born a slave in Missouri but spent the Civil War years in Texas, as her owner had shipped her and other slaves south, where they were less likely to be freed by Union troops. After the war she joined her mother in Leavenworth and got to know Campfield there. One document places their marriage at 1874, another at 1877. In any case, Fannie was certain, decades later, that it was 1879 when they left Kansas and came to Wyoming.[6]

Territorial Wyoming

The 1880 census places Matt Campfield at Fort McKinney, Wyoming Territory, just outside the new town of Buffalo in Johnson County, working as a barber and living with Fannie, whom it lists as his wife. He was still there in the fall of 1882, when election records show that he ran to represent Johnson County in the Council, the upper house of the Wyoming Territorial Legislature. He received one vote.[7]

Fannie remembered years later that Matt ran the post barbershop and she worked for Col. Verling Hart, the post commandant, and later ran a restaurant for the officers. Then the Campfields moved to Laramie for a few months, and then to Rock Creek, a town about 45 miles northwest of Laramie and for a few years one of the main livestock shipping points on the Union Pacific Railroad. The place was lively, with at least one hotel and four saloons. Matt barbered. Fannie washed and ironed.[8]

A number of white people remembered them there. One rancher, T.S. Garrett, whose wife Mary was an avid horsewoman, liked to tell the story of her outracing all challengers on her splendid buckskin horse and a delighted Matt Campfield winning all the bets: “Another plug of Climax [tobacco] on Mrs. Garrett!” Campfield would yell at the start of each race.[9]

When the Fremont Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad came out of Nebraska and up the North Platte River Valley late in the 1880s, the Campfields must have realized that Rock Creek’s days as a shipping hub were numbered. In 1888, the railroad reached what’s now Casper, and the town began. Matt and Fannie Campfield moved again.

Life in early Casper

W.S. Kimball was publishing a newspaper in Glenrock, 20 miles east of Casper and the next-to-last town on the F.E.&M.V.R.R. One day a spring wagon, piled high with pots, pans, chairs and bedsprings—and with a coop full of live chickens hanging off the back—came rolling and clucking down the street. Up on the wagon seat were a “large and portly” man and a “somewhat tall and angular woman,” Kimball remembered. He called them Uncle Matt and Aunt Fannie Campfield, as people in Casper would come to know them, using the terms that conveyed a patronizing respect toward blacks who were well liked and not young.

Kimball wrote a long letter to the Casper Tribune-Herald in 1936, a few days after the paper had settled the leg-bone mystery to its satisfaction. Kimball supported the paper’s conclusions. Matt had clearly lost his feet long before he came to Casper.

That first time he saw the Campfields, Kimball wrote, they were en route from Rock Creek to Casper, behind two bony horses that “could just about pull the load.”

Kimball himself moved to Casper in the spring of 1890 to start “a red-hot Democratic newspaper,” the Wyoming Derrick. The Derrick office and print shop was just north of Campfield’s barber shop, on the west side of Center Street, between Midwest and Second—the block where the Wonder Bar is now. Two years later Kimball bought a half interest in a drugstore just south of the barbershop. He saw Campfield every day and came to know him well.

Natrona County coroner

Campfield had “a keen and alert mind” and was “beloved and respected by the people,” Kimball remembered. The people of Natrona County thought well enough of him to elect him twice as Natrona County coroner on the Democratic ticket, in 1892 and 1894. People in those days, Kimball recalled in the letter, were less worried about “race, color, or creed” than they became later. “[E]arly settlers were keen judges of character, honoring courage and integrity [and] quick to detect a ‘streak of yellow’”—that is, cowardice.

A missing bathtub and an eviction

One story that lasted in Casper’s black community shows the kind of courage the Campfields needed to survive. In the back of his shop Matt had a bathtub where a dusty sheepherder, say, could get a bath after his haircut. Baths cost 50 cents.

A cowboy named George Mitchell stole the bathtub and took it out to Alcova, 30 miles from town, and set it in hot springs near the edge of the North Platte River. Instead of going to the police, or going directly after the cowboy, Campfield used a quieter tactic. Every time a customer came to the shop looking for a bath after that, he made a mark on the wall. These marks would have become well known around town. Casper only had about 500 people in the early 1890s.

Mitchell later returned the tub and started a lumber business. By then there were 70 marks on the barbershop wall. When Campfield needed lumber—perhaps for a cabin or sheds on his homestead claim, west of town—he went to Mitchell’s lumberyard, and demanded and got $35 worth of lumber in exchange for the business Mitchell had stolen from him by stealing the tub.[10]

In 1894, Kimball acquired full interest in the drugstore. With that came title to the building where Matt had his barbershop. Business must have been good, as Kimball decided to expand the drugstore into the barbershop space between his two properties. Campfield had to move. He wasn’t pleased about it.

The day Campfield moved, Kimball remembered years later, there was a gunfight on Center Street between the mayor and another man. One bullet went through the other man’s heart, and two more came through the front of the drugstore and hit the wall right behind where Matt would have been cutting hair. Kimball claimed he’d saved Matt’s life by evicting him. He doesn’t say if Matt agreed with that conclusion.[11]

A veteran’s pension

Maybe because he couldn’t get around much, Campfield was a big man and his health was not good. In 1891, he applied for an invalid’s pension due him as a veteran of the Union Army. Friends filed affidavits saying they knew him well and admired him, and that he could do only about half the work of an able-bodied barber. His doctor noted that both Matt’s stumps were often sore and tender, and the right one still bled from time to time.

Campfield also had rheumatism and heart trouble. He couldn’t lie on his back at night because to do so gave him “a smothering sensation;” his heart sometimes beat irregularly and he was often short of breath. He was 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 250 pounds. The doctor could not clearly hear the sound of Matt’s heart “on account of adipose tissue”—that is, fat.[12]

The pension case was straightforward. Campfield had served in the Army, and he was partly disabled. He was granted a pension of $12 per month beginning in September 1892.[13]

Then on the evening of March 5, 1897, while he and Fannie were getting ready for bed, Matt dropped dead on the floor of their room. He was about 52 years old.[14]

A widow’s pension

Fannie was devastated. She also suffered from rheumatism and was not in good health. With the help of friends in Casper and the same lawyer in Washington, D.C., who had worked on her husband’s case, she applied a few weeks later for a pension as a widow of a Civil War Union soldier. The pension, if she could get it, would bring her $8 per month.[15]

Over the next six months, she sold most of their property to pay Matt’s $1,200 in debts. This included 500 sheep that Matt had bought on an installment plan, three horses, some sheds on the homestead claim, a mile of wire fence and a wagon.[16] She returned to Leavenworth in December of that same year, and spent the rest of her life trying to get the government to pay the pension she was certain she deserved.

Her friends and family members in Casper and in Kansas filed many affidavits to the effect that she was of good character, that she had been married only once and that Matt, likewise, had never been married to anyone but her. After she’d been back in Kansas two years, she visited a Dr. A.G. Abdelal for her rheumatism. When he learned she was getting nowhere with her pension application, he offered to help. As a doctor, he said, he could make things move along faster. He started collecting small fees from her to do this work and gradually larger ones. Eventually he borrowed money from her as well. Then he left Leavenworth and went to California.[17]

In June 1901, a clerk in the Pension Bureau in Washington noticed some discrepancies in Fannie’s application file.[18] A certificate transcribed from public records in Kansas showed she and Matt were married in 1874. But an affidavit from Fannie in Casper placed the marriage in 1877.[19] Further, some documents showed she was Fannie Davis before she was married; others showed her as Fannie Crump. The different names, she explained later, were due to the fact that she’d been sold away from her family at the age of 8, and had taken the last name of the new owner—Davis—while other family members had taken the name of an earlier owner, Crump. Some people in Leavenworth called her Fannie Crump as a result. The Washington office referred the case back to a pension examiner in Kansas.

Pension examiner Elias Shafer interviewed Fannie at great length about her life. He also interviewed James and Ellen Crump—Fannie’s brother and sister—her brother-in-law John Brown, Samuel Hagwood, who had known Matt in the Army, a neighbor or two, and one or two white women Fannie had worked for.[20] Shafer came away from these interviews sympathizing with her because of her victimization by Dr. Abdelal, convinced she was honest and convinced she badly needed the money. But he felt there were still more people to talk to about her. Washington ordered him back to work on the case.[21]

Only at this point does Shafer seem to have checked back through public marriage records in Leavenworth. The records showed a Mathew Campfield had married a Paulina Davis in November 1867.[22] Finally Shafer found a Mary Marsh, also called Paulina Marsh, who said she was the woman who had married Campfield not long after he was discharged from the Army and before he lost his feet.

“They tell me Mary and Paulina are about the same. Some call me one name and some another,” the woman told Shafer. Her life story wandered unconvincingly through the decades, across the West, and among various husbands. She appears to have been a prostitute some of the time, both in Leavenworth and later in Cheyenne. Still, the records were pretty clear that she had married Matt Campfield, and though they may have spent only three or four scattered weeks together in their lives, neither had ever filed for a divorce.[23] This meant that Fannie was not Mathew’s legal widow, and therefore was not entitled to the pension.

Her application was rejected formally on May 24, 1902.[24] Apparently, however, no one in Washington bothered to inform her. In 1916, a lawyer in Lawrence, Kan., wrote the pension bureau to find out if there was any record of her case.[25] There was, the bureau answered, and gave the 1902 date of the rejection of the application.[26] A letter to Washington followed from a D.B. Hunnicutt of the local chapter of the G.A.R.—the Grand Army of the Republic—the Union veterans’ organization. Fannie Campfield, he said, “is a hard working, honorable Christian woman aged and crippled with Rheumatism a true and worthy soldiers widow” whose plight would soon be turned over to Fannie’s senator and congressman.[27] More letters followed from the congressman as late as 1918. Answers, if there were any, have not survived.

A new gravestone

Mathew Campfield was buried in the Highland Cemetery in Casper. By 1936, memories of him and of the nature of his disability were getting a little hazy, at least among Casper’s white people. Fortunately W.S. Kimball wrote his long letter to the newspaper that year. Accounts since then have relied primarily on Kimball’s letter.

Near the end of the account, Kimball noted that Matt’s wooden grave marker was weathering badly and urged the Natrona County Pioneer Association to replace it with a marble stone. But it took Casper’s black community to bring that about.

In the fall of 1954, when she was running for the first time for the Wyoming Legislature, W.S. Kimball’s daughter, Edness Kimball Wilkins, was invited by the Rev. Belton Randall to speak to the congregation of the Grace African Methodist Episcopal Church in Casper. Wilkins spoke about Matt Campfield that Sunday night. Afterwards, the Casper Morning Star reported, the congregation launched a fund drive for a new gravestone.

In the fall of 1958, Rev. Randall roped several other black churches in Casper into the effort. The newspaper ran a photo of the preacher in the cemetery, kneeling by Matt’s wooden grave marker, looking up at Wilkins, who is looking down at him. In front of the marker, a metal stake with a star on it shows Campfield a member of the G.A.R. By the spring of 1960, the Harmony Art and Literary Club had raised enough money at last to replace the wooden marker with a gravestone. It’s still there, among the stones of Casper’s earliest citizens, and looks as if it will be there a long time yet.[28]

Resources

Primary sources

• Garrett, T.S. “In Memory.” Annals of Wyoming 4, no.1 (July, 1925): 264-65. The account is repeated in Burroughs, Guardian of the Grasslands, cited below.

The following items are cited more fully in the footnotes:

Newspapers

• Casper Morning Star
• Casper Tribune-Herald
• Casper Tribune-Herald & Star
• Casper Tribune-Star May 29, 1960
• Casper Journal, March 22, 2001
• Natrona Tribune

Archives

• Fannie Campfield Pension Records, National Archives
• Mathew Campfield Military Records, National Archives

Secondary sources

• Burroughs, John Rolfe. Guardian of the Grasslands: The First Hundred Years of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Pioneer Printing and Stationery, 1971, 316.
• “A Brief Outline of the Negro in Wyoming.” Booklet published 1955 by the Grace Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Casper. Titled and transcribed by local historian Bob David into a personal notebook, Casper College Western History Center archives, David notebooks pp. 4338-4339, February 1956.

A note on sources

In the footnotes, C T-H stands for Casper Tribune Herald. FCPF stands for Fannie Campfield’s Pension File.

Other Casper newspapers are cited throughout the article. One mention of Campfield not included in this narrative was in Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Natrona Tribune, which published its first edition in 1891 and was a serious competitor to Kimball’s Derrick. The edition included introductions to a number of Casper’s businessmen, surely hoping that buttering them up would lead them to advertise in the paper in the future. Campfield’s notice ran as follows:

“MATT CAMPFIELD, tonsorial artist. Matt is an old timer in this country, he having been here for over thirteen years. He put up the fourth building in Buffalo, Wyoming and was an early settler in several towns through this country. He has a neat shop with bath rooms in connection. Matt came to Wyoming directly from Africa in 1867.”[29] This last detail was not true, of course, but perhaps a way for the paper to let its readers know that Campfield was African-American.

Archival sources for the article include Mathew Campfield’s Civil War-era military records at the National Archives, and Fannie Campfield’s pension file, also at the National Archives. Civil War military records are generally quite brief, showing the dates and places of the soldier’s enlistment and mustering out, his rank and promotion dates, and not much else. The Civil War Pension files, however, are often packed with personal information, as the Pension Bureau had to make sure claims were honest. Thus the

bureau often demanded lengthy statements testifying to the claimant’s character and to medical and financial conditions. Records of Mathew Campfield’s original pension claim are included in Fannie Campfield’s pension file. I’m grateful to former archivist Kevin Anderson at the Casper College Western History Center, and especially to Ami Dyrek, formerly of the Casper College Library, who rounded up the Campfield military and pension records years ago and was kind enough to share them with me.

For more on Civil War Records in the National Archives, see http://www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war/index.html, and for Civil War pension files, see http://www.archives.gov/research/military/index.html. See also tips for researching African-Americans in National Archives resources at National Archives documents having to do with African-Americans in the Civil War at http://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/.

And for a lesson plan using original documents on black soldiers in the Civil War, see http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war/. All links accessed Jan. 21, 2016.

Field Trips

The original wooden marker for Matt Campfield’s grave is in the collection of the Fort Caspar Museum and may be seen there on request. Campfield’s grave with its new stone is easy to find in Block 8, on the right just inside the front gate from Conwell Street into the Highland Cemetery in Casper. More information on the cemetery is included below.

Illustrations

• The photo of the band of the 107th USCI is from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks.
• The two photos of Mathew Campfield, the image of the 1894 ballot and the 1958 photo of his grave are from the Frances Seely Webb collection at the Casper College Western History Center. Used with permission and thanks.
• The 1974 photo of Rock Creek, Wyo., is from Wyoming Tales and Trails. Used with thanks.
• The rest of the photos are by Tom Rea.

In December 1892, a tug-of-war between Wyoming Democrats and Republicans resulted in a tense standoff in the governor’s office. Two men claimed to be the state’s top official. The deep-seated conflict carried over into the state’s legislative session. The divide between lawmakers that year was so great that they failed to elect a U.S. Senator, leaving Wyoming with only one senator for the next two years.

The effects of the Johnson County War the previous April, when vigilantes invaded Johnson County and murdered two men in an ill-fated attempt to put a stop to cattle rustling, still resonated with the public. The events occurred in the spring, but became the significant issue during the fall campaign. Would that conflict and its aftermath lead to violence in the capital city?

A Dec. 6, 1892, report in the Cheyenne Daily Sun showed the strain:

No proclamations yesterday. Armed men on both sides of the big hallway at the state house. Armed men in the ‘office’ of the pseudo governor. Armed men with Private Secretary Repath in the office of the acting governor. Armed men with Chief Clerk Meldrum in the office of the secretary of state. No trouble. No sign of trouble. No loud talking. Plenty of quiet, earnest consultation.

Democrat John E. Osborne of Rawlins, elected on Nov. 8, 1892, to fill the vacancy in the office created when the first elected governor of Wyoming, Francis E. Warren, resigned to become U.S. Senator, engaged a notary public to give him the oath of office on Dec. 2, 1892. Osborne issued a proclamation that he was now the governor and set up shop in the governor’s office.

However, Acting Governor Amos W. Barber, a Republican, who had been ill that day, issued a proclamation on December 3 asserting that Osborne had “by stealth and force effected an entrance into the capitol building at Cheyenne” and had attempted to declare himself elected and assume the powers of the office of governor, in “direct violation of the constitution and laws of the state.” Barber, as secretary of state, had become the acting governor in 1890, when Warren resigned from the position.

The Sun reported that Osborne had snuck into the office through a window that had been forced open. Modern-day historians doubt the likelihood of this version of events, attributing it to Republican propaganda. Osborne, the Republican-leaning Sun stated, had been “provided with a pistol and ammunition,” and Barber had allowed a bed to be taken in to him.

Barber’s private secretary, R.H. Repath, made sure the office remained locked and kept the keys. The crowd that night “swelled to enormous proportions,” according to the Sun, and officials and lawmen remained on hand. But by 2 a.m., the “scene wore a decidedly peaceful aspect.”

Post-invasion politics

Violence did not break out in Cheyenne, but the Johnson County War continued to generate newspaper headlines because the trial of the invaders was yet to be scheduled. And in 1892 and 1893, the political stakes were high.

The invasion was “the major issue in the 1892 election,” according to historian T.A. Larson, and while it “was not a Republican project,” he explains, “many citizens associated the big cattlemen with the Republican party.” Democratic newspapers often referred to “The Republican Ring Gang of Cattle Barons of Cheyenne.”

That perception certainly plagued Sen. Warren, whose term would expire in March 1893. He wanted to continue representing Wyoming in Washington, but his arid-lands bill had also been a campaign issue in the state, where Democrats opposed a policy they felt would “permit a ‘land steal’ by large corporations,” according to Larson.

Republican U.S. Sen. Joseph Carey’s term would not expire until 1895. Osborne, a Democrat, could sway members of the Legislature to elect a Democrat to Warren’s senatorial post, especially likely if the Legislature contained more Democrats than Republicans. During the campaign, Democrats had “fused” with Populists, at that time reaching the peak of their power across the nation. Populists supported the free coinage of silver and the interests of small farmers and opposed the power of banks and railroads. Although the Populists weren’t a large force in Wyoming politics, there were enough in the Legislature to make a significant difference that year.

In his book Wyoming Range War, historian and attorney John W. Davis states that the “most important responsibility” of the Legislature was to elect a U.S. Senator, but writes, “As noble as the prize might be, the attempts to obtain it were correspondingly ignoble.” Davis explains, “The effort to select a Wyoming senator in 1893 was a travesty, surely one of the lowest points in the state’s political history. The Republicans did everything they could to undercut the selection of a senator, but they would never have succeeded without the thoroughgoing political incompetence of the Democrats and Populists.”

Distrust, delays and decisions

Osborne originally hailed from Vermont and, after earning his medical degree at the University of Vermont, came to Rawlins in 1881 as a Union Pacific surgeon and practiced with local physician Thomas Maghee. A couple of years later, Osborne had been elected to the Territorial Assembly but did not serve because he had to leave the territory. He did serve as Rawlins’ mayor in 1888 after being elected to that position.

He owned a pharmacy and raised sheep, as well as participating in other businesses, and these enterprises made him wealthy. In July 1892, delegates to the contentious Democratic convention in Rock Springs, Wyo., finally chose him as their nominee for governor on the 37^th ballot. At one point, he had withdrawn his name, but delegates convinced him to stay the course. The party platform condemned the actions of the invaders of Johnson County and supported the policy of fusion with Populists.

During the campaign, Osborne traveled thousands of miles throughout the state by buckboard. He defeated Laramie banker Edward Ivinson, a Republican, in the November 1892, election by a vote of 9,290 to 7,509. Wyoming historian Phil Roberts says, “Ivinson did not have the taint of Warren’s operations nor was he close to Carey and apparently believed that he would be able to escape ‘punishment’ in the polls by those facts.” But it did not work that way.

Osborne attempted to assume the duties of governor a month before the constitutionally set time—the first Monday in January following a general election—because Democrats were concerned that Republicans would try to sway election results in their favor so that the Legislature would elect Warren to another term as U.S. Senator. Osborne argued that no state canvassing board was authorized to decide the gubernatorial election and the county canvassing boards showed that he had been elected to the office and was “duly qualified,” and thus, could take office. He accused Amos Barber of being guilty of usurpation of the office.

But as historian Larson notes, Osborne “had a comic-opera time of it.” Legal haggling continued during the months of November and December 1892, and the questions soon came before the Wyoming Supreme Court. Among them were concerns about the assumption of offices after special elections held to fill vacancies—as opposed to after general elections—and the accuracy of decisions by canvassing boards. Attorney Willis Van Devanter, as the state chairman of the Republican Party and an ally of Warren’s, interceded in county canvasses that had questionable results and could affect the political balance of the Legislature. According to historian Lewis Gould, Van Devanter’s plan was to “make the opposition decidedly weary” of all the litigation.

Races were contested in Converse, Fremont and Carbon counties. In Carbon County, the Hanna returns stood out: The precinct was not listed and the polling list had not been signed. If the clerk did not accept the returns, two Democrats would not be elected to the House. Republican County Clerk S.B. Ross canvassed the returns with two justices of the peace, one Republican and one Democrat. They voted two to one accept the Hanna returns. Van Devanter, though, argued that the clerk should have more power than the other two men on the board.

A vote canvass and an appeal

Osborne set Dec. 5, 1892, as the date that a state canvassing board would convene to review all the county votes, but when he arrived at the secretary of state’s office, the doors were locked. The other members of the state canvassing board of officers elected by voters statewide—state auditor, state treasurer and secretary of state—were all Republicans. Acting Governor Barber was also acting as secretary of state in this capacity, and Democrats distrusted him and viewed him as a sympathizer with the Johnson County invaders. He had set a Dec. 8, 1892, date for the canvass.

On that day, members of all three parties—Republicans, Democrats and Populists—were present. Davis writes, “The all-Republican canvassing board accepted every one of Willis Van Devanter’s arguments; the only delay was so that the board was sure of getting Francis Warren’s instructions right.” The board accepted the Carbon County results without the Hanna returns included and ruled that only Acting Governor Barber could issue certificates of election—something that the Democrats had hoped to avoid by having Osborne assume the gubernatorial position.

The Democrats sought a ruling by the Wyoming Supreme Court, which took the case on an expedited basis. Justices listened to oral arguments in mid-December and issued a decision on Dec. 31, 1892. The all-Republican court gave equal power to the three men on the Carbon County canvassing board and allowed the Hanna returns to be included in the final count. Democrats S.B. Bennett and Harry Chapman were elected to the House from Carbon County.

In the decision the justices noted, “The rights of the people in choosing their officers are certainly safer in the hands of three persons, of different political parties when practicable, than in the hands of one man.” The other questionable elections—in Converse and Fremont counties—the court left to the Legislature to decide.

Acting Governor Amos W. Barber issued a pardon to state penitentiary inmate James Moore on Dec. 28, 1892. The question of its validity brought another case before the Wyoming Supreme Court.

An unusual inauguration

John E. Osborne’s Jan. 2, 1893, inauguration was “exceedingly unostentatious,” according to a report in the Cheyenne Daily Sun. Osborne named Democrat Charles P. Hill, a Rawlins attorney, as his private secretary. Hill had been one of the men who served on the Carbon County canvassing board. The Leader reported that Barber officially transferred the office to Osborne at 2 p.m.

While the inaugural formalities were perhaps simple in nature and the newspaper articles did not mention his attire, Osborne apparently wore shoes made from the skin of outlaw Big Nose George, who had been lynched in Rawlins in 1881 after murdering a deputy. Osborne and another local physician, Thomas Maghee, had claimed the outlaw’s body for medical study and skinned the corpse, giving the skullcap to Maghee’s young protégée, Lillian Heath. Osborne had the shoes and a medical bag made from the hide.

The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled on Jan. 17, 1893, that Osborne’s attempt to assume his official duties in December was “premature and invalid.” The pardon of James Moore, which had been issued by Acting Governor Barber, was deemed valid and Moore was set free. The justices debated various constitutional issues including the timing of the governor taking office after an election, whether a special or general election, and the determination of the state canvassing board.

The men who decided the case—Herman V.S. Groesbeck, chief justice; Asbury B. Conaway, associate justice; and Jesse Knight, district judge of the Third Judicial District—were all Republicans. Conaway and Knight had served as members of the Constitutional Convention in 1889. The justices asked Knight to hear the case and help determine the outcome because newly elected Justice Gibson Clark, a Democrat, whose term began in January 1893, had excused himself. He had been nominated for the court at the Democratic convention when John Osborne was nominated as a gubernatorial candidate, and he had served as attorney for A.L. New, the state Democratic chairman.

Second Wyoming Legislature: “a dismal failure”

After this inauspicious start, Osborne, a bachelor who was in his early 30s and acknowledged as the nation’s youngest governor in some press reports, endured a term with a deadlocked legislature. The members decided the Converse and Fremont county races in favor of the Democrats. State Sen. John N. Tisdale, Johnson County Republican, Johnson County invader and by now a resident of Salt Lake City, was removed by a majority vote. The Legislature now totaled 48: Republicans 22, Democrats 21 and Populists 5.

The legislative session was, according to historian Gould, “bitter, faction-ridden and indecisive.” Thirty-one attempts to elect a U.S. Senator failed. Warren realized early on that the votes were too fragmented for him to win the seat. During one ballot, Democrat John Charles Thompson, Sr., a Cheyenne attorney fell one vote short of earning election. Democrats accused Republicans of bribing the man who refused to vote for Thompson. Other “intrigues” occurred, including the alleged poisoning of a Sen. James Kime’s cocktail—he sickened, but did not die—and the censure of Sen. L. Kabis, accused of tampering with the drink.

Gov. Osborne decided not to attend the inauguration of President Grover Cleveland in Washington, D.C., a Democrat, because Republican Amos Barber, who had returned to his original position as Wyoming’s secretary of state, would again serve as acting governor during Osborne’s absence. The risk that Barber might appoint a Republican to the Senate was too great for Osborne feel safe leaving the state.

The Democratic Cheyenne Daily Leader labeled the state’s second legislative session “a dismal failure.” A bill to eliminate the Wyoming Live Stock Commission did not pass, and $23,000 appropriated by the senators for prosecution expenses for the trial of the cattlemen did not reach the House before its adjournment, so that did not become law either. However, Osborne used his veto power to strike down a $12,000 appropriation for the Wyoming Live Stock Commission, which angered cattlemen “offended by suffering real consequences for their actions,” according to Davis.

Two years without a senator

A few days after the Wyoming legislative session ended, Osborne, under the powers granted him by the state’s constitution, appointed a Democrat, A.C. Beckwith to the U.S. Senate. Gould explains that Osborne thus hoped to placate A.L. New, state Democratic Party chairman, who had sought the seat, and John Charles Thompson, who had come near to being elected.

The U.S. Senate met in special session in March that year, but tabled a resolution that would have begun the confirmation process. Historian Gould explains, “The Senate questioned the power of a governor to fill a vacancy left by the failure of the legislature to act, and Beckwith’s case, like that of several other senators appointed from western states, was referred to a committee for investigation.”

After several months without action taken, Beckwith submitted his resignation in July 1893, apparently mostly over patronage issues with New. New convinced Osborne to appoint him, but the governor was understandably reluctant to call a special joint session of the Wyoming Legislature to decide the matter.

According to the 1974 edition of the Wyoming Blue Book, the U.S. Senate convened in regular session in early August, and Beckwith’s resignation was received before the resolution about his appointment was to be considered. Had had the resignation not been submitted before the resolution, the Senate might have confirmed Beckwith. Instead, during the years 1893-1895, Wyoming had only one U.S. senator, Joseph Carey, instead of the two allowed for the state.

Osborne’s later political career

In 1896, Osborne declined the nomination for governor, accepting instead the opportunity to run instead for Congress. He won, defeating Republican Frank W. Mondell by just 266 votes. In 1897-1899, Osborne served as Wyoming’s lone congressional representative with Republican U.S. senators Francis E. Warren and Clarence D. Clark.

In 1898, Osborne tried for a U.S. Senate seat, but lost to Clark. Warren and Clark continued to represent Wyoming in that capacity.

However, Osborne remained active in politics on the national level for many years. From 1900 to 1920, he served as a member of the Democratic National Committee. He enjoyed traveling and while visiting the eastern Mediterranean in 1906, he met Selina Smith of Princeton, Ky., and was immediately smitten.

On his passport application the previous year, he had listed his date of birth as June 19, 1860, although many sources report he was born in 1858. She was more than 20 years younger than he, but they were engaged soon after they met.

They were married Nov. 2, 1907, at Selina’s parents’ house. They honeymooned in New York, Tahiti and Denver before returning to Rawlins. The couple had a daughter, Jean Curtis, in 1908.

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Osborne as first assistant secretary of state under William Jennings Bryan, a longtime friend of Osborne’s. Bryan resigned in 1915 because he disagreed with Wilson’s war policy. Osborne served until December 1915.

In 1918, Osborne once again ran for the U.S. Senate against Francis E. Warren. By this time, the U.S. Constitution had been amended to allow voters rather than state legislators to choose senators. Historian Hugh Ridenour explains that Warren, 75, had planned to retire, but when two Republican candidates, John W. Hay and Frank Mondell, campaigned extensively and then decided Warren’s experience was needed instead, Warren entered the race and they withdrew.

Democrats nominated Osborne. Ridenour states the campaign was “typically acrimonious” and Republicans hounded Osborne about his premature attempt to become Wyoming’s governor in 1892. Osborne lost by more than 6,400 votes.

Traveling and business interests in Rawlins kept Osborne busy after that. Selina Osborne died March 2, 1942, at 59. John Osborne died April 24, 1943, in Rawlins, after having suffered a heart attack. He had served for many years as chairman of the board of the Rawlins National Bank, which closed for a half day to honor him when his funeral was held. Both Osborne and his wife were buried in the family mausoleum in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Princeton, Ky. Their daughter died in 1951.

Osborne had served as Wyoming’s top officer during one of its most tumultuous and least productive legislative terms. His eagerness to take the gubernatorial office is perhaps the most remembered aspect of his political career, but despite that controversial move, he continued to represent the state on the national level in highly respected positions for many years.

Resources

Primary sources

• Newspapers found at Wyoming Newspapers online:
  Carbon County Journal, “Governor Osborne.” Dec. 10, 1892, 3.
  Carbon County Journal, “The Winners Named,” July 30, 1892, 2.
  Cheyenne Daily Sun,“Has Been No Change,” Dec. 6, 1892, 3.
  Cheyenne Daily Sun,“Usurpation--John E. Osborne Boldly Attempts to Seize the Office of Governor,” Dec. 3, 1892, 3.
  Cheyenne Daily Sun,“Pretender on Deck,” Dec. 4, 1892, 3.
  Cheyenne Daily Sun,“As Ordained at the Polls” Jan. 3, 1893, 3.
  Cheyenne Daily Leader, “Under Difficulty—Conversations Carried on Through a Door,” Dec. 6, 1892, 3.
  Cheyenne Daily Leader, “Again Inaugurated,” Jan. 3, 1893, 3.
  Cheyenne Daily Leader,“Peculiar Conduct, “Jan. 3, 1893, 2.
  Cheyenne Daily Leader, Feb. 19, 1893, “End of the Session,” 2.
  Above listed newspapers found at Wyoming Newspapers. Accessed throughout January 2016, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.)
• “Dr. John E. Osborne Buried This Morning,” Carbon County News, April 29, 1943.
• “Dr. John E. Osborne Dies in Memorial Hospital,” Rawlins Republican-Bulletin, April 27, 1943.
• Hill, C. P. Public Papers, Messages and Proclamations of Hon. John E. Osborne, Governor of Wyoming 1893-4, Together with Some Public Addresses and Correspondence of Interest. Cheyenne: 1894. Osborne Collection, Carbon County Museum, Rawlins, Wyo.
• House Journal of the State Legislature of Wyoming. 1899, 119. Accessed Jan. 26, 2106, at https://books.google.com.
• “In Memoriam—John Eugene Osborne 1858-1943.” Annals of Wyoming 15, no. 3, (July 1943), 279-280. Accessed Jan. 23, 2016, at https://archive.org/details/annalsofwyom15141943wyom.
• “Mrs. John E. Osborne Dies in Kentucky,” Rawlins Republican-Bulletin, March 4, 1942.
• McBride, J.F. “John E. Osborne, Governor of Wyoming.” Typewritten manuscript, 1894. Osborne Collection, Carbon County Museum, Rawlins, Wyo.
• Osborne Collection, Carbon County Museum. Collection includes a massive 200-page scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about Osborne’s political career, the shoes, the brand, medical items, a desk and a curio cabinet as well as some correspondence and photographs.
• U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925, record for John E. Osborne, from Ancestry.com. Application No. 97972, dated Jan. 30, 1905. Osborne Collection, Carbon County Museum, Rawlins, Wyo.
• Wyoming Constitution, Art. 6, Sec. 17. “Time of holding general and special elections; when elected officers to enter upon duties.” Accessed Jan. 26, 2016, at http://www.uwyo.edu/robertshistory/wyoming_constitution_full_text.htm.
• ­­­­­­_________________, Art. 6, Sec. 16. “When officers to hold over; suspension of officers.” Accessed Jan. 26, 2016, at http://www.uwyo.edu/robertshistory/wyoming_constitution_full_text.htm.
• Wyoming Reports, In Re Moore 1892, 113. Accessed Jan. 14, 2016, at https://books.google.com.
• Wyoming Reports, State ex rel Bennett v. Barber 1892, 78. Accessed Jan. 23, 2016, at https://books.google.com.

Secondary sources

• Davis, John W. Wyoming Range War. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010, 227-246, 255-270.
• Drake, Kerry. Francis E. Warren: A Massachusetts Farm Boy Who Changed Wyoming. WyoHistory.org. Accessed Jan. 20, 2016, at http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/francis-e-warren-massachusetts-farm-boy-who-changed-wyoming.
• Find a Grave. “John Eugene Osborne.” Accessed Jan. 14, 2016, at http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Osborne&GSfn=John&GSbyrel=all&GSdy=1943&GSdyrel=in&GSob=n&GRid=7182235&df=all&.
• Georgen, Cynde. John B. Kendrick: Cowboy, Cattle King, Governor and U.S. Senator. WyoHistory.org. Accessed Jan. 20, 2016, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/john-kendrick.
• Gould, Lewis. Wyoming: A Political History 1868-1896. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968, 159-196.
• Larson, T. A. History of Wyoming, 2d ed., rev. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. 284-290.
• Ridenour, Hugh. “John E. Osborne: A Real ‘Character’ from the Old West.” Annals of Wyoming: The Wyoming History Journal, Summer 2008, 2-16.
• Roberts, Phil. University of Wyoming history professor. Email to author, Jan. 18, 2016.
• Trenholm, Virginia Cole, ed. Wyoming Blue Book, vol. 2. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, 1974.
• Van Pelt, Lori. Big Nose George: A Grisly Frontier Tale. WyoHistory.org. Accessed Jan. 20, 2016, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/big-nose-george-grisly-frontier-tale.
• ___________. Dreamers and Schemers: Profiles from Carbon County, Wyoming’s Past. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 1999, 113-120.
• ___________. Lillian Heath: Wyoming’s First Female Physician Packed a Pistol. WyoHistory.org. Accessed Jan. 20, 2016, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/lillian-heath.
• ___________. Willis Van Devanter: Cheyenne Lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court Justice. WyoHistory.org. Accessed Jan. 20, 2016, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/willis-van-devanter-cheyenne-lawyer-and-us-supreme-court-justice.
• Wyoming State Archives. John Osborne. WyoHistory.org. http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/john-osborne.
• ____________________. Wyoming Postscripts. “Wyoming’s Bachelor Governor: Dr. John E. Osborne.” June 19, 2015. Accessed Jan. 15, 2016, at https://wyostatearchives.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/wyomings-bachelor-governor-dr-john-e-osborne/.

Field Trips

The shoes John Osborne wore when he was inaugurated as Wyoming’s governor are displayed today at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins near his livestock brand—the skull and crossbones. For many years, he had displayed the shoes in a glass case in the lobby of the Rawlins National Bank. A massive 200-page scrapbook kept in the museum collections contains numerous newspaper articles about his political career. His private secretary, C.P. Hill, compiled many of Osborne’s proclamations and messages as governor into a book, which is also part of the museum collections. See below for details on visiting the museum.

Illustrations

• The photos of Francis E. Warren and Selina Smith Osborne are from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from the collections of the Carbon County Museum. Used with permission and thanks. Museum Registrar Corinne Gordon advises us that though Osborne’s auto was often claimed to be first one in Rawlins, that was not the case. The former governor was the first in Rawlins to order a car, and local newspapers reported his order. But the factory burnt down, shipment was delayed and a different auto arrived in town first. That car, however, did not work well. Osborne’s was the first car in good working order in Rawlins, thanks, says Gordon, to mechanic D.C. Kinnaman.

The young woman in the plaid jumper could hardly contain her excitement as she stood in a crowd outside the University of Wyoming field house after President John F. Kennedy spoke there in late September 1963.

Kathy Karpan, editor of the UW student newspaper, introduced herself and two staffers standing next to her. President Kennedy moved on and then came back to Karpan to ask, “What’s the name of the student newspaper?” Karpan replied: “The Branding Iron.” It took a second to register, and then he smiled and said, “That’s clever.”

Less than two months later, President Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullet. But Kathy Karpan’s remarkable Wyoming political career was well on its way.

“They say your personality is set by the time you are 6 years old,” says Karpan. “In first grade, I knew that I was a Catholic and a Democrat.”

Karpan was born in Rock Springs, Wyo., in 1942, the first child of Thomas and Pauline Taucher Karpan. Growing up in the heart of what was then Wyoming’s unionized coal country, she “didn’t know there was a Republican Party.”

While still only in elementary school, Karpan pedaled her bicycle to the county Democratic headquarters on M Street in Rock Springs to get an Adlai Stevenson bumper sticker, which she threaded through the spokes on her bike.

Injuries from a mine cave-in ended Thomas Karpan’s career as a coal miner, and he went to work for the Union Pacific Railroad on the short, 25-mile “mine run” from Rock Springs to Superior. In 1952, the UPRR switched to diesel and closed its coal mines, “nearly killing Rock Springs,” according to his daughter. The end of the mine line precipitated a family move to Rawlins when Thomas Karpan was transferred to the UPRR’s main line across southern Wyoming.

Pauline Karpan’s health was in decline at the time of the move, however, and she passed away in December 1954, a day after her 37th birthday. Thomas Karpan moved back to Rock Springs, where relatives could help him take care of the children—Kathy and her two younger siblings, Judy and Frank; consideration was given to sending them to St. Joseph’s Children’s Home in Torrington. Then only 12 years old, Kathy tearfully implored her father to keep the children together at home, promising to “do everything you say.” She helped care for them through a move back to Rawlins, where she graduated from high school in 1960.

College didn’t appear to be in the cards for a young woman with family responsibilities and limited resources. But on the night of her high school graduation, she learned she had won a scholarship to the UW College of Commerce and Industry. Karpan duly presented herself in Laramie that fall and was told, “secretarial science is down that hall.”

Discovering later that she qualified for the honors program, Karpan changed her major to journalism and served as editor of The Branding Iron during the spring and fall of 1963–when she met President Kennedy–and the spring of 1964.

Karpan considers herself “part of the generation inspired by JFK,” and she “secretly hoped I’d get into politics.” She approached the head of UW’s journalism department about getting a job with U.S. Sen. Gale McGee, formerly a UW history professor. McGee’s office was fully staffed, but Karpan’s friend and law student Bill Bagley made a connection with Wyoming’s freshman congressman, Rep. Teno Roncalio of Rock Springs. Roncalio and McGee were both Democrats.

By this time, Karpan had taken her first journalism job, at the Cody Enterprise. Roncalio called her and offered her a job as secretary. Karpan balked, thinking back to the bad old days of secretarial science. “I have a degree in journalism,” she told Roncalio. “I’m not going to be a secretary.” Roncalio replied, “I’m asking you to be my press secretary.” Karpan accepted.

Washington in a heady time

“You can’t imagine how heady it was to be in Washington at that time,” said Karpan. “We all had tickets to LBJ’s [President Lyndon Baines Johnson] 1965 State of the Union address. To look down and see Teno sitting with the Kennedys … It was incredible.”

Heady days can pass quickly in politics. Wyoming Democrats held high hopes for the 1966 election. LBJ had carried the state in 1964, and swept Democrats into a rare majority in the Wyoming House of Representatives. But the dreams for 1966 were not to be. All the statewide Democratic candidates were defeated, including Roncalio, who had run for an open U.S. Senate seat; he lost to Cliff Hansen, who was then just completing a four-year term as Wyoming’s governor. “That was the most heartbreaking defeat in my life, more than my own,” said Karpan.

The turbulent sixties

Looking for a change of scene, Karpan took some short-term jobs and began a desultory effort toward a master’s degree in American Studies at UW. “I was not a stellar student,” Karpan said, “and there was a lot of protesting and dinking around.”

The protesting included opposing the dismissal of the Black 14 from the UW football team in October 1969 and participating in a march against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C., a month later. Karpan wrote about the march for an unofficial student publication, Free Lunch, “a high-calorie chewspaper where the effete meet to eat”—a takeoff on then-Vice President Spiro Agnew's October 1969 description of Vietnam War protestors as “... an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” In the midst of these distractions Karpan finished her coursework, but couldn’t come up with a thesis topic.

A connection through friends landed her a journalism job in Canberra, Australia, where she again breathed political air in that nation’s capital. After she had worked in Canberra several months, rewriting stories from print media for broadcast media, she received a letter from Roncalio. He had run again for U.S. House in 1970 and won. Karpan served as Roncalio’s chief of staff for the next four years.

In January 1975, Karpan left Washington and returned to Wyoming to finish her master’s thesis on the political career of Democrat Jack Gage, who was elected as Wyoming’s secretary of state in 1958 and briefly served as governor. “I knew I had to finish that thesis before I went to law school, or I wouldn’t,” Karpan said. She did, and then graduated from law school in 1978 from the University of Oregon.

Karpan took her freshly minted law degree back to Washington, D.C., to seek her fortune—and possibly get back into politics. She landed a job with the Economic Development Administration (EDA) in the Department of Commerce as the deputy director for congressional relations, then became the acting deputy legal counsel after passing the district bar exam. But when it became clear that the Republicans were coming to town after the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, Karpan made plans to return to Wyoming.

Into Wyoming politics

She quickly was pulled into politics as manager of Democrat Rodger McDaniel’s 1982 campaign for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Republican Malcolm Wallop. Like Karpan, McDaniel had an early start as a Democrat; he was elected to the Wyoming House in 1970 when he was only 21, and subsequently elected to the Wyoming Senate, where he served until 1982. And like Karpan, he was a former Roncalio staffer.

Wallop was one of the first Wyoming politicians to employ campaign consultants and pollsters, and later-famous Roger Ailes—currently Chairman and CEO of Fox News and the Fox Television Stations Group—consulted for Wallop’s 1982 campaign. The campaign was rough-and-tumble by Wyoming standards, with both Republican incumbents U.S. Rep. Dick Cheney and U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson throwing their weight against McDaniel.

“Although we raised more than $400,000—more than any Wyoming Senate campaign had raised to date—Wallop raised over a million dollars,” McDaniel recalls. “Kathy and I used to tell each other that this campaign would be the test of whether money and East Coast consultants could overcome a grassroots campaign.” The grassroots lost the test when Wallop won: 57 percent to McDaniel’s 43 percent. Karpan needed to look for a new job.

She found one in the Wyoming attorney general’s office under Attorney General Archie McClintock, who was appointed by three-term Democratic Gov. Ed Herschler. Among other assignments, Karpan represented boards and commissions, including the Wyoming Board of Medicine.

Dr. Story case

This seemingly routine duty became anything but after the Board of Medicine received complaints about Dr. John Story, a general practice physician in Lovell, Wyo. Several female patients accused Story of sexual misconduct.

Karpan recalls that the women’s previous accusations “were not taken seriously” by the Board of Medicine. From 1983 to 1984, Karpan investigated, made the appropriate filings and introduced evidence for what was only the second contested case hearing in Wyoming history on revocation of a doctor’s license. Karpan also handled the first contested case hearing, against a doctor in Douglas.

The Board of Medicine revoked Story’s license; he appealed and lost. The revocation of his license gave more of his former patients the courage to come forward. The Big Horn County attorney filed criminal charges against Story, who was convicted and sent to prison.

Department of Health

By this point, Karpan was beginning to feel a bit like a lightning rod. This feeling was reinforced one day when Gov. Herschler called her into his office. “I need a new director for the Department of Health,” he told her. Karpan assumed he was going to ask her for names. “I think it should be you,” Herschler said.

Karpan took the helm of the state’s sprawling Department of Health and Social Services in December 1984. There were four divisions: Health and Medical Services, Public Assistance and Social Services, Community Programs and Vocational Rehabilitation. She remembers looking at the budget in horror, with no idea what went where. To further complicate matters, Karpan also inherited a legislative budget footnote mandating the reduction of 10 positions.

Karpan put her administrative skills to work. She reorganized the budget by program so that dollars went with their purpose. The department had offices in every county to provide direct service to clients; Karpan concluded these jobs were the priority and eliminated the 10 positions in administration instead of simply cutting vacant slots.

Secretary of state

When longtime Wyoming Secretary of State Thyra Thomson decided not to run again in 1986, friends approached Karpan about running for the office. In Wyoming, the person holding the position also functions as the lieutenant governor. Karpan resigned as director of the Department of Health in May 1986 and ran her campaign from then until Election Day, winning with 54 percent of the vote against Thomson’s son, K.C. Thomson. Wyoming voters returned Karpan to the secretary of state’s office in 1990 with a 64 percent margin against Republican Tom Zollinger. Karpan carried every county.

Karpan looks back with delight at her eight years as secretary of state, even though the proverbial lightning found her again. “We had to run the first statewide special election ever in Wyoming, when Dick Cheney resigned his congressional seat [in 1989] to become President Bush’s [Republican George H.W. Bush] Secretary of Defense,” Karpan said. “We had to fashion an elections process out of the very spare statutory language about special elections.”

“Then there was reapportionment,” she said with a grin, referring to the lawsuit Gorin v. Karpan, which led to legislative reapportionment[1]. Although the Legislature itself is the architect of reapportionment, Karpan–in her secretary of state responsibility as chief elections officer—had to stand as the target of the lawsuit.

Gorin v. Karpan changed Wyoming’s system of electing legislators from counties to a system of electing legislators from districts drawn according to population; most were wholly within a county, while others crossed one or more county lines. “Once again, we had to forge ahead without much guidance from the law,” said Karpan. “We focused on helping the county clerks implement the new system on the ground, redrawing precinct boundaries in the most workable way.”

Karpan and Margy White, who served as Karpan’s co-counsel on the Story case and became Karpan’s deputy secretary of state, also brought the office into the modern age, transitioning from paper to electronic recordkeeping.

Races for governor and U.S. Senate

With two terms behind her as secretary of state, it seemed natural to run for governor in 1994 when Democrat Mike Sullivan ended his two terms in that office. Democrats had held the governorship since 1974, when Ed Herschler was elected and served for three terms prior to Sullivan.

However, the politics of the country—and of Wyoming—had shifted. “No matter what their party, many Wyoming voters used to go down their ballots and cross from one side to the other,” Karpan said, meaning that the voters chose by person rather than by political affiliation. “But although the exit polling on Election Day 1994 showed that [Gov.] Mike [Sullivan] and I were in the 70 percents on approval of our jobs and likeability, I got 40 percent and Mike got 39 percent! After the election, so many people actually came up to say, ‘I like you and I think you did a good job. But I just don’t like Bill Clinton,’” the Democratic U.S. President who had been elected two years earlier.

Apparently a lot of Wyoming voters didn’t care for Bill Clinton. Republican Jim Geringer won the governor’s race with 59 percent of the vote to Karpan’s 40 percent. Mike Sullivan, who was running for U.S. Senate against Republican Craig Thomas, mustered the aforementioned 39 percent against Thomas’s 59 percent.

Karpan returned to practicing law with her former secretary of state deputy, Margy White. Karpan also taught a course on Wyoming state government at Laramie County Community College in 1995 followed by political science classes at UW as the Milward Simpson Fellow during spring semester 1996.

As fate would have it, Milward Simpson’s son Alan Simpson, a longtime U.S. Senator, announced he would retire and not run for re-election in 1996. Karpan decided to give campaigning another go after U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, then chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, called Karpan with the news that two polls again showed that she held a high approval rating among Wyoming voters.

Phil White, Margy's brother and a friend of Karpan's from UW student days, recalls one of Karpan's campaign announcement events. “I had known Kathy for a long time but I was amazed at her energy, her grace and charm, and ability to interact, calling out and connecting to her many good friends in the audience.”

Karpan's opponent, Mike Enzi from Gillette, was a longtime Wyoming state senator making his first bid for statewide office. Enzi used the now tried-and-true formula of tying Karpan to incumbent President Clinton. In November 1996, most Wyoming voters started marking their ballots by voting for the Bob Dole-Jack Kemp ticket at the top and kept on voting Republican, giving Enzi 54 percent of the vote to Karpan’s 42 percent. “You could just feel, about two weeks out, the support evaporating,” said Karpan.

In the Clinton administration

Despite the antipathy of Wyoming voters, President Clinton won re-election handily with the help of voters from other states. He previously had offered Karpan a high-level position in his first administration; she turned it down because she wanted to finish her term as secretary of state. But with that no longer an obstacle, an offer was made again, and the U.S. Senate confirmed Karpan as director of the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) in July 1997.

“Lightning” in the form of difficult issues followed Karpan to OSMRE. After her confirmation, the agency became embroiled in an intense controversy that tested Karpan’s skills—over mountaintop removal mining in eastern U.S. coalfields. “My father was a coal miner, and it is not in me to get rid of coal mining jobs,” Karpan said. “But I also believe that we need regulation to address the impacts of coal mining.”

Shortly before Karpan’s arrival, OSMRE had begun a “Clean Streams Program” in abandoned mine lands; Karpan carried this program forward and began budgeting money for nonprofit community-based organizations to receive grants for this purpose.

Karpan’s tenure at OSMRE also brought her full circle to her first Washington job with Rep. Teno Roncalio. One of OSMRE’s responsibilities is to reclaim abandoned mine lands, using funds generated from a tax on current coal mine production, a program that resulted from a bill sponsored by Roncalio, who had advocated the measure because of coal mine subsidence problems in Rock Springs.

“I played around a mine mouth in No. 4 closed off by only two 2x4s,” Karpan said, recalling her childhood and referring to that mine’s structure at the time. “I couldn’t even fathom back then that 20 years later, a federal law would authorize reclamation of the sites, or that 40 years later, I’d head the agency that administered the law.”

Karpan’s attempts to take a measured approach to controversial issues before OSMRE pleased no one. After two and a half years at the helm of OSMRE, she moved on to spend another year and a half as Principal Assistant Secretary of Interior for Lands and Minerals Management.

Back to Wyoming law

The inauguration of President George W. Bush in January 2001 sent Karpan back to Wyoming to resume her law practice at Karpan and White, P.C., in Cheyenne, where she remains today.

Of her longtime legal partner, Margy White says, “Kathy has an enviable sense of humor. My personal favorite story of Kathy practicing law arose from a deposition she took of a person who had only a fleeting acquaintance with the concept of truth. After the deposition, Kathy said if and when we called this person to testify at trial, she would say, 'the plaintiff would like to call Pinocchio to the stand.'”

“The thing about Kathy,” added White, “is she’ll always talk about what other people have done. She never talks about herself, even though she does everything.”

As she still does, sitting at a conference table in her law office, alternately considering a legal matter and commenting on the 2016 presidential primary. “The law is interesting,” Karpan says, but admits with a smile, “politics is my first love.”

Resources

• Karpan, Kathy M. Personal interviews with author, Jan. 15, 2016, and Jan. 26, 2016.
• McDaniel, Rodger. Personal interview with author, Feb. 2, 2016.
• White, Margy M. Personal interviews with author, Jan. 15, 2016, and Feb. 16. 2016.
• White, Philip. Personal interview with author (including the information about the publication, Free Lunch), Feb. 16, 2016.
• Wyoming Secretary of State. 1983 Wyoming Official Directory. Compiled by Thyra Thomson, Secretary of State; Linda Mosley, Deputy; Kathy Wilson, Publications. Cheyenne: State of Wyoming, 1983.
• Wyoming Secretary of State. 1987 Wyoming Official Directory and 1986 Election Returns. Compiled by Kathy Karpan, Secretary of State; Margy White, Deputy; Dawn Hill, Editor. Cheyenne: State of Wyoming, 1987.
• Wyoming Secretary of State. 1991 Wyoming Official Directory and 1990 Election Returns. Compiled by Kathy Karpan, Secretary of State; Margy White, Deputy; Dawn Hill, Editor. Cheyenne: State of Wyoming, 1991.
• Wyoming Secretary of State. 1995 Wyoming Official Directory and 1994 Election Returns. Compiled by Diana J. Ohman, Secretary of State; Patricia O’Brien Arp, Deputy; Dawn Hill, Editor. Cheyenne: State of Wyoming, 1995.

For further reading and research

• White, Phil. “50 years ago today: Inspiring JFK drew crowds on Wyoming tour.” Casper Star-Tribune, Sept. 25, 2013. Accessed Feb. 26, 2016 at http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/years-ago-today-inspiring-jfk-drew-crowds-on-wyoming-tour/article_591d01c3-f024-5ddc-8ef9-bc52afd05a5a.html

Illustrations

• The photo of Kathy Karpan with President John Kennedy and Sen. Gale McGee is courtesy of Phil White. Used with permission and thanks. The rest of the photos are from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.

Few Wyoming newspapers have names as arresting as Laramie’s. Go to the newspaper’s home page on the web, and you will find: “Laramie Boomerang: Laramie’s Voice Since 1881.”[1] But the page provides little else about the paper’s origins or those of its name. In fact, the newspaper and its name were established by a man who resided in the state less than seven years but was, at one time, considered “Wyoming’s most celebrated citizen” and remains one of the state’s most famous historical figures.[2]

Bill Nye, more formally known as Edgar Wilson Nye, was the first editor of the Laramie Boomerang. He named the paper for his mule because of what he described as the “eccentricity of his orbit.”[3] As Nye’s son Frank said, something about the word “boomerang” piqued Nye’s imagination. “His mule, his mine, his newspaper, his [first] book [Bill Nye and Boomerang], all bore the trademark.”

Indeed, the mule and the paper were in close association early on. Originally housed in a shoe store, the paper soon moved to the more expansive loft of a livery stable. Its editor could be found by coming “up the stairs,” Nye said, “or you could twist the tail of the iron gray mule and take the elevator.”[4]

Nye’s signature was humor. As he later said, “I can write up things that never occurred with a masterly and graphic hand.”[5] But when he first arrived in Laramie from Wisconsin, his talents were neither well developed nor well known, although that soon changed. “Ideas rose from his mind like bubbles from champagne,” Nye’s son Frank later observed, but Wisconsin was too conservative for Nye. It took Laramie to pop the cork.[6]

Early life

Nye was born in 1850 in Maine, where his parents found farming difficult. The soil was rocky, Nye later explained, and the farms so upright and steep “they could be cultivated on both sides.” Nye accompanied his family two years later to what would become Hudson, Wis., where as he grew up they led a rural, humble life.[7]

He enjoyed writing plays, instigating pranks and playing hooky from school, but he disliked farming. Instead, he tried working as a miller, then as a schoolteacher. Successful at neither, he tried the law—“Every boy who wore a big hat and got tired easily with manual toil,” he said, “was set aside for the ministry or the law”—but he never passed the bar in Wisconsin.[8]

He tried newspapering as well but could only find temporary work. Nonetheless, a freelance article he wrote for the Chicago Times led a family friend to recommend him to a Cheyenne businessman who in turn referred him to J.H. Hayford in Laramie, where Nye stepped off the train in late spring 1876 with 35 cents in his pocket.[9]

A Laramie newspaperman

During his first year in Laramie, Nye took a position with J.H. Hayford’s Laramie Sentinel, studied the law and passed the Wyoming bar. He also was appointed justice of the peace and notary public for the 2^nd Judicial District of Wyoming.

And, he married. His bride, Clara Frances Smith, a petite music teacher, came west anticipating introduction to Nye through family friends. They were married within a year.[10]

Between the occasional law client and even more infrequent commission work, Nye wrote short pieces for various newspapers, which in turn led to a column for the Denver Tribune and national exposure.

When he hired Nye in 1876, Hayford had been publishing a daily version of his Laramie Sentinel, a Democratic newspaper, for about a year. Nye worked two years for Hayford, a straight-laced newspaperman with a medical degree who later became a judge. “He gave me $12 a week to edit the paper,” Nye said. “He said $12 was too much, but, if I would jerk the press occasionally and take care of his children, he would try to stand it.”[11] Nye worked at the Sentinel two years. He said he might have stayed longer “if I hadn’t had a red-hot political campaign, and measles among the children, at the same time. You can’t mix measles and politics,” he said, so he collected his salary and quit.[12]

That’s the way Nye chose to remember it in his autobiography, Bill Nye: His Own Life Story (1926), a book Frank Nye assembled long after his father’s death. But there was more to it. For one thing, the fun-loving Nye and the officious Hayford didn’t see everything eye to eye. Hayford, who gave away the bride at Nye’s wedding, would later chastise Nye for not being serious in his journalism, even suggesting Nye “rub the donkey off his coat of arms.”[13]

A Boomerang humorist

For another, local Republicans, smarting from poor election results in November 1880, wanted a daily newspaper. Hayford was only publishing a weekly, and that did not compete with a new Democratic daily, the Daily Times.[14] So, they raised $3,000 to purchase a newspaper plant and paid Nye $150 a month to edit what became the Boomerang, a Republican sheet. They also gave Nye the county printing contracts, secured for him the Laramie postmaster’s job to supplement his income, and found space for the paper at the livery stable.[15]

Nye came at the end of an already long line of American funny men. Together, they had been developing an American-styled humor since the Revolution and employing the humorous techniques of burlesque, parody, puns, exaggeration, anti-climax and irony since the 1830s. The line can be traced back to Ben Franklin, but in the 19th century, it included such notables as Maj. Jack Downing, Petroleum V. Nasby, Davy Crockett and Mark Twain. Nye became for a time the most successful of them, although Twain remains far better known today. By the 1890s, thanks to the publication of more than 16 books, two plays and a national tour of stage performances, Nye was the nation’s best-known humorist, and at $30,000 a year, its highest paid.[16]

Like other American humorists, Nye deflated those who would be pretentious, vain, or pompous, exposed booster propaganda and wooed readers with local color, which he did not find in paying quantity until he moved to Laramie. As Wyoming historian T.A. Larson notes, Nye’s best material came from his time in Laramie. “His later humor, whether published in newspapers or books, rarely amuses,” Larson concluded, but “in earlier, happier days in the West, Nye had been really funny.”[17]

Indeed, material from his time in Laramie can still bring a smile. Like Twain and most everyone else who went West, Nye invested in mining prospects. As with Twain and most others, mining stocks never earned him a red cent, except as fodder for one of his funniest tales, titled “My Mine.” When he sent a specimen to be evaluated, Nye wrote, the assayer reported what he found: gold, nil; silver, nil; “railroad iron,” one ounce; “pyrites of poverty,” nine ounces; and “parasites of disappointment,” 90 ounces. The formation was “igneous, prehistoric, and erroneous,” said the assayer, who advised: “If I were you I would sink a prospect shaft below the old red brimstone and preadamite slag crosscut the malachite and intersect the schist. I think that would be schist about as good as anything you could do. Please send specimens and $2.”[18]

“Well,” said Nye, “I didn’t know he was ‘an humorist.’”[19]

Bursting the boomers’ bubbles

A tall, spare man with what his illustrator Walt McDougall termed “a lounging gait, blue-grey myopic eyes, and a sweet, wry smile,” and best known for his exceptionally bald head, exaggeration and understated self-deprecation, Nye made himself the butt of almost all his humor.[20]“It’s a lot funnier to call yourself names,” he said. “And besides, it’s a lot healthier in Wyoming.”[21]

By nature, Laramie seemed an exaggeration. At the time Nye was there, Laramie’s population numbered perhaps 2,500 souls. It had a burgeoning economy based on heavy industries, including machine shops and a steel mill rolling out rails for the Union Pacific Railroad. The town also had stockyards, a slaughterhouse, a glass-blowing plant, a plaster mill and a brewery. Lodged between the Laramie and Snowy mountain ranges along the Laramie River at almost 7,200 feet elevation, the city was founded less than a decade earlier in 1868, received less than 11 inches of moisture a year, and could record temperatures of 50 degrees below zero.

For Nye, Laramie was a gold mine. He had, for example, Wyoming’s climate, and he had Hayford for a straight man. In classic boosterism, 19th-century newspapermen could write unmitigated exaggeration. Hayford, for example, claimed Wyoming’s weather to be a positive factor. He reduced Laramie’s winter storms to tropical breezes: “No other Rocky Mountain town presents as much attraction in the way of climate as Laramie City,” Hayford enthused. “Laramie City is the only one of all the towns in this region which is almost entirely exempt from hard winds. The blustering storms and howling winds spend their fury harmlessly in the mountains around us and above, while perpetual calm and sunshine bless the inhabitants below.”[22]

Nye delighted in bursting such bubbles. Describing the wind from one particular storm, he wrote: “The sun was hidden by clouds and also by flying fragments of felt roofing and detached portions of the rolling mill and machine shops.”[23]

Hayford and company boomed Wyoming’s agriculture absurdly and with straight faces. Hayford not only claimed that rain followed the plow, but that the iron tracks of the railroad attracted it as well.[24] Nye checked his reasoning. “I do not wish to discourage those who might wish to come to this place,” he wrote, but “the soil is quite coarse, and the agriculturalist, before he can even begin with any prospect of success, must run his farm through a stamp-mill.”[25] Winter, he said, “lingers in the lap of spring till it occasions a good deal of talk,” although in Laramie, he admitted, “it does not snow much, we being above snow line.”[26]

If Nye could “write up things that never occurred,” so could J.H. Hayford, but Nye never asked his readers to buy it as truth. Self-deprecation was impossible for Hayford, but it came naturally to Nye, who attributed his election as justice of the peace in Laramie to his ability to make people laugh. Or was the laugh on him? As he said, “I was elected quite vociferously, for the people of the West are a humor-loving people and entered into the thing with great glee.” And further, “While I was called Judge Nye, and frequently mentioned in the papers with great consideration, I was out of coal half the time.”[27]

National fame

Nye left Laramie in 1883, advised by doctors that he could not live at such a high altitude after being diagnosed a year earlier with spinal meningitis. Two of his books, Bill Nye and Boomerang (1881) and Forty Liars and Other Lies (1882), were published before Nye left town. Compiled mainly from Nye’s newspaper work in Laramie, they are what T.A. Larson regards as his funniest. A third volume, Baled Hay, (1884), which Nye is said to have clipped from the pages of the Boomerang’s office files just before he left, also drew from his Laramie newspaper work.[28]

Nye returned to Hudson, Wis., where he lived quietly and produced more material. He also began lecturing, which Larson regards as possibly “the worst mistake he ever made” because his lecturing, ever lucrative, drove him beyond his physical endurance.[29] After three years, Nye moved briefly to New York City and then to Arden, N.C., where he lived the remainder of his life.

Soon after leaving Laramie, he was hired as a columnist for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. On stage, he found great success with James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet.” Working together for four years—Nye with his deadpan humor and Riley with his nostalgic poems—they were even introduced one evening in Newark, N.J., by none other than Mark Twain. Nye hated the lecture circuit, however, and all but gave it up three months before his death on Feb. 22, 1896.[30]

To literary critics, Nye was said to be a realist, a trait hastened on him by his time in Laramie. Nye saw genuineness and forthrightness in western life, and he defended it against Eastern pretensions.[31] As O.N. Gibson would later note in the Annals of Wyoming, Nye “was a humorist, purely and simply. He possessed no poetic gift, no prophetic insight … He acknowledged no graver purpose, claimed no higher mission, than just to make men laugh.”[32] Gibson speculated whether that might be the reason Nye, even then in 1925, was not as well remembered as he otherwise might be.

In February 1896, however, Nye’s obituary ran in scores of newspapers across the nation. In another obituary, one written in 1926 by the beloved humorist Will Rogers for Montana’s cowboy artist, Charlie Russell, Rogers said to Russell: “I bet you hadn’t been up there three days till you had out your old pencil and was a drawing something funny about some of the old Punchers … I bet you Mark Twain and Old Bill Nye, and Whitcomb Riley, and a whole bunch of those old joshers was just a waiting for you to pop in with all the latest ones.”[33] The latest ones were a distinctly American type of humor that Nye knew well. American humor, he said,

crystalized by hunger and sorrow and tears … is not found elsewhere as it is in America. It is out of the question in England … an Englishman cannot poke fun at himself. He cannot joke about an empty flour barrel. We can: especially if by doing it we may swap the joke for another barrel of flour. We can never be a nation of snobs as long as we are willing to poke fun at ourselves.[34]

Few people ever said it better.

(Editor’s note: Publication of this and seven other articles on Wyoming newspapering is supported in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council with funds from the Pulitzer Prize Committee’s Campfires Initiative, celebrating in 2016 the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize.)

Resources

Primary Sources

• Laramie Boomerang. Accessed Feb. 9, 2016, at http://www.laramieboomerang.com.

Secondary Sources

• Gibson, O.N. “Bill Nye.” Annals of Wyoming, 3, no. 1 (July 1925): 96-97, 101.
• Kesterson, David B. Bill Nye: The Western Writings. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1976, 6-7.
• Larson, T.A. History of Wyoming. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, 116, 119, 359-60.
• Larson, T.A., ed. Bill Nye’s Western Humor. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1969, v, vii-viii, xi, x, 26.
• Saum, Lewis. “Bill Nye in the Pacific Northwest.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 84, no. 3 (July 1993): 83.
• Nye, Bill, and Frederick Burr Opper. Baled hay: a drier book than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' grass". New York: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1884.
• Nye, Edgar Wilson. “In Lighter Vein, Autobiography of an Editor.” The Century Magazine, 45, no. 1 (November 1892): 158, 159.
• Nye, Frank Wilson, Bill Nye: His Own Life Story, Continuity by Frank Wilson Nye. New York: The Century Co., 1926, 30, 41, 43-45, 48, 57, 60-63, 77-82, 89.
• Stone, Melville. A Book of American Prose Humor. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone Company, 1904, 82.
• Yagoda, Ben. Will Rogers: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 204.

Illustrations

• The line-drawing image of Bill Nye, from the frontispiece of Baled hay: a drier book than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' grass," is courtesy of the author. The A.J. Russell photo of the UP roundhouse and machine shops is from the U.S. Geological Survey Denver Library Photographic Collection. Used with thanks. The photo of Bill Nye in cowboy garb is from the Rainsford Collection at the Wyoming State Archives, used with permission and thanks. The photos of the early Boomerang office and of Nye in a fur hat are from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks. The cartoon of the crow from Bill Nye's Comic History of the United States (1894) is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• Charles E. Rankin is associate director/editor-in-chief for the University of Oklahoma Press, a position he has held for sixteen years. Before that, he was director of publications for the Montana Historical Society and editor of Montana The Magazine of Western History. He earned a doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 1994 and is editor or co-editor of three books, one on Wallace Stegner, another on the Battle of the Little Bighorn and a third on the New Western History.

The old trapper galloped for his cabin, with 75 yelling Arapaho close behind. Reaching his front door just in time, he slammed it in his enemies' faces. His gun spat bullets from the windows, and warriors fell by the dozens until they retreated—all but one, who crept up close and threw a lighted torch at the cabin. Smoked out, the trapper emerged, was captured and tied to a stake. The Indians piled brush and straw around it, and the incident could have only one ending.

As tendrils of flame rose from the straw, women in the grandstand shrieked and fainted. Even the men blanched. Some audience members half-believed that the old white trapper had actually been killed.

This Wild West show, the 14th annual event of its kind, and not to be confused with its contemporary, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, was held in Lander, Wyo., in 1908. According to some who attended, it was so well staged that nobody could figure out that a dummy had been substituted to allow the trapper to escape. Not only that, the trapper wasn't even a bona fide white man: His name was Albert "Stub" Farlow, and his mother, Lizzie Lamoreaux Farlow, was one-half Hunkpapa Sioux, a niece of the ferocious warrior, Gall, military leader at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Stub's father, Ed Farlow, was one of the producers of the show.

Stub's role in the show typified the public face of Native Americans and mixed-bloods as they adjusted to their post-defeat lives on reservations or mingled in white culture. As far back as 1883, William F. "Buffalo Bill"Cody had produced his first show, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, touring the U.S. and eventually Europe. The show featured Indians attacking a stagecoach, wagon train or settler's cabin. A make-believe buffalo hunt was also staged. Cody's shows, though sensational, were the first of what became some Native Americans’ new opportunities to get off the reservation and gain some relief from the monotony of that life.

These opportunities continued during the 1920s in the early silent film era when Ed Farlow and Tim McCoy became theatrical agents for the Arapaho and Shoshone on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation, and also for members of the Bannock and Crow tribes of, respectively, Idaho and Montana. Both men were white Wyoming ranchers and, according to their own accounts at least, were trusted friends of the Indians.

Ed Farlow

Ed Farlow, born in Iowa in 1861, traveled to Wyoming at age 15, leaving home without the knowledge or consent of his father. In June 1876, two months after his arrival, Farlow was camping near the Bighorn River with a small group of prospectors when they noticed several parties of Indians close by. Farlow did not actually witness the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but heard about it immediately thereafter from some Indian friends of his companions.

Farlow settled in the Lander area and by 1883, was working for his father-in-law, rancher Jules Lamoreaux, who ran his cattle on the Wind River reservation. Through his work on and around the reservation, Farlow made friends among mixed-bloods and Indians and, surprisingly, in a dispute with a Shoshone man over a stolen horse that was resolved by Chief Washakie, became an accepted member of the Shoshone tribe. Over the years, Farlow also met and befriended Sioux and Arapaho.

In July 1913, Farlow traveled out of Wyoming with his Indian friends for the first of what was to be many promotional trips for various purposes. The Colorado Publicity League had invited him, along with 35 Arapaho, to the annual conclave of the Knights Templar in Denver. Farlow and the Indians, explained members of the Publicity League committee, were there to advertise the "Last Grand Council of the American Indians," a mammoth event slated for the following year.

Although Grand Council plans were eventually canceled because of the outbreak of World War I, while the Farlow party was in Denver the Indians held a Wolf Dance at their campground near the amphitheater set up for the Knights Templar festivities. The dance, which the Indians performed for their own amusement, attracted, according to Farlow’s account, a crowd of 40,000. The throng pressed so close that the encircling fence broke. Then Farlow and the Indians had to be escorted out by the police.

In 1914, Farlow traveled to Casper, Wyo., with 75 Indians for a three-day celebration, and then to Fort Collins, Colo., with 25 Indians in 1916. In Farlow’s account he does not say whether they were Arapaho or Shoshone. In subsequent years, he accompanied Indian groups to other Wyoming towns, including Rawlins, Riverton and Lander.

In September 1922, Farlow received a phone call from Tim McCoy, who had just resigned his post as adjutant general of the Wyoming National Guard to accept a position as technical advisor with Famous Players-Lasky, a Hollywood film company. McCoy had contracted to provide 500 Indian actors for the filming of The Covered Wagon, based on the novel by Emerson Hough. After some scrambling, because the actors had to have long hair and be able to ride bareback—an increasingly rare combination of traits—Farlow and McCoy found their 500. Some were Shoshone and Arapaho from the Wind River Reservation and others were Bannock from Fort Hall in northern Idaho.

The filming, in Milford, Utah, lasted about eight weeks. McCoy was allowed to hire up to three other men to supervise the Indians; presumably Farlow was one of these. McCoy later reported that this filming and his friendship with the Indians began his own movie career. And the movie itself was a huge success. It was Hollywood’s largest-grossing film up to that time, and held that record for 10 more years.

Tim McCoy

Tim McCoy was born of Irish Catholic parents in Saginaw, Mich., in 1891. In spring 1909, at age 18, he took a train to Omaha, Neb., without telling his parents that he had left St. Ignatius, the Jesuit college in Chicago. He had been studying Latin there, probably in preparation for the priesthood. McCoy ended up in Lander, Wyo. Like many other young men floating around the West in those days, he found work as a cowboy.

From the beginning, McCoy was interested in and curious about the Indians. Noticing that many white men were insolent and contemptuous to the Indians they encountered while riding the range, he took special pains to greet the Indians with respect. Although many of the younger Indians spoke English, McCoy wanted to talk with the older Indians as well. In this, though, he was thwarted by the double language barrier: He knew no Indian language and each tribe spoke in its own tongue. McCoy's Arapaho friend, Buffalo Lodge—whose white name was George Shakespear—taught him the sign language of the plains Indians. This enabled McCoy to communicate with members of different tribes.

Movies and live prologues

Both Farlow and McCoy claimed friendship with Arapaho warrior Goes-In-Lodge, who was about 79 when The Covered Wagon was filmed. Goes-In-Lodge, along with dozens of his tribe, played the stereotypical Indian roles reminiscent of Cody's shows in at least six movies, and appeared in most of the live prologues Famous Players-Lasky and other companies produced to promote their films. The first live prologue was staged at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, Calif., in the spring of 1923. All the subsequent prologues for various other movies were roughly the same: Approximately 35 Indians, dressed in their own war bonnets, fringed buckskin shirts, beaded leggings and quilled moccasins, stood on stage with Tim McCoy. Each individual stepped forward in turn to tell his or her own story in sign language, with McCoy interpreting.

The contract for this first prologue ran four months, until early August 1923. However, no sooner was it concluded than Famous Players-Lasky re-engaged the Indians to travel to London. Both Farlow and McCoy went on this trip, which lasted more than six months, from Aug. 27, 1923, until March of the following year, and included appearances in New York City, Chicago and Paris. Concurrently, prologues continued in Hollywood with some of the Arapaho who had refused to travel to London over the unknown and dangerous Big Water. A white actor stood in for McCoy.

Through the mid to late 1920s, Farlow and McCoy continued as technical advisors for the filmmakers and as theatrical agents for the Indians. Farlow served as guide for more live prologues in Philadelphia, Boston and Hollywood, negotiating and managing the Indians' fees as well. Eventually he accompanied Indian groups on 27 trips coast-to-coast, including performances in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Omaha and many smaller cities and towns.

McCoy turned to acting; among his first films were War Paint (1926), The Winning of the Wilderness (1926) and Wyoming (1927). For these silent films plus Thundering Herd (1924), and Iron Horse (1925), he and Farlow engaged hundreds of Indian actors and extras, some of whom were Arapaho: Goes-in Lodge, Left Hand, Yellow Calf, Mr. and Mrs. Black Weasel, Buffalo Fat, Black Horse, Yellow Horse, Mr. and Mrs. Red Turtle, Mr. and Mrs. Red Pipe, Alberta Sitting Eagle, Red Fox, George Shakespear, Bill Shakespear, Jack Shavehead, Charlie White Bull, Rising Buffalo, Night Horse, William Penn, Painted Wolf, Charlie Whiteman and Little Ant.

Also mentioned were White Horse, a Cheyenne; Black Thunder, a Bannock; and two sons of Shoshone Chief Washakie, identified only as Dick and Charlie. McCoy noted that Iron Eyes Cody, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, went on to become "perhaps the most knowledgeable and authentic of … modern Indian actors."

Working conditions

Through all their various engagements, the Indians were fairly paid and, according to both Farlow and McCoy, not exploited. For The Covered Wagon they earned per day, in addition to food and transportation: $5 per adult, 50 cents per child, $1 for each horse, and $1 per tipi. McCoy commented that this was "more than most of them saw in a year." McCoy's own wages for The Covered Wagon, at $50 per week, were comparable to those of the Indians.

For the London prologue, Farlow successfully negotiated all expenses plus $5 per day for each individual. McCoy's account names the figure at $8 per day. Regarding subsequent films, McCoy observed that, contrary to the "revisionist" claims of some, Indians were not paid less than white man extras and also enjoyed themselves while acting. The non-sensational nature of the live prologues plus fair wages, expenses paid for travel, housing and food plus their two reliable white intermediaries, apparently made it worth the Indians' while to continue participating, no matter how they were portrayed on screen.

The meeting of divergent cultures created some amusing episodes as, during their travels, the Indians encountered new environments and situations. While shopping at Macy's in New York City before embarking on their sea voyage to England, Red Turtle accidentally stepped onto a rising escalator. He was startled, but by calm signs, Farlow instructed him on how to get off, and then had to face the somewhat harder task of persuading Red Turtle's wife onto the escalator to join her husband at the top: "I had to take a firm hold of her arms and push her on."

After their continental trip, the Indians appeared at a press conference in New York City arranged by Players-Lasky. With McCoy interpreting as usual, the reporters asked the Indians what London was like.

"It was the same as Wind River," Goes-in-Lodge replied, his face impassive. Pressed for an explanation, he added, "The underground, the subway." Then, breaking into a grin, he explained to the puzzled reporters, "All same. Prairie dog go down one hole, come up another."

A few years later, while filming War Paint in the canyon mouth of Wyoming's Little Wind River, Indian actors had to stage a fight with rubber knives. This struck them as so absurd that they were laughing during the mock fight, and the director had to tell Farlow to make them be serious.

According to Farlow, the Indians who went on tour sent some of their pay home and established a "feast fund" so they could hold a feast for the whole tribe on their return. Farlow was also expected to contribute, and was probably invited to the celebration.

On several occasions when a scene or a whole movie was being shot in Wyoming and Ed Farlow could not be there as technical advisor and helper to the Indians, he sent his one-quarter Sioux son, Jule. Apparently the film companies sometimes hired Jule independently of his father as well, and at least once, Jule traveled to Hollywood as an Indian escort.

As for Jule's brother, Stub, his most sensational "Wild West" appearance was probably that 1908 show in Lander. He participated in so many other stunts, shows and rodeos—and won so many awards for the latter events—that Wyoming Secretary of State and former Lander dentist Lester C. Hunt, who later became governor and U.S. senator, considered Stub the "most typical cowboy" he'd ever known. For that reason, Hunt had Stub in mind when he commissioned the bucking horse design for Wyoming license plates. The logo is one of the best-known symbols of Wyoming, although few people may realize that the rider who inspired it was part Hunkpapa Sioux.

Goes-in-Lodge lived to be 88. He and McCoy saw each other for the last time in the spring of 1931. To the end of his life, Goes-in-Lodge was custodian of a 3-foot long briarwood pipe presented to the Arapaho by Cecil Baring, a wealthy Englishman, on their 1923 trip to London.

Tim McCoy ultimately acted in about 100 films and performed with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus from 1935-1937. On April 4, 1938, emulating Buffalo Bill Cody, his lifelong hero, he opened Tim McCoy's Wild West and Rough Riders of the World in Chicago. McCoy’s efforts proved much less long lasting. The show closed just 21 days later in Washington, D.C. McCoy lost about $300,000 on the venture.

Ed and Lizzie Farlow helped start the Lander Pioneers group in 1886. Farlow was mayor of Lander from 1923-1927 and also served on the school board, as justice of the peace and in the Wyoming Legislature from 1932-1934. On June 21, 1931, in a special ceremony, the Arapaho made him an official member of their tribe, though he had been informally a member for more than 50 years. He continued as a friend and advocate of Indians from many tribes, helping them find work, protesting when they were mistreated and feeding more Indians at his home, ranch and camps than did any other white man in Fremont County.

Nonetheless, all was not clear sailing with the Indians for Farlow and McCoy. At one point during the London trip, some sort of trouble arose—not well described by either man—and all Farlow could get out of the Indians was that "McCoy did not know how to handle Indians." Farlow himself mentioned that in his contact with the Indians he had "several close calls," adding that, notwithstanding his trusted role with the Indians, they hated white men in general and "when they are drunk it comes out." His wife Lizzie even commented, "they will kill you yet."

Any conquered people, watching attempts to stereotype if not obliterate their culture, must have mixed feelings toward even the most benevolent, helpful and sincere of their conquerors. It’s remarkable, therefore, that the friendships of both these white men, Ed Farlow and Tim McCoy, and their many Native American neighbors lasted as long and as well as they did.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Farlow, Albert "Stub."“Surprise.” Undated manuscript. Intertribal Cultural Center, Central Wyoming College, Riverton, Wyo.
• Farlow, Edward J. Wind River Adventures: My Life in Frontier Wyoming. Researched, edited and annotated by Loren Jost. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 1998, 32-33, 169-176, 182-209, 213-227, 230-234, 248-253.
• McCoy, Tim, with Ronald McCoy. Tim McCoy Remembers the West: An Autobiography. 1977. Reprint, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1988, xvii, 1-20, 159-199, 242-251, 265-267.
• Wyoming State Journal, Lander."Ed. J. Farlow, Wyoming Pioneer, Dies." April 10, 1951. Fremont County Pioneer Museum, Lander, Wyo.

Secondary Sources

• Aleiss, Angela. Making the White Man's Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2005, 32.
• Bonner, Robert E. "Town Founder and Irrigation Tycoon: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows." Accessed Nov. 17, 2015, at http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/town-founder-and-irrigation-tycoon-buffalo-bill.
• Buscombe, Edward. 'Injuns': Native Americans in the Movies. Bodmin, Cornwall, U.K.: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006.
• Gaddy, Jean C. "Wyoming's Insignia—The Bucking Horse."Annals of Wyoming, 26 no. 2 (July 1954): 129-136.
• Hilger, Michael. Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
• Rea, Tom. "Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express: Fame, Truth and Inventing the West." Accessed Nov. 17, 2015, at http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/buffalo-bill-and-pony-express-fame-truth-and-inventing-west.
• Rollins, Peter C. and John E. O'Connor. Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Illustrations

• The lobby card from The Covered Wagon is from Lobby Cards. Used with thanks.
• The color photo of Tim McCoy is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• All other photos are from the collections of the Lander Pioneer Museum, used with permission and special thanks to Randy Wise of the museum staff.

In the spring of 1934, an aging cowboy and stockman wrote some recollections to the editor of the Lusk Free Lance, a newspaper then published in Niobrara County in eastern Wyoming. In his letter, Addison A. Spaugh detailed his extensive life in the Wyoming cattle business, including a discovery he made in 1880 while driving cattle up the Muddy River drainage in the foothills of the Laramie Range.

“It was on this trip up the Muddy I discovered the Spanish Diggings. Thinking I had discovered a Spanish gold mine, I reported the fact to Mr. Manville [Hiram S. Manville, co-owner of the Converse Cattle Company] and he reported it to Adams and Glover, two drug store men in Cheyenne …”

The name, Spanish Diggings, stuck. Assumptions about its origins did not. Archeologists and geologists were the first to call Spaugh’s assumptions into question. In 1894, University of Wyoming Geology Professor Wilbur C. Knight examined the quarries and estimated that “aborigines” excavated “hundreds of thousands if not millions of tons,” of quartzite.

Knight made no reference to the Spanish or any other European settlers.

Eventually, archeologists would confirm that Spanish Diggings is a 400 square-mile series of Paleo-Indian quarries, dating to 10,000 years ago. As Gene Gade, president of the Vore Buffalo Jump Foundation, notes, “It was slowly accepted that the ‘Spanish Diggings’ were, in fact, the work of groups of hunters that had lived in the region and quarried the stone for projectile points, knives, scrapers, and other tools.”

Trade among tribes of the Plains

A general misperception of Native American enterprise and trade continues today. On the Wikipedia page on Indian Trade, the discussion centers on Native American interactions with the English at the Jamestown colony in Virginia, general information about tribes involved in the Canadian-Missouri fur trade, and explains how some California tribes gathered slaves for the Spanish. The page omits any references to or examples of tribe-to-tribe trade.

Indians of the southern and northern Plains traded with each other for thousands of years. Flint points 13,000 years old, chiseled from the Texas quarries, have been found in eastern New Mexico. Quarried stone from the Obsidian Cliffs near Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyo. in Yellowstone Park, traveled to the the Ohio River Valley around 100-350 CE.

While archeological objects abound in Wyoming, the artifacts alone don’t tell the story of pre-settlement trade among nomadic Plains tribes. Moreover, even before the advent of Europeans, tribal boundaries fluctuated with weather, game populations and alliances with other tribes. For example, the Comanche, one of the most entrepreneurial of tribes, once were part of the Shoshone tribe and lived largely in what's now Wyoming. In the  middle 18th century they split from the Shoshone and moved south to rule the plains of Texas and Oklahoma.

Archeological artifacts do suggest, however, that native-to-native trade expanded over time. Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield, authors of the Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World, say that the Hohokam tribe, centered in present day Arizona, traded seashells, which they had acquired from the Mojave tribe, for buffalo hides from various southern Plains tribes. “By between 500 and 200 B.C., North American Indians had established a vital network of trade.”

Those networks weren’t equally distributed, however, on the central plains.

Wyoming’s role in tribal networks

The center of Wyoming, close to modern-day Lander, is isolated and roughly 800 miles equidistant from the three major pre-settlement trading centers for tribes: The Dalles, where the Chinookan tribes gathered along the Columbia River in what’s now Oregon; Taos Pueblo in present New Mexico, which serviced the tribes of the southwest; and the Mandan/Hidatsa trade center, where the Knife River joins the Missouri River in modern-day North Dakota, where northern Plains tribes came to trade (see map).

There were also trade centers further south along the Missouri in what’s now South Dakota– the Arikara Center and the Dakota Rendezvous – that attracted mostly tribes from the southern Plains.

It would be reasonable to assume that entrepreneurial tribes inhabiting Wyoming faced the same obstacles as a modern Wyoming business in creating a trade hub: distance to markets, lack of a critical mass of customers, and inclement weather. That may be true.

Wyoming, however, was home to at least two enterprising tribes, the Crow, and particularly the Shoshone, who had their own trade fair, the Shoshone Rendezvous.

We know little about this event, including its exact location. The recognized authority on the Shoshone Rendezvous, Smithsonian ethnologist John C. Ewers, wrote in the early 1950s that the most likely location was in “in the river valleys of southwestern Wyoming west of the South Pass—“a description that would also fit the later, better-known fur trade rendezvous of 1825-1840.

Ewers’s main source is Canadian fur trader M. Charles McKenzie’s narrative, “The Mississouri [sic] Indians. A narrative of four trading expeditions to the Mississouri, 1804, 1805, 1806, for the North-West Company.”

Tribes, aiming for handsome profit, would buy items from the either the Mandan/Hidatsa Center or the Dakota Rendezvous and transport them to southwest Wyoming each spring.

Relying on McKenzie, Ewers notes that in June 1805, the Crow traded 250 horses to the Hidatsa, who offered 200 guns in exchange. The next year the Hidatsa offered 200 guns to the Cheyenne, hoping to receive at least that many horses in exchange. Normal markups were 100 percent; the Crow sold horses to the Mandan and Hidatsa at twice the price they had paid at the Shoshone rendezvous. The river tribes doubled the prices again when trading with others, like themselves, on the upper Missouri.

W. Raymond Wood, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Missouri,said that long before the advent of Europeans the Shoshone Rendezvous served as a trade link between tribes of the Pacific Coast and tribes of the upper Missouri.

“Crow Indians,” writes Wood, “carried goods to this rendezvous from the northern plains; Utes brought goods to it from the Southwest; and the Shoshone, Nez Perce, and Flatheads brought goods from the Great Basin and Plateau.”

The Shoshone Rendezvous eventually gave way to the Green River Rendezvous, generally credited as an invention of Rocky Mountain Fur Company co-founder, William Ashley.

Although there is no direct connection between the two, Ewers says its “probable” that Ashley’s rendezvous “was an adaption of the pre-existing Shoshoni trading rendezvous, at the same season of the year and the same region, in the advantage of white trappers.”

“We think that the Shoshone were among the great Indian traders in the interior West,” said Dudley Gardner, professor emeritus of history and political science at Western Wyoming Community College in Rock Springs. “Jim Bridger's trading post location”—on the Black’s Fork of the Green River in what’s now Uinta County, Wyo.—“in the Dove Eater Band of the Shoshoni was no accident.”

Tapping Wyoming’s resources

In his 1907 Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, anthropologist and archaeologist Fredrick Webb Hodge lists 13 tribes that included Wyoming in their historical range. Half of those spent a significant amount of time in this region: Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, Shoshone, Ute and later, the Sioux.

These tribes tapped Wyoming’s abundant natural resources for desired trade goods: quartzite or obsidian for knives, scrapers and arrowheads; buffalo for robes, dried meat, pemmican and hides; soapstone for bowls; elk or deer for tanned hides; and horn, particularly from the bighorn sheep, for making bows, which were highly desired.

Again, the Shoshone were prominent. "One other specialty practiced by Sheepeaters, recognized by all other Shoshoni,” recorded Maine-born trapper Osborne Russell, who worked the Rocky Mountain fur trade in the 1830s, “was the manufacture of very powerful bows from the horn of a mountain sheep. The bows were beautifully wrought from Sheep, Buffaloe and Elk horns secured with Deer and Elk sinews and ornamented with porcupine quills and generally about 3 feet long.”

The Shoshone, it seems, traded with everyone, including northwest and southwest tribes. Other Rocky Mountain and central Plains tribes also took goods to the Missouri River valley to trade for corn, pumpkin, squash and native-grown tobacco (Nicotiana quadrivalvis, Pursh). Their primary trading partners were the Mandan and Hidatsa of what is now North Dakota and, to a lesser degree, the Arikara, who were located north of the Grand River in present South Dakota. In his journal, William Clark of Corps of Discovery fame noted that the Arapaho conducted business with the Mandan, while the Cheyenne and Sioux traded with the Arikara.

Corn also appealed to former woodland tribes. “For the Sioux, corn was more important than blood,” says James P. Ronda, professor of Western American History at the University of Tulsa. In August, “as in every other late summer and early fall, Sioux bands flocked to the Arikara towns, bringing meat, fat, and hides from the plains and European-manufactured goods from the Dakota Rendezvous.”

Similarly Ewers notes that the Crow and Cheyenne, “both of which tribes had formerly been horticulturalists, seem to have been particularly fond of corn … while the Cheyenne found it difficult to go without this vegetable.”

Probably one of the best descriptions of Plains tribes trade fairs comes from the journal of François-Antoine Larocque, a trader from the Montreal-based Northwest Company. Larocque spent the summer of 1805 with the Crow and earned a place in Wyoming history by being the first European-American clearly to describe them and their homelands in the Bighorn Mountains and along the Yellowstone River and its tributaries. He wrote his notes in English.

On June 25, 1805, Larocque described a band of 654 Crow warriors dressed in buckskins and carrying painted rawhide shields riding into a Hidatsa and Mandan village on the banks of the Knife River. After making a display meant to show off their wealth and power, the Crow returned to their tipis, set up west of the Hidatsa and Mandan settlements. Their hosts followed, “carrying a quantity of Corn raw and cooked which they traded for Leggings, Robes, and dried meat.”

Early post-settlement trade

When Larocque and Lewis and Clark encountered each other at the Hidatsa and Mandan villages in 1804 and 1805, there had already been white traders there for at least a decade. But when, 600 miles further west in what’s now western Montana, the Corps of Discovery encountered a group of Lemhi Shoshone, the white men were the first the Shoshone had seen.

After the first white-Indian contacts, European-tribal trade was not always quick to develop, however. Wyoming State Archeologist Greg Pierce notes in his doctoral thesis that on the northern Plains, stone tools and weapons, including bows and arrows, “remained in use from the 17th through the 19th century.”

Art is not anthropology or archeology. Still, artists who visited the upper Missouri and Rocky Mountains in the 1830s noticed tribes hanging onto traditions or only selectively using European goods.

German artist Karl Bodmer made a sketch for his painting Indians Hunting the Bison, on Oct. 11, 1833, on a trip through the West with Prince Philipp Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied. They were near Fort Union, in what’s now North Dakota, close to the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.

Nearly half a century after the introduction of the gun to the Plains tribes, Bodmer shows warriors riding horses with only skins for saddles, no European bridles or reins, and felling their prey with a traditional bow and arrow. All the items they used, except for the horses, were gained through self-acquisition or inter-tribal trade, not necessarily through commerce with Europeans.

In another Bodmer engraving from the same trip, “The Interior of the hut of a Mandan chief,” we see a mix of possessions, most of them native but also what may be a metal bowl at right and spears with what probably are metal spearheads.

Alfred Jacob Miller, an American-born, European-trained artist also documented the tribes’ habit of selective use of what Europeans offered. Here, in Miller’s 1837 sketch, “Crossing to the North Fork of the Platte River,” we see Sioux in possession of guns and blankets but little else from the white culture.

As noted, these manufactured goods didn’t necessarily come into Indian hands directly from white traders. For example, Larocque met some of the Shoshone—whom he calls the Snakes—at these Knife River trade fairs and noted how they acquired goods, explaining in great detail how Indians could have European items through indirect trade:

The Snakes dwell east of the Flat heads upon the same range of mountains and on the head of rivers that have likewise a southerly course. They say there is much beaver on their lands and that they partly dress with it, they are all on good terms with the Rocky Mountains with whom they carry on such a trade as the Flat Heads. This nation is very numerous & each tribe has different names. The more southern tribes have dealings with the white of New Mexico from whom they get thick striped Blankets Bridles & Battle axes in exchange for Buffaloes robes and Deer Skins, but it is probable that this trade of the Snakes is carried on at a second or third hand and that they themselves have no direct trade with the Spaniards.

Horses, guns and disease

Tribes may have kept their distance from Europeans and stuck to their own ways, but contact with whites invariably altered tribe-to-tribe trade patterns. The horse, which came from the Spanish in the mid-17th century, allowed tribes to to expand their territories and become more efficient hunters and traders.

“The high tide in typical Plains culture seems to have come in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” Clark Wissler writes in his often-quoted 1914 essay about the introduction of the horse to the Plains tribes. “While this was the era of trade, yet the horse increased the economic prosperity and created individual wealth with certain degrees of luxury and leisure; also it traveled ever ahead of the white trade and white trader.”

Yet modern-day scholars warn against assuming the horse totally rearranged trading patterns.

“This process of ‘indigenizing’ the horse may have resulted in the acceleration or intensification of traditional native activities, such as raiding and bison hunting, or cultural practices related to social and political stratification,” writes Wyoming State Archeologist Pierce. “However, there appears to be no reordering of indigenous worldviews as a result of the horse.”

The gun was another story. Until the invention of the repeating rifle, tribes preferred to hunt bison with traditional bows and arrows. They used guns in warfare, however. The gun, first introduced to Plains tribes in the early 18th century—Swagerty calls the exact date of its advent to the Plains tribes “fragmentary”—left the tribes dependent on Europeans for ammunition, gunpowder and repair.

“When the gun got to the tribes, it created problems,” says Gardner. “It created a dependency, including maintaining the rifle itself. That required a blacksmith.”

European-tribal trade also brought disease. Smallpox may have altered post-settlement Indian trade more than the gun or the horse. The 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic killed thousands people along the Missouri. Hardest hit were the Mandan. Historian Paul Carlson says that at the height of the culture, the Mandan had 15,000 people. After successive epidemics, ending with the smallpox epidemic of 1837, “only 138 people remained.”

The Rocky Mountain Fur Trade

As white intrusion became more common, the area that is now Wyoming played a more important role in Indian-to-European trade. The fur trade, which in Wyoming ran roughly from 1805-1840, involved numerous tribes. In 1824, Jedediah Smith, on a tip from the Crow, crossed South Pass and began trapping beaver on the Green River. Fort Laramie, built in 1834 at the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte rivers, served as a fur trading post. The same year, Antonio Montero built a trading post on the middle fork of Powder River about 11 miles east of present Kaycee.

The Green River Rendezvous, first held in 1825, attracted not only the Shoshone, but the Nez Perce, Ute, Flathead and other tribes. When the Oregon Trail started attracting significant emigrant traffic in the 1840s, local entrepreneurs—Indian and white—began doing business with the travelers. Veteran mountain men Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez founded their trading post in 1843 on the Black’s Fork of the Green River—in the heart of Shoshone territory—to sell goods, livestock and blacksmithing services to the travelers. Bridger married Little Fawn, the daughter of Chief Washakie. Fort Bridger became for a time a large Shoshone community, with many eastern Shoshone spending much of the year in the area.

By 1854, there were small posts along the Oregon/California trail every 12 or 15 miles across what’s now Wyoming. These were mostly run by French-speaking men with native wives and families—predominantly Lakota Sioux in what’s now eastern Wyoming, Shoshone to the west.

The older tribe-to-tribe trading patterns, altered by disease, market hunting and the fur trade, began to fade away. In 1851, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Luke Lea promulgated a doctrine calling for the Indians'"concentration, their domestication, and their incorporation.” The reservation period had begun. Still, many held on to old ways. Swiss-born artist Rudolf Friedrich Kurz made reference to the Hidatsa trading corn to the Crow as late as 1851.

Trading–or at least the image of trading–hasn’t totally disappeared among tribes. In the movie Smoke Signals, written by Sherman Alexie, who grew up on the Spokane Reservation in northeast Washington State, characters Thomas Builds-the-Fire and Victor Joseph trudge along a highway, hoping for a lift. Two women from the reservation stop their car, asking if the men need a ride. “Yeah,” says Thomas Builds-the-Fire enthusiastically. One of the women in the car hesitates, then demands: “What are we goin’ to trade for it? We’re Indians, remember? We barter!”

Resources

Primary Sources

• Burpee, L.J., ed. Journal of Larocque from the Assiniboine to the Yellowstone, 1805. Publications of the Canadian Archives, no. 3. Ottawa, Canada: Government Printing Office, 1910. Accessed Feb. 19, 2016, at https://archive.org/stream/journaloflarocqu00laro/journaloflarocqu00laro_djvu.txt.
• Gardner, Dudley, Interview, February 2, 2016
• Kurz, Rudolph Friederich. 1937. Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, ed. J. N. B. Hewitt, trans. Myrtis Jarell, Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology, no. 115 , page 198. Washington, 1937.
• Lea, Luke. Cited in a 1948 US Department of the Interior document, Handbook of Federal Indians Laws, edited by Felix Cohen, Page 14. Accessed April 6, 2016 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=n8tGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=Commissioner+of+Indian+Affairs+Luke+Lea,++domestication&source=bl&ots=GMWchXQqCr&sig=INpTiCdxrcPOg6MtFJUF-YVzC9A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjorvqnnPrLAhXCmoMKHdsxAdIQ6AEIOzAG#v=onepage&q=Commissioner%20of%20Indian%20Affairs%20Luke%20Lea%2C%20%20domestication&f=false
• Wood, W. Raymond, and Thomas D. Thiessen. Early fur trade on the Northern Plains: Canadian traders among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818 : the narratives of John Macdonell, David Thompson, François-Antoine Larocque, and Charles McKenzie. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985, 221-296.
• Russell, Osborne. Journal of a Trapper: Or, Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains, 1834-1843, 31. Accessed March 16, 2016, at https://books.google.com/books?id=49HTAAAAMAAJ&pg=PR3&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false.
• Niobrara County Library. “Roundup of 1884, by Addison A. Spaugh,” Lusk Free Lance, May 17, 1934, 1. Accessed Feb. 19, 2016, at http://www.niobraracountylibrary.org/history/?id=142. This newspaper can also be accessed at Wyoming Newspapers at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• Wood, W. Raymond, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Missouri. Email to the author, February 6, 2016

Secondary Sources

• Carlson, Paul. The Plains Indians. College Station, Texas: Texas A & M University Press, 1998, 8.
• Davis, Leslie B., Stephen A. Aaberg, James G. Schmitt and Ann M. Johnson. The Obsidian Cliff Plateau Prehistoric Lithic Source, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
• Accessed Feb. 19, 2016, at http://www.blm.gov/style/medialib/blm/wo/Planning_and_Renewable_Resources/coop_agencies/cr_publications.Par.85037.File.pdf.
• Ewers, John C. 1954. “The Indian Trade of the Upper Missouri Before Lewis and Clark: An Interpretation.” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 10 (4):429-446.
• Gade, Gene. “The Spanish Diggings.” Vore Buffalo Jump Foundation. Accessed March 16, 2016 at http://www.vorebuffalojump.org/pdf/VBJ-Spanish%20Diggings.pdf.
• Hodge, Fredrick. Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. Volume 1, Volume 30, Part 1. Government Printing Office, Washington. D.C.,1907.
• Keoke, Emory Dean and Kay Marie Porterfield. Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovation. New York: Checkmark Books, July 2003, 3.
• Knight, Wilbur, C. “Prehistoric Quartzite in Central Eastern Wyoming.” Science.7, no. 166 (1898): 310.
• Pierce, Greg. Re-examining Contact on the High Plains and Rocky Mountain Regions of the West, Ph.D. diss., University of Wyoming, 2015.
• Ronda, James P. “The Arikara Interlude.” Lewis & Clark Among the Indians, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expdition. Accessed April 19, 2016 at http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/read/?_xmlsrc=lc.ronda.01.03.xml.
• Swagerty, William. Indian Trade in the Trans-Mississippi West to 1870. In the Handbook of North American Indians: History of Indian-White Relations, ed. by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988, 286, 353.
• Wikipedia. “Indian Trade.” Accessed Feb. 19, 2016, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Trade.
• Wissler, Clark. “The Influence of the Horse in the Development of Plains Culture.”
• American Anthropologist, 16, no. 1 (January-March, 1914): 1-23.
• Wood, W. Raymond. Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003, 26.

Illustrations

• Wilbur Knight’s 1894 photo of Spanish Diggings is from the Samuel H. Knight Collection at the American Heritage Center via Wyoming Places. Used with thanks.
• The Indian trade map was created by Dr. Raymond Wood, professor emeritus of anthropology, University of Missouri, for his book, Anthropology on the Great Plains, which he edited with Dr. Margo Liberty. Used with his kind permission.
• Karl Bodmer, Indians hunting the bison. Tableau 31, is found in Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied’s Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834; Translation H. Evans Lloyd; Achermann & Comp., London 1843–1844. This image is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image of Karl Bodmer’s aquatint, "The interior of the hut of a Mandan Chief" from Maximilian, Prince of Wied’s book, Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834 is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image of Alfred Jacob Miller’s sketch of the two Sioux warriors from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Used with thanks. Patron William Walters commissioned Miller to do a series of 200 watercolors of Rocky Mountain life; Miller based them on sketches he had made on his 1837 trip to the fur trade rendezvous on Green River. “At these crossings,” Miller writes in his caption, “our goods were placed on Bull Boats ... A number of Sioux were watching our operations all this time, statue-like on the banks, and although we offered them strong inducements to help us, nothing would move them. We fancied we saw an expression of contempt on their faces. The trappers, becoming enraged, launched at them the choicest anathemas in French. 'Nursing their wrath to keep it warm.' Luckily for the poor Indians, they understood not a word of these nice expletives, and certainly so far as quiet dignity was concerned, they had the best of it."

Most people associate Amelia Earhart with aviation, worldwide fame and her mysterious disappearance in 1937 during an attempt to fly around the world. Fewer may realize that the record-setting pilot flew an experimental aircraft across Wyoming and made plans for a vacation home in the mountains above Meeteetse.

The Kansas native with a penchant for “first-time things” and a love of “shining adventure,” as she called it, flew an autogiro across the country in June 1931, stopping at Cheyenne, Laramie, Parco (present Sinclair), Rock Springs and Le Roy, Wyo., west of Fort Bridger.

Earhart wanted to set a transcontinental record in the awkward-looking craft, which resembled a fixed-wing propeller plane with an engine on the front, but was equipped also with four long rotors that spun at 100 revolutions per minute –much slower than the 400 revolutions per minute of modern light helicopters—above the open cockpit. The 52-gallon fuel capacity of the rotorcraft, dubbed the “flying windmill” by the press, made frequent stops necessary. Amelia made time to visit with local dignitaries and give flight demonstrations. She charmed the crowds who greeted her on the ground.

The Laramie Republican-Boomerang’s front-page report described her as “a petite tousle-haired sky goddess in a weird windmill ship” who “greeted a crowd of pop eyed spectators” numbering several hundred. While she had flown over previously, this 20-minute stop was the first time Earhart had actually visited Laramie.

Earhart, who was born in Atchison, Kan., on July 24, 1897, first gained fame when she rode as a passenger in 1928 across the Atlantic Ocean in the Friendship, a Fokker trimotor piloted by Wilmer Stultz. Mechanic Lou “Slim” Gordon also participated in the 20-hour, 49-minute flight, the brainchild of Amy Guest of Philadelphia, who hoped to promote good relations between the United States and Britain. Her family dissuaded her from going on the flight. Guest had asked New York publisher and promoter George Palmer Putnam to find someone else to replace her.

Earhart was a social worker in Boston at the time, but she loved flying and had been taking flight lessons for several years. She was vice president of the Boston chapter of the National Aeronautic Association. On May 15, 1923, she received her pilot’s license from the international aviation organization to which the American National Aeronautic Association belonged. Earhart was the 16^th woman in the world to receive the license.

She had owned a Kinner Airster, but sold the plane in 1924 because of recurring sinusitis problems that made it difficult for her to fly. She bought a canary-colored Kissel Kar automobile, which she named Yellow Peril, and made a 7,000-mile cross-country trek with her mother, Amy Otis Earhart, visiting several national parks en route.

Lady Lindy

In 1928, despite her lack of experience in a trimotor, and with only 500 hours of flight time logged, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the ocean in an airplane. Her good manners and her striking resemblance to pilot Charles A. Lindbergh, who had made a successful solo flight across the sea May 20, 1927, likely led to her being chosen to ride on the Friendship. She was called “Lady Lindy,” and recognition was her only remuneration for the flight; payments she received for writing newspaper articles and for other advertising activities were donated to help finance the flight.

At the time Putnam met Earhart, he was married to Dorothy Binney. Putnam and Earhart became friends, and their relationship grew even closer after the Friendship flight. Putnam and his first wife divorced after 20 years of marriage. He married Amelia Earhart in a simple ceremony at his mother’s home in Noank, Conn., on Feb. 7, 1931. On that day, Amelia presented him with a frank, rather businesslike letter outlining her wishes that the marriage not be confining for either of them. If they found they weren’t happy after a year, then she wanted the marriage to end.

But in June 1931, as Earhart flew the autogiro from coast to coast, the couple appeared to be pleased with each other. In Laramie, she told reporters that she telephoned her husband every night.

The autogiro

Earhart referred to the autogiro as “the answer to an aviator’s prayer,” although other pilots disagreed with that assessment and accidents were common. Spanish mathematician Juan de la Cierva invented the rotorcraft in the early 1920s and his American partner, Harold Pitcairn, who had begun Eastern Air Transport in 1926 and was the developer of Mailwing biplanes, marketed the autogiro. The aircraft was equipped with an engine to get it started, but once aloft, air pressure kept the rotor blades spinning. The rotors allowed the craft to make short takeoffs and landings, somewhat similar to those of a helicopter.

Putnam had ordered an autogiro for Amelia, who had set a woman’s autogiro altitude record of 18,415 feet in a company model on April 8, 1931, but he canceled the order when he learned that Beech-Nut Packing Company’s rotorcraft was available for promotional purposes. Earhart flew the PCA-2 sponsored by Beech-Nut to promote its chewing gum. Another autogiro, manufactured a few months later that same year and sponsored by Champion Spark Plug Company, carried a factory price of $15,000—around $235,000 today.

Putnam arranged for Earhart’s transcontinental tour in the Beech-Nut craft. She took a single lesson in December 1930 from the manufacturer’s test pilot, James G. Ray, in Willow Grove, Pa. When she and her mechanic, Eddie de Vaught, departed from Newark, N.J., in late May, for her transcontinental jaunt, Putnam and his son David handed out chewing gum to onlookers.

76 towns in three weeks

According to a schedule of the trip posted on the website of the Lincoln Highway National Museum and Archives, Earhart arrived in Cheyenne on June 2, 1931, late in the afternoon. She apparently stayed overnight and departed a few minutes after 6 a.m. the next day for Denver, which took about an hour and a half of flight time. The Denver Post reported thousands watched her. The newspaper’s owner and publisher, Frederick G. Bonfils, greeted her at the airport. This was her first visit to Denver, and she stopped for breakfast at the Brown Palace hotel and then returned to the airfield to give demonstrations.

She returned to Cheyenne about 4:30 p.m. that day, according to a report in the Wyoming State Tribune and Cheyenne State Leader, which estimated “fully half of the population” of the city had gone to the airport during Earhart’s time there. She departed Cheyenne at about 9 a.m. on June 4, made the half hour flight to Laramie, and after her brief stop there, went on to Parco, arriving about 11:30 a.m., and flying on to Rock Springs, where the gathered throng numbered about 2,000 people. The Rock Springs Rocket reported she had lunch with the local Lions Club, then flew to Le Roy, near Fort Bridger, to refuel before her flight across the Wasatch Mountains to Salt Lake City.

Earhart arrived in Oakland, Calif., on June 6, and the crowd there was so large that it broke the barricades. However, she had not set the record she hoped for; she had wanted to be the first to cross the country in the autogiro. Instead, pilot Johnny Miller had won that honor. Amelia continued her tour, returning east. On June 12, 1931, she crashed the autogiro in Abilene, Texas, but she had managed to aim the aircraft away from the onlookers and no one was hurt. A replacement craft was sent.

Although the Aeronautics Board of the Department of Commerce issued a formal reprimand citing Earhart for pilot carelessness, an official of the National Aeronautics Administration, an organization for which Earhart served as vice president, interceded and she was not grounded. Earhart said that the crash was caused because the wind stilled beneath her.

On the tour, she stopped in 76 towns during about three weeks of traveling. She flew an average speed of 80 mph, about five hours daily, often landing 10 times in a day. She became the first pilot to fly an autogiro round-trip across the United States. She later made two additional cross-country tours in the autogiro.

Wyoming hideaway

In 1926, George Putnam invited Carl M. Dunrud to travel with his expedition to Greenland. Dunrud had guided Putnam on a pack trip in Yellowstone National Park a few years earlier, and Dunrud later acquired the Double Dee Ranch in the rugged Absaroka Range of northwestern Wyoming, southwest of Meeteetse in Park County. Dunrud recalled in a memoir that Putnam wanted “to make Amelia Earhart the world’s leading woman pilot.”

On May 20, 1932, the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh’s historic flight and a year after her transcontinental autogiro tour, Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in a single-engine Lockheed Vega, becoming the first woman to do so, and finally earning her “Lady Lindy” title. In July, she became the first woman pilot to fly solo across the transcontinental United States from Los Angeles to Newark. She earned numerous accolades for these flights and many other record-setting aviation adventures during her lifetime. She was also eventually awarded the American Distinguished Flying Cross.

In 1934, Earhart and Putnam stayed at the Double Dee, a dude ranch owned by Carl and Vera Dunrud. The Dunruds’ two sons, Richard and Jim, were toddlers, but they have fond recollections of Earhart. Richard called her “a very generous person,” and he treasures a bamboo fishing pole and a .22-caliber rifle that she sent to them. Tires for Carl Dunrud’s truck were also prized gifts during those Depression-era years.

Carl Dunrud wrote that during their 1934 visit, Earhart and Putnam filed a mining claim and commissioned him to build a small log cabin for them near the Wood River and at the base of Mount Sniffer about a mile from the old mining town of Kirwin. Jim Dunrud remembers that his mother told him that Earhart “didn’t like the limelight much.” Richard keeps correspondence between his father and George Putnam with instructions on how their vacation cabin should be built.

Earhart wanted to fly the “world at its waistline,” something no other pilot had done. In 1935, she had served as a counselor to female students at Purdue University, in Indiana. Her world flight was to be funded by donations to Purdue passed on to Earhart to establish the “Purdue Flying Laboratory” and to help further the progress of women in aviation.

Before embarking on the 1937 flight along the Equator, Earhart sent two coats to Carl Dunrud, a long leather flight jacket and a buffalo coat that had been given to her by cowboy actor William S. Hart. Dunrud later gave the coats to the Buffalo Bill Center for the West in Cody, Wyo., where they are now kept.

During her first world flight attempt in March 1937, Earhart flew west from California and then crashed on takeoff from Hawaii, escaping injury but damaging her plane. Repairs to the Lockheed Electra caused lengthy delays, which made an alternate route and a reversal of the direction of the flight necessary because of changing seasonal weather patterns. She raised additional funds through promotional activities.

On her second attempt, Earhart departed from Miami on June 1, 1937, and successfully logged 22,000 miles with stops in Brazil, West Africa, India and Australia. On July 2, she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, departed from Lae, New Guinea, to make the 2,556-mile flight east across open water to Howland Island, a U.S. possession near the Equator in the central Pacific. They never made it to the atoll. She had reported their position via radio at 8:44 a.m. that day. The U.S. Coast Guard’s Itasca, stationed near Howland Island, picked up her signals but was unable to contact her.

The search continues

President Franklin Roosevelt authorized a search of a quarter of a million square miles of the Pacific Ocean, the largest land/sea search ever undertaken and thought to have cost about $4 million. That effort was abandoned on July 18, 1937, but George Putnam kept trying to find out what had happened to his wife. He completed Earhart’s book Last Flight to help pay for his efforts. Work on the Wyoming cabin stopped after Earhart’s disappearance. On Jan. 5, 1939, Amelia Earhart was officially declared deceased. Putnam remarried twice after Earhart’s death. He died in 1950.

Amelia Earhart’s fame continues in contemporary times. Two women re-created her world flights, one in 1967 and one in 1997. Another female pilot in 2001 re-created one of Earhart’s earlier cross-country flights in an Avro Avian biplane.

Independent searchers still spend millions of dollars combing the Pacific trying to discover what happened to Earhart, Noonan and the Lockheed Electra. One organization, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has focused its efforts on the island of Nikumaroro, formerly Gardner Island, about 400 miles south of Howland Island.

A substantial donor to TIGHAR, Riverside, Wyo., resident Timothy Mellon, the chairman and majority stockholder of Pan Am Systems and the son of philanthropist Paul Mellon, sued the group in June 2013, asserting that TIGHAR’s team had actually found Earhart’s Electra in 2010, but did not release that information to the public because they wanted fundraising efforts for future expeditions to continue. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2013.

In Earhart’s hometown of Atchison, Kan., an annual festival is held in late July in honor of her birthday and to celebrate the accomplishments of the aviatrix. In Wyoming, the Meeteetse Museum sponsors a trek to the old mining town of Kirwin each August, which includes a hike to the cabin site that Putnam and Earhart chose before she disappeared.

Resources

Primary sources

• “Amelia Earhart Visits City in Autogiro,” Laramie Republican-Boomerang, June 4, 1931, 1.
• Cassidy, Megan. “Wyoming Man Denies Plot Against Amelia Earhart Plane Recovery Group.”Casper Star-Tribune, Aug. 11, 2013. Accessed Feb. 26, 2016, at
• http://trib.com/news/local/casper/wyoming-man-denies-plot-against-amelia-earhart-plane-recovery-group/article_c31f3ffe-5a21-516c-b9ea-8a38a8318f6e.html.
• Denver Post, June 3, 1931, 1.
• Dunrud, Carl M. Let’s Go! 85 Years of Adventure. Cody, Wyo.: WordsWorth, 1998, 25, 91, 95-98.
• Dunrud, Joan. Meeteetse Museums. Telephone interview with author, March 23, 2016.
• Lorenzi, Rosella. “Hunt for Amelia Earhart Resumes in Pacific.” June 1, 2015. Discovery News. http://news.discovery.com/adventure/hunt-for-amelia-earhart-resumes-in-pacific-150601.htm.
• Rock Springs Rocket, June 4, 1931.
• TIGHAR. “TIGHAR Sued in Federal Court.” The Institute for Aviation History Forum. Comments listed with date of June 8, 2013. Accessed Feb. 26, 2016, at https://tighar.org/smf/index.php?topic=1206.0.
• Wyoming State Tribune and Cheyenne State Leader, June 4, 1931, 1.

Secondary sources

• Experimental Aircraft Association. “1931 Pitcairn PCA-2 Autogiro 'Miss Champion' - NC11609” https://www.eaa.org/en/eaa-museum/museum-collection/aircraft-collection-folder/1931-pitcairn-pca-2-autogiro-miss-champion---nc11609.
• House, Marguerite. “Amelia Earhart’s Wyoming Connection.” Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Nov. 10, 2014. Accessed May 3, 2016, at
• http://centerofthewest.org/2014/11/10/amelia_earhart/.
• Lincoln Highway National Museum and Archives, “1931 Amelia Earhart Travels the Lincoln Highway, Beech-Nut Transcontinental Autogiro Tour.” Accessed March 18, 2016, at http://www.lincoln-highway-museum.org/earhart/earhart-index.html.
• Lovell, Mary S. The Sound of Wings. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
• Rich, Doris. Amelia Earhart: A Biography. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
• Rumm, John. “Her Plane Vanished, Her Flight Jacket Didn’t.” Buffalo Bill Center of the West. March 17, 2014. Accessed Feb. 26, 2016, at
• http://centerofthewest.org/2014/03/17/plane-vanished-flight-jacket-didnt/.
• Van Pelt, Lori. Amelia Earhart: The Sky’s No Limit, American Heroes series. New York: Forge, 2005.
• ­­­­___________­­­­.“Airborne Amelia: Famed Aviatrix Left Her Mark in State.” Casper Star-Tribune, April 10, 2005, C1.
• ___________­­­­.“ “Splendid Dreams, Fond Memories: Former Kirwin Residents Recall Mining Town’s Heyday,” Casper Star-Tribune, Aug. 23, 2005, B1.
• ___________­­­­.“ “Amelia Earhart Once Winged Her Way Across Wyoming.” Wyoming Rural Electric News, October 2006, 18-20.
• ___________­­­­.“ “Amelia’s Autogiro Adventures,” Aviation History, March 2008.

For further reading and research

Amelia Earhart wrote several books about her experiences. Her husband, George Palmer Putnam and her sister, Muriel Morissey, also wrote books that contain more information about Earhart:

• Earhart, Amelia. 20 Hrs., 40 Mins.: Our Flight in the Friendship. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928.
• ___________­­­­.“ The Fun of It. Press of Braunworth & Co., Inc., 1932.
• ___________­­­­.“ Last Flight. Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1988.
• ___________­­­­.“Wide Margins. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942.
• Morissey, Muriel with Carol L. Osborne. Amelia, My Courageous Sister. Osborne Publisher, 1987.
• Morissey, Muriel. Courage Is the Price. McCormick-Armstrong Publishing, 1963.
• Putnam, George Palmer. Soaring Wings. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
• Information about the women who re-created Amelia’s flights:
• Television documentaries:
• National Geographic’s “On Assignment,” The Travel Channel’s In Search of Amelia Earhart (Pioneer Productions, 2002), PBS The Final Hours: Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight (Romeo Delta Productions, 2001).

Books by the women who re-created Amelia’s world flight:

• Finch, Linda. No Limits. World Flight, 1996.
• Pellegreno, Ann. World Flight. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1971.
• Dr. Carlene Mendieta, a periodontist, re-created Amelia’s 1928 cross-country flight in an Avro Avian biplane. See more: Pro, Johnna A. “Happy Landings: Crowd Welcomes Pilot Recreating Earhart Flight,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sep. 6, 2001. Accessed March 18, 2016, at http://old.post-gazette.com/regionstate/20010906earhartreg3p3.asp.

More information about ongoing search activities:

• The official Earhart website, http://www.ameliaearhart.com.
• Nauticos, http://www.nauticos.com.
• The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), http://www.tighar.org.

Museums, archives and other resources:

• Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, Atchison, Kan. http://www.ameliaearhartmuseum.org
• Amelia Earhart papers, George Palmer Putnam Collection, Purdue University Library archives. Accessed May 12, 2016 at http://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/cdm/search/collection/earhart.
• Forney Museum of Transportation, Denver, Colo. http://www.forneymuseum.org.
• Earhart, Amelia. “A Woman’s Place in Science,” radio broadcast, 1935; speech is about four minutes long. Accessed May 12, 2016 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDreaW2cEUI.
• Experimental Aircraft Association, Oshkosh, Wis., photos and technical specifications of the 1931 Pitcairn autogiro, http://www.eaa.org/en/eaa-museum/museum-collection/aircraft-collection-folder/1931-pitcairn-pca-2-autogiro-miss-champion---nc11609.
• Ninety-Nines, the international organization of women pilots, established in 1929 by 99 women pilots, Oklahoma City, Okla. Amelia Earhart served as the first president of the group. See more at http://www.ninety-nines.org
• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Amelia Earhart-related items, http://airandspace.si.edu/search/?criteria=Amelia+Earhart.

Illustrations

• The photo of Earhart and her autogiro is from the George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart papers, Purdue University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the Fokker trimotor is from the Aviation History Online Museum. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Lockheed Vega is from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Pitcairn autogiro is from the website of the Experimental Aviation Museum. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Lockheed Electra is from a website on the history of the Lockheed Martin aerospace company. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Earhart getting her hair cut is courtesy of the Dunrud family. Used with permission and thanks, and thanks also to Joan Dunrud and David Cunningham of the Meeteetse Museums.
• The Charles Belden photo of Earhart and Carl Dunrud on the corral gate is from the collections of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyo., gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Belden. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the remains of the cabin on the DD was taken by the author in 2005.

The plains of Wyoming and Nebraska are dotted with old cemeteries hidden in hay meadows or on vacant plots between county roads slicing the countryside in perfect, straight lines. Interred in the graves are thousands of settlers who came west at the turn of the 20th century to scratch a living in a wilderness of grass and sagebrush.

Many of the farming communities that sustained the cemeteries have not survived. Farmhouses, churches and other buildings crumbled into the soil or were scavenged by people for other purposes. The graves are often the only remains of once vibrant agricultural towns.

Roughly ten miles northeast of Torrington, Wyo., and a mile over the state line in Nebraska, lies the cemetery for the abandoned Sheep Creek Presbyterian Church. The cemetery served the community of Empire, Wyoming, founded in 1908 by African-American families who came from Nebraska to build a racially self-sufficient, politically autonomous community in the Equality State.

Empire thrived for only two decades, however, and disappeared from the landscape by the mid-1920s. Today, the Sheep Creek Cemetery, surrounded by a hayfield under windswept sandstone bluffs, is the only reminder of the community.

African-American community building in the West

Empire’s story opens with the social upheaval that followed the American Civil War. The war left the South in ruins, and the post-war Reconstruction Era was marred by poverty and racial upheaval. Many African-Americans fled these conditions to seek new opportunities on the western plains recently opened to settlement by the federal Homestead Act of 1862 and related state and federal land laws.

In the 1870s, more than 25,000 African Americans flooded into Kansas, encouraged at least in part by Kansas’ abolitionist sympathies stretching back to before the Civil War. In 1859, Kansas had been the first state in the region to enact a constitution that declared its land open to settlers regardless of their race. The black immigrants to Kansas came to be known as “Exodusters.” The Exoduster movement eventually spread beyond Kansas to Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Colorado and Wyoming.[1]

Many of the Exoduster settlements were communal efforts organized by African-American emigration agencies. Leaders of the Exoduster movement believed that the only way for African Americans to achieve political rights after the Civil War was through the formation of autonomous, economically self-sufficient communities on the western plains.

In the 1890s Edward P. McCabe, a black politician from New York, founded the community of Langston City on newly opened land in Oklahoma Territory. McCabe echoed the sentiment of the Exodusters when he wrote in 1892 that “Langston City is a Negro City, and we are proud of that fact. Her city officers are all colored. Her teachers are colored. Her public schools furnish thorough educational advantages to nearly two hundred colored children.”[2]

An African-American community in Wyoming

At the dawn of the 20th century, Wyoming seemed an unlikely place for an African-American community. African-Americans were a small, isolated minority in a sea of whiteness. The Cheyenne State Leader reported on June 13, 1911 that only 65 out of 10,915 farms in the state were owned by “negro and other non-white farmers.” When the Exodusters first headed west in the 1870s, Wyoming was perceived as a vast desert—a rugged, inhospitable frontier outpost dominated by cattle barons and not suitable for farmers.

In the first decade of the 20th century, however, Wyoming experienced a homesteading boom. The landscape of eastern Wyoming began to reflect the yeoman farmer rather than the cowboy. The federal government worked to turn the arid land of the west into a Garden of Eden through extensive irrigation projects organized by the new U.S. Reclamation Service formed in 1902.

Homesteaders were also encouraged by the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act, which doubled the size of available allotments from 160 to 320 acres. Agriculturalists at the time believed that so-called dryland farming had the potential to turn prairie dust into productive soil through methods like deep plowing, crop rotation, and the use of drought resistant crops.[3]

In the early 1900s, homesteaders in the region appeared to embody the Jeffersonian ideal of a democracy of small landholders. An article in the Torrington Telegram boasted on January 2, 1908 that the land around Torrington was “suitable for the raising of all kinds of fruits, grains and vegetables,” by “active, business-like intelligent people, who maintain high ideals and strive to measure up to them.”

Life in Empire

The Jeffersonian ideal of the American yeoman farmer initially only extended to white men. Yet in the 20th century, descendants of slavery succeeded in embodying Jefferson’s image of the archetypal American in the small Wyoming community of Empire.

Empire was founded in 1908 by Charles Speese and his new bride, Rosetta. Three of Charles’ brothers–John, Joseph and Radford–and their families formed the nucleus of the new settlement.

The Speeses were joined by two branches of the Taylor family headed by Otis and Baseman. In 1911 Russell Taylor, an ordained Presbyterian minister, arrived in Empire with his wife, ten children and mother-in-law, and quickly became the community’s leader.

The Speeses and Taylors had come from Nebraska. Charles Speese’s parents Susan and Moses were originally born into slavery in North Carolina and moved to Nebraska in the 1870s at the height of the Exoduster movement. By 1908, the Speese family had managed to accumulate a considerable estate. According to the Torrington Telegram of May 14, 1908, the Speese brothers had inherited $10,000 from their uncle, Josiah Webb.

The brothers pooled the inheritance with proceeds from the sale of their land in Nebraska and purchased hundreds of acres near Torrington. By 1912, Empire had grown into a full-service farming community with its own school, post office and Presbyterian church.

The town sat above the well-watered North Platte River Valley on arid tableland that was not irrigated. Farmers in Empire, therefore, had to depend on dryland farming techniques. The Torrington Telegram reported on October 12, 1911 that Joseph Speese, with his knowledge of dryland farming methods, “raised more Irish potatoes than many of the farmers under irrigation.”

Potatoes were prominent in Empire, but Joseph Speese grew a wide variety of crops. The Torrington Telegram, on September 19, 1912, noted he won first-place prizes at the county fair for sweet corn, popcorn, potatoes, millet, cucumbers, muskmelon and field peas. Apparently, he had turned his corner of the Wyoming desert into a garden.

The push for a separate school

Within a year of settling in eastern Wyoming, the residents of Empire made a successful bid to the county school board to build their own school.[4] Clearly, Empire residents valued education highly; several had advanced degrees. Russell Taylor possessed a divinity degree from Bellevue College in Omaha, Neb.[5] John Speese earned a law degree at Wesleyan University in Salina, Kansas—a “remarkable” achievement for a “colored man” of his time, the Torrington Telegram would note in his February 1914 obituary.

In the early 20th century, education in Wyoming was legally segregated. The state’s school code stipulated that if a school district contained more than fifteen non-white students, the district could build separate educational facilities for them.[6]

Russell Taylor used the segregation law to advocate for an independent school for African-American children in Empire—free from the domination of the all-white school board in Torrington. Taylor believed that African-American children had the right to learn from a role model who belonged to their race.

Race relations in a troubled time

When the Speeses and Taylors arrived in Wyoming, race relations in America were at rock bottom. Jim Crow and the vigilante justice of the Ku Klux Klan ruled the lives of African-Americans. Thousands of African-American men, women, and children were lynched by white mobs in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. African-American veterans who returned home after World War I demanded greater equality from the country they had fought for. The white majority reacted violently to the unrest, and race riots erupted in cities across the country in 1919 and 1920.

The Equality State did not escape this turmoil. At least five African-American men were lynched by white mobs in Wyoming between 1904 and 1920.[7] State laws upheld segregation and banned miscegenation. Russell Taylor wrote numerous letters to the editor of local papers stating that he and other African-American citizens in Empire were often denied service and lodging at restaurants and hotels in Torrington.[8]

The state’s newspapers, the main conduits of information in a pre-digital age, de-humanized African Americans through racist advertisements and degrading cartoons. As racial violence swept the nation, the Wyoming State Tribune, for example, announced on July 22, 1919 that “law and order” around Cheyenne would be maintained by a “secret vigilante committee” made up “prominent men” from Cheyenne. The paper claimed the anonymous committee would aim its efforts at automobile thieves. But it hinted that committee members might move in “other directions” as well—much, it said, as vigilantes had moved against Cattle Kate 30 years earlier. “The Ku Klux Klan is with us!” reads one of the headlines on the story.

A death in police custody

On November 6, 1913, Russell Taylor’s brother Baseman died in what appears to have been a case of police brutality in Torrington. According to the Torrington Telegram, Baseman Taylor was arrested by Sheriff Michael A. Hayes for vandalizing a bank door in town. Taylor was judged incompetent by a hastily convened “insanity board” and was placed in a hotel room until he could be taken to the State Hospital in Evanston. On November 6, after three days in custody, the Telegram reported that Baseman died in the hotel due to a “pain in his head.”

The following year, Russell Taylor filed a wrongful death suit on behalf of his brother against the sheriff and deputies. The lawsuit’s depositions tell a different story from the one published by the papers.

Witnesses reported that Sheriff Hayes had responded to rumors of a “crazy negro” wandering town that day, and gathered a posse to arrest him. Baseman Taylor offered no resistance when he was apprehended by the posse, but the witnesses stated that, after he had been handcuffed to be searched, he was thrown violently to the ground. Two witnesses stated that Taylor injured his head during the arrest.

Over the next three days, the sheriff and several deputies kept Taylor shackled hand and foot in the hotel room. Witnesses in the wrongful death suit stated that Baseman was repeatedly beaten and choked by the sheriff and his deputies while he was in custody and died as a result of the abuse on the evening of November 6.

The witnesses, H.N. Carmichael and Abner Lloyd, were laborers from Colorado who were working on the new Goshen County Courthouse and were staying at the Torrington hotel where Baseman Taylor was being held. They said they watched Taylor’s torture in the hotel room night after night after they returned from work, and later travelled from their homes in Colorado to Torrington to testify on behalf of Taylor in 1914. Russell Taylor’s suit was later thrown out by District Court Judge William C. Mentzer in Torrington for lack of evidence.

Russell Taylor, activist

The settlers in Empire found a voice to fight back against racism through the leadership of Russell Taylor. Taylor was active in his role as an educator and spiritual leader, and advocated for his people both at local political events and at state and national conferences of the Presbyterian Church.

Taylor taught at Empire’s public school, and worked to maintain control over his students’ education. In 1914, for example, he appeared at a Goshen County school board meeting to protest the board’s hiring of a white teacher who lacked qualifications to teach at the Empire school. Taylor wrote in the Goshen County Journal on December 3, 1914, that due to the white teacher’s lack of a certificate, “she has been unable to properly control the school or do the work therein.” Taylor remained in charge of the school at least until 1916 when he was listed as Empire’s sole teacher in the Goshen County Journal on November 2 of that year.

He also wrote numerous editorials to the state and local press. In an era when speaking out against the status quo of white dominance was dangerous for African-Americans, Taylor refused to have his voice silenced. He always affixed his name to his letters, unlike many letter writers who encouraged racism.

On December 19, 1918, Taylor wrote a particularly impassioned protest against the lynching of Joel Woodson, an African-American man, by a white mob of more than five hundred in Green River, Wyo.

“It is believed that if Woodson could have told his story,” Taylor wrote, “the state whose motto is equal rights before the law would not have been again disgraced by another terrible lynching. Five hundred men would not be guilty of murder as they now are, though the law seems to take no cognizance of the fact.”

The end of Empire

According to the 1910 federal census, there were 36 African-Americans living in Empire that year, all members of the various branches of the Speese and Taylor families. In 1911, after Russell Taylor arrived with his wife, ten children, and his mother-in-law, and the African-American population rose to 49. However, the 1920 federal census showed only 23 African Americans living in Empire. By 1930, there were only four African Americans living in all of Goshen County out of a population of more than 11,000. By the late 1920s, Empire had vanished.

Economics provides one explanation for the community’s demise. America experienced a serious agricultural recession after World War I when agricultural prices, inflated by the war, took a nosedive in 1919. A bad drought in Wyoming that year made things far worse. Many farmers in Wyoming were forced into foreclosure when the agricultural bubble burst.[9] Banks failed in Wyoming throughout the 1920s.

Despite the 1919 bust, homesteaders continued to flood into Wyoming during the 1920s. Many new settlers took advantage of the 1916 Stock Raising Homestead Act that opened up non-irrigated land for cattle grazing and doubled allotment sizes to 640 acres Thousands of farmers flocked to marginal lands to try their hand at dryland farming.[10] Many white settlers managed to weather the bust and remain in Goshen County.

Yet all of the county’s African-American homesteaders had left by 1930. Isolation and racism had taken its toll on the black settlers who tried to make a new life in Empire. The people of Empire lacked an organized community or social safety net outside the confines of their little town. Fears of racism, harassment and death must have been constant in their lives.

(Editors’ note: WyoHistory.org thanks Beth King and the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office for supporting intern Robert Galbreath’s work, including this article, during the summer of 2016.

Edward T. Payton, a Wyoming reporter, editor and tireless advocate for the mentally ill is now nearly forgotten. During his lifetime, however, he published two Wyoming newspapers, promoted newspapers in Colorado and Wyoming, wrote many articles for others and two booklets on mental illness and hospital conditions, all while dogged by recurring bouts of mental illness of his own.

Payton’s was a long life, and a troubled one. But his own writings plus evidence in public records show a lucid passion for the plight of his fellow sufferers. After the many times he was released from the hospital, he clearly felt that others had been left behind whom he should defend; and his allegations were indirectly supported by several other former patients with their own horrific accounts.

By the time of his death in 1933, his legacy may already have brought improvements to care at Wyoming’s state mental hospital.

Early career

Payton was born in Minnesota in 1856 to James Harvey Payton and Rebecca Ann Thomas Payton. Sometime before 1886, the family moved to Rapid City, Dakota Territory. Payton first worked as a government freighter and in 1889 began to sell magazine and newspaper subscriptions, working for the Denver Post, and by 1890 for the Cheyenne Daily Leader.

Subscription selling and reporting were a fortuitous combination. In spring 1892, Payton, though barely launched on his reporter's career, witnessed the invasion of Johnson County and, as he wrote years later in the first of his booklets, Mad Men, "scooped the professionals [who] intended to cover the news of the expedition for the press of the country." Payton's articles "Caught in a Trap" and "Coming to Cheyenne" were published in the Cheyenne Daily Leader on April 13 and 16, 1892, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

In 1899, Payton accompanied one of the posses that chased the outlaws after the Wilcox Train Robbery. In so doing, he encountered some personal danger: Both the Natrona County Tribune and the Wyoming Derrick reported on June 8, 1899, that his horse was shot, though he escaped serious injury.

Newspapering with a taste for politics

From early in his career, Payton seems to have seen himself as a champion of the little guy.

"When in 1890 I became attached to the [Democratic] Cheyenne Leader," Payton wrote in Mad Men, "I had no politics, but soon began to read with interest the editorials in the paper and that fall marched in the parades with the party to which it belonged; within two years I claimed allegiance to the same party … [and] became actively interested in state issues."

In August 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed the Carey Act, named for Wyoming’s U.S. senator, Joseph Carey. Under its provisions, the federal government could donate up to a million acres of federal land to any state that would help private developers and settlers irrigate that land. Payton, along with many other Democrats, felt the act simply legalized the efforts of a few rich men to grab as much land as they could. During the 1894 election season, when Republican William A. Richards was running for governor, Payton accused him of land fraud in the Laramie Daily Boomerang of Oct. 22, 1894. Two days later, he also attacked Sens. Carey and Francis E. Warren, as published in the Boomerang.

When John Carroll, Payton's editor at the Cheyenne Daily Leader, switched party affiliation during the 1894 campaign season, Payton started his own newspaper in Cheyenne, the Big Horn Basin Savior, picking up the term "Savior" from an anti-Payton editorial Carroll had published November 3 of that year. Years later, Payton explained in Mad Men, "I desired to see the land of the Big Horn, and the water saved to the homesteaders. … There was nothing religious about my paper unless it is religious to try to save from the few for a posterity majority what rightfully belongs to it." The Savior had a short run, from early November, just before the 1894 election, into January 1895.

A few months later, in early spring of 1895, Payton traveled in a snowstorm to Thermopolis, Wyo., to settle on the homestead he'd filed on the previous year. He also started his second newspaper, publishing the premiere issue of the Big Horn River Pilot on April 18, 1895.

A mental crisis

By Payton's own analysis, these combined efforts and the resulting difficulties precipitated one of his early episodes of mental instability: "I was without funds, yet impatient, impulsive, determined. Circumstances made it impossible for me to keep up with my desires and I could not sleep."

His insomnia persisted; he began hallucinating, and in August he was arrested and escorted to Lander, Wyo., for a trial to evaluate his mental state. In those days, juries determined whether a person was insane; this jury could not agree and the case was dismissed.

A few weeks later, however, Payton was again arrested and this time declared insane by the jury and taken to the Wyoming Insane Asylum, as it was then called, in Evanston, Wyo., for the first of several times throughout his life. Quite soon, Payton felt he had recovered his sanity and tried to get released, starting in late October. On November 20, Payton finally left the hospital—though his official release date was November 4—to spend Thanksgiving with his family in Rapid City. On December 10 of that year the Daily Boomerang published a long letter by Payton, "State Insane Asylum," which earlier had been published by the Wyoming Tribune.

Payton described the hospital: its grounds, daily routines, administration and finances, including employee salaries. Mentioning several of the inmates and their backgrounds, he wound up by praising one of the attendants, Herbert L. Jackson. Sadly, according to Payton, the sheriff who escorted him from Green River to Evanston had "beat[en] the blood from my nostrils with his brawny fists." This was the first time he reported being abused while in the custody of the state as a mental patient.

“Cruel Treatment:” a series of news stories

In spring 1896, Payton returned to Thermopolis and hired Mike Maley, a Cheyenne printer, to run the Pilot while Payton traveled in Wyoming selling subscriptions to the Denver Post. About two years later, still working for the Post, he began writing more articles for the Pilot, precipitating a bout of overwork and insomnia that apparently caused stresses similar to those he experienced in September 1895. Again he became unbalanced, was arrested and after a hearing was committed to the Wyoming State Hospital for the Insane, as it was now called. This time Payton stayed for six months, from late May 1898 to Nov. 17, 1898.

In January 1899 Payton began publishing a series of articles, titled "Cruel Treatment," about his stay at the hospital. In five weekly issues of the Pilot, January 18 through February 22, Payton described what he had gone through and what he had seen. Naming 15 patients and four attendants, he told 11 specific stories of abuse.

In one, he stated that three attendants had seized one of the patients and thrown him across the edge of a bathtub. Then one of these attendants "placed both hands upon his throat and choked him until he was black in the face." Payton noted that the patient had not been violent or in any way threatening to the attendants.

Payton claimed an attendant had also beaten him, while other attendants looked on. By the end of the episode "my shirt was very bloody … the walls of the room were covered with blood … and the back of my head was beginning to swell in lumps where it had struck the wall. The window, five feet away, was bespattered with blood."

An eye for the bigger picture

In conjunction with these reports, Payton published an article with general information about the hospital, and another on a mental hospital in Gheel, Belgium. This was an early manifestation of his desire to educate the public about the medical, as well as the physical, treatment of mental patients worldwide.

Conflicts with Dr. C. H. Solier

The Wyoming Insane Asylum had been established in 1887. By 1891, when C. H. Solier was appointed superintendent, the hospital was governed by the state Board of Charities and Reform. The board was one of several overseeing state government, all of them made up of the state’s top five elected officials: governor, secretary of state, state auditor, state treasurer and state superintendent of public instruction.

Prior to his appointment, Solier lived in Rawlins and was county physician and a surgeon for the Union Pacific Railroad. He was a Republican, and may have won the post due to his party affiliation as much as to his qualifications.

In his "Cruel Treatment" series of 1899, Payton reported that Solier had opened, read and destroyed most of Payton’s outgoing mail. He also accused Solier of abusing patients and witnessing similar episodes. Solier wrote a letter to the Pilot, denying all of Payton's allegations, and Payton published this letter with his own rebuttal in the February 1 issue.

Solier wrote another letter, this one to the Board of Charities and Reform, refuting Payton's charges against himself and the hospital, which the board noted in its Feb. 6, 1899, minutes. The board as well sent two of its members to Evanston to investigate. Details from their report are recorded in the April 3, 1899, minutes. The investigators said they had interviewed "[e]very one of the inmates referred to in the … Pilot [and] not one had any complaint."

In a series of three articles dated March 31, April 12 and May 1, 1899, the Laramie Daily Boomerang condemned the board’s investigation as a whitewash. The Boomerang also published a long letter from Payton in the May 1 issue, in which he contested the investigators' claims that they had interviewed all the inmates he had named in the Pilot. Some were not competent, Payton wrote, while others had left the hospital and so could not have been there to speak to the investigators.

The Saratoga Sun, a Republican paper, noted on April 27, "[I]t is time to ask that Payton be given an opportunity to prove his charges." In a separate article, the Sun interviewed a former patient, not named, who had been at the hospital seven years previously: "I was thrown down and choked until almost dead … one of the attendants … used to beat me with a hard-wood cane … until I would be black for days."

The Sun called for a more thorough investigation to "bring the truth to the surface, scorch whom it may." However, the board took no further action.

More charges

The next two-and-a-half years seem to have been quiet for Payton. While in St. Paul, Minn., he married Della Badger, a graduate of Wellesley College, on July 3, 1900. The couple returned to Wyoming where Payton continued publishing the Pilot and sold subscriptions for the Denver Republican and Cheyenne Leader.

Then, on Jan. 3, 1902, Payton wrote to the Board of Charities and Reform, "I have recently been urgently appealed to for help and furnished with evidence of the … cruelties practiced in … [the hospital] since the year 1898." Calling for "another and most thorough investigation," Payton went on to state that conditions were far worse than they had been when he was there.

The board apparently responded; Payton wrote another letter January 10, stating that he could comply with their requests for names of victims and witnesses. Four patients "are believed to have died" from abuse and neglect, he wrote, and Solier—in front of witnesses—choked three different patients until they were "black in the face" or "blood ran from their mouths." Payton also claimed that Solier forced towels down the throats of two others, and dragged three female patients by the hair. Mr. Wanlace, the steward, was one of Payton's primary witnesses, and Payton requested that both he and Wanlace testify before the board.

Minutes dated January 16, 1902, indicate the board met that day in Cheyenne, expressly to listen to this evidence. Present were Payton, Wanlace, Solier, a stenographer—Miss Webster—plus board members Fenimore Chatterton, secretary of state; Thomas T. Tynan, state superintendent of public instruction; George E. Abbott, state treasurer; LeRoy Grant, state auditor and F. B. Sheldon, clerk. The board spent the day listening to Payton, Wanlace and Solier testify, and decided to continue the hearings at the hospital on January 20. This second hearing, however, is not mentioned in subsequent minutes.

On April 28, 1902, Sheldon, the clerk of the board, wrote to Payton, "[E]vidence does not sustain the charges made by you against Dr. Solier and the management of the institution." There was no further investigation.

Spreading ideas of reform

On June 20, 1903, Payton suspended publication of the Pilot. In November of that year he was again committed to the hospital but was released to the custody of his wife sometime in December, and the couple traveled to South Dakota. By 1904 they had returned to Wyoming, and in 1907, Payton began one of his major efforts to improve the care of the mentally ill.

Since 1898 he'd been studying the causes and treatment of insanity. In in March 1907 he suggested to the Board of Charities and Reform that some less dangerous patients in Evanston could benefit from home care. Payton offered to take in Ed Byers, a 32-year-old man who had been at the hospital since 1893.

Around the time the board was consulting Solier about this, the June 27, 1907, Laramie Boomerang published an extensive, front-page letter from former patient Joe Gillespie, who had been at Evanston the previous year. "I was beaten and kicked [by an attendant] into unconsciousness," Gillespie wrote. "Then I was allowed to recover my senses and was choked almost into unconsciousness again. … It is my opinion that the board of charities is completely deceived as to the true condition at Evanston and Dr. Solier himself is, to some extent."

The board did not investigate Gillespie's charges, and also refused to release Byers to Payton. However, Payton filed suit for custody and won it from Wyoming's Supreme Court. Byers then moved in with the Paytons at their ranch near Thermopolis. In 1908, Payton toured the state with a lecture about insanity, "Psychological Truth." Then, in June 1909, he was again committed but was released in August on the condition that he halt any further attempts at home treatment of the mentally ill.

The Jenkins murders, and two booklets

In late September 1911, Edna Jenkins, the youngest daughter of former Gov. William A. Richards, was found shot along with her husband, Thomas Jenkins. The murders occurred at Richards' Red Bank cattle ranch on Little Canyon Creek south of Tensleep in present southeastern Washakie County. Payton had been in the area at the time.

On October 7, the Wyoming Tribune reported that Payton "was so clearly out of his head and caused so much trouble that the sheriff was notified." Payton "constantly muttered about the dead woman and ... made other remarks which aroused suspicion." Briefly held in the Big Horn County jail in Basin, Wyo., Payton was released and never charged because there was no real evidence against him.

Payton continued selling newspaper subscriptions. In January 1923, he published Mad Men: A Psychological Study Complete in Twelve Parts. The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out; Payton printed another 2,000 in April.

He published the second booklet of the series in June 1923, but titled it Behind the Scenes at Evanston. This was the last volume, though he had planned more. Mad Men is autobiographical, focusing mainly on events he felt affected his mental state, and includes details from some of his early attacks and incarcerations. Behind the Scenes continues the tale, while broadening out to include descriptions of some of the other patients at Evanston, as well as reporting on Payton's own extended study of insanity and its treatment. He mentions Solier in both booklets, but mostly in passing and not directly in connection with the various charges in the Pilot and in letters to the Board of Charities and Reform.

From January 1924 on, Payton struggled with his malady, ending up at the hospital in late November 1925, never to be released again. Overlapping with his last months of liberty, however, were new charges of abuse by yet another former patient.

Charges from other patients and staff

Sometime in spring 1924, former patient Mary Emma Meek, wife of a state senator from Weston County, wrote to the Board of Charities and Reform requesting an investigation and the opportunity to testify "to the brutal and inhuman treatment given to … inmates." Meek claimed she was "left without succor, not allowed drinking water … brutally assaulted by attendants without cause or provocation … placed in a straightjacket, and submitted to numerous indignities."

Her neck had been injured, she wrote, and "other unfortunates" had also been cruelly treated. Mrs. Meek, confined from September 1923 through early March 1924, said she was "of sound mind and memory within a month or thereabouts after her incarceration … and knows whereof she speaks." The letter ended, "[Y]our petitioner has been by a jury on the 19^th day of April A.D. 1924 declared to be of sound mind."

On April 21, 1924, her husband, Sen. Commodore P. Meek, also wrote in a short letter to the board, "I shall never let up on this man at the Asylum. He has got to go." The context of this letter makes it clear that Meek was referring to Solier.

On May 6, 1924, the board met to investigate Mrs. Meek's charges. The transcript indicates that Solier testified himself and also questioned two witnesses: Mrs. Anna Massamore, night nurse; and Mrs. Inez Stricker, matron. All three among them denied 100 percent of Mrs. Meek's charges, Solier adding, "[S]he was not in her sound mind at any time while she was in the State Hospital. … [W]hat she saw, what she heard, what impressions she received, were those of an insane person." The board took no further action.

Solier was superintendent until he died on Dec. 10, 1930. Obituaries lauded him in The Wyoming Press and The Wyoming Times.

The hospital after Solier

Dr. D. B. Williams was appointed in Solier’s place in April 1931. Hospital staff soon charged Williams with mismanagement and cruelty, but the board investigated, concluding that disgruntled employees were making unfounded charges.

Then, on Jan. 11, 1932, Dr. A. L. Darche, formerly of the hospital staff, sent an affidavit to acting Gov. Alonzo M. Clark. Darche, assistant superintendent during Solier's declining years, detailed the behavior of Inez Stricker, the matron who had testified against Mrs. Meek. Stricker, Darche wrote, "had never taken a regular nurse's course … and therefore could never be a registered nurse. ... She ruled the place in a high handed manner … and discharged or had discharged any and everyone who did not pay obedience to her. Her orders were supreme and extended to every department of the hospital."

Darche charged Stricker with running "a veritable espionage system," dismissing good employees for no reason. Further, Darche stated, Stricker witnessed the severe beating of several patients, condoning this and protecting the guilty attendant. Mrs. Stricker subsequently left the hospital, apparently sometime in 1932.

At about the same time as the Darche affidavit, the board held a hearing to investigate another matter, the death of an epileptic patient, Mr. John Erickson. Mr. A. N. Williams, an attendant, was the only witness testifying, and apparently had requested the hearing because he feared Stricker would charge him with Erickson's murder. The transcript of this Jan. 7, 1932, hearing reveals that after general questions about the events leading up to Erickson's death, the inquiry turned to Solier's last years as superintendent.

Williams testified that during the time Solier and Stricker were in charge, they "never did anything against" the beating and other cruel treatment of patients. Attendant Williams further accused Stricker of locking two other epileptic patients each alone in a (heated) cement-floored room in winter, without clothing or blankets, for up to two months. When asked by the board about Solier’s successor Dr. D. B. Williams's running of the hospital, witness A. N. Williams, the attendant, replied that it was "very good."

Payton’s legacy

Although Payton was still alive at the time of this hearing, more than seven years after the last time he entered the hospital, we do not know whether he was aware of the change of administration or in the treatment of patients. We do know that fourteen months earlier, he had still been mentally active and hoping to gain his release. On October 26, 1931, he wrote to Grace Raymond Hebard at the University of Wyoming, "I expect to leave here in the spring, my expectations being based on the best possible reasons." These and other letters written to Hebard in November of that year reveal that he was writing or had written a manuscript, "Wyoming 1807-1899." His half-brother, Benjamin Dowd of Gillette, and his grown daughter, Dorothy, then living in Nebraska, were apparently helping him with it.

Payton died on Jan. 3, 1933. Only one short obituary appears to have survived, in the Jan. 4, 1933, Wyoming Press. The Press stated that he "had no known relatives," but this may not have been true. However, he was divorced from his wife and buried, presumably in the hospital cemetery, in a pauper's grave.

Although he had been well known and liked, participating in the political life of the young state, reporting on important events, boosting the town of Thermopolis from its beginnings, advocating for those he claimed were victimized at the Wyoming State Hospital and bravely putting forth his own case, hoping thereby to educate the public about insanity, all seems to have been forgotten and swallowed up in the shadow of his own mental illness.

Yet some of his efforts may have been effective: On Feb. 25, 1925, the Wyoming Legislature passed a law prohibiting harsh, cruel or abusive treatment of insane persons. Representative Preston McAvoy, like Sen. Meek from Weston County, who introduced the bill, cited Mrs. Meek's case. Possibly, public awareness had been advancing for the past quarter-century, starting with Payton's 1899 revelations in the Pilot, and continuing with those of other former patients.

Payton's battles, on his own behalf as well as for his fellow patients, illustrate the difficulty both of his position and of Solier's. Mental patients are easy targets for that percentage of caregivers who are thugs and sadists. Who would believe the testimony of a person known to have mental problems, when those problems by definition can include hallucinations and delusions? Incompetent administrators and cruel attendants, it seems fair to say, can have an easy time refuting patients' accusations.

Conversely, compassionate and well-qualified caregivers of the mentally ill can easily face the specter of demented patients fabricating stories about their treatment. In either case, one can only hope the truth provides adequate defense.

This was Payton's mission. His letters, booklets and newspaper accounts of conditions at the Wyoming State Hospital are fair and objective in tone, noting the good as well as the bad. Although officials discredited all of Payton's accusations, Solier's case stands, or falls, on the historical record. Payton's remarkable persistence and energy, despite his illnesses, shone through to expose what should never be tolerated or allowed to continue.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Darche, A. L., M.D. Affidavit to Acting Governor A.M. Clark, Jan. 11, 1932. MA 8925, Box 6, Investigations, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyo.
• Meek, C. P. Letter to Board of Charities and Reform, April 21, 1924. MA 1606, Box 6, Wyoming State Archives.
• Meek, Mary Emma. Letter to Board of Charities and Reform, undated. MA 1606, Box 6, Wyoming State Archives.
• Payton, E. T. Behind the Scenes at Evanston, 1923, 6, 7, 17-20, 26, 28, 32-36, 56-64, Wyoming State Archives.
• __________. Letters to Grace Raymond Hebard, Oct. 26, Nov. 1, 15, 20, 24, Dec. 6, 12, 17, 1931. Grace Raymond Hebard Collection, Box 41, Folder 25, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
• __________. Letters to Board of Charities and Reform, Jan. 3, 10, 12, 17, 1902. Letters Received, Incoming Correspondence, MA 7939, Box 3, Wyoming State Archives.
• __________. Mad Men: A Psychological Study Complete in Twelve Parts, 1923, 11-20, 26, 31, 35, 41-49, 51,Wyoming State Archives.
• Sheldon, F. B. Letter to E. T. Payton, April 28, 1902. Letterpress Book, p. 589, Wyoming State Archives.
• Wyoming State Board of Charities and Reform. "Hearing Before the State Board of Charities and Reform, at Cheyenne, Wyoming, January 7, 1932, with reference to Alleged Mismanagement of Wyoming State Hospital at Evanston, Wyoming." MA 8925, Box 6, Investigations, Wyoming State Archives.
• ———. "Investigation: C. P. Meek, Upton, Wyoming, Wyo. State Hospital, Evanston," May 6, 1924. MA 1606, Box 6, Wyoming State Archives.
• ———. Minutes, Feb. 6, 1899, Book B, p. 98; April 3, 1899, Book B, pp. 123-124; Jan. 16, 1902, Book C., p.116; March 3, 1902, Book C, p. 136; April 26, 1902, Book C, p. 166, Wyoming State Archives.
• Wyoming Press, Jan. 4, 1933. (microfilm) Coe Library, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo.
• Wyoming Newspapers. Accessed June 16, 2016, June 20-25, 2016, July 14, 2016, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov/.
• Big Horn River Pilot, June 1, 1898, July 27, 1898, Sept. 14, 1898, Jan. 11, 1899, Jan. 18, 1899, Jan. 25, 1899, Feb. 1, 1899, Feb. 8, 1899, Feb. 15, 1899, Feb. 22, 1899.
• Cheyenne Daily Leader, April 13, 1892, April 16, 1892, April 24, 1894, Nov. 3, 1894.
• Daily Boomerang, Oct. 22, 1894, Oct. 24, 1894, Oct. 23, 1895, Dec. 10, 1895, March 31, 1899, April 12, 1899, May 1, 1899, June 6, 1899.
• Laramie Boomerang, June 27, 1907.
• Natrona County Tribune, June 8, 1899, April 8, 1908.
• Saratoga Sun, April 27, 1899.
• Wyoming Derrick, June 8, 1899.
• Wyoming Tribune, Oct. 7, 1911.

Secondary Sources

• Beers, Clifford Whittington. A Mind that Found Itself: An Autobiography. 5^th ed., rev. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1953.
• Bogart, Barbara Allen. "The Wyoming State Hospital." WyoHistory.org, accessed June 21, 2016, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyoming-state-hospital.
• Bonner, Robert. "Town Founder and Irrigation Tycoon: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows." WyoHistory.org, accessed Aug. 6, 2016, at www.wyohistory.org/essays/town-founder-and-irrigation-tycoon-buffalo-bill.
• "Carey Act." Wikipedia, accessed Aug. 6, 2016, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carey_Act.
• Davis, John W. Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion of Johnson County. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010, 178-179.
• Ewig, Rick. “E. T. Payton: Savior or Madman?.” Annals of Wyoming 79: 1, Winter 2007, 18-36.

For Further Reading and Research

• Big Horn Basin Savior, (microfilm, Special Collections) Coe Library, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo.: Nov. 19, 22, 29, Dec. 3, 6, 27, 31, 1894; Jan. 3, 1895.
• Big Horn River Pilot, Wyoming Newspapers, http://newspapers.wyo.gov/: June 15, 29, 1895; Aug. 4, 11, 18, 25, Sept. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, Oct. 6, 13, 20, 27, Nov. 3, 10, 17, 24, Dec. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, 1897; Jan. 19, 26, Feb. 2, 9, 16, 23, March 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, April 6, 13, 20, 27, May 4, 11, 18, 25, June 8, 15, 22, 29, July 6, 13, 20, Aug. 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, Sept. 7, 21, 28, Oct. 5, 12, 19, Nov. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, Dec. 7, 14, 21, 28, 1898; March 1, 8, 15, 1899.
• Rothman, David J. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1971.
• Scull, Andrew, ed. Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
• Whitaker, Robert, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002.

Illustrations

• The images of of the Wyoming Insane Asylum and Dr. C.H. Solier are from the Uinta County Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The page of the Big Horn River Pilot, 1899, is from Wyoming Newspapers. Used with thanks.
• The photos of Secretary of State Fenimore Chatterton and the 1909 J.E. Stimson photo of Thermopolis are from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.

Caroline Fuller had never heard of women’s liberation in 1905 when she entered a field of medicine usually reserved for men—dentistry. How she came to pull teeth and take dental impressions while raising three children and teaching school in a remote part of Wyoming at the turn of the last century is only one phase of her interesting life story.

Caroline Fuller—Mrs. George Fuller—was about 93 years old when interviewed June 14, 1973, at the Wyoming Pioneer Home in Thermopolis, Wyo., by May Gillies on behalf of the Hot Springs County Historical Society.

This oral history is from the collections of the Wyoming State Archives. Used with thanks.

May Gillies: Caroline, you have had a very interesting life and I’d like you to tell me about it. But first I’d like you to tell me where you were born and when.

Caroline Fuller: In Czechoslovakia in 1880.

May Gillies: And you came to this country …

Caroline Fuller: To Omaha, Nebraska.

May Gillies: When was that?

Caroline Fuller: In ’83.

May Gillies: What was your father’s name?

Caroline Fuller: Joseph Fibiger, F-i-b-i-g-e-r.

May Gillies: And your mother’s name?

Caroline Fuller: He was a watchmaker in  [unintelligible].  Mother’s name was Caroline.

May Gillies: What was her maiden name?

Caroline Fuller: Von Brill, V-o-n and then B-r-i-l-l.

May Gillies: And when did you go to school in Omaha?

Caroline Fuller: I went all the way through high school and grade school and business college.

May Gillies: And then you worked there?

Caroline Fuller: I worked for Dr. Bailey, the dentist, for five or six years.

May Gillies: And you learned dentistry?

Caroline Fuller: I learned enough dentistry so to be able to fill teeth and pull teeth and send away and have plates made.

May Gillies: Not very many women did that did they?

Caroline Fuller: No, not in those years, no.

May Gillies: In fact, not very many do it now I don’t suppose.

Caroline Fuller: There’s more of them now.

May Gillies: How did you come out to Wyoming?

Caroline Fuller: I came to visit—I came out in 1904—came out to visit the Longfellow family at their ranch.

May Gillies: And did you like it well enough to come back?

Caroline Fuller: I liked it well enough, I met and got married, of course, my future husband there and came back the following year.

May Gillies: How did you meet your husband?

Caroline Fuller: At a dance.

May Gillies: And I understand you did some dentist work, dentistry then on your visit.

Caroline Fuller: Yes, I did a lot of dentistry.

May Gillies: Can you tell me about helping Mr. Okie? [J.B. Okie, the so-called sheep king of central Wyoming, based in Lost Cabin, Wyo.—Eds.]

Caroline Fuller: Yes, that was an emergency case. He had a terrible toothache and he couldn’t get to Casper to the nearest dentist because the stage didn’t come on until Monday so we, he came down and got me at the, after the dance at the hotel, and he got me and we didn’t have any instruments of any kind, so we got a pair of, what do you call them?

May Gillies: A brace and a bit?

Caroline Fuller: Yeah, brace and bit things in the store and different boys around there held him down and I used the instrument and opened up his tooth and relieved the pressure and he was able to go on to Casper Monday to have his tooth filled.

May Gillies: And how did he travel to Casper?

Caroline Fuller: On the bus.

May Gillies: How did he manage to stand it without anesthetic?

Caroline Fuller: Well he took, he had several drinks and he was pretty well under the effects of the drinks.

May Gillies: But still it was quite a job to hold him down.

Caroline Fuller: Oh yes, they had to hold him down.

May Gillies: So, then, that’s where you met Mr. Fuller?

Caroline Fuller: Yes.

May Gillies: And the following year you were married?

Caroline Fuller: Yes.

May Gillies: Can you tell me about that?

Caroline Fuller: I was married in Casper.

May Gillies: And two other couples were married about the same time.

Caroline Fuller: Yeah, they were married at Lost Cabin and we had a preacher coming through and they were married. But I was married in Casper and that night we came down and then we all celebrated together.

May Gillies: Who were these other two couples?

Caroline Fuller: Dr. Jewel and his wife, Willoughby, and her sister.

May Gillies: Well, you must have had a good time, all of you.

Caroline Fuller: Young folk. Danced all night.

May Gillies: Those dances were really something. Well then, you and your husband were in the ranching business.

Caroline Fuller: Yes.

May Gillies: And you had, your family was born there.

Caroline Fuller: Born at Lost Cabin.

May Gillies: Can you tell me their names?

Caroline Fuller: Yes. It was Caroline Louise was the first one born and she passed away when she was 12 years old. Poisoned candy during the war. Then I had, Inez was born and then my son, George.

May Gillies: And you had trouble getting a teacher to teach your children, I understand.

Caroline Fuller: Yeah, we were so far out in the country and the girls coming out from the cities were afraid to walk down to the school house and back. They’d walk in the wrong direction, they’d go downhill instead of uphill coming home so finally this one girl stayed three days.

May Gillies: Oh my. What did you do then?

Caroline Fuller: Well then, I tried to get a teacher and they told me to take it over myself so I did. I took a course from the university, correspondence work, and no books to study out of. Just …

May Gillies: Did they send you questions that you had to answer and no books?

Caroline Fuller: Yes, and no books to study but I made it.

May Gillies: You probably relied on what you learned in school yourself like reading and arithmetic.

Caroline Fuller: From what I remember.

May Gillies: How many pupils did you have?

Caroline Fuller: Eight.

May Gillies: Your own three and these others.

Caroline Fuller: Yes, but there was eight altogether.

May Gillies: And how long did you teach?

Caroline Fuller: Two years.

May Gillies: Then you did get a teacher?

Caroline Fuller: Finished them and then we came to town to, for high school.

May Gillies: Oh yes, and that was, now, while you still were at Lost Cabin, you did some dentistry there for the cowboys.

Caroline Fuller: Oh I did a lot of it, yeah. They’d come over the mountain to have teeth pulled and I’d take impressions for teeth. Make new teeth for them.

May Gillies: For heaven’s sake, you mean you did it, you actually did the teeth?

Caroline Fuller: No, no, I sent to Omaha. But I’d take the impressions. Pull teeth and take impressions.

May Gillies: And you did finally get the instruments you needed, didn’t you?

Caroline Fuller: Oh yes, Dr. Bailey sent me the instruments. Little [unintelligible] engine and three pairs of pliers and we went into business.

May Gillies: Oh, I think that’s really something. Did you have a sign that said “Dr. Fuller”?

Caroline Fuller: No, I didn’t have any sign. I didn’t want any sign; I had enough trade without putting up a sign.

May Gillies: I see this article in the Riverton Ranger that headed, Aunt Caroline, Dentist of Lost Cabin. Did they all call you Auntie?

Caroline Fuller: I think Ruth Fuller put that in. That’s why she put Aunt Caroline.

May Gillies: She was your niece that wrote the article. Well, this is wonderful, this article. Well then, you came to Thermopolis and that was in 1920.

Caroline Fuller: Started Inez in high school and I was superintendent of the county hospital.

May Gillies: What were your duties then?

Caroline Fuller: Well, I would see that I had, I kept the books and saw that we had the correct number of nurses. All new work to me.

May Gillies: Then you had some more jobs.

Caroline Fuller: Yes, I had, I worked for three different county superintendents of schools.

May Gillies: And one of them was Mrs. Thompson?

Caroline Fuller: Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Hodgson, and who was the other one?

May Gillies: Well anyway, you worked for the three of them. And you were pretty busy in a number of clubs in Thermopolis too? And then you came to live here at the Pioneer Home. And you’re still busy.

Caroline Fuller: I’m still busy.

May Gillies: You play the piano. And you’ve been here six years now. Do you think it’s a good place to live?

Caroline Fuller: Wonderful, and I’ve always thought so ever since I came in.

May Gillies: Well, I sure do thank you Caroline. This has been real interesting.

Caroline Fuller: It’s kind of rough but …

May Gillies: No, it’s just fine.

Resources

For further reading and research

• Hein, Annette. “Hot Springs County, Wyoming.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Aug. 14, 2016 at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/hot-springs-county-wyoming.
• Rea, Tom. “J. B. Okie, Sheep King of Central Wyoming.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Aug. 14, 2016 at http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/j-b-okie-sheep-king-central-wyoming.

Illustrations

• The photo of Birdseye Station around 1910 is from the American Heritage Center via Wyoming Places. Used with thanks.
• The 1909 J.E. Stimson photo of Thermopolis is from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks. 

What does an editor reveal about himself by offering 100-year subscriptions to his brand-new weekly newspaper? That he has a sense of humor? Superhuman energy? Grandiose plans? Perhaps all three.

Merris C. Barrow, editor and proprietor of Bill Barlow's Budget in early Douglas, Wyo., worked hard, boosted his young and growing community, succeeded with his newspaper where others had failed and reached beyond his current achievements to accomplish even more. After the Budget had been in business nearly 20 years, Barrow began a monthly magazine, eventually reaching an international audience with this engaging compendium of news, commentary, aphorisms, essays and opinion pieces. All these writings seemed spoken in his unique tone: the voice of a didactic imp.

Youth, education and early career

Born Oct. 4, 1857, in Canton, Pa., to Robert Barrow and Helen Harding Barrow, he grew up and was educated in Tecumseh, in southeastern Nebraska, where his parents settled in 1867. Nine years later, he leased and edited the Tecumseh Chieftain, and on March 17, 1877, during this approximately two-year tenure, he married Minnie Florence Combs.

Sometime in 1878 Barrow was appointed U.S. postal clerk, responsible for a run from Sidney, Neb., 140 miles along the Union Pacific line to Laramie, Wyo., where he lived with his wife and their first child, Elizabeth. A charge of robbing the mail cost him his job, but the jury found him not guilty. Records of the trial have not survived. Years later, Barrow defended himself, claiming that a fellow clerk had framed him. Even while his trial was in progress, he accepted a position as compositor and reporter for the Laramie Daily Times. Right after his acquittal, he became city editor of the Times. For the rest of his life, Barrow was a journalist.

In 1881 he began working for the new Laramie Boomerang, alongside famed Wyoming humorist Bill Nye, who was managing editor. Later that year, Barrow himself rose to city editor and, when Nye became ill during the winter of 1882-83, Barrow became editorial writer. In September 1884 he took over the editorship and business management of the (Rawlins) Wyoming Tribune. All this was excellent preparation for owning and managing his own newspaper.

Bill Barlow's Budget

In early 1886 the Barrows moved to Fetterman, Wyo., on the south bank of the North Platte River at the mouth of La Prele Creek in east central Wyoming, in what soon would become Converse County. Fetterman was the site of old Fort Fetterman, abandoned in 1878 by the U.S. military. Even before 1886, settlers had begun to arrive, and as the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad approached from its terminus in Chadron, Neb., people flooded Fetterman and the future site of Douglas, about eight miles to the southeast.

On June 9, 1886, Barrow published the first issue of Bill Barlow's Budget, a weekly. He had set up his equipment in a small shed in Fetterman that later became a chicken coop; it must have been dusty, cramped and ill lit. By August the Budget had moved to a lumber shack in booming North Douglas, a tent town where several hundred merchants and citizens had already camped, awaiting the railroad company's permission to build on the official Douglas townsite.

In his first issue, Barrow wrote, "The Budget will sit on the fence 'politically,' and throw stones at whoever and whatever it pleases. … It is in no sense the organ of any party or private interest in politics, in religion, or in anything else." This issue also contained more than two pages of news shorts, such as obituaries, accounts of crimes and reports on the progress of the railroad. Some of these were as much opinion as news, for example, "Fetterman needs reliable telegraph communication with the outside world almost as badly as it needed a newspaper before The Budget came in."

In the first half of September, after the arrival of the railroad, the Budget moved again, this time to a more substantial building on Third Street in Douglas. During the next 14 years, Barrow added to his printing equipment both for the Budget and for outside jobs. He expanded his paper from six to 12 pages, continued to boost Douglas and became one of its leading citizens.

It seemed there was hardly a project Barrow did not participate in. He served on the town's first school board in late 1886; helped establish the Douglas Club, an organization of business and professional men; and joined the Douglas Gun Club and the Douglas Whist Club. "Mrs. Bill," as Barrow invariably referred to his wife, was president of the Douglas Social Club, a women's organization. As various lodges were established, such as the Knights Templar, the Mystic Shrine and the Eastern Star, Barrow seems always to have been in the thick of these plans.

Through his paper, Barrow called for mail service in the Fetterman country even before railroad officials had revealed the location of future Douglas. He encouraged merchants to settle in the area, advocated for civic fire protection in June 1887 after the town’s first fire, and a year later suggested a city water system. By 1901-02 he was calling for a sewer system and reported on the progress of telephone service into Douglas.

With all this community involvement, it's not surprising that politics came next.

Public office and politics

On June 8, 1887, the city of Douglas incorporated. Barrow became clerk of the city council, a post he held nearly two years. During the second year he was also city assessor. On May 13, 1890, he was elected mayor, serving one term. In 1890 he also became receiver of the U.S. Land Office, accepting payments for federal land and issuing receipts.

As Wyoming approached its debate on statehood and a new state constitution in the summer of 1889, Barrow decided the fence-sitting policy he’d adopted at the start of the Budget was no longer appropriate.

"Thus far The Budget's political policy has been that of an independent newspaper … uninfluenced by threats or offers of boodle," he wrote on page four of his June 5, 1889, issue. Mentioning the prospect of statehood for Wyoming, he continued, "[A]n independent newspaper is out of place where national questions may be discussed. … The Budget, therefore is henceforth a republican newspaper."

Late that summer, he attended the state’s constitutional convention, and reported on the proceedings in his unique tone and style:

"As a matter of fact the work should have been concluded a week or ten days ago; and it would have been, were it not for the fact that there are a half-dozen or more talented gentlemen in the body each of whom seems to be a sort of a Jack-in-the-box. Every once in a while—oftener in fact—the catch which holds these gentlemen down slips off and they bob up and shake their gory locks at the convention. The gentleman from Gander Creek moves to amend by inserting the word 'tweedle dee' after the seventh word in line four of section ten. Then the gentleman from Jawbony moves to amend the amendment by substituting the word 'tweedle dam' in lieu thereof. Then the catches slip off all over the house and a general discussion follows."

As chief clerk of the Wyoming House of Representatives in the 1894 and 1896 legislative sessions, Barrow reported the proceedings in detail. In 1896 he was secretary of the Republican state convention in Sheridan, Wyo., and was chosen alternate delegate to the national Republican convention in St. Louis. Ever the community booster, he worked with Converse County state senator and future Wyoming Gov. DeForest Richards to bring the 1898 Republican state convention to Douglas, and succeeded.

In the years 1886-1898 the Budget stayed in business while six other newspapers in the Douglas area failed. Not only did the Budget prosper; Barrow sometimes published extra issues, sending them out free, as he did during the 1888 election season.

Meanwhile, Barrow continued to develop his amusing, often pugnacious, style. One of the paper’s most engaging features was a regular column of brief quips like these from page two, May 21, 1902: "The man who kicks himself for having made a fool of himself only adds insult to injury."And "The distressing news comes from Atlanta that a youngster of that city swallowed a ping-pong ball and the physicians had to work several hours before the game could be resumed."

Though these may be old standards re-invented, there's no doubt Barrow’s jokes added to the Budget's appeal. Eventually it occurred to Barrow that he could create an additional platform for his wit, political commentaries, general opinions and outlook on life.

The sagebrush philosopher

On December 9, 1903, Barrow wrote in the Budget, "I am about to launch a monthly magazine—the which [sic] will face the footlights early next month. … It will comprise stuff written only to be read." The phrase, a favorite with Barrow, summed up his literary convictions: If you expect people to read what you write, write something they want to read. The pages of Sagebrush Philosophy bear this out.

For example, the September 1905 issue includes a barbed commentary on steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie's then-current project of financing community library buildings throughout the nation. "His benevolence is a bluff—his love for his fellows rank egotism," wrote Barrow. "If honest in his professed desire to benefit mankind, why not divide a few [dollars] with the poor devils whose daily toil maintains his troublesome bank balance?"

In the same issue is an amusing account of a tenderfoot who was taken in by a fake gunfight yet later failed to realize he was in actual crossfire outside a Casper, Wyo., saloon. The man failed to take cover. Barrow concluded, "[T]hanks to a [mistaken] state of mind he had been the bravest man in town—for about a minute!"

Another essay, on the "mutton-head," further illustrates Barrow's timing. "You know who I mean," he wrote, "the man whose mind is dormant, or missing … who never learns to think and act for himself and only does what he is told to do and like as not never does that well. … We meet him every day," Barrow wound up, "but never in an automobile of his own."

Barrow became known for his folksy style, in which he misspelled words on purpose, used slang or left apostrophes out of contractions. He often used the phrase "pure stuph," for example, to describe his writing, and preceded the first essay in each issue of Sagebrush Philosophy with the carpe-diem warning, "Just let this sorter sink into your soul: The mummy aint had no fun for moren five thousand years."

The magazine caught on; readers liked it and Barrow promoted it with vigor. He wrote to major news agencies, among them the American News Company in New York and its Colorado branch; the Washington News Company, which also had a branch in Colorado; and the Railroad News Company in Boston. He corresponded with individual newsstand operators nationwide as well, sending free samples whenever possible. His correspondence shows different claims about how many copies he'd printed of his first issue: Two thousand are mentioned in one letter, 5,000 in another.

On Jan. 13, 1904, Barrow reported in the Budget that the Chicago Inter-Ocean newspaper had given his magazine a favorable review. Also that first year of publication, readers wrote to Barrow from Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, California, Texas, Illinois, Nebraska, Georgia, Colorado, New York, Massachusetts and Kentucky, as well as Canada, Nassau and the Bahamas. Readers and reviewers compared Barrow favorably with two other contemporary magazine editors, Elbert Hubbard of the Philistine, published in Georgia, and William Cowper Brann of the Iconoclast, published in Texas. Barrow's subscription base is difficult to verify, but in his Budget of May 31, 1905, he claimed that recent orders would boost his circulation to 15,000 by July.

A cloud appeared early in 1905 when an unknown person wrote to the General Land Office, as it was then called, accusing Barrow of fraud in his capacity of receiver. Barrow had held that position since 1890, with one interruption from 1894-1897 (most of Democratic President Grover Cleveland's term). Through two years of correspondence with officials at the GLO, Barrow asserted his honesty and accused R. F. Potter, Jr., a clerk, of failing to account for $230.00 in fees. Barrow and A. D. Chamberlin, register in the Douglas Land Office, paid the shortfall. Nonetheless, both men were dismissed in early February 1907.

This was the second time in Barrow's life that he had been accused of fraud. Perceptions of his integrity and his public standing appear not to have changed much at the time, however. On both occasions, for example, his longtime friend and colleague in the newspaper business, W. E. Chaplin, editor of the Laramie Republican, defended him publicly.

Yet decades later, in the late 1940s, when historian Margaret Prine was writing two long articles about Barrow for the Annals of Wyoming, Chaplin felt free to express franker feelings about his old friend’s personal traits. In a letter to Prine, Chaplin wrote

Socially Barrow did not stand high. He was quite generally known as a philanderer. He embraced vice in nearly all its hideous forms. . . . At Douglas he belonged to a small coterie that played poker at each other’s homes. He enjoyed going over to Deadwood [S. Dak.], where vice was considered a virtue and gambling and prostitution were leading industries.

Prine also noted a “general impression” among people in Douglas, continuing down to her time though only indirectly expressed, “that Barrow had a reputation for worldliness and even ‘wickedness,’ which shocked some of his more upright neighbors, and that this reputation took form largely in his later years.” Prine was also careful to note that regardless of judgments like these, Barrow was clearly “a man of many friends, an influential editor, and a tireless worker for local and state enterprises in which he believed.”

And Bill Barlow's Budget prospered. Though some items in Sagebrush Philosophy were lifted, by intent, from earlier issues of the Budget, Barrow worked harder as the years went by to generate new content for the magazine while still publishing the Budget every week. Perhaps this is part of the reason he died of heart failure at just 53, on Oct. 9, 1910.

After his death, two more issues of Sagebrush Philosophy were published. In July 1911, Minnie Barrow, "Mrs. Bill," published The World of Just You and I, a collection of past articles from Sagebrush Philosophy. The title is from a verse of Barrow's by the same name. Minnie Barrow also published the Budget through most of 1914. With the issue of Dec. 10, 1914, the paper became the Douglas Budget and has continued under that name up to the present, through a variety of owners and editors.

There's no doubt that Barrow was a financial success. In 1890 he and his wife built a $1,500 residence on Fifth and Center Streets in Douglas, and later they built a large ranch house near town west of the North Platte River. Friends also recalled that Barrow drove "a good team of horses." Although Bill Barlow's Budget and Sagebrush Philosophy could not have lasted long without the author's wit and originality, modern readers still have access to his mind and imagination—and to the times and culture he lived in—through the writings he left, "written to read."

(Editor’s note: Publication of this and seven other articles on Wyoming newspapering is supported in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council and is part of the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative, a joint venture of the Pulitzer Prizes Board and the Federation of State Humanities Councils in celebration of the 2016 centennial of the prizes. The initiative seeks to illuminate the impact of journalism and the humanities on American life today, to imagine their future and to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by the body of Pulitzer Prize-winning work. For their generous support for the Campfires Initiative, the council thanks the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prizes Board, and Columbia University.)

Resources

Primary Sources

• Adelman, Matt, publisher, Douglas Budget. Personal emails to the author, Aug. 5, 2016.
• Barlow, Bill. Sagebrush Philosophy 2: 9, Sept. 1905, Western History Center, Casper College, Casper, Wyo. (hereafter WHC)
• __________. Sagebrush Philosophy 3: 1, Jan. 1906, WHC.
• __________ . Sagebrush Philosophy 12: 6, Dec. 1909, WHC.
• Barrow, Minnie F., ed. The World of Just You and I By "Bill Barlow." Douglas, Wyo.: Mrs. Minnie F. Barrow, 1911. Accessed Sept. 7, 2016, at https://archive.org/details/billbarlowsbook00barrgoog.
• Wyoming Newspapers. Accessed July 23, 2016, Aug. 3, 2016, Aug. 9-10, 2016, via http://newspapers.wyo.gov/, Bill Barlow's Budget, June 9, 1886, June 5, 1889, Sept. 25, 1889, May 21, 1902, Feb. 18, 1903, Dec. 9, 1903, Jan. 13, 1904, May 31, 1905, Dec. 13, 1905, June 12, 1907, Sept. 29, 1909.

Secondary Sources

• McInnis, Doug. "Converse County, Wyoming." Accessed Aug. 9, 2016, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/converse-county-wyoming.
• Prine, Margaret. "Merris C. Barrow: Sagebrush Philosopher and Journalist, Part I."Annals of Wyoming 24: 1, Jan. 1952. Accessed Sept. 7, 2016, at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom24121952wyom#page/n0/mode/2up.
• ____________. "Merris C. Barrow: Sagebrush Philosopher and Journalist, Part II."Annals of Wyoming 24: 2, July 1952, pp. 3-72. Accessed Sept. 7, 2016, at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom24121952wyom#page/n105/mode/2up/search/Margaret+Prine. W.E. Chaplin’s comments about Barrow are on p. 13.
• United States Bureau of Land Management. Records of the Bureau of Land Management, Record Group 49. "Records of District Land Offices 1800-1980," 49.9. Accessed Sept. 6, 2016, at http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/049.html.

For Further Reading and Research

• Bill Barlow's Budget, Wyoming Newspapers, http://newspapers.wyo.gov/: Most weekly issues, June 9, 1886-Dec. 3, 1914.
• Sagebrush Philosophy, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyo.: All monthly issues, Jan. 1905-Nov. 1910.
• Sagebrush Philosophy, Casper College Western History Center, Casper, Wyo.: Sept., Dec. 1905; Jan. 1906; all monthly issues, Jan. 1907-Dec. 1909.

Illustrations

• The photos of Barrow, his ranch house and Douglas in its tent-town phase are from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The portrait of Minnie Barrow is from the frontispiece of The World of Just You and I, which she published in 1911, the year after his death. The book is available electronically at archive.org; used here with thanks.
• The newspaper images are from the June 12, 1907 edition of Bill Barlow’s Budget, available at Wyoming Newspapers. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the C&P press is from the Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum, with special thanks to Jenna Thorburn.

In May 1950, Louise Spinner Graf served as foreman of a jury in a murder trial in Green River, Wyo.—the first jury in Wyoming to include women since the early 1870s, when territorial courts briefly allowed women to serve in that capacity and then quickly ended the practice. Six women served on the 12-person Green River jury, which convicted Otto Long of second-degree murder. After the trial his defense attorney complained, Graf says, “he would never have lost that murder case if it wouldn't have been for those damn women.”

Louise Spinner was born in Green River in 1904 to German-American parents, was valedictorian of her high school class, attended the University of Wyoming and returned to Green River, where she worked at local banks, rising to assistant cashier. In 1930 she married George Graf and quit working to raise their daughter. She served for many years as treasurer of the Sweetwater Conty Fair Board, was active in the Woman’s Club and the Girl Scouts and was a founder of and leader in the Sweetwater County Historical Society. She died in California in 1997.

She was interviewed in Green River by Wyoming State Archives staffer Bill Barton on July 15, 1975.

Barton: Louise Skinner Graf …

Graf: Spinner, Spinner Graf.

Barton: Spinner Graf. And you’ve lived in this area all of your life?

Graf: Yes.

Barton: You mentioned that the Spinners came in 1868. I wonder if you could start this by telling me a little about that.

Graf: Well, I'll tell you that my father had an uncle that came to the United States to St. Louis before the Civil War. And in fact he was in the Civil War and in it he was wounded and discharged; [he] came with the Union Pacific Railroad to Green River. And they came in 1868.

And he was a bachelor and he finally brought a brother and a sister of his over here from Germany, and then in 1890, my dad came as a young man. I think that he was 16 years old. And learned the butcher trade, and he was here for about seven years and then he went back to Germany, and then in 1901 he and my mother were married and came to—let's  see they were married in June—in April, and in June they came to Green River and lived here the rest of their lives. And then of course I was born here and I have lived here. I went to the high—I finished at that time—there were not too many graduates from high school, and I was one of them, and I was valedictorian of the class, a small class of seven. And then I went to the University of Wyoming, then I came back and I worked at the First National Bank. I started there and then they offered me more money at the State Bank, and I went up there. Then in—I was made the first lady or woman assistant cashier that they'd had. Which I was very proud of. And then I worked six years and then I got married and I quit work, which they were very, very, much were against, but at that time, women didn't work like they did now. They were just starting to.

Barton: You were saying that you had married and quit work.

Graf: Oh yes, uh huh. And at that time we built this house and I have lived here 45 years. In this very same house, and by the way, the little house that I was born in is still standing in Green River. It's right across from the court house west north of the sheriff's office—the sheriff's house. The funniest little house sitting there all by itself. And so then, we had one daughter. And immediately, well the first thing that happened to me when I got married, they asked me to join the woman's club. Well, I said all right. I did join and I was their treasurer for 10 years. And then I got involved in the Girl Scouts and this year I get my 30-year pin. For working with Girl Scouts. Well then, let's see what other things I was mixed up in. Of course I am a member of the Catholic Church, and I have belonged to the Altar Society. And there has been a custom—years ago there was a lady that always opened her house to the Girl Scouts at Christmas time. And they would come and see her Christmas tree and things. Now that's something I must tell you about. My old fashioned Christmas tree.

I have a Christmas tree and the Girl Scouts still come every year to my house. And they started then, first they come to my house and then they go to hers. I didn't have refreshments, but she did. But now I do because she has passed away. And this Christmas tree stands on the floor to the ceiling, has ornaments dating from my first Christmas. When I was a year old. And every year something has been added to it until now you can barely see the tree. I still have candles on it. I have six strings of lights, however. But I have candles, and you'd be surprised how few people have seen—the younger people that have seen actual candles on the Christmas tree. And the year before my husband passed away, he called me, and I was in the basement, and he said, I'm going to show you something. I said what do you want to show me? Come quick, it can't wait. And he lit every one of those candles on that Christmas tree. It was the beautiful thing, you can just imagine.

And so, anyway, we, let's see, then I helped to organize the, he and I helped organize the [Sweetwater County] Historical Society. They wanted a historical society going here and Rock Springs wanted no part of it, and so we got busy and though we had a hard time—sometimes we could only get 12 people out, it's amazing how people are afraid of something new. And so a—we finally got it going and now we have a very good membership, a lot of Rock Springs people, and the very nice membership, but by golly it took a lot of plugging.

And he had been born and raised on a farm and like I said was instrumental in getting the county fair started and worked with it from the very beginning., Then he was on the fair board and for many years he was the treasurer. Well, I kept the books for him. HA HA.

I remember he came in the door and he was—do you know I got a job, a new job. I said what? He said, I'm treasurer. I said what did you take that for? I knew you'd do it for me. Well, then when he passed away the county commissioners wanted me to carry on and I said no I didn't want to, and they talked and they talked and I said well, I'd try it for a year. And I liked it so well, I'm still doing it. I have clerked at every county fair in the agricultural department since its beginning.

Barton: Marvelous.

Graf: I feel kind of like I'm a fixture or something. They don't even ask me anymore, do you want the book. The book comes out and there I am. Now you see lately the senior citizens have been quite active here, and I take part in a lot of their things. I belong to three bridge clubs and the Yucca Club. I go a lot in the afternoons, but I never go out at night. Kitty and I stay home at night, that's where old people belong. So I don't know.

Barton: Just a couple of things. I was wondering about, well, some of the recreation in Green River some time back. I noticed that there is a pavilion on Expedition Island. What was that initially built for?

Graf: That island, that they call Expedition Island, at one time, was one huge island that extended way up here. And the river has washed it and made it into three islands now. And there the—there was a dance hall at the north end of what you call Expedition Island. At the west end, this direction, there was an open-air dance hall.

Then during the Depression our mayor was also in the contracting business. He decided Green River should have a place where they could have their dances inside and use it for other things. Drumming up a little business you see. And people were very opposed to having it put down into that hole. And but he did, and it has been a big headache to the city and to everybody that has ever had it, nothing but an expense, it has never worked out.

Now they are trying to rehabilitate it for a skating rink and I don't know what, all kinds of things. I'm afraid it's not going to work. I've seen too much of where they've tried to, you know, build it up, and it has just been destroyed, and then the city has to put open fire places, put beautiful brick fire places there and people go over there with trucks and just pull it down and just ruin. You have no idea what they do to that place. Vandalism. They are going to have to have somebody live there. And actually watch it, because the police can't patrol it all the time.

Barton: Just too expensive to maintain.

Graf: And then another thing, I don't know, maybe you noticed there is a playground on the way up to a school that sits at the head of the hill. You saw that playground. That used to be our old cemetery. And I remember when I was a little girl I was, my mother always took me to funerals. Everybody would go to a funeral, of course it was a small town and everybody knew everybody. And a—everybody would walk along and there would be the cemetery. That's why there is no building there. Because it has to be a playground.

Barton: Did they move the bodies?

Graf: The people that were here moved the bodies, and then the others that they didn't know who they belonged to, the city moved. But there is one row of bodies on the east end on the long way that they never dared move. Because they died with black smallpox during the building of the railroad. So they were afraid to move them. So those bodies were there.

And there might be some that we, you know, nobody even knew there was a grave that had been flattened over, because, well, there was a wooden fence around it at one time, and it got pretty well dilapidated, and cattle and everything marched around on there. And there were a lot of graves that had their own little fences like you see the old fashioned cemeteries, but they did move what graves they could find. Then I suppose that someone has told you that we had a potash plant here at one time.

Barton: Yes, but I don't know much about it personally.

Graf: Well. It was over toward this end where all the building is up there, is where it was. And there is a road coming down the side of the hill that still goes up to where the railroad had built a spur to go to it. And it would have been all right but the World War, the First World War, just ended too soon. And they could import potash cheaper than they could make it here.

Then the old soda plant, now where you go across the river, you go to the other side, where that bridge is. Well, west of that, of that bridge, oh, I'd say maybe a block or so was the original bridge. We used to call it the wagon bridge. That went to the other side of the river.

You see the old Lincoln Highway used to go out telephone canyon on that side of the road. And so, my dad had the butcher shop until he retired, and he of course—in later years we could buy meat from the packing company. But when he first started out and in earlier years, they had to have the slaughterhouse and the tannery. And where about where El Rancho stands there--that's a first addition here, too—is where the old slaughterhouse and all the pens and that—now in the museum they had the painting of that that I donated to them.

And it seems so funny to think now, there's this old slaughterhouse over there and all that, and now there's—look at the people. I never thought I'd see the day that all those houses—well in fact, I didn't think we'd see the day when we'd have houses in back of my house. When we built this house, it was absolutely out in the prairie.

Barton: You were just out in the country.

Graf: We were just in the country and then finally a couple of houses moved in here, and finally, one built here and one built there and these were brought in later after—this was always our alley back, then they made this a street. I don't know—Green River's getting too big for me.

Barton: Well, there has been an awful influx and a big boom so to speak with the Bridger power plant and a lot of people seem to think it's okay because of the revenue it brings, but a lot of other people are very displeased with it.

Graf: I'm very unhappy with the whole situation. My gosh. Quite like I said, I never go out at night. I—we never were people to go out at night, much. Well, he wanted that shift, because he worked from four in the morning until noon, for the water works. Then that gave him the afternoon and evening to work in his garden, and all those trophies that you see on the buffet, those are only for about five years’ effort. And I think there were 24 or 25 of them. And that he won at the county fair for his produce.

He was known as the gardener of Sweetwater county. Because oh—he could make things grow. I don't know. But people—well of course, you take about—he started in about 40 years ago before he passed away. Well let’s say, we were married about 1930—say about 1935 he started gardening. And then it kept getting bigger and bigger. And all these bare grounds here and all—I have two lots here, and everything in the back was garden. And he finally got some tomatoes and things to grow that—found out what kind would mature here and one thing another.

I remember one year he even experimented to see if sugar beets would grow here. And they did, and we got great big sugar beets. He just would make a small spot of something and he had them tested to see for sugar content, and at the university, and they said the sugar beets—but nobody ever done anything with sugar beets here. It's good soil for sugar beets.

Barton: Well, it sounds like he had a real green thumb.

Graf: Oh, he did. He had a beautiful garden. And so it was just one of those funny things. He just loved it. Well, he was born and brought up on a truck garden and just couldn't seem to get away from it.

Barton: Kind of came naturally.

Graf: So that's the reason I say that we never went out much in the evening, because he was a person that—well, if you have to get up at four o'clock in the morning, you don't stay up until 11 or 12 o'clock at night. So it didn't bother me, but I would not go out on the street alone now at night. You couldn't hire me—I won't even—and I've got a big light I can turn on in the back of the house if I want to do something out in my little garden out in the back there. But you know what I do—I lock my front door when I go around at night and—I don't want somebody walking in here and find somebody in here—no sir. No. It isn't the same. Now they tell me there is supposed to be a town come west of here. Texas Gulf is going to—you see some of those trailer houses that are here have to be out of here in three years. And they have to have permanent housing for them, so I don't know.

Barton: These big vast mobile home parks that one sees around.

Graf: Some of them have only a three-year life.

Barton: I think that is good planning on somebody's part.

Graf: I think so.

Barton: Because it could turn into a slum area so easy.

Graf: Oh—they deteriorate so and they go down so fast.

Barton: Well, would you say then that to some extent that this boom and Bridger power plant especially has brought in what could be called an undesirable element?

Graf: Well, I have met some very, very nice people from both places. I still go out to all the Pacific Power doings that they have, and I have met some very nice people, but from what I hear, there is a kind of a scummy crew there. When—take any of these construction people, they have some pretty tough elements with them.

Barton: Well, I know that there have been remarks and of course with the good wire service that we get now days, we get current press releases from Sweetwater County over in Cheyenne, and the crime rate rise seems to be alarming.

Graf: Oh—it's terrible. I was just reading in the [Rock Springs] Rocket [-Miner]. Rock Springs is worse yet than Green River. And goodness knows we're bad enough. But I tell you it is awful. And then you get into another area. It isn't only the crime, they’re after the wild game, they're such hogs with fish.

Now the other day, and I don't know who in the world did it, there was a—I walked along my sidewalk on the outside, I knew what I was doing out there. Here were four little fish, a little brook trout that somebody had caught down in the river. You catch fish right down here about a block or so, and I guess they didn't want them and just threw them along the sidewalk. A waste.

I know one of the officers in Rock Springs—oh, this happened several years ago, the thing they had gone out to—somebody had reported that someone must have cleaned out their freezer and it just made him sick when he went out there to look. There were the great big lake trout, about 75 or 80 that [were] frozen and hauled to the dump. And they'll take your animals and shoot them out of season. And just take certain parts of them, and let them lay. I don't know what the human being is coming to.

Barton: I don't think they realize there will be none left if they keep that up.

Graf: That's it. It's just really terrible.

First woman jury foreman

Barton: One thing that I would like to talk to you about. I understand that you were the first woman foreman of a jury in Wyoming.

Graf: Oh, for heaven sake! I forgot all about that.

Barton: I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about that when it happened, and what kind of a trial it was, what the crime was?

Graf: Well yes, I said, in fact I gave all the information to the museum. They have the picture. In fact, the picture is right by the door as you go in. Well, I knew there was this murder trial—there was going to be a jury trial—but I didn't think—they thought it was going to have the first woman on it—but they had to wait for sure until they passed—I don't know—some law they had to pass. And if it went through, the women could serve on it. Well anyway, it passed.

And I know it was on—I think it was on a Thursday or Friday. Mike Maher was the sheriff. And he came to the door, and I wondered what in the world does Mike Maher want? And he said Louise, I got something for you. And he was kind of one of these happy Irishmen.

And he waved this little paper around and he handed it to me. It was a summons. And I said I can't go, that's on a Monday. That's my wash day. And he laughed and he said you are going to have to go. So anyway, I said well, all right, so I wasn't very happy about it, but Monday morning at 10 o'clock I marched down there, and well anyway I was chosen on the jury.

They had quite a panel. You know that they selected from. But for some reason I got chosen and I don't know—then when we went into the back room of the—it was a murder trial is what it was—it was two—I can't remember the fellow—I have a paper of it in my scrapbook that I have written up of the first woman jury in Wyoming.

And, but anyway—it seemed that there were two fellows coming from Rock Springs and they had been drinking, and they stopped halfway between here and Rock Springs and got out of the car. And one shot the other, and killed him, and that was it.

And so it went on. It lasted for about two days. And when we went into the room in the back, they—one of the men from Farson, [Wyo.]—you know since this is the first woman—first jury with women—I think there were five women and seven men—well, eight would be all, wouldn't it? And they said that we should have a woman foreman.

And one other one spoke up and said that they thought that I should be—because having lived here so long, and my people having been here so long. And I said oh no. You know, I had never even been to a jury. I had never even been in a courtroom. I didn't even know what a courtroom was like, let alone a jury. And I said oh my gosh, I wouldn't know what to do. And they said oh we'll help you, you'll get along all right. All right, it went on and of course we found him guilty. And the judge gave him the sentence.

And the lawyer that defended him was—well, I had to go again the next morning because there was another case, I was on the regular panel. And he [the lawyer] couldn't come to the courtroom, because he had gotten so drunk the night before. He was never a criminal lawyer, and he had never lost a murder case. And he said he would never have lost that murder case if it wouldn't have been for those damn women. And he sure had it in for me afterwards.

Barton: I'll bet.

Graf: And I said well, I didn't influence anybody. Because, you know, they take a ballot, you know, maybe you've been on a jury, how you take a secret ballot. And there was one man who was kind of holding out a little bit, but he finally went along with the rest. I was on that case, and I was on one case that they called the Bastardly case, and I was on the horse—the civil case, a horse-stealing case. I said—oh, dear, I was called—I never got called anymore, I said I had enough of that.

Barton: I can see what you mean. I can definitely see what you mean.

Graf: So that was—one of my best friends said to me, "What did you do to get on that jury?" And this was—well, it was the first woman in Wyoming, and they said possibly the United States, when the papers came out. Now, I wouldn't say anything about that, because I don't know whether they had served on juries before that in other states or not.

Barton: It's hard to document sometimes. It really is.

Graf: I wouldn't say that. I know it was in Wyoming and that's as far as I agree to go.

Barton: What year was this?

Graf: 1950. Oh my stars above. I just remembered they let us call home, you know, to get something to stay overnight. Well, they had no quarters for us. The courthouse was divided, it had a hall in the middle. The men were on one side, where they used the—well, they had the two rooms that were for jury rooms. And they just had cots in there. Well, of course they put the men on the one side, and the women on the other.

We were pretty nearly evenly divided, and there wasn't even a mirror in that place. There was nothing in that place. So Barton Hutton got us a mirror, there was a toilet and there was a wash basin, and that was the extent of it. I say now they take them and they put them in a motel, and I said so they did get some new sheets and fixed us up there. And so anyway, they let us call home for some little suitcase and, you know, a few little things for you so you could get along. And of course my daughter was home. She fixed up mine.

I had a real nice little suitcase. But you'd be surprised what some of those men had packed together. It was the funniest thing. It was really some comedy attached to it. And one man was so mad when his wife called him. He was from Rock Springs. About packing her suitcase. He had told her to tell them that she did not believe in capital punishment. And she didn't do it. And she was chosen.

And so when he brought her suitcase—of course there was always this bailiff or somebody standing there, they were never alone. And when he brought her this suitcase, he just pretty near threw it at her. He was just that mad that she was on that jury. I can't understand that. It wasn't that big of a deal.

Barton: He couldn't have been inconvenienced that much. And it was just a murder trial. Just kind of a crime of passion?

Graf: Well, they had been drinking and just what the difference was, I don't know. But one of them stopped the car and got out on one side and one got out on another side and one just shot the other one dead.

Barton: Sure doesn't accomplish anything really.

Graf: No it doesn't. It was awful.

And of course in those days they had no air conditioning and I tell you that court house was hotter than blazes. It was not much fun. It is fun afterwards to look back and, you know, to kind of laugh about it. And there was one lawyer there, I don't know why. Well when somebody—when I'm listening to somebody, or someone is doing something, you know, especially, I concentrate on what they are saying. And that fellow kept looking at me and looking at me. I know the judge said once, asked him one time what was so troubling.

And that was before they even knew that I was the foreman. It was before I was chosen. I didn't even know it myself at that time, because it went on during the day and then in the evening is when we went into the room and try and start--the trial started in the morning. But I sure didn't like that very much.

Early trona mining

Let's see, I've got something else on my mind now. I kind of forgot what I was--oh, I think I got started, but I never did finish about the old soda. I talked about the bridge. And then they moved the bridge east a little bit. Well, there's a building there now, it used to be a laundromat, I don't know what it is, just part of a big brick building sitting there. That was the old soda plant. And that is where they first discovered—now they call it trona—and at that time, they called it soda ash. Well, which is the same thing.

Only they tried to develop it by brine. They'd pump the brine. There is a well there that is marked by the Historical Society, and there is another one just as you go around the corner to go to that bridge where that little filling station is. And they used to pump the brine out of the ground, and they had big tanks and things that they would evaporate the water. And fix the soda ash. But I know, my uncle and my dad had some money in it--oh there were quite a few people who had money in it. They never made anything on it, because they couldn't do it on a big enough scale. But that was really the beginning of your trona.

Barton: The trona mining. Well, that's definitely big business now.

Graf: Oh heavens! I remember when FMC came. Well, they called it West Vaco. George and I went out one time and you know, they—you go down in a bucket to the bottom of the mine and look around, and now they don't even let you near the place.

Barton: I guess you have to have security badges and everything.

Sweetwater County, Rock Springs and Green River

Graf: Yes. Well, it's a good thing for Green River and Rock Springs. For Rock Springs more so than Green River, because, you see, Green River was so dependent on the railroad. And the railroad was just going to diesel about that time. And that caused a big layoff to railroad people here. Well, of course Rock Springs had shut down the mines and Rock Springs was really, really in a bad way. And a—Rock Springs was really in a bad bad way. And when this West Vaco came it absorbed a lot of those miners. They were happy to get them because they were experienced men and it certainly helped Rock Springs.

Of course, Rock Springs and Green River have always been feuding. I think they have been the best friends the last four or five years than they have ever been. That is, in working together a little bit and not trying to—well, Rock Springs always got the best of the deal because they were the bigger—but there was never any cooperation and between the schools. They had fights every time there'd be basketball games or football games. Doesn't Cheyenne and Laramie have the same?

Barton: Exactly.

Graf: So you know what I'm talking about.

Barton: Yes. Indeed. It goes back to early days, you can't imagine that you're not living without a fight going on.

Graf: Well, and I tell you, we had a few people in Green River that tried to keep everybody out. If the new business wanted to come in to Green River, they made it as miserable for them or wouldn't even let them in or something fixed them, because they wanted to run the town, and that is over with, thank goodness. Which I think is good for the town.

Barton: Well, Sweetwater County, it seems to me, throughout the state has always had a reputation for being progressive.

Graf: It has. It has been a very progressive county sheep-wise and ranch-wise and like that, but as far as looking at it you wouldn't think there's much here, would you.

Barton: I don't know, appearances can be deceiving. To an out-of-state person it would look like nothing.

Graf: Well, that's what I say. A person driving--I've had people go through, friends--and they say what do you do in this God-forsaken country? Why, there's nothing here. And here we're sitting on it and it took us all these years to find out what was underground.

Barton: I noticed the other day that one of the buildings in the Green River Brewery is still standing. It's a very pretty late-Victorian place.

Graf: That was my dad's uncle, Karl Spinner, that built that building. He built that building and also that dilapidated house just west of it. Oh, that was a beautiful place. He started—it  was a little wooden brewery—somewhere—I  think on the other side of the river, if I'm not mistaken. And he bought it and he built this. It was built by a German stone mason. And then in later years it had a lot added on to it, but they had torn all of the wood away and just left the original thing. And he was going to get married and he built that house next door. That was one of the most ornate houses in town.

Barton: The proportions are still lovely.

Graf: And you should have seen the inside of that house. Because I know one of my girlfriends—well, her father Hugo Ganzlin bought it when … this uncle of my Dad's. This uncle was interested in the sheep business and in the brewery. And he sold—he got kind of a big head. Green River was getting a little bit too small for him, so he sold everything and went to Salt Lake and got into real estate up there. And he sold the brewery and the house to Hugo Ganzlin. And it still belongs to the Ganzlin estate.

Barton: Do you know if the society here is making any plans or any provisions to keep the old building so that it won't be destroyed?

Graf: Well, they are talking about it. Now, just how far or what they are going to do or how far they can go—because we just don't have too much money. But they are sure pushing it. There was talk about it being torn down and they've got a stop put to that. I certainly think that is one of the places that should be preserved.

Barton: Yes.

Graf: That is one of the things that I can't understand. Your old churches, your old houses, and all, why they don't try to preserve any of them? Now, I've made a tour of Europe for six weeks about five years ago. And my heavens, the way they've preserved things out there, and the older it is the more they value it. And here, if—well golly, if it isn't two or three years old, it's no good. And that I don't understand. Our country has got to wake up. I notice in Denver, of course we used to go down there so much—with all those beautiful, beautiful homes and buildings that they had, now they have just completely wiped just blocks and blocks of them out. And put up these big old skyscraper things.

Barton: And those old homes are so gracious and elegant.

Graf: Oh yes, and if they would have—well surely some of them had to come down, but they could have renovated some of them to a certain extent and made something out of them. That's—I just don't understand. That's just to me an utter waste. Now, these other countries, they say oh they're so beautiful, they have this and they have that, we have this and we have that, why get rid of it. I don't understand.

Barton: I sure don't either. But it is an interesting building and I kind of wanted to know the history behind it.

Graf: It was, yeah, I don't—I have all sorts of clippings, I'm a great scrapbook keeper and things like that and I—now the year that that building was built, I can tell you that. On the west side up above there are—it looks like there's two big beer barrels, and down below—something runs in my head 1906. Now, will not vouch for it, but I know the year that that was built is on that building.

Barton: Well, it's a handsome old building.

Graf: It's a sturdy building. Of course, our old court house—I felt bad to see it go—it was built in 1876. But it was [unintelligible] and it had gotten to the stage where it was costing too much to keep it up. It was built of native adobe brick. And it was sagging and they had to reinforce it and naturally it wasn't big enough and to build on to a building like that, it’s really a—but it would have been nice if they could have kept it for something. But who would have the money to keep it up and maintain it?

I hope—now they are talking of building a new library. I hope when they do that, that they'll let that little library stand. This—the man that was instrumental in having that library built was Bobby Morris. Robert Morris, and he was the son of Esther Morris. You know who Esther Morris was. And he was the one that saw that Green River got that money to build that library, and he also was the one that saw to it that the first trees were planted in town. He did a lot for the town. He had a store, it was a two-story brick building. It was called the Morris Mercantile Company, and I still have the sugar bowl that man sold me when I was a little youngster.

My mother gave me a quarter—oh boy—that was a lot of money. I wanted to buy her a Christmas present, so she gave me a quarter. And I went to town. Down stairs they had dishes and all kinds of things, and they had a grocery store, meat market, a bank—well it was just—and a clothing store—it was just everything in one. It took in quite a—it took in about half a block. Well, it was just east of the brewery. It was that building that's there now. That two-story building. Only the old one burnt down.

Well, I went downstairs and I picked out this sugar bowl that I wanted for this Christmas present. And he told me it was 35 cents. I only had a quarter and he said well, if I wanted one without the lid, it was a quarter, but with the lid it was 35 cents. And I tell you. I guess I looked so hard at the lid and didn't have the money he wrapped it up and gave it to me. And I still have that sugar bowl. It's the most beautiful thing I ever saw.

Barton: As a historian, I'd like to know what sort of research or what sort of material you're using for your history of the Catholic Church here?

Graf: Well, I'll tell you, I had quite a problem. Now, Mr. Chadey gave me a book that the Knights of Columbus had put out and they had different things of the—now this is all it's got about ours. But it tells enough of the early history up to Father Schieler. And I had something that I, here—that I cut out of the register, where it told his whole life’s work. You see, he was here 40 years, and of course I can remember a lot of that myself.

I remember the first little Catholic Church. I can remember it. It was a little bit of a thing. And it's still being used as a house, as a residence. And then a present one was built, and that without a basement. And poor old Father Schieler used to dig it out with buckets and carry the dirt out, and that's how he dug the basement.  And first he got holes dug for two rooms. One he had used for a study and one was for a bedroom. And there is where he lived. And he dug out more and sometimes some of the parishioners would help him carry it out. Well, he finally got that dug out. Well, he just built that up.

Well, then the house, the parish house, was—when this big Morris Mercantile burnt down, he used to sit in that hole and clean those bricks. And have them hauled up there, and that house is built from the old bricks from that burnt store. But it is faced with the—oh, what are those fancy bricks that they have--kind of like a wire brick. They're brown and kind of rough like.

Barton: I know what you mean, but I can't recall the name of them.

Graf: Well, there's a name for them. And so that's that. Well, then he kept acquiring property and he kept acquiring property until he had that whole half block with the exception of one little corner, there's a little house sitting on the corner. And if he would have lived long enough and been here he would have had it, too. And he really worked hard. So between that and the piece I cut out of the paper, and different articles I'm going to get out of my scrapbook, I'll be able to get quite a history. And I don't like where they are putting the new church at all.

Barton: Where will it be located?

Graf: Well, do you know where the new high school is going to be? Well, it's east of that. And the Mormons are right across the street, we're on one side and they're just a little ways across the street. And they say that the reason they wanted the high schools over there, they wanted the release time for the kids so they could go to their religious instructions during school time. Which I think is ridiculous. They can get their religious instruction without imposing on the school. And but so, I don't know, I know now the bishop said it must be over there because that's the up-and-coming part of town. Now, people are grumbling because they say with all this being west, going in west of here, it's kind of out of the way.

Barton: Yes, it's a ways for children to go.

Graf: Well, anyway, I don't know how. So that's what I'm going to do, what I'm using for that. And then, of course my family’s history I won't have any problem, I've got all the information that I'll want to put in on that. And then, I said to someone, I must look like a historian. I'm getting tired of writing history. I wrote an early history of Green River. I think it was about 1945, I think that's when I wrote it.

When I ended it and I was always going to add on to it and I never did. And boy, everything started slam banging around so fast, I decided somebody else could do it. Carry on from there. And then I got a few years ago, they asked me to do a history on the Girl Scout movement from the time it started in Green River. So I got that together. Well, just this past winter I helped get the history of the woman's club from its beginning from 1926. So I said I'm getting tired of history. But, I kind of like it, as they know.

Barton: Well, it is interesting.

Graf: It's amazing what you come up with if you really stop and get back into history.

Barton: Yes, it is amazing the things that you can come up with.

Well, I think that I've hit all the points that I wanted to. If there's anything that you feel I've missed, please do add it.

Graf: I just don't know. I'll probably think of something later on, but right now I can't.

Barton: Well, I've very much enjoyed talking to you, I know that this tape is going to be a very big help.

Graf: Just play a little tiny bit of it back.

Barton: I would like at this time to add an additional comment. The sugar bowl that Mrs. Graf showed me, that was sold to her as a child by Robert Morris, is a rather pretty pressed glass, large sugar bowl, about 6 1/2 inches in diameter, with two real large loving cup-type handles and extremely ornate lid, with a large pressed-glass handle. And one can see why it would appeal to a child and why she would want to have the best for a Christmas present. And it's quite a family keepsake. It's a very handsome sugar bowl.

Transcribed by Ginger Elden July 31, 1975

Resources

For further reading and research

• Del Bene, Terry A. “Green River, Wyoming.” WyoHistory.org, accessed Sept. 16, 2016 at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/green-river-wyoming.

Illustrations

• The photo of the jury is from the collections of the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, used with permission and special thanks to Brie Blasi and the staff.
• The 1901 J.E. Stimson photo of the Green River Brewery is from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.

On May 9, 1950, a court in Green River, Wyo. found Otto Long guilty of second-degree murder. Long's attorney, Walter Muir Sr., complained, "I'd never have lost if it hadn't been for those damn women on the jury."

Did some men expect more lenient verdicts from all-male juries? Apparently so. For the past 80 years, they had been enjoying this bias, whether perceived or real, but now the fun was over.

With one minor exception, an 1891 civil case in the Bighorn Basin town of Bonanza, Wyo., the Long jury was the first with women on it after 1890, when Wyoming became a state. Members of the 1950 jury, which included six women, chose Louise Spinner Graf as their foreman, making her almost certainly the first woman in Wyoming, after statehood, to hold that office.

Woman jurors in Wyoming Territory

Wyoming's territorial government had paved the way on Dec. 10, 1869, when Gov. John Campbell signed into law the bill granting women the right to vote and to hold public office. Jury duty followed soon after the woman suffrage law when Territorial Chief Justice John Howe called women to serve.

On March 9, 1870, Eliza Stewart, an unmarried schoolmistress from Laramie, Wyo., became the first woman in the known history of the world to be subpoenaed for jury duty. Mrs. Martha Boies of Laramie was the first female bailiff, and Amalia Post of Cheyenne was the first woman jury foreman.

Recollections of Sarah Wallace Pease, another of the early woman jurors, were published in 1897.

Pease wrote that Howe and his associate justices wanted female jurors because "hitherto they had been unsuccessful in securing juries that would convict well-known guilty criminals.""The community [of Laramie] at that time was led and controlled by lawless and desperate men. … [T]here was a public sentiment that did not demand that criminals should be punished for their deeds. The Judge believed that women serving on the juries would remedy this flagrant evil, and inaugurate a better condition of things."

Reporters and artists from leading periodicals flocked to Laramie from all over the nation to view the novelty. "Of course, we were caricatured in the most hideous manner," wrote Pease. "Some of us were represented as sharp-nosed spinsters, holding a favorite cat or lap dog." The female jurors wore heavy veils when going to and from the court, and refused to sit in a body for their pictures.

The grand jury on which Pease served included six women. The panel in Laramie for three weeks, considering several murder cases as well as horse and cattle theft. In its most unpopular decision, that jury enforced the law requiring saloons to close on Sunday. "The courts were persistent in enforcing the [saloon closure] law, and imposed fines and penalties without stint," wrote Pease. "Nothing that had been done before created as much ill feeling."

Women also served on petit juries for three terms of court, convicting murderers and thieves, until Howe retired in September 1871. His successors opposed female jurors. In 1891, the Sept. 17 Cheyenne Daily Leader and the Sept. 19 Laramie Weekly Sentinel carried the same short paragraph from the Big Horn Rustler in Bonanza, Wyo, reporting that two women served on a civil jury in the case of W. S. Collins vs. E. Minnie Whittington. After this, the issue of female jurors appears to have lain dormant in Wyoming until 1949.

Meanwhile, other states were admitting women to jury service, with Utah leading in 1898. By 1949, 40 states, including Wyoming, allowed or required female jurors. By 1953, only six states were still holding out. A federal court decision in 1966, ruling that both racial and gender distinctions in state juries were unconstitutional, forced these six to capitulate. Mississippi was last, in 1968.

Wyoming's Woman Jury bill

On Feb. 19, 1949, Wyoming Gov. Arthur G. Crane signed House Bill No. 40, known as the "Woman Jury Bill." Introduced by Reps. Frank Mockler, Fremont County, and Madge Enterline, Natrona County, it was supported by numerous Business and Professional Women's organizations throughout the state. Effective Jan. 1, 1950, the bill read, "A person is competent to act as juror if he or she be:" and the list of existing qualifications followed—U.S. citizen, state and county resident, property owner and fluent in English. The bill also stated that a juror must be "[i]n possession of his or her natural faculties."

Despite this clear language, in February 1950 a defense attorney questioned it in a case pending in Albany County, in which Francis K. Yazzie was charged with criminal assault. Yazzie's attorney claimed that female jurors were ineligible because the 1949 legislation was invalid until the state constitution was amended. This question moved quickly to the Wyoming Supreme Court, which ruled on May 5, 1950, that the statute was sufficient, with no need to change the constitution. Subsequently, State vs. Yazzie was dismissed due to the disappearance of witnesses, but the trial of Otto Long opened in Sweetwater County only three days later. Women began to serve on juries throughout other parts of Wyoming as well.

Louise Spinner Graf, jury foreman

"[The jury] said that we should have a woman foreman," Louise Spinner Graf reminisced 25 years after the conviction of Otto Long. "[T]hey thought that I should be—because having lived here so long, and my people having been here so long."

Graf's father, Karl Spinner Jr., married Therese Weber in Renchen, German on April 22, 1901. The couple traveled to Green River, arriving on June 1 of that year, and lived there for the rest of their lives. Their daughter Louise was born in Green River on March 2, 1904.

Louise Spinner was valedictorian of the Green River Lincoln High School's graduating class of 1923. Majoring in accounting at the University of Wyoming, she returned to Green River after graduating and worked at the First National Bank and later at the State Bank of Green River, where she was the first female assistant cashier in their history.

On June 14, 1930, she married George J. Graf, of Arvada, Colo. For most of his career he worked in Rock Springs, Wyo., for the company that become Pacific Power and Light. The couple had one daughter, Mary Louise.

Graf joined the Woman's Club in Green River in 1932, serving as treasurer and auditor. She became an associate member of the Girl Scouts of America in 1940, and was involved for more than 30 years. She and her husband also organized and worked for the Sweetwater County Fair, and helped to start the Sweetwater County Historical Society. Louise served on the first executive board in 1956. A longtime member of the Wyoming State Historical Society, Graf wrote papers about many of her community activities, including the details of her jury service.

Commenting on the evidence in the Long case, Graf observed, "[I]t seemed that there were two fellows coming from Rock Springs and they had been drinking, and they stopped halfway between here and Rock Springs and got out of the car. And one shot the other, and killed him. … [O]f course we found him guilty."

As with any other jury, the members were isolated from the public. "[T]hey let us call home," Graf recalled, "to get something to stay overnight." Graf's daughter packed her a "real nice little suitcase." And, Graf reported with some amusement, "[O]ne man was so mad when his wife called him. He was from Rock Springs. About packing her suitcase. He had told her to tell them that she did not believe in capital punishment. And she didn't do it. And she was chosen. … [H]e just pretty near threw … [the suitcase] at her. He was just that mad that she was on that jury."

Women as jurors

The results of the "woman jury experiment" were unsurprising: Good female jurors, like good male jurors, are conscientious and committed to justice. There are also bad jurors of both sexes. This was probably well known back in 1870 by the time the first female jurors served in Wyoming Territory. "The story had obtained credence," wrote Pease, "that former [all-male] juries were in the habit of flipping coppers, shaking dice or playing a game of cards to determine what their verdict should be." At the same time the first female jurors criticized one of their number for embarrassing them, according to Pease, by "sitting there and knitting all day long."

Pease commented that the criminals and their supporters found "many ready to reassure them that they had nothing to fear, for women were chicken-hearted, and their tender feelings could easily be wrought upon." One prisoner was "a handsome young man, of a pale, dreamy Byronic type." The jury "promptly voted a verdict of guilty," presumably on the evidence, and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Beginning in 1950, court after court in Wyoming seated female jurors, with the first all-woman jury serving in Cody in January 1951. The comments of Wyoming judges and attorneys were uniformly positive. Justice Glenn Parker, who presided at the Long trial and later served on the Wyoming Supreme Court, stated, "I feel that the administration of justice in the State of Wyoming has been improved." Justice G.A. Layman of Sheridan reported that, "The fact that none of my [mixed male and female] juries were out an unreasonable length of time leads me to believe that women are just as willing as men to reconcile and compromise differences of opinion for the sake of reaching a just and fair verdict."

Louise Spinner Graf lived to be 93, dying on Oct. 28, 1997, in Laguna Beach, Calif. Her service as, apparently, the first female jury foreman since Wyoming territorial days remains an important milestone in the history of the state.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Barton, Bill. "Louise Graf, Jury Foreman and Green River Citizen." Accessed Sept. 23, 2016, at www.wyohistory.org/oral-histories/louise-graf-jury-foreman-and-green-river-citizen.
• "District Court Session Will Open Here Monday Morning." Unidentified newspaper clipping, May 4, 1950. Jury-Women research file, Sweetwater County Historical Museum, Green River, Wyo. (Hereafter SCHM)
• Graf, Louise Spinner. "The Spinner's [sic] in Green River." Sept. 2, 1949. Spinner/Gaensslen/Graf family file, SCHM.
• _______________. "Women on the Jury, 1950." Paper prepared and read by Louise Spinner Graf at the Sweetwater County Historical Society meeting, Feb. 8, 1970. Spinner/Gaensslen/Graf family file, SCHM. Also in Wyoming Blue Book, Vol. III, edited by Virginia Cole Trenholm. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, 1974, 422-425. Accessed Sept. 21, 2016, at http://wyoarchives.state.wy.us/pdf/WyomingBlueBookThree.pdf.
• "Graf's historical moment draws world interest." Unidentified newspaper clipping, no date. Spinner/Gaensslen/Graf family file, SCHM.
• "Jury Session to Open Here Monday; Supreme Court Okays Women Jurors." Unidentified newspaper clipping, no date. Jury-Women research file, SCHM.
• "Louise Graf Dies Oct. 28."Rock Springs Rocket, Oct. 29, 1997. Spinner/Gaensslen/Graf family file, SCHM.
• "Otto Long Murder Trial Starts Session of Court."Rock Springs Daily Rocket, May 9, 1950. Jury-Women research file, SCHM.
• Parker, Glenn. "The Significance of the Yazzie Case." Wyoming Blue Book, Vol. III, edited by Virginia Cole Trenholm. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, 1974, 420-422. Accessed Sept. 21, 2016, at http://wyoarchives.state.wy.us/pdf/WyomingBlueBookThree.pdf.
• Pease, Sarah Wallace. "Women as Jurors."Wyoming Historical Collections, Vol. 1, 1897. Reprinted in Wyoming Business and Professional Women's Clubs. History of Jury Service for Women. Thermopolis, Wyo, 1953.
• Session Laws, 1949, Chapter 61, Original House Bill No. 40, Jurors. Wyoming Blue Book, Vol. III, edited by Virginia Cole Trenholm. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, 1974, 419-420. Accessed Sept. 21, 2016, at http://wyoarchives.state.wy.us/pdf/WyomingBlueBookThree.pdf.
• "Women Serving on Jury Here For First Time." Unidentified newspaper clipping, May 1950. Jury-Women research file, SCHM.
• Wyoming Business and Professional Women's Clubs. History of Jury Service for Women. Thermopolis, Wyo, 1953. Jury-Women research file, SCHM.
• Wyoming Newspapers. Accessed Sept. 27, 2016, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov/:
• Cheyenne Daily Leader, Sept. 17, 1891; Laramie Weekly Sentinel, Sept. 19, 1891.

Secondary Sources

• "Glenn Parker: Wyoming Supreme Court 1955-1973." Accessed Sept. 19, 2016, at https://wyomingstatearchives.wikispaces.com/Glenn+Parker.
• Harrison, Cynthia. "Shoehorning American Women onto American Juries."H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences. Nov. 2013. Accessed Sept. 27, 2016, at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38851.
• Hein, Rebecca. "Big Horn County, Wyoming." WyoHistory.org, accessed Sept. 27, 2016, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/big-horn-county-wyoming.
• "History+." Business and Professional Women's Foundation. Accessed Sept. 27, 2016, at http://bpwfoundation.org/about/history-2/.
• Larson, T. A. History of Wyoming. 2d. ed., rev. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978, 84-85.
• Rea, Tom. "Right Choice, Wrong Reasons: Wyoming Women Win the Right to Vote." WyoHistory.org, accessed Sept. 21, 2016, at www.wyohistory.org/essays/right-choice-wrong-reasons-wyoming-women-win-right-vote.
• ­­________. "John Campbell and the Invention of Wyoming." WyoHistory.org, accessed Sept. 21, 2016, at www.wyohistory.org/essays/john-campbell-and-invention-wyoming.
• Thompson, D. Claudia. "Amalia Post, Defender of Women's Rights." WyoHistory.org, accessed Sept. 21, 2016, at www.wyohistory.org/essays/amalia-post-defender-women's-rights.
• “Timeline 1949.” Wyoming Blue Book, Vol. III, edited by Virginia Cole Trenholm. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, 1974, 457-458. Accessed Sept. 21, 2016, at http://wyoarchives.state.wy.us/pdf/WyomingBlueBookThree.pdf.
• Whittenberg, Clarice. "Portrait of an 'Ordinary' Woman: Eliza Stewart Boyd."Annals of Wyoming 29: 1, April 1957. Accessed Sept. 20, 2016, at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom29121957wyom#page/n33/mode/2up/search/jury.

Illustrations

• The 1950 photo of the jury is from the Sweetwater County Historical Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photos Amalia Post, Frank Mockler and Madge Enterline are from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks.

Mrs. Robert C. Morris of New York is an authority on Western fishing. ... In the Winter she lives on Fifth Avenue, and goes to the opera, and rides in her limousine, and does the other things that city women do; in the Summer she is off to the Rockies to fish, ride the mountain trails, camp, and fish again (New York Times, May 12, 1918).

A wealthy New York socialite seemed an unlikely candidate to spearhead one of the earliest efforts to establish a standard trail system in Yellowstone National Park. But Alice Morris was no stranger to the park. By 1917, she had come to the Yellowstone country each summer for many years, camping, fishing and riding horses.

From Army to Park Service

When Morris came to Yellowstone – “America’s Wonderland” – the park was struggling through a difficult transition. In 1883, the U.S. Army took over management of the park, which was suffering from vandalism, poaching and poor administration. The Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Cavalry managed the park until 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Act. The last soldiers left Fort Yellowstone in October, turning over management to the National Park Service. The first Park rangers were 22 discharged Army men.

The transition did not go smoothly. Local communities wanted the Army back, and politicians blocked funding for the civilian force. Army management made a temporary return, but when the United States entered World War I, troops were needed in Europe. Congress reluctantly provided non-military funding for the park in July 1918.

Getting around

The original road system was built by the competent Army Corps of Engineers. One of the earliest park superintendents, Philetus W. Norris, devised a system of circular loop roads to connect the natural wonders. During his tenure from 1877-1882, workers completed about 104 miles of today’s 140-mile Grand Loop Road.

The Army then took over administration. Lieutenant Dan C. Kingman concentrated on improving the hastily built roads, set park road standards, and built several substantial bridges. Norris and other pre-Army superintendents also began laying out a system of foot and horseback trails to access the park’s attractions and to patrol the backcountry. These early trails often followed existing American Indian routes, game trails, or, simply, paths of least resistance.

The military, charged with controlling poaching and wildfires, established regular patrols that used existing roads and trails. Gradually new trails were added to the park system. Starting in about 1890, the Army built patrol cabins for shelter during the winter months. These so-called snowshoe cabins were strategically located throughout the park and were eventually connected by trails.

Fire control was a major concern after the Great Fire of 1910 (“the Big Blowup”), which burned over 3 million acres of forest in Washington, Idaho and Montana, and killed at least 85 people. The Army began building new trails that served a dual purpose—tourism and fire prevention. Many of the trails were designated as “firelanes.”

By 1917, about 400 hundred miles of trails were in common use, including 280 miles classified as firelanes. Milton P. Skinner, a geologist intimately familiar with the park, suggested an additional 521 miles of new trails. In 1916, cars began streaming into the park, and it became imperative to separate horseback travel from auto traffic.

“I had long known the Park”

Although Alice Morris was a world traveler and could afford to visit any destination, she chose Yellowstone National Park. For several summers she stayed on a homestead claimed in 1913 by G. Milton Ames along Slough Creek just north of the park. “Lady Morris,” as she was known, first stayed in a tent, later a log cabin accompanied by her cook, Estelle. Morris kept five ponies and a colt on the homestead and often traveled into the park.

Usually, she left her husband in New York. Robert Clark Morris was born into a prominent New England family. He graduated with a law degree from Yale. In 1890, he married Alice Parmelee, age 17, and soon established a law practice in New York City. He and Alice were active in civic, social and political affairs. In 1896 they sailed to Japan, where they visited Yokohama, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. She subsequently wrote an illustrated book, Dragons and Cherry Blossoms, about the adventure. This thin volume displayed her writing skills, which she would one day put to good use in her reports on the Yellowstone trails.

An invitation

Alice must have been a notable sight during her visits to Yellowstone, exploring the park on horseback. In 1917, at age 44, she was invited by the Park Service to undertake a study of the trails. That summer, she covered 1,500 miles on horseback, mapping and blazing a system of trails.

She described her adventures to a reporter in a New York Times article that ran February 10, 1918. She related her daily regimen of waking at 5 AM, riding all day working out a route across a variety of terrains, sometimes through deep snow, and swimming the horses through rivers. She concluded her long days around a campfire, making notes of the day’s journey. “Work? Of course it was work,” she said. “But it was the most stimulating kind of work you can imagine.”

Two reports

As a result of that summer’s explorations, she compiled two official reports. The first,“Notes on Trail Study in Yellowstone Park” (1917), provided park officials with specific recommendations, including suggestions for trail connections and complete marking of the trails. Her subsequent report, “Map and Description of the Trails in and about Yellowstone Park” (1918) was an eloquent essay on the beauty and wildness Yellowstone offered tourists willing to travel the back country. Her observations included colorful descriptions of wildlife, flora and geysers.

Her 1917 report recommended three circular trails. One, she urged, should connect the principal hotels; the second would be a series of trails radiating like spokes from the hotels for short trips; her third recommendation proposed an outer loop through the wilderness to the borders of the park, based on existing firelanes. The report listed all the trails she rode and her recommendations for specific improvements, shortcuts or new trails.

She advised that trail specifications be followed and used as a basis for construction and inspection of new trails:

Trails should be cut 6 ft. wide through timber, and graded 3 ft. wide on all side hills, and through rough ground. Also that overhanging branches be removed from trees. Small stumps and snags should be cut below the level of the ground, if possible, and the trail should be reasonably free from sharp turns, sudden declivities and loose stones. All trails to be constructed should be run out with a hypsometer [an instrument for measuring height or altitude] or some such simple instrument and staked, in order to establish an even grade. Recommended that the maximum grade on any trail constructed be 10 per cent, very few grades being over 8 per cent.

…It is suggested that on this trail work there be appointed a Trail Master, whose business it should be to plan and superintend work on all trails in order that the system of trails may present a uniform appearance. The existing trails give an unpleasant impression of dissimilarity of method of construction.

Appreciative of her summer’s labors, Superintendent Lindsley graciously wrote Alice: “The manner in which you have handled this important problem of our National Park, and the completeness and charm of expression of your reports and notes, is a joy. And best of all, to my mind, you have made the whole scheme perfectly a practicable one, and I hope that you can be the one to see it carried eventually to completion, and enjoyed and appreciated by the public.”

“The fishing – Oh, the fishing!”

The unusual combination of socialite and explorer had begun to catch the public’s eye. Morris was interviewed by a New York Times reporter for an article that appeared on May 12, 1918. Answering his questions about fly fishing, she scoffed at any fisherman who would sink to using worms. “The keenest joy in fishing,” she observed, “was luring a trout that you’ve never been able to catch…But when you get him, you are satisfied… It has been a battle of wits, a tussle of strategy, and you’ve won! That’s fishing!”

Fishing remained one of Alice Morris’s greatest passions. She exclaimed in the Times article, “The fishing—Oh, the fishing in the Yellowstone!—is such fishing as the passionate angler dreams of….The day’s ride along the trails finds always a jewel-like lake in the mountains, or a crystal sparkling stream, at the edge of which to make camp when evening falls.”

“This unique splendor”

Alice Morris expected that her longer, more impressionistic 1918 report, along with 32 photos, would be published by the National Park Service. However, this author was unable to locate any record of an officially published version. The 1918 report survives in the Yellowstone National Park archives. This second report provides the basis of this article and will be quoted at length. She began by explaining the urgent necessity of her explorations. The introduction of the automobile had made travel much easier, she wrote, but many feared a loss of the park’s “primitive charm” would result.

To…make public the information that would establish the Yellowstone National Park more firmly than it ever had been before as the people’s wonderland – a unique and marvelous thing to see, a safe and simple place to visit, a delightful, picturesque, magnificent country to ride through and camp in and enjoy – the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior asked me to map the trails and bridle paths…The motor cars travel over a small part of the park’s great area. Into all the magnificence of the wilderness, otherwise inaccessible, go the trails.

Of course, Alice Morris lived in a world far removed from today’s. Present-day park management of some 4 million visitors per year would have been beyond her imagination.

“Harmless, good-natured” bears

Though Alice Morris was an experienced backcountry traveler, her attitudes towards safety on pack trips seem naïve today:

It is safe in spite of black bears and mountain elk, of precipitous canyons and rushing rivers. It is so safe that women and children may set out with a pack-train. The pack-train is of course accompanied by a guide, and all the Yellowstone guides are well-known and experienced men…As for the wild animals that roam the hills…they simply pay no attention to him at all. Now and then a great black bear will come lumbering out of the forest and cross the bridle-path. His big clumsy body may halt its swinging gait as he hears the pack-train’s approach; his wistful, humourous [sic] face may turn gravely for a moment toward the intruders in his domain; but after all he is used to them; they are harmless; they are not worth more than an instant’s attention; he ambles on. And the horses, by no means disturbed, keep on their way. … The grizzly bears are made of different stuff. They seek no compromise in their ancient enmity. They have their homes – the few that are in the Park – in remote fastnesses high up in the hills. Man almost never meets them; he never wants to.

Morris did not record any incidents involving bears during her horseback rides through the park that summer of 1917. Only the summer before, however, a large grizzly attacked and killed a teamster, Frank Welch, who was sleeping under his wagon. His was the first documented death from grizzly attack in Yellowstone National Park.

The “bear problem” started after two large hotels opened in the park in 1891 and developed large waste dumps. Emboldened by these dumps, bears gradually lost their fear of humans and started begging from tourists along the park roads. Visitors tended to underestimate the risk, approaching the bears to feed or photograph them.

From 1931 to 1969, an average of 46 people per year were injured by black bears. Only 8 people have been killed by grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park during its 146-year history. Eventually, the dangerous combination of garbage dumps and tourists became evident. By 1973, the dumps were permanently closed, and many problem bears were transplanted to remote areas.

“The whole park is a flower garden”

Alice observed that “the flowers grow, wild and luxuriant, as they grow in primeval lands,” and singled out a few as objects of her particular affection. Lupine, pale lavender to deep purple and blue, was the dominant flower growing in masses on the hillsides; the gentian was “…a clear blue fringed flower that…remains characteristically the Yellowstone’s own.” She was especially charmed by columbine and Indian paintbrush, which changed to a large, gracefully formed flower of deep magenta or crimson in the high peaks.

Morris admitted that the auto tourist could now visit most of the “spectacular wonders” of the park, but only those who traveled the trails by pack-train could linger in their own favorite places for as long as they chose, even all summer if they liked. “Everyone knows that there are geysers there,” she wrote; “almost everyone knows that there are petrified forests; few Americans, I think, understand the untouched natural beauty and interest even in little things that lie in this American wonderland.”

Magic fountains

Despite the fact that Alice Morris considered the geysers an obvious Yellowstone attraction, she devoted several pages of her report to their description. Although geologists classified and explained the geyser phenomena in great detail, Morris related to the simple “wonder and delight” of the tourist in seeing them. “These great bursts of silver beauty from the earth are so mysterious, so splendid, so curiously varied.” Many of the names she used are still in use today:

Here is Black Warrior, whose fountain play never ceases, and the indolent lovely majestic Giantess that rests from five to forty days! The explosive Minute Man sends his silver shower into the air for fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds, and then stops. The Giant plays for precisely one hour at a time. And there is the exquisite little Jewel, whose magic fountain is never more than twenty feet high, whereas the Giant, the highest stream of all, sends forth a gleaming misted tower with a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 250 feet. The Fan is unlike most of the other geysers in that it throws its water at an angle instead of vertically. Castle Geyser, with a gush of seventy-five feet or so, has built itself an impressive crater from which it takes its name. The Beehive is a creation of simple artistry – a slender column of water that rises to a height of 200 feet from a small beehive mound. The Great Fountain’s basin is strangely and pleasingly ornamented, and its volume of water is extraordinarily large.

In her 1918 report, Alice Morris called the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone “one of the great natural wonders of the world”:

It is a place not only of beauty and majesty of line, but of magnificent color – so magnificent, so varied, that it is as if a single artist has spilled his gorgeous tint upon the rocks. Leaving its quiet valley, the river tumbles first over the Upper Falls and then on to the Lower Falls, where it is truly a queen in its flowing robes of silver as it dashes in glory down what is perhaps the most beautiful waterfall in the world.

“Into all the magnificence of the wilderness, otherwise inaccessible, go the trails”

The nuts and bolts of Alice’s 1918 report were the trail-by-trail descriptions. Portions of this segment of her 1918 trail study were printed in the “Yellowstone National Park: Rules and Regulations” issued in 1920. However, as stated earlier, it does not appear that her 1918 report was ever printed in its entirety as an official park pamphlet.

The recommendations

Correspondence between Alice Morris and Superintendent Lindsley in February and March 1918 indicate how seriously he took her recommendations concerning the park trail system. In regard to her 1917 report, Lindsley stated that “I only wish there were room for all of it in our little booklet on park information which is distributed by the thousands each summer. I have already recommended that your Trail Notes be added to that circular, and trust it may not be too late to have it done for the season of 1918.”

In a letter dated February 15, Lindsley stressed the necessity of cutting out and marking the north boundary line of the park and the west line of the park from the northwest corner, “as this is a favorite hunting country in the fall and there is some doubt as to the location of the line on the part of hunters.” He also recommended heavy rock work on the trail north of the Yellowstone River.

Lindsley requested a map from Morris, as well as cost estimates for conducting the work, based on three (possibly four) crews of four men each and four pack horses in the field; a map and cost figures were attached to his letter in park files, indicating her response. Her agenda for trail work was much more ambitious than Lindsley mentioned in his letter. She also calculated the number of days needed for each project to be completed.

She attached two appendices, one of which provided for improvement of Uncle Tom’s Trail from the canyon rim to the shore of the river. “Many people persist in using this trail in its present dangerous condition in spite of sign at its head and warnings duly given. Steps can be cut in rock, iron hand-rails provided, and earth part widened, relocated, and re-graded.”

Many of Alice’s recommendations were later incorporated by the Park Service as funding and other priorities allowed. One of her suggestions for a new trail has become today’s Trail Creek Trail, which follows the north and east sides of Heart Lake, then continues east along the south shores of the South and Southeast Arms of Yellowstone Lake to connect with the Thorofare Trail. Milton P. Skinner also recommended this route in his 1917 report. He stated that “a fair game trail covers most of the route.” Superintendent Albright agreed with them both and recommended that it be added to the trail system in his 1919 and 1920 “Report of the Superintendent.” The trail was finally constructed during the years 1934-1936.

In the same area, she recommended constructing what has become today’s Snake River or Snake River Cutoff Trail. She also suggested the construction of the Elephant’s Back Trail at the north end of Lake Yellowstone, which was subsequently built in 1928, as well as what is today’s Buffalo Fork Trail at the north end of the park. This trail was finally designated on park maps in 1937.

Down the rabbit hole

As for the rest of Alice’s life, after her 1917 summer of trail-breaking and subsequent articles, little is known about her. The Slough Creek homestead, her summer home for many years, was sold in 1918 and became a part of the Silver Tip Ranch, a guest ranch with a rustic lodge and polo field. Alice Morris ceased her summer visits to the homestead, and her name is not mentioned in a history of the Silver Tip Ranch from 1922-1947, written by A. Conger Goodyear.

No evidence has been found of any further association between Alice Morris and Yellowstone National Park. After G. Milton Ames sold his property in 1918, Alice Morris stayed with Mrs. Joe B. Duret, wife of “Frenchy” Duret, on a nearby homestead. Her visit in June 1921 was mentioned in a local newspaper: “Mrs. Duret looks after the comforts of a number of tourists every year at her place on Slough Creek on the Cooke City Road, where she will entertain this year, Mrs. Robert Morris, wife of a prominent New York lawyer, who arrived in Livingston Wednesday from the east.”

The remainder of Alice Morris’s life is a mystery. In the 1920s, she and Robert C. Morris were divorced. The couple never had any children. After the divorce, her name vanished from the society pages of the New York Times. Robert C. Morris remarried, but his second wife died only 17 months later. He passed away in 1938, leaving one-quarter of his estate to Alice. At that time, Alice had not remarried, and she resided in Palm Springs, California.

Did Alice Morris ever return to Yellowstone National Park after committing so much time and energy to the development of its trail system? Further research may cast new light on her later life, but for now this dynamic woman from New York City deserves recognition for her contributions to Yellowstone’s backcountry trails. In her report, she added:

I had long known the Park… and had literally chosen it as in all the world the most interesting, enjoyable goal for summer journeyings. Certainly, too, the earth knows no place more beautiful, just as it knows no place that is at all like the Yellowstone National Park.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Anderson, George S. Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to the Secretary of the Interior, 1892. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892.
• Anderson, George S. Report of the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to the Secretary of the Interior, 1895. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895.
• Hale, Elaine Skinner. “A Brief History of the Slough Creek Wagon Road,” typewritten 13-page manuscript dated 19 June 2006. On file at Branch of Cultural Resources, Yellowstone Center for Resources, Yellowstone National Park.
• National Park Service. Yellowstone National Park: Rules and Regulations, 1920. “Trails in and About Yellowstone National Park”, by Mrs. Robert C. Morris. Accessed Nov. 1, 2016 at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/brochures/1920/yell/sec4.htm.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, Item No. 113: Roads and Trails, 1912-1918; letter report dated November 15, 1916, from Chester A. Lindsley, Acting Supervisor to the Superintendent of National Parks, Washington, D.C. concerning statistics for roads and trails in Yellowstone National Park.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Item No. 113: Roads & Trails, 1912-1918, “June 1917, Suggested Addition to System of Trails in Yellowstone National Park with Advantages of the Trails Mentioned, Present Condition of Trails where Old Trails Exist, and Estimated Cost of Necessary Work” by Milton P. Skinner, Geologist, 13 pages.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Item No. 113: Roads & Trails, 1912-1918. Folder 342, five page letter dated November 20, 1917, from Major John W.H. Schulz, District Engineer, Corps of Engineers, to the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. concerning trails in Yellowstone National Park.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, Folder: Notes on Trail Study in Yellowstone Park, 1917, by Alice P. Morris, File No. 332.4; Yellowstone Trails by Alice P. Morris, 1918.
• Yellowstone National Park Archives, Pre-National Park Service Collection, Letter Box 72, File No. 332.4; letters dated February 15 and March 14, 1918, from C.A. Lindsley, Superintendent Yellowstone National Park, to Alice Morris, concerning Yellowstone National Park trails and suggested improvements.
• “Yellowstone Trails Blazed by New York Woman.” The New York Times Magazine, 10 February 1918, p. 7.
• “From Fifth Avenue She Turns to Fly-Fishing.” The New York Times, 12 May 1918.
• Mrs. Robert C. Morris of New York at her camp, Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone Park, Wyoming.” Photograph and caption, The New York Times, 16 August 1914.
• “Local News.” The Park County News, Livingston, Montana, 28 June 1921. Reference to Mrs. Joe B. Duret and summer visit of Mrs. Robert Morris.
• “Bear Killed and Ate Mont. Trapper.” The Cody Enterprise, Cody, Wyoming, 28 June 1922, p. 1.
• U.S. Forest Service. “The 1910 Fires.” U.S. Forest Service History. Forest History Society 2012. Accessed Nov. 1, 2016 at http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Policy/Fire/FamousFires/1910Fires.aspx.

Secondary Sources

• Culpin, Mary Shivers. The History of the Construction of the Road System in Yellowstone National Park, 1872-1966. Historic Resource Study, Vol. 1, No. 5. Denver: National Park Service, Rocky Mountain Region, 1994.
• Egan, Timothy. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009.
• Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story, Volumes 1 and 2. Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1996.
• No Author. “Robert Clark Morris, 1869-1938.” The New York Community Trust, New York, NY. http://www.nycommunitytrust.org/Portals/0/…/BioBrochures/Robert%20Clark%20Morris.pdf.
• Whithorn, Doris. Twice Told on the Upper Yellowstone, Volume 2. Published by Doris Whithorn, Livingston, Montana, 1994.
• Whittlesey, Lee H. Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. Second Edition. Lanham, Maryland: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 2014.

Illustrations

• The photos of Alice Morris on her horse, the cabin on Slough Creek and the cook, Estelle, are from the Yellowstone Gateway Museum of Park County, Livingston, Montana, all now in the authors’ collection as well. Used with thanks.
• The map of Yellowstone trails that Alice Morris prepared for her 1918 report to the Department of the Interior is from the Pre-National Park Service Collection, Yellowstone National Park Archives, now in the authors’ collection. The photos the Trail Creek Trail bridge, tourists riding the Howard Eaton Trail and the tourist above the Yellowstone River, are all from Box L-8, 1934 Fire Trails, Yellowstone National Park Archives and are now in the authors’ collection as well. Used with thanks.
• The photos of the steps to the foot of the Lower Yellowstone Falls and the waterfall itself are by the authors, 2009. The photo of the Blue Sapphire Pool is from 2016, also by the authors. Used with thanks.

In 1973 in Lander, Wyo., a father faced a difficult choice: Buy rubber boots to get his daughter through the Wyoming snows? Or continue pouring family funds into his newspaper and its quixotic mission—saving Wyoming? High Country News Publisher and Editor Tom Bell must have chosen the boots.

Bell announced in the March 2, 1973 edition that he was closing the newspaper, which he had launched just four years earlier. His wife, Tommie, and he had put $30,000 into its operation; he had drawn a salary in 1971 and 1972 that totaled only $910.97, he said. He had three little children at home, all adopted. He still owed $7,500 on a bank note from when the paper was first launched. He said he had few regrets about giving up.

High Country News still lives, however, 43 years later. After the 1973 announcement, pledges and commitments flooded in; readers sent in small checks and appealed to their philanthropic friends. In the July 6, 1973, issue, he announced a “miracle”: They had received $29,467.75, and he paid off the bank loan.

Why did this small newspaper with only 2,608 subscribers inspire such a dramatic response? When asked to remember those days, Wyomingites told Wyohistory.org that they credit both the man and the significance of the threats the region faced at that time.

The threats

The most significant threat was coal development. In earlier decades, most of the coal was mined underground in Wyoming, but by the early 1970s, huge strip mines were being proposed along with power plants and synthetic fuel plants that would transform the rural region into what Bell and his supporters saw as an industrialized colony. Some called it a National Sacrifice Area. The North Central Power Study, a joint government-industry effort published in 1971, predicted construction of 42 power plants on the Northern Plains. While the six major Western coal states would produce only 9,000 megawatts of coal-fired electricity in 1972, the study predicted that the northern states would produce five times that much by 1980 and 200,000 megawatts per year by the year 2020.

Government and industry looked to the Northern Plains to solve the nation’s energy crisis and proposed ambitious projects. Near Pinedale, Wyo., the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to use 100 nuclear bombs underground to frack tight shale beds to release natural gas. Along the Green River in southwestern Wyoming, developers proposed diverting water across the Continental Divide to feed the giant coal-fired power plants. Another plan called for tapping precious groundwater and mixing it into a coal slurry that would be shipped to Arkansas.

At the same time, ranchers were shooting and poisoning hundreds of eagles to protect their livestock. Pronghorns were suffering slow deaths, tangled in illegal barbed-wire fences on public lands in the Red Desert, fences that also excluded the public from those lands. The Forest Service was allowing huge, 1,000-acre clear cuts of timber that denuded hillsides, filled rivers with topsoil and could not be sustained.

The High Country News covered all of these issues, and despite its small circulation, enjoyed an outsized influence. Reading about the North Central Power Study in HCN, the editor of Science News called Bell to confirm what he read: The numbers could not be right. When Bell referred him to the study itself, the editor ran a front page story on it. Wyoming’s lone congressman, U.S. Rep. Teno Roncalio, was on a first-name basis not only with Bell but also with his office manager, Mary Margaret Davis.

Dick Prouty, environmental reporter for the Denver Post, recognized early the importance of the High Country News when the big energy companies began quoting it. “They respected the reporting there, and we all started using it for ideas,” Prouty said. The paper’s “miracle” was covered by the Los Angeles Times. Audubon magazine sent historian Alvin Josephy to investigate the threats and ran his in-depth analysis of the North Central Power Study, “Agony of the Northern Plains,” in its July 1, 1973, issue.

The man

Tom Bell was born in Wyoming, and so was the High Country News. Their indigenous roots served them well in an era when ranchers and mining interests tried to tie the fledgling environmental movement to outsiders. No one could question Bell’s credentials. He didn’t just wear jeans, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. He hunted, lived on a ranch—until he had to sell it to save the newspaper—trapped and, when he was a student at the University of Wyoming after World War II, started the rodeo club there. His father was a coal miner.

Tom had staked uranium claims with his fellow teachers, later selling the uranium stock to subsidize HCN. It was his passion, however, that ignited a movement in Wyoming. Small in stature, he seemed to have a gargantuan presence.

Many people shared his desire to save Wyoming, but the Northern Plains had no environmental movement in the 1960s, only isolated organizations with differing priorities and no paid staff. In 1967 Bell started the Wyoming Outdoor Coordinating Council, now called the Wyoming Outdoor Council.

Though he did not intend to start an environmental newspaper, Bell needed a forum for sharing news among the groups in the WOCC and their members. As it turned out, Camping News Weekly was closing. Bell took out a loan in 1969 to purchase the publication and in 1974 transformed it into the High Country News. Realizing that he could not continue to run both WOCC and HCN, he convinced the WOCC board to take out a loan and hire Keith Becker.

There was no business plan for High Country News, but practicality was never high on Tom’s list of priorities or that of his wife, Tommie. By then he had quit several different jobs, one after he told a member of the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission to go to hell. He was very clear about his priorities in 1970: “I view conservation not just as a job nor as an avocation but as a way of life and a means to survival for the human race. It is a deadly serious business in which a person must be willing to sacrifice, personally as well as economically.”

The vision

Bell provided three things: well-researched information, a vision of how to tackle the problems and often the nudge to get people to work. With the exception of The Denver Post and the Missoulian in Montana, there were no other reporters focusing on environmental issues in the region at the time. The Casper Star-Tribune of the early 1970s focused instead on discrediting the environmentalists, according to Bruce Hamilton, who later joined Bell as an editor at HCN.

“He was a catalyst for me, constantly on your case to do something. He was a buzz bomb of dedication and tenacity,” Leslie Petersen says. Petersen’s parents, Les and Alice Shoemaker, owned a dude ranch near Dubois, Wyo. The Shoemakers were alarmed about the clearcutting in the Shoshone National Forest around them and worked to protect the DuNoir area in particular, losing friends in the process in a community dependent upon the timber mill. Petersen’s father served as the second president of the WOCC Board, and she learned about broader environmental issues when she attended meetings with him and read High Country News.

Bell conveyed his vision in a letter to Wyoming Gov. Stan Hathaway in 1972, pleading for a special session of the Legislature to deal with “impending social, economic and environmental problems.” The letter suggested specific legislative initiatives.

Hathaway, however, rejected Bell’s vision, saying the energy plans did not seem imminent. Bell never forgave him and often in the High Country News, vented his wrath against Hathaway, U.S. Sen. Cliff Hansen, and other individuals who, he thought, imperiled wildlife and the state’s future.

Bell was perceived as “someone to be reckoned with, someone who knew his stuff and would not back off,” Petersen says.

“No one could threaten him. He was absolutely fearless and confrontational. He acted as if he had nothing to lose,” according to Keith Becker, who worked side by side with Bell when the WOCC and HCN shared an office. Bell was more incendiary in print than in person. “Tom was so earnest that he was able to disarm people,” Becker says.

War

Bell’s war experience shaped his perspective on risk, sacrifice and beauty. Flying as a bombardier over Italy in 1944, he was hit by shrapnel that destroyed his right eye and nearly killed him. He was told he would never see again. Later, at the age of 90, he told historian Mark Junge, “It was not as tough being an environmentalist as it was serving in World War II.”

Getting his vision back solidified his love for Wyoming and specifically for the Red Desert where he went after the war to recover from his emotional scars. “It was important to see the beautiful earth,” he said. When Junge asked what his family lived on, he said, “If I had enough money to put beans in my belly and have a roof over my head, that’s all I needed.”

His family’s and his staff’s dedication and sacrifices seem even more surprising than Bell’s. Losing the family ranch to pay HCN bills was heartbreaking for both Tom and Tommie, she said. Knowing how little money he was bringing home and how much they owed, it was she who suggested adopting three children after raising three of their own. Their courage inspired his two employees (Mary Margaret Davis and Marge Higley), who also went without salaries for six months, and the newspaper’s printer, who let printing bills slide, unpaid.

Bell himself was amazed at his readers’ loyalty and the miracle that resurrected HCN. Earlier, when he announced the closing of HCN in 1973, he had admitted that he had “few regrets.” When his readers sent donations and would not let him quit, he advertised for someone to help him with the editorial duties.

Joan Nice, a 25-year-old journalist from Colorado, arranged an interview, and he hired her on the spot, offering $300 per month. She hesitated only for a moment, saying they would have to find a job for her boyfriend bagging groceries or something. Instead, Bell hired them both, paying them $300 each. Bell, Nice and Bruce Hamilton shared editorial duties for a few months.

Then, suddenly, Bell announced he was leaving.

Move to Oregon

It turned out that Bell had something to lose after all. The 50-year-old man behind the legend was very human. He suffered from migraines and mercurial moods, twice over the years throwing the HCN layout sheets into the trash where his staff went to retrieve them. He also suffered from guilt about neglecting his family. He believed the world was going to hell, and his obligation was to move to Oregon where the climate lent itself to gardening, and he could better support his family.

When he walked out the door, he left his leadership role as well, unlike most founders of institutions. “Play with it until the string runs out,” he told his staff. He continued to contribute his “High Country” column, but he never tried to tell Joan Nice and Bruce Hamilton or subsequent staff how to edit or finance the newspaper.

Looking back, people involved in the Wyoming environmental movement at the time realize that the work took a heavy toll on many people, not just him. “We were a bunch of zealots, overdoing it,” in the words of one person. Working 60-70 hours a week for little or no pay, they acted as if they could save the world in their lifetimes. Relationships and physical health suffered. Constantly trying to raise money from the same people to fight crises destroyed friendships.

Evolution

Without Bell at the helm, the newspaper evolved into a more objective, less strident publication that focused on the environment. Bell had a fiery temper and made no attempt at objectivity, even testifying at public hearings on behalf of the readers. In Bell’s apoplectic newspaper, the sword of Damocles hung over the Clarks Fork River, sites for nuclear power plants and various other threatened areas.

Nice’s and Hamilton’s approach was different. They felt that if they laid out the facts, people would be convinced. “He was the right person to do it his way. Tom’s credentials as a native Wyomingite gave him credibility, but we were outsiders. We didn’t have the authority to speak for what Wyoming should do. Making it more objective was the only appropriate thing we could do,” Nice says.

Hamilton later left the High Country News to open a Sierra Club office in Lander. He and Nice were married and started having children and eventually left the state to work for the Sierra Club. By the time Nice left the HCN editorship in 1981, the newspaper circulation had increased to 9,000 and the paper continued to attract national attention as people such as Edward Abbey and Robert Redford visited Lander and spread the word about the paper.

Subsequent editors and financial managers continued the paper’s gradual progress toward stability, most notably converting it from a privately owned business owned by Tom Bell to nonprofit status so it could receive tax-deductible donations from individuals and foundations. In 1983, when Bell returned to Wyoming, editor Geoffrey O’Gara, the architect of this change, tried to ask Bell what he thought of the foundation. He had no interest in the details and just said, “Thanks for keeping it alive.”

In 1983, the board hired Ed and Betsy Marston to run the newspaper, and they moved it to Paonia, Colorado. High Country News had a truckload of files and photos and $7,000 in the bank, but the string never ran out and, in fact, the newspaper is thriving.

High Country News now has a budget of $3 million and more than 10 times as many paid subscribers as it had in 1974 (31,000). The website, which includes a full archive of back issues, attracts 360,000 unique visitors each month. The breadth of its coverage has continued to grow, reflecting the change in the tag line from “the environmental biweekly” to “for people who care about the West.” Bell’s other creation, the Wyoming Outdoor Council, has also thrived. Once struggling to support a half-time director, WOC now owns a building in Lander, has a staff of 12, and will celebrate its 50^th anniversary in 2017.

Until his death in Lander Aug. 30, 2016, Bell continued to fight to protect the Oregon Trail and the Red Desert. In his 90s, he was still writing angry letters to lawmakers about climate change. “Most of us mellow with age, but not Tom,” says Keith Becker. “He didn’t know how to back up, and God bless him for it.”

Looking back

Wyoming conservationists were remarkably successful in the 1970s. Some of the victories could be attributed specifically to Tom Bell. For example, U.S. Rep. Teno Roncalio wrote to Bell in 1974 about the federal coal surface mining law saying, “written landowner consent remains in the bill, and you deserve credit for that.” He personally brought national attention that eliminated illegal fencing and protected the Red Desert that he loved.

However, Tom was at the helm of High Country News for only five of its 13 years in Wyoming and about one-tenth of its full life; HCN will turn 50 in 2019. In contrast, the current publisher, Paul Larmer, has been publisher for 13 years, and the previous publishers, Ed and Betsy Marston, were publishers for 19 years.

His impact should be measured by the environmental movement that he sparked. Told recently that he left in 1974, Leslie Petersen, one of the early staffers, was surprised. “He got us all started, and then he left.” Bart Koehler, who served as the Outdoor Council’s executive director after Becker, calls Bell the Paul Revere of Wyoming. “Just as Revere was a patriot for spreading the alarm, so was Tom.”

Wyoming conservationists blocked the biggest threats of the 1970s and convinced the legislature to address not only the environmental but also the social impacts of development, as Bell had envisioned. Most of the power plants and gasification plants were never built. The Green River was never sent across the Continental Divide. The nuclear fracking plan was abandoned. The slurry pipeline was never built. Near Dubois, the DuNoir was designated a special management area, which prevented clearcutting there, and the oversized timber mill was shut down.

In 1973, environmentalists helped convince the Wyoming Legislature to pass an Environmental Quality Act, which established a Department of Environmental Quality. In 1974, Koehler and others recruited constituents to demand an Industrial Siting and Information act, which was passed by the Legislature in 1975. Also that year, Gov. Hathaway was replaced by a moderate Democrat, Ed Herschler, who ran on the slogan, “Growth on our terms;” he served for three terms.

On the walls of their offices and the pages of their publications, Tom Bell is still a constant presence at both HCN and WOC, and the staffs feel a deep loyalty. Several of them drove hundreds of miles to attend the University of Wyoming ceremony in 2016 when Bell received an honorary doctorate in absentia. Later, after he died, two of the HCN staff, in Paonia, jumped in the car again to attend his memorial in Lander.

When Bell was on his deathbed in July 2016, Joan Nice Hamilton wrote to him and said, “Thanks for believing in us.” Although he had left for Oregon shortly after they arrived, “Tom's vision—letting people know about the threats to and the glories of the Rocky Mountain West—were still the heart of the endeavor,” she says. “He was the passion behind HCN; that passion and the loyal readers were the whole reason we were there. A bunch of kids starting a newspaper would not have been significant: A lot of newspapers came and went. This one lasted because of that voice in the wilderness.”

In September, Bell’s friend John Mionczynski of Atlantic City, Wyo. walked to the top of Oregon Buttes on the Red Desert to release his ashes. Bell’s legacy lives in the legions of people who carry on his work, including Mionczynski, whose work on behalf of the Red Desert was inspired by Bell.

Marjane Ambler was one of the editors of High Country News from 1974 until 1980. In 2013, she and Lander-based journalists Geoffrey O’Gara and Sara Wiles videotaped interviews with Tom Bell, which were sent to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo. Bell also donated his personal papers to the center. Keith Becker continued ranching and working on behalf of the environment after his tenure as WOC executive director. Leslie Petersen was president of the WOC board in 1979, was Wyoming’s Democratic candidate for governor in 2010, and served as a Teton County commissioner. Bruce Hamilton is the deputy executive director of the Sierra Club. Joan Nice Hamilton was the editor of Sierra magazine for many years. Bart Koehler devoted over 40 years to working for wilderness.

(Editor’s note: Publication of this and seven other articles on Wyoming newspapering is supported in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council and is part of the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative, a joint venture of the Pulitzer Prizes Board and the Federation of State Humanities Councils in celebration of the 2016 centennial of the prizes. The initiative seeks to illuminate the impact of journalism and the humanities on American life today, to imagine their future and to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by the body of Pulitzer Prize-winning work. For their generous support for the Campfires Initiative, the council thanks the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prizes Board, and Columbia University.)

Resources

Primary Sources

• Becker, Keith. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 24, 2016.
• Bell, Tom. Interview with Mark Junge. Lander, Wyo., April 5, 2014. Wyoming State Archives. Accessed Nov. 2, 2016 at http://wyospcr.state.wy.us/MultiMedia/Display.aspx?ID=130&icon=1.
• Bell, Tom. “We’re Alive and Well, Thank you.” High Country News 5:14 (July 6, 1973): 1-4.
• Hamilton, Bruce. “Bart Koehler, Environmental Advocate.” High Country News 6:10 (May 10, 1974): 16.
• Hamilton, Bruce. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• ______________. “Tom Bell: Visionary, Advocate, Mentor, Fighter, Friend.” September 8, 2016. Accessed Nov. 2, 2016 at http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/tom-bell-visionary-advocate-mentor-fighter-friend.
• Hamilton, Joan Nice. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• Higley, Marge. “Thoughts from the Distaff Corner.” High Country News (16 March 1973): 14. Higley’s column includes the story about the choice between the boots and the newspaper.
• Koehler, Bart. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 26, 2016.
• Petersen, Leslie. Telephone interview with author, Sept. 23, 2016.

Secondary sources

• Josephy, Jr. Alvin M. “Agony of the Northern Plains: Impact on the Northern Plains of the 1971 ‘North Central Power Study.’” Audubon Magazine 75:4 (July 1, 1973): 68-99. Josephy’s article includes the map reproduced here.
• O’Gara, Geoffrey. “Saga of a High Country Newsman.” Sierra Magazine, (March/ April 1987): 72-77.

Illustrations

• The Mike McClure photos of Tom Bell and the High Country News staff, the image of the HCN front page from July 1973 and Kathy Bogan’s later illustration of Tom Bell are all from HCN files. Used with permission and thanks.
• The map accompanying Alvin Josephy’s article, “Agony of the Norhtern Plains,” cited above in more detail, ran in Audubon Magazine in July 1973. Used with thanks to the magazine and with special thanks to Bart Rea, who had a copy, and to Vince Crolla of the Casper College Western History Center, who prepared the scan.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, workers and their families came to southwest Wyoming from around the nation and world, drawn by good wages paid by the coal mines that served the Union Pacific Railroad. The coal-mining town of Rock Springs, Wyo. and nearby railroad town of Green River, along with smaller coal towns like Hanna, Superior and Reliance, became the most ethnically diverse communities in the state.

Many of these people were African-American. In the early 1920s, they came together in Rock Springs to erect two black churches, which became symbols of the Sweetwater County community they had built.

The first black churches in Wyoming were in Cheyenne, which had a relatively large African-American population from its earliest days. The African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) is the oldest black denomination in the United States, dating back more than 200 years. Cheyenne’s Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal, founded either in 1868 or 1878—reports conflict—was the first black church in Wyoming.

In southwestern Wyoming in the early 20th century, towns sprang up wherever the coal reserves looked promising. Several times, coal quality proved to be low and the town disappeared after just a few years.

As a result, it often took several years for townspeople to feel established enough to build permanent church buildings. Several of the towns’ African-American populations were instead served by traveling pastors from Rock Springs or farther afield, despite having strong congregations in towns such as Superior, Wyo. and Dines, Wyo. One exception in the area was Hanna, Wyo., where at least one black church was built in 1924.

In towns like Rock Springs with growing black populations, it became increasingly important to them to have social, professional and religious organizations that demonstrated to black and white communities alike their rightful and respected place in society.

As World War I began, tens of thousands of African-American men from across the nation enlisted in the U.S. Army. Many communities echoed the sentiment found in the poem, “The Negro in Khaki,” printed in a Rock Springs newspaper in 1918:

With every right that is due a man

Must be crowned the black American.

After the war, many returning black soldiers instead were greeted with violence. Lynchings increased and membership surged in the Ku Klux Klan. Wade Hampton was lynched in Rock Springs in 1917 and Joel Woodson was lynched in Green River in 1918. Both were black men.

At this same time appeals began to appear in Sweetwater County newspapers for the black community to “stand for the church and righteousness,” and to “uplift the race to a higher standard” by making financial donations to build a church. The writer of “News of Interest to the Colored People” noted July 26, 1918 in the Rock Springs Rocket:

“Every nationality has a church except us, and we are appealing to the public to help us in this great struggle. … As we realize the church not only helps the community, but it makes labor more stable, makes better citizens, makes homes happier, hence we ask you to help us to plant the banner for Jesus sake. As we are so few, but determined to do all we can to lift up fallen humanity, we ask you to help us.”

The Rev. T.B.J. Barclay often wrote these semi-weekly bulletins, not just for African-American readers but also as a way to show the rest of the community their contributions and accomplishments. The bulletins often mentioned prizes and awards won, educational and religious public programs, and news of local soldiers serving in the war.

Nearly every bulletin included an appeal to help build a church. In the early 1920s, two congregations in Rock Springs—the Second Baptist Church of Rock Springs and the Baker’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal—realized that dream.

J.W. Randolph and the Second Baptist Church of Rock Springs

John Wallace (J.W.) Randolph Sr. arrived in Rock Springs to work in the coal mines in 1899. This puts him in a generation of African-Americans who had been born, most likely into slavery, before or during the Civil War, or born free shortly afterward.

During the Great Migration, which saw thousands of African-Americans leave the South for opportunities in the North or the West, many sought work in the coal mines of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and other eastern locations. Once experienced, they were drawn to the coal mines of Wyoming by the promise of better wages and a better life for themselves and their families.

Randolph was born between 1863 and 1865 in Virginia. It was not uncommon at that time for people born into slavery not to know their own birthdate. Records in Wyoming do not show whether he was born free or not. Some of the early census material does list him as being mulatto, which was defined at the time as someone who had one black parent and one white parent. It suggests that his mother was a slave.

He would have been around 35 years old when he arrived in Rock Springs in 1899, with wife Mary and son John Jr. in tow. The Randolphs went on to have six more children and settle into a comfortable and influential life in Rock Springs.

The “Randolph Boys” were well-known around town and in photographs appear dapper and outgoing. J.W., who always appears more stoic than his sons, had a reputation as hardworking, helpful and community-minded. He retired from the Union Pacific Coal Company in 1929 after 30 years of service and was honored as an “Old-Timer” in 1942. During that time, he was a prominent local figure in the United Mine Workers of America and served on delegations to union conventions several times.

He was also active in several local organizations designed build up the black community, including the Roosevelt Republican Club. Prominent African-Americans were often involved with the Republican Party—the party of Lincoln—prior to the 1960s. But what he was best known and loved for was his role as pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Rock Springs.

J.W. Randolph was one of the main people actively seeking funds to build a church specifically for the African-American community in Rock Springs prior to 1920. He was also getting his feet wet preaching at various events and doing baptisms and funerals with other pastors who came at times to help found the Rock Springs church. His wife, Mary, was also very active in church activities until her untimely death in 1924.

The black Baptist congregation met most often at the Finnish Lutheran Church—generally called the Finnish Church—on M Street before raising enough funds for their own building, which was probably on or near Rainbow Avenue, now Pilot Butte and Paulson avenues.

Although the congregation had already chosen him as pastor in September 1920, J.W. Randolph was officially ordained into the Gospel Ministry by unanimous vote of the ordaining council and about 50 members of the Second Baptist congregation Jan. 16, 1921. Just 10 days later on Jan. 26, 1921, the Second Baptist Church of Rock Springs, Wyo., incorporated in the office of the Secretary of State with J.W. Randolph as the agent in charge.

The Second Baptist Church was so named because the First Baptist was a mainly white congregation established years earlier. It is unknown how long the Second Baptist continued to operate in Rock Springs. It is never listed in the existing city directories and there are no land records in the church’s name.

J.W. Randolph passed away at the Wyoming General Hospital in Rock Springs in November 1943, though he had gone to live with his adult children on and off in California during the 1930s. It is possible that without his leadership and with the growing congregation of the A.M.E. church, the Second Baptist was unable to survive in Rock Springs. Randolph Street in Rock Springs, just north from what used to be Rainbow Avenue, is named for him.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church of Rock Springs

Although the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church of Rock Springs had a longer history than the Second Baptist, less is known of its origins. St. John’s, founded around 1904 under the Rev. James G. Cole and again in 1913, was the first A.M.E. church in Rock Springs. It is unclear how long these congregations lasted.

The third iteration of the A.M.E. had a story similar to the Second Baptist, with its congregation meeting in the Finnish church and various other locales while they raised funds for a building of their own.

The Rock Springs Rocket reported a “new” A.M.E. church was organized in Rock Springs on Oct. 27, 1917, by the Rev. T.B.J. Barclay, sent by the Colorado Annual Conference of the A.M.E. Church. This time they had a large enough congregation to make a building a reality.

The cornerstone of the Rock Springs A.M.E. church was laid April 3, 1921 at the corner of N and Channel streets. By April of the following year, the newspaper reported that “perhaps the most enthusiastic and positive religious campaign ever conducted in this city by the colored people is now under way at the A.M.E. church.”

The building was planned and built by an African-American carpenter named Tustin Brawley. His World War I registration card lists him as a resident of New Mexico and there is no record of his having lived in Wyoming, so the congregation may have recruited him to come to Rock Springs to build their church.

The building has now been remodeled and has a 1970s stone façade. It stands on an odd, v-shaped corner in what was in the 1920s an expanding neighborhood. The Union Pacific Coal Company offices, the Old Timers Club, the Excelsior Garage and the Eastern Orthodox (Greek) church were all just on the next block. In the surrounding neighborhood, then known as East Flat, families of various ethnic and national origins, including African-Americans, were buying their first homes after years of living in company housing.

Beginning about the same time as the Second Baptist, the A.M.E. congregation began soliciting donations to build a church. Although the A.M.E. church of Rock Springs is identified in city directories, on maps and in the newspaper as “Baker’s Chapel,” it is unclear which Baker it is named for and just who was the rallying figure behind its formation.

First, the newspaper names a Rev. C.N. Baker and a Rev. L.W. Baker in 1922 as being the inspiration for the chapel’s name. As no one by these initials shows up in other records for the area, it is possible they were visiting pastors, many of whom came from other parishes throughout the years to help establish the church.

One pastor undoubtedly involved was Warren L.N. Baker. Little is known about him, his wife Mary, or their children. From records that do exist it does seem he spent his career traveling to various towns throughout Montana and Wyoming helping to establish A.M.E. churches. He was pastor in Great Falls, Mont., from 1901 to 1906, helping a congregation build a church in 1902. In 1908, he was in Helena, Mont. He then moved on to Cheyenne around 1910 and was in Thermopolis in 1920.

At the rally where the cornerstone of the Rock Springs church was laid in 1921, the Rev. W.L.N. Baker was appointed to the circuit of Rock Springs and Rawlins by A.M.E Bishop H.B. Parks. It’s possible that Baker died in Cheyenne since both his wife and his son are buried there, but without a headstone. Most likely, he is the Baker of Baker’s Chapel.

In March 1922, the church announced a week-long revival to celebrate its upcoming one-year anniversary. The program would feature Madame Ida B. Jefferson, evangelist, of an A.M.E. church in Texas who was said to possess the power to heal and was renowned for her preaching. The Rocket declared March 10 that “God has given her the power to heal and lead the people from darkness to light. Her advice on business problems is worth more than you will ever be able to pay. Madame Jefferson can bring tangled brains to the light of helpful sensibility. She can cure any disease that you were not born with.” The week ended with an evening sermon from Madame Jefferson. The public was invited to attend.

In January 1935, the Baker’s Chapel, which had been without a pastor for several years, welcomed the Rev. H.H. Hooks, previously of Casper and Cheyenne, as the new pastor. The church continued to operate until about 1954, the last time it is listed in the city directories, and the land was sold a few years later.

Changing Times

African-American populations in Sweetwater County dwindled mid-century as people began to leave for larger metro areas. Most coal-mining jobs disappeared after the Union Pacific in the early 1950s began fueling its locomotives with diesel. Many of the smaller coal towns began to shut down.

This may be the reason the Baker’s Chapel A.M.E. closed its doors. In the 1970s, when the boom-and-bust towns of southwest Wyoming boomed again, several other congregations emerged. In 1981, the People’s Missionary Baptist Church formed because “the black community here was in need of a church,” according to the pastor who traveled from Casper to help set it up. Today, The New Hope Baptist Church and several other denominations serve the African-American community in Sweetwater County.

Resources

Primary Sources

• “A.M.E. Church,” Sheridan Enterprise, August 3, 1912, 5.
• “A.M.E. Church Cornerstone to be Laid April 3rd,” Rock Springs Rocket, March 18, 1921, 1.
• “Anniversary A.M.E. Church,” Rock Springs Rocket, March 10, 1922, 3.
• “Black Baptist Church Chartered,” Rock Springs Rocket-Miner, August 22, 1981, 1.
• “Colored Baptists Organize,” Rock Springs Rocket, September 3, 1920, 1.
• “Colored People News,” Rock Springs Rocket, August 14, 1918, 2.
• “Colored People News,” Rock Springs Miner, August 16, 1918, 2.
• “Death of Wife of Rev. J.W. Randolph,” Rock Springs Rocket, May 16, 1924, 2.
• “Old Timer Passes,” The Union Pacific Coal Company Employes’ Magazine, Vol. 20 No. 12 (December 1943): 516.
• “First Baptist Church,” Rock Springs Rocket, January 21, 1921, 7.
• “New A.M.E. Church,” Rock Springs Miner, November 9, 1917, 6.
• “New Pastor for A.M.E. Church,” The Union Pacific Coal Company Employes’ Magazine, Vol. 12 No. 1 (January 1935): 25.
• “New Year’s at Second Baptist Church,” Rock Springs Rocket, January 6, 1922, 1.
• “News of Interest to the Colored People,” Rock Springs Rocket, July 26, 1918, 4.
• “News of the Colored People,” Rock Springs Rocket, March 1, 1918, 4.
• “News Pertaining to the Colored People,” Rock Springs Rocket, August 2, 1918, 4.
• “Notice of Incorporation,” Rock Springs Rocket, March 18, 1921, 7.
• Polk’s City Directory: Rock Springs and Sweetwater County. Omaha: R.L. Polk & Co. 1931-1954.
• “Randolph Funeral Rites Wednesday,” Rock Springs Rocket, November 9, 1943, 5.
• “Religious Campaign Under Way at A.M.E. Church,” Rock Springs Rocket, April 7, 1922, 1.
• “Rosevelt [sic] Republican Club Organized,” Rock Springs Rocket, April 15, 1910, 1.
• Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. Rock Springs, Wyo. (1920, 1931, 1946).
• “Second Baptist Church,” Rock Springs Rocket, March 11, 1921, 8.
• “St. John’s A.M.E. Chapel,” Rock Springs Independent, June 3, 1905, 2
• Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900; Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930.Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910. National Archives, Washington, D.C.
• “The New Forty-Year Class,” The Union Pacific Coal Company Employes’ Magazine, Vol. 19 No. 7 (July 1942): 269.
• Warranty Deed, Book Q, Page 169. First Baptist Church of Rock Springs, June 17, 1911. Sweetwater County Courthouse, Green River, Wyo.
• Warranty Deed, Book 291, Page 462-6. African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States to Lloyd Jackson, January 12, 1962. Sweetwater County Courthouse, Green River, Wyo.
• World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. New Mexico; Registration County: Bernalillo; Roll: 1711857. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls. Imaged from Family History Library microfilm.

Secondary Sources

• Case, Samantha. “Allen Chapel, Cheyenne.” Alliance for Historic Wyoming. August 2016. Accessed Jan. 21, 2017 at https://www.historicwyoming.org/historicplacesblog/allen-chapel.
• Dickerson, Dennis C. “African Methodist Episcopal Church: Our History.” Accessed Jan, 21, 2017 at https://www.ame-church.com/our-church/our-history/.
• Hallberg, Carl V. An Introduction to Wyoming’s Ethnic Churches, Wyoming State Historical Society, 2002, 5-9.
• Krugler, David F. 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Robison, Ken. “Historical Black Americans in Northern Montana: Early Black American Settlers Great Falls MT 1886-1920,” Overholster Historical Research Center. Accessed Jan. 21, 2017 at http://www.blackamericansmt.blogspot.com/2009/05/early-black-american-settlers-great.html.

Illustrations

• All the black and white photos are from the collections of the Sweetwater County Historical Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the students at the Finnish Church is negative 73-81-20. The 1922 photo of the Second Baptist Church parishioners is New Studio Collection negative 458. It has been misidentified in other publications as being a picture of parishioners of the A.M.E. Church of Rock Springs. The photo of J.W. Randolph and his family is negative 1281 from the New Studio Collection. The photo of Randolph wearing his Old-Timer Badge is from the Union Pacific Coal Co. Collection.
• The color photo of the A.M.E. Church in Rock Springs is by the author. Used with permission and thanks.

Rocky Ridge, where the Oregon Trail climbs a steep, stony slope to a high plateau about 40 trail miles east of South Pass, was troublesome to all emigrants. But it was deadly to some starving Mormons pulling handcarts through snow in 1856.

To avoid a steep-walled canyon, the trail leaves the bottomlands of the Sweetwater River and climbs about 700 feet in two miles through a rugged, boulder-strewn path. It was one of the most difficult stretches of the emigrants’ entire journey.

“About 10 we left the valley by an abrupt turn to the right,” Joseph Berrien wrote June 13, 1849, “and began to ascend the mountains. ... The steep hills and rocky ridges nearly shook the waggons to pieces and we passed several ravines where the snow still lay several feet in depth. Camped at night in a beautiful little ravine completely enclosed by surrounding hills, a fine stream of snow water running through it, taking its rise from a large snow bank on the shady side of the hills at least 12 feet deep [Rock Creek].”

“Curious rocky riffles or rows of rocks,” forty-niner Peter Decker wrote with remarkable precision two days later, “running lengthwise over ridges of hills, sticking out bristling toward the West, one to 2 ft high and on level of ground.”

Greenberry Miller noted later that same month that “[s]ome of the rocks over which we traveled today lay in rows and lapping one upon another like shingles on the roof of a house. These lines of rock stretch southeast and northwest. Over this we had some of the roughest driving that we had ever met with yet.”

“It was continual rise and fall, from one rock to another for our wagons,” Edward Harrow wrote July 1, “which I thought would every minute fall to the ground smashed to pieces, such was the roughness of the roads.”

But by the time the 500-member Willie Handcart Company of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—reached Rocky Ridge in late October snowstorms in 1856, they were dealing with far more than just a rough trail. Most members of the Willie Company and of the even larger Martin Handcart Company travelling two weeks behind them were recent converts from factory towns in England and Denmark. Their leaders were experienced trail travellers, however. A series of missteps—a very late start, poorly built handcarts, a failed system of resupply and a sudden onslaught of bad weather—had led to disaster.

Advance members of a relief party from the Salt Lake Valley reached the Willie Company, entirely out of food, camped on the east side of Rocky Ridge. Many hancarters had already died. The rescuers provided some food, and wagons for many of the children to ride in.

“We buried our dead, got up our teams and about nine o’clock a.m. commenced ascending Rocky Ridge,” diarist Levi Savage wrote. “This was a severe day. The wind blew hard and cold. The ascent was some five miles long and some places steep and covered with deep snow. We became weary, set down to rest, and some became chilled and commenced to freeze.”

The relief wagons were so “perfectly loaded down with the sick and children, so thickly stacked I was fearful some would smother,” Savage wrote. After a 16-mile journey up the rocky trail, across the high plateau, across creeks and through snow, much of it in the dark, they reached camp on the Sweetwater River. The next day, they buried 15 people there.

The full stretch of trail known today as Rocky Ridge runs about 12 miles, across two high ridge shelfs, crossing Strawberry Creek and passing the old ghost town of Lewiston. The rock cuts left by wagon wheels are among the most dramatic trail remnants remaining on the westward emigrant trails.

Rocky Ridge, not surprisingly, has become a compelling story in Mormon lore, and the church has erected monuments at the lower and upper ends of the 12-mile stretch.

Resources

Primary sources

• Berrien, Joseph Waring. “Overland from St. Louis to the California Gold Fields in 1849: The diary of Joseph Waring Berrien.” Edited by Ted and Caryl Hinckley. Indiana Magazine of History (December 1960), 273-352.
• Decker, Peter. The Diaries of Peter Decker — Overland to California in 1849 and Life in the Mines, 1850–1851. Edited by Helen S. Griffen. Georgetown, Calif: The Talisman Press, 1966.
• Miller, Greenberry. Diary. Mss 74/157 c, Bancroft Library, University of California. Richard L. Rieck transcription.
• Harrow, Edward C. The Gold Rush Overland Journal of Edward C. Harrow, 1849. Austin, Texas: Michael Vinson, 1993.

Secondary sources

• Brown, Randy. Oregon-California Trails Association. WyoHistory.org offers special thanks to this historian for providing the diary entries used in this article.
• Del Bene, Terry A. “Trails Across Wyoming: The Oregon, Mormon Pioneer and California Routes.” WyoHistory.org, accessed Jan. 19, 2017, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/trails-across-wyoming-oregon-mormon-pioneer-and-california-routes.
• Hein, Annette. “Journey to Martin’s Cove: the Mormon Handcart Tragedy of 1856.” WyoHistory.org, accessed Jan. 19, 2017, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/martins-cove.
• Long, Gary Duane. The Journey of the James G. Willie Handcart Company: October 1856. Published by author, 2009. Based on diaries of Willie Company members, diaries of members of the rescue party and on later, reminiscent accounts, Long traces the company’s route day by day across Wyoming. With detailed topo maps of each day’s progress. Events surrounding the difficulties on Rocky Ridge are on pp. 59-86. The quote from Willie Company member Levi Savage is on p. 77.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Rocky Ridge.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed Jan. 19, 2017. at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/rockyridge.htm.

Illustrations

• The photos of Rocky Ridge are by Tom Rea.

“Noted beauty coming,” declared the Laramie Republican in its October 1916 headline advancing Inez Milholland’s appearance in Cheyenne.

Accustomed to having her good looks noticed before her formidable intellect, Milholland had learned to rely on the first to lure crowds and the second to convert them. As she rose to prominence in previous years, becoming the prototypical “New Woman,” the Laramie Republican had also noted Milholland’s “striking features, flashing dark eyes, mass of dark brown hair, dimples, even, regular teeth and dazzling smile.”

Milholland was born in Brooklyn in 1886, but moved to London at age 13. There, she learned social justice from the British suffragettes, African-American civil rights activists, Irish revolutionaries, and Boer War dissidents her parents regularly entertained. By 1905, when Inez returned to the United States to attend Vassar College, she had become a fearless activist.

She made waves by ignoring Vassar’s ban on suffrage activities and by leading her fellow students to a nearby cemetery to hear speakers banned by the college. After graduation, Yale, Harvard and Columbia law schools rejected Milholland because of her gender.

But New York University welcomed her, conferring her law degree in 1912. Milholland was passionate about prison reform, world peace and labor reform but gained fame as a suffragist, often leading their colorful parades, complete with floats, banners, bands and costumes.

Drunks attack Washington parade

Such was true in 1913 when Milholland—resplendent in a flowing white cape and crown atop a large white horse—led a massive parade on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.

When drunken bullies rushed the crowd—grabbing, cursing, and spitting on the women—things quickly turned ugly. The Laramie Boomerang captured the scene: “Five thousand women … fought their way foot by foot up Pennsylvania avenue, through a surging mob that defied the police, swamped the marchers and broke the procession into little companies.”

From her perch high above the crowd, Milholland continued to guide the “petticoat cavalry,” pushing through the mob until troops finally arrived to assist the “exhausted and unnerved” marchers. Later, after witnesses at a Senate hearing told jarring “tales of indignities and affronts,” of “coarse buffoonery,” of police standing by “with arms folded,” according to press reports, the Senate passed the first favorable women’s suffrage report in two decades.

“Women for women and not for Wilson.”

But in 1916, with another presidential election looming, the women’s right to vote remained elusive. Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party, devised a special appeal to the 4 million Western women already empowered to vote: Vote for women’s suffrage by voting against Wilson, then running for a second term.

A public relations genius, Paul beseeched the always-newsworthy Milholland to lead this effort. Although exhausted by a recent unsuccessful European peace conference, Milholland agreed to become the campaign’s “special flying envoy.” The effort would begin in Chicago with a keynote by Milholland to the National Woman’s Party convention. One hundred years before teleconferencing became commonplace, Paul arranged an open phone line to allow people in far-flung communities to hear Milholland’s address.

Afterwards, Milholland left for Cheyenne, Wyo., accompanied by Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of the nationally known veteran suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They would kick off the tour on Oct. 6 at Cheyenne’s Plains Hotel.

The headlines now would belong to Inez Milholland Boissevain. Shortly after the terrifying 1913 parade, Milholland had proposed to, and then eloped with, Eugen Boissevain, scion of a Dutch publishing family. Ironically, having married a foreigner, Inez had lost her citizenship. So even her most passionate advocacy would never win Milholland a vote.

Dr. Frances Margaret Lane of Cody, Wyo., chaired the Woman’s Party in Wyoming. She arranged for “every woman voter in every county of the state” to receive the party’s appeal, which declared: “It is impossible for any problem that confronts the nation today to be decided adequately or justly while half the people are excluded from its consideration. If Democracy means anything it means a right to a voice in government.”

Decrying as intolerable allowing so many issues to be decided without women’s input, the appeal urged Western women to vote “for her fellow women who are not yet free.” Newspapers summarized the message as: “Women for women and not for Wilson.”

Miss Mildred McIntosh, Cheyenne chair of the Woman’s Party, welcomed Milholland and Blatch to the city. “[B]acking no campaign, as such” but “fighting all who oppose the [suffrage] amendment,” Milholland “spoke from the standpoint of the republican; [Blatch] from the standpoint of the democrat,” the Laramie Republican reported.

Milholland crosses Wyoming

The Republican judged the event at the Plains Hotel “highly successful.” At a reception in Cheyenne, however, a skeptical Mrs. Gibson Clark challenged the women for their “inconsistencies and contradictions” and expressed confidence that their rhetoric “would not … injure the cause of President Wilson.”

The Cheyenne Sunday State Leader dismissed Milholland and Blatch’s “little fling at President Wilson,” crowing: “These women of national reputation journeyed two-thirds of the way across the continent to find themselves out-matched by a Cheyenne woman,” justifying “a certain thrill of pride.”

Across the state in Kemmerer, Wyo., however, the Kemmerer Republican reported Mrs. C. Watt Brandon ebullient after seeing the two speak in Pocatello, Idaho: “Mrs. Boissevain is a most interesting, convincing and logical speaker and she made a most favorable impression. … As a woman of immense wealth, splendid education, accomplished, one of magnetism and stately beauty, yet withal a womanly woman, she is one to win the hearts of all who were so fortunate as to hear her.” With “common sense … plainly written in [Boissevain’s] every feature,” Mrs. Brandon lamented that “the women of Kemmerer are unable to hear these speakers,” noting that even tiny Montpelier, Idaho, had given the women “quite an ovation.”

The same happened in Green River, Wyo., where a large crowd turned out to meet the train carrying the two. Inez “made a brief speech from the rear platform of No. 7,” charming “all who heard her,” the Rock Springs Miner reported. Throughout the West, noted the Kemmerer Republican, “enthusiastic crowds” had filled “halls and theaters … to the limit.”

Buoyed by the crowds, Inez Milholland Boissevain gave rousing, impassioned speeches but, behind the scenes, she was ill. She had returned ill from the European peace conference even before she began her western tour. By this time, she was suffering from a raging infection. The recommended strychnine and arsenic did nothing and she grew weaker and weaker.

In Butte, Mont., she awoke unable to stand. Then, on Oct. 22, 1916, Inez collapsed before a packed Los Angeles auditorium. The infection had spread to her teeth and weakened her heart. Hospitalized with pernicious anemia, her ups and downs were closely chronicled by newspapers nationwide. Finally, on election night, as the Western states guaranteed President Wilson a second term and Montana elected Jeannette Rankin the first female to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, Inez’s sister announced that the suffrage movement’s “noted beauty” was dying.

Dead at age 30, Inez Milholland Boissevain continued to make history, becoming the first woman honored with a memorial service in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. “Politicians, in this unusual and beautiful ceremony … glimpse[d] the turning of the tide,” the Park County Enterprise reported.

In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by enough states that it became law, giving women nationwide their long-sought right to vote. As suffragists celebrated, a small group gathered in upstate New York, in the shadow of the recently renamed Mt. Inez, to honor the indomitable and beautiful Inez Milholland Boissevain.

Resources

Primary sources

• “Beauty Contest to Be Part of the Great Suffrage Parade,” Laramie Republican, February 1, 1913, 2.
• “Cheyenne Woman Routs Speaker of Sex Party,” Sunday State Leader, October 8, 1916, 1.
• “Dawn Mist of Montana in Parade,” Weekly Boomerang, February 27, 1913, 4.
• “Death of Miss Inez Milholland Boissevain,” Rock Springs Miner, December 2, 1916, 6.
• “Extension Phones for Mrs. Boissevain’s Talk,” Wyoming Tribune, November 4, 1916, 1.
• “Famous Woman Spoke at Pocatello,” Kemmerer Republican, October 13, 1916, 1.
• “Memorial for Inez Milholland Boissevain,” Park County Enterprise, December 27, 1916, 4.
• “Memorial to Mrs. Boissevain,” Kemmerer Republican, December 29, 1916.
• “Miss Inez Milholland: Equal Suffrage Advocate Is Made the Heroine of a Novel,” Laramie Republican, November 11, 1911, 5.
• “Noted Beauty Coming,” Laramie Republican, October 4, 1916, 8.
• “Rioting Mars the Suffrage Parade,” Laramie Boomerang, March 4, 1913, 1.
• “Sing Sing Inmates Honor Suffragist,” Laramie Daily Boomerang, December 7, 1916, 1.
• “Successful Meeting at Plains Hotel,” Laramie Republican, 11 Oct 1916, 6.
• “Washington’s Discourtesy to Women,” Wyoming Semi-Weekly Tribune, March 11, 1913, 6.
• “Washington City’s Insult to Women,” Wyoming Semi-Weekly Tribune, March 11, 1913, 6.
• “Women Outline Political Views,” Kemmerer Republican, October 27, 1916.
• “Women Unfurl Their First Battle Flag,” Laramie Daily Boomerang, December 7, 1916, 1.

Secondary sources

• Cooney, Robert P.J., Jr. Remembering Inez, The Last Campaign of Inez Milholland, Suffrage Martyr. Half Moon Bay, Cal.: American Graphic Press, 2015.
• Lumsden, Linda J. Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
• _______________. “The Woman on the White Horse: The Forgotten Fighter Who Led the Way for Woman’s Suffrage.” TalkingPointsMemo. Accessed Feb. 24, 2017 at http://talkingpointsmemo.com/longform/the-woman-on-the-white-horse-inez-milholland.

Illustrations

• The Milholland portrait, the photo of Milholland on a white horse and the photo of the woman holding a banner are all from Wikipedia. Used with thanks. The photo of Inez at the start of her 1916 speaking tour is from Wikimedia Commons. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Inez giving a speech in Cheyenne in 1916 is from the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. Used with thanks.

In a U.S. Army career spanning three wars and four decades, Paul Kendall, of Sheridan, Wyo., never forgot the moment when his platoon, guarding a Siberian rail station, was attacked one night at 30 below—by an armored train full of Bolshevik partisans.

The attack came on Jan. 10, 1920. Young 2nd Lt. Kendall’s 34-man platoon was part of a 90,000-man force of American, Canadian, British, French, Italian and Japanese troops, which had landed 16 months earlier in Vladivostok, Russia, at the Pacific end of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Their mission was to cover the retreat of the famed Czechoslovak Legion, by then allied with the Tsarist Whites against the Communist Red Army in Russia’s bitter Civil War.

The U.S. mission was never particularly realistic, relationships with supposed allies, especially the Japanese, were rocky, and the American experience in Siberia proved to be confusing and frustrating. The night attack was Kendall’s first taste of combat, however, and he and his men performed well.

Young Paul Kendall

Paul Wilkins Kendall was born July 17, 1898, in Baldwin City, Kan. His family subsequently moved to Sheridan, Wyo. As a boy, Kendall remembered years later, he was absorbed by a series of books, “The West Point Series,” by West Point graduate Capt. Paul Malone. These novels, with eye-catching, full-color covers of young West Point cadets in all their glory, featured cadet life and were extremely popular.

Kendall attended Sheridan High School, where he captained the football team, and graduated in 1916. He was accepted at West Point, where he arrived the hot, muggy morning of July 10, 1916, as a member of the class of 1920. At the academy he wrestled, played football and served as a cadet sergeant.

The United States entered World War I in April 1917. Facing a high demand for junior officers, the Army accelerated West Point graduations. Kendall’s class graduated Nov. 1, 1918—just ten days before the armistice that brought an end to the war was signed in France.

U.S. troops in Russia

But large pieces of that conflict lingered elsewhere. Pressures of war were one of the immediate causes of the Russian Revolution, which deposed the Tsar and brought the Bolsheviks to power in November 1917. Quickly, the Bolsheviks made a separate peace with the Central Powers—Germany and Austria—and began withdrawing Russian troops from the Eastern Front.

The peace stranded 60,000 battle-hardened, high-morale Czech and Slovak troops, who had allied with the Tsar’s army to fight the Austrian overlords that had ruled their provinces for centuries. Trapped deep in the Ukraine between Russia and Poland, which with the peace had become German territory, the Legion’s officers believed they would be shot as traitors if they surrendered to advancing German troops. They figured their best hope was to travel 5500 miles east on the Trans Siberian Railway to Vladivostok. There they planned to board ships, continue east around the world and rejoin their French and British allies fighting Germans on the Western Front.

Circumstances intervened. When the Russian Revolution devolved into Civil War, the Legion joined the Tsarists in a railroad war that involved heavily armed trains on both sides.

Bound for Siberia

Kendall, meanwhile, underwent three months of infantry training at Camp Benning, Ga. before shipping out—for Siberia via San Francisco. He arrived at Vladivostok March 28, 1919, where he was assigned command of the 3^rd Platoon, Company M, 27th U.S. Infantry, nicknamed the Wolfhounds.

The earliest American troops had arrived in September 1918, initially parts of the 27^th and 31^st U.S. Infantry regiments ordered from garrison duty in the Philippines. Under the command of Maj. Gen. William S. Graves, this 9,000-man American force was supposedly safeguarding American property in the port of Vladivostok, securing the Trans-Siberian Railway, and defending the Czechoslovak Legion, troops of which by then had been arriving at the port for several months.

Difficult service

For Kendall and his fellow doughboys, service in Siberia was austere, and living conditions were primitive. The climate was brutal. One soldier with the 31^st Infantry wrote a poem ending, “The Lord played a joke on creation, When he dumped Siberia on the map.”

The U.S. Army lacked adequate cold weather gear, and had to issue muskrat coats, gloves and caps dating from the the Indian Wars on the Northern Plains 40 years earlier. Military duties proved tedious and boring.

In June 1919, Pvt. John Speer threw down his rifle and bayonet at Lt. Kendall’s feet, cursing “I’ll be damned if I can stand it any longer and you can give me six months or a year, I don’t give a damn which.”

Anton Karachun, a soldier in the Machine Gun Company of the 31^st Regiment, married a Russian woman, deserted to the Bolshevik partisans, and became a leader fighting against the Americans until he was captured and court-martialed.

Kendall’s 34-man platoon was assigned to guard a portion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, at Posolskaya Station, Siberia, on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal and 2,000 rail miles west of Vladivostok.

A night attack

At 1 a.m. on Jan, 10, 1920, Kendall’s position was attacked by the Red Russian armored train, the Destroyer, operated by the free-wheeling Cossack, Ataman Semionoff, a self-styled general with dreams of rebuilding the empire of Genghis Khan. The train was directly under the command of Semionoff’s chief, General Nikolai Bogomolets.

With the Americans in the process of withdrawing from Siberia, the Cossacks doubtless expected to catch the doughboys enjoying a long winter’s nap, for the Fahrenheit temperature was 30 below. Unfortunately for the Bolsheviks, Kendall had been warned, and his platoon was alert and waiting. Instead of silence and surrender, the Bolsheviks met hot gunfire and an aggressive counterattack.

Sgt. Carl Robbins climbed up on the locomotive, threw a hand grenade into the cab and disabled it, being killed in the action. Another soldier, Pvt. Homer D. Tommie, also attempted to climb on the Cossack train, was wounded, and fell under the wheels of the train, losing his leg.

The Reds and their train, including Bogomolets, were forced to surrender to Kendall. His small command had overcome a heavily armored and well-armed train manned by no less than 48 Cossacks, killing 12 of them. His platoon lost two killed and one wounded. This proved to be the final combat action of World War I.

A long career

Kendall’s platoon received an unprecedented three Distinguished Service Crosses in this action, with Kendall, Sgt. Robbins and Pvt. Tommie recognized. Kendall captured a Hotchkiss Model 1914 heavy machine gun, manufactured at the Japanese Koishikawa Arsenal, perhaps showing some double-dealing by the Japanese allies.

Just two weeks after the attack, Kendall on Jan. 25 left Siberia with his regiment. He donated the machine gun to Sheridan High School upon his return, and this historically significant gun remains at the Sheridan National Guard Armory today–the last weapon captured in the First World War.

Kendall went on to one of the most distinguished careers of any Wyoming soldier. During World War II he commanded the 88th Infantry Division in Italy; and, in 1952 and 1953 he commanded the I Corps in the Korean War. He retired as a lieutenant general in 1955, and died at Palo Alto, Calif., Oct. 3, 1983. He is buried at the West Point Cemetery beneath a simple soldier’s headstone.

In his incredible military career that spanned 37 years, three wars and four continents, Paul Kendall’s finest moment was as a 21-year old second lieutenant on a dark, frozen Siberian night.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Faulstich, Edith Collection, Hoover Institution, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California. Box 19, Paul W. Kendall Folder.
• Kendall, Paul. “Horizontal File: Sheridan High School, Class of 1916,” Sheridan County Fulmer Library, Sheridan, Wyoming.
• Kendall, Paul. Entry in The Howitzer, (West Point, New York: U.S. Military Academy Yearbook), 1920.
• West Point Association of Graduates. “Memorial: Paul W. Kendall, 1918, Cullum No. 6212.” Accessed March 9, 2017 at http://apps.westpointaog.org/Memorials/Article/6212/.

Secondary Sources

• 31st Infantry Association, “America’s Legion: The 31st Infantry Regiment at War and Peace.” Chapter 2- Siberia.” Accessed March 9, 2017 at http://www.31stinfantry.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Chapter-2.pdf.
• Bell, Ulric. “Colonel Morrow Bares Semenoff Atrocities as He Nears America,” Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, January 16, 1922, 1-2. Accessed March 9, 2017 at https://www.newspapers.com/image/119471737/.
• Bibliomaven. “The West Point Series by Paul Malone -Penn Publishing,” July 9, 2009. Accessed March 9, 2017 at http://bookofbibliomaven.blogspot.com/2009/07/west-point-series-by-paul-malone-penn.html.
• Borch, Fred L. III. “Bolsheviks, Polar Bears, and Military Law: The Experiences of Army Lawyers in North Russia and Siberia in World War I.” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration, 30:3, Fall 1998, 181-191.
• Filofey, Reverend F. “Asia’s Man on Horseback: The Story of Ataman Semionoff, Adventurer and Empire Builder of the Far East,” Sunset: The Magazine of the Pacific and of All the Far West, 44:4, April 1920, 30-32.
• “Find A Grave Memorial: LTG Paul Wilkins Kendall (1898-1983).” Accessed March 9, 2017 at http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=52686798.
• HomeofHeroes.Com. Website: “Full Text Citations for Award of The Distinguished Service Cross, U.S. Army--Siberia Expedition.” Accessed March 9, 2017 at http://www.homeofheroes.com/members/02_DSC/citatons/02_interim-dsc/dsc_06siberia.html.
• House, Col. John M. Wolfhounds and Polar Bears: The American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, 1918–1920. 2nd Edition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016.
• Kindall, Sylvian G. American Soldiers in Siberia. New York: R. R. Smith, 1945.
• Military History Now. “A Long Way from Home: The Czech Legion’s Amazing Trek Across Siberia.” Accessed March 8, 2017 at http://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/06/02/a-long-way-from-home-the-czech-legions-amazing-trek-across-siberia/.
• O’Connor, Neil P., Jr. Website: “AEF Siberia: Everyday Life of a Soldier.” Accessed March 8, 2017 at https://sites.google.com/a/bates.edu/aefsiberia/home/everyday-life-of-a-soldier.
• O’Connor, Richard. “Yanks in Siberia,” American Heritage 25:2, August 1974. Accessed March 8, 2017 at http://www.americanheritage.com/content/yanks-siberia?page=show.
• Smalser, Colonel Robert L. The Siberian Expedition 1918-1920: An Early Operation Other Than War. Newport, Rhode Island: Naval War College Thesis, 1994.
• Smith, Gibson Bell. “Guarding the Railroad, Taming the Cossacks: The U.S. Army in Russia, 1918-1920. Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration, 34:4, Winter 2002. Accessed March 9, 2017 at https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/winter/us-army-in-russia-1.html.
• Willett, Robert L. “The Story of a Turncoat” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration, 37:4, Winter 2005, 32-38.
• The author acknowledges the generous assistance of Ms. Carol A. Leadenham, Assistant Archivist for Reference, Hoover Institution Archives.

Illustrations

• The photos of the morning train in the station and of troops training in the snow are from Paul Kendall’s Siberian Scrapbook in the collections of the Wyoming Veterans Memorial Museum. Used with permission and thanks.
• The colorful 1903 advertising card is from the author’s collection. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of U.S. troops on parade in Vladivostok is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the armored train is from U.S. Militaria Forum, with special thanks to Bob Hudson.
• The Sheridan High School photo of Paul Kendall is from the historical collections at the Sheridan Fulmer Library. Used with thanks. The photo of cadet Paul Kendall is from Special Collections and Archives, Jefferson Hall, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York. Used with thanks. The photo of Gen. Paul Kendall late in his career is from Findagrave.com. Used with thanks.

Among the many branches and variants of the Oregon Trail was the 35-mile Seminoe Cutoff, which allowed travelers to avoid the last four crossings of the Sweetwater River as well as the difficult climb over Rocky Ridge.

The cutoff was opened to wagons in the spring of 1853, after heavy snowmelt and heavy spring rains made the fords across the Sweetwater impassable well into the traveling season. The cutoff, combined with the use of the so-called Deep Sand Road that bypassed Three Crossings, enabled emigrants to stay south of the Sweetwater and avoid all the river’s fords except the first one—near Independence Rock. There, French-speaking traders with Shoshone families built a bridge across the river that lasted only until late June 1853, when it washed away.

In subsequent years, the cutoff was used at times of exceptionally high water or early in the season when the river was too high to be safely forded.

In a letter on June 1, 1853, Joseph Crabb wrote: “We started for the Sweet Water, a distance of 26 miles, got within two miles of the crossing, and stopped, finding the Sweet Water from 8 to 10 feet deep. Here we expected to be detained some days or weeks. I rode up to the crossing, and luckily found that there was a company of French traders encamped at Independence Rock, and lots of shanties. They came there early in the spring, and had built a bridge over this stream. It was just finished.”

Crabb’s company was to become one of the first to use the bridge and then the Seminoe Cutoff. Succeeding bridges at Independence Rock came and went as the years of the emigration passed.

The cutoff was probably named for Charles Lajeunesse, one of owners of the post at Devil’s Gate and likely one of the builders of the Independence Rock bridge of 1853. His nickname was “Semino.”

The cutoff commenced about seven miles west of Ice Slough. Warm Springs and Alkali Creek were passed on the way, but they only supplied poor, brackish water essentially unfit for use. The first good water on the route was at Immigrant Springs, as it is called now; in trail days it was called Rock Springs or Antelope Springs. The spring is about 15 miles west of where the cutoff leaves the main branch of the Oregon Trail and seven miles west of Alkali Creek.

A grave at immigrant springs

Diary and newspaper accounts show that there were emigrant deaths on the Seminoe Cutoff just as there were on the “old road,” as the main route was sometimes called, but existing identified graves on both routes are now rare. The only one that can be identified on the Seminoe is the grave of Sarah A. Thomas at Immigrant Springs.

Nothing is known of Sarah Thomas other than the date of her death and age at the time, and these facts only because someone inscribed the information on her headstone. The epitaph reads: “SARAH A. THOMAS D. JUN 29 /54 AG. 22.”

One account survives of her burial, but it does not even include her name. Jacob Hays of Missouri was heading for California when his company reached the springs on June 29, 1854. He wrote: “Clear but very windy, traveled over some pretty rough roads some 13 miles, encamped for the night on Rock Creek [the runoff from Immigrant Springs]. Witnessed the burial of a lady, herded cattle some miles from the wagons to the left of the road where there is a noble spring. Spring near the road called Rock Spring.” That’s it, and it’s the only contemporary account of the life and death of Sarah A. Thomas thus far discovered.

The grave was covered over with large rocks collected from the surrounding hills, and a headstone was neatly inscribed and placed over the grave. Whoever Sarah Thomas was, her family and friends went on, likely to California or Oregon, and only Jacob Hays left us an account of her burial.

New stones in 1924

His is the last-known record of the grave until 1924 when it was re-marked by three newly inscribed stones. Two were left at the grave, and a third is now in the Pioneer Museum in Lander, as is the original. One of the two placed at the grave has since vanished completely. They are all dated Oct. 10, 1924, inscribed “10, 10, 24.” and all confirm what Jacob Hays had written, that Sarah A. Thomas died on June 29, 1854, at the age of 22.

These three markers include a cryptic postscript that proved difficult to interpret, as was the 1924 date. For years this postscript was a mystery to trail researchers, and several interpretations of what it says were suggested including “bacon colic,” as a possible cause of death, or “Bogan County” as her place of origin, but nothing really made any sense.

I now think the phrase is the name of the person who inscribed the three secondary markers, a Bogdan Cosic—the “S” is backwards—who, immigration records show, came to America in 1907 to settle in Rock Springs, Wyo. The immigration officials apparently spelled his name wrong: “Bogdan” instead of “Bogan.”

Cosic must have become a history buff, since it seems he went to the Thomas grave in 1924, collected the original marker, and left at least two of the replacements he had inscribed, signed and dated by himself, but all this is speculation. Emil Kopak of Oshkosh, Neb., photographed the grave and these two markers in 1930.

This convoluted story of Thomas grave markers received a happy ending when curator Randy Wise at the Lander Pioneer Museum rediscovered in storage what is assuredly the original headstone. The inscriptions on the replica markers were found to exactly match the inscription on the original grave marker, inscribed and placed over the Sarah Thomas grave on June 29, 1854. Whoever Bogan Cosic was, we owe him a debt of gratitude, along with the Lander Museum, for preserving this historic artifact.

Sometime early in the 1960s a ghoulish vandal desecrated the Sarah Thomas grave by digging up her bones, and leaving them scattered at the grave. It is not known if anything was taken, perhaps nothing. When Tom Bell, the curator at the Lander Museum at the time, heard about the vandalism, he organized a party that went to the grave where they collected the bones, reburied them, and replaced the rocks over the grave, including the remaining secondary headstone. Except for occasional visits by trail buffs exploring the Seminoe Cutoff, the grave has remained undisturbed ever since.

Resources

Sources

• Crabb, Joseph. Letter. The Alton Weekly Courier, Alton, IL, July 8, 1853, Vol. 2, #6, p. 3, 3, cols. 2-3.
• Hays, Jacob O., 1854. Diary- Lexington, Mo., to Sacramento, Calif., typescript, Acc. No. 543 Box 1, 10 p., American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.
• Wise, Randy. “Emigrant Trail Grave.” E-mail messages to Randy Brown. November 17, 18, 20, 24, 29, 2015.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Sarah Thomas Grave.” Emigrant Trails Throughout Wyoming. Accessed April 28, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/sarahthomas.htm.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Cutoffs Seminoe.” Emigrant Trails Throughout Wyoming. Accessed April 28, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/seminoecutoff.htm.

Illustrations

The two color photos are by Randy Brown, and the black and white photo of the two headstones from his collections. Used with permission and thanks. The photo of the two BLM staffers at the Sarah Thomas grave is from the Lander Pioneer Museum. Used with permission and thanks. The map of the Seminoe Cutoff is from the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. Used with permission and thanks.