Like many of their faith, Charlotte and Robert Dansie converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while still young adults in England. After 13 years of marriage they determined to make their way with other Mormons to their Zion in the Salt Lake Valley. Crossing an ocean and a continent, would prove too much, however, and Charlotte, pregnant with her eighth child, would fail to finish the journey.

Charlotte Rudland and Robert Dansie were married April 8, 1849, in the parish church at Newton Green, Suffolk, England. They were residents of Boxford, Suffolk County, northwest of London. Robert was a blacksmith. Robert had been born Feb. 5, 1825, in Boxford and Charlotte Feb. 10, 1832, in nearby Newton. Their houses of birth still stand in their respective Suffolk villages. Robert described Charlotte to his grandchildren as a “beautiful wife,” small in stature with black hair and dark, flashing eyes.

Shortly after their marriage, the Dansies joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then moved to Barking, Essex, a town near London. Disapproval of their new religion by their families and friends prompted the move. Robert became a gardener and took care of the grounds and flower gardens of a wealthy landowner. They left for America on May 12, 1862, with their five offspring, leaving behind in England the graves of two other children.

They sailed from Liverpool on May 14 aboard the sailing ship William Tapscott, which had been chartered by the church to bring 850 English saints to the United States. They arrived in New York on June 25 and docked the next day, arriving after 42 long days at sea, a voyage that harmed the health of many of the passengers.

The church had chartered a train to take the converts to Florence, Neb., the gathering point near Omaha on the Missouri River, where Mormons gathered to outfit for the trip to the Salt Lake Valley. The Dansies were assigned to the company of Capt. Ansil P. Harmon, who led one of six companies of teams sent east from Utah that year—so-called church trains—to bring Mormon emigrants to the valley. The Harmon company consisted of 48 wagons and nearly 500 individuals. They left Florence on Aug. 2.

John D.T. McAllister was elected president and chaplain of the company and unofficial journal keeper. He had made several similar trips between Salt Lake and Florence in previous years and now was returning from missionary work in Birmingham, England. From his journal we learn there were eight deaths while the company camped at Florence and probably at least 25 more, the majority children, many of them from measles, before the company in the third week of September reached a camp on the Sweetwater River a mile east of Twin Mounds as they approached South Pass.

Charlotte Dansie was expecting the birth of an eighth child, but we do not know how far along her the pregnancy was. She had suffered during the voyage, and her health had continued to deteriorate during the wagon journey. On the night of Sept. 20 the baby was born prematurely and lived just long enough for his parents to name him Joseph.

A Dansie descendant would remember years later that “before grandmother died she was in such pain that she told [her husband] she could stand her suffering no longer and asked him to pray to God that she might be released and return to her maker. Grandfather did pray and it was only a matter of minutes until both she and the baby died.”

The journal of John D.T. McAllister, president and chaplain of the company, notes, “September 21, Sunday. At 7 ½ o’clock a few of us went ahead to dig a grave for the body of Sister Charlotte Dansie, wife of Robert, age 32, who died early this morning of a “Miscarriage” and general debility. One mile brought us to the Summit or pass. Three more we made the Pacific Spring, one mile farther we crossed Pacific Creek and dug her grave on the right of the road[. W]hile [we were] digging the grave, Captain Harmon rode up and informed us that Caroline Myers, aged 25 was dead. She died of bilious fever just after the wagons left camp. We widened the grave for both bodies. We stopped there three hours then traveled 11 miles to Dry Sandy.”

Little is known about Caroline Myers (or Meyers) except for the sad circumstances of her death. She seems to have been traveling alone with no other family members, and does not appear on the list of passengers from the William Tapscott.

Caroline had probably been sick for several days, but on the morning of the 21^st she began that day’s journey by walking ahead of her team. Diarist William Priest wrote, “When the wagons came, the teamster reported another death a young woman belonging to Bro Jarmin’s tent. She started to walk a little from camp but had to sit down on the road. The teamster of the wagon she belonged to would not take her up. The captain had her put in another wagon. She had only been in a few minutes and she died. The camp stopped to water the oxen where they was all buried.” [The passage has been edited for readability.]

Robert Dansie put a strand of blue beads around Charlotte’s neck and, from the family belongings, tore the lid off a large trunk, its brass hinges stamped with images of the British lion, and placed it over Charlotte’s body in the grave. The baby was buried in the arms of its mother who lay beside the body of Caroline Myers. After the burial a large rock was placed over the grave.

The Harmon company arrived in Salt Lake on Oct. 2. In December Robert married Jane Wilcox, who also had been a member of the company. They settled in Herriman, Utah, and had nine children together. In all, Robert and his two wives, Charlotte and Jane, had 13 children who lived to have families of their own, by which the Dansie family has continued to multiply and prosper in Utah and Idaho.

Some of Robert’s children later tried to locate Charlotte’s grave, but without success. In 1939 some members of the next generation, armed with an earlier letter to the family from D.T. McAllister, made another attempt. When they reached Pacific Springs they found a man they described as a “Mexican sheepherder” camped nearby. They asked him if he knew of any old graves in the area. He told them that some other sheepherders had dug into a grave he had noticed nearby, but when they found that three people were buried in the grave, two adults and a baby, it had been covered back up.

After they questioned him further, it began to appear to the Dansies that the man himself had dug up the grave. Becoming frightened, they said, he admitted to it and produced a string of blue beads that he had found in the grave. The necklace was recognized as the one placed by Robert around Charlotte’s neck before her burial.

At the grave, scrap metal from the trunk, copper rivets, brass hinges and lock engraved with the image of the lion, and old pieces of leather were scattered around the grave. All this evidence led the family members to believe that they had finally relocated the grave of Charlotte and Joseph Dansie and Caroline Myers.

Little more than a month later, the present monument and fence were installed and dedicated by more 80 members of the Dansie family. The senior Dansie present for the ceremony was Sarah Ann Dansie, Charlotte’s last surviving child, who had been 4 years old when she witnessed her mother’s burial 77 years before.

In 1958 President Eisenhower authorized the Secretary of the Interior to convey an acre and a quarter of land to be used as a grave site and memorial to Charlotte Rudland Dansie. The Dansie Family Organization now has a deed to this property, where every few years they hold family reunions.

The words quoted on the monument are from the Mormon rallying anthem, “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” written by William Clayton of the 1847 Mormon Pioneer Company that led the way into Salt Lake Valley. Clayton wrote the words while camped in Iowa 43 days out on the journey from Nauvoo to Winter Quarters—later Florence—in 1846. The fourth verse is as follows.

And should we die before our journey’s through,

Happy day! All is well!

We then are free from toil and sorrow too;

With the just we shall dwell.

But if our lives are spared again,

To see the Saints, their rest obtain

Oh, how we’ll make this chorus swell –

All is well! All is well!

Resources

Sources

• Brown, Randy. “The Grave of Charlotte Dansie.” Headed West: Historic Trails in Southwest Wyoming. Brown, ed. Mike W. and Gorny, Beverly. Sweetwater County Joint Travel and Tourism Board. Printed for the Oregon–California Trails Association 10^th Annual Convention in Rock Springs, Wyoming. 1992.
• Dansie, Julian LeGrande. “Robert Dansie: Devoted Pioneer Father, Faithful Latter-Day Saint.” Privately printed. Dansie Family Association. 55 pages. No date.
• Dansie, Marvin. “Finding the Pioneer Grave of Charlotte Rudland Dansie after Seventy-five years.” Unpublished monograph, 6 pages. No date.
• Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel. Priest, William, "A record of my life, 1828," 42-62. https://history.lds.org/overlandtravel/sources/17501/priest-william-a-record-of-my-life-1828-42-62.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Charlotte Dansie Grave.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming, accessed May 2, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/charlottedansie.htm.

Illustrations

The photo of the grave is by the author. The photo of Robert Dansie is from the author’s collection, courtesy of the Dansie family.

As they made their way toward the sixth crossing of the Sweetwater River, emigrants found the Oregon Trail descending a steep bluff of sand and gravel. Half a mile later, the trail split, and half a mile after that the trail crossed the river in two different spots.

The travelers were glad, at this point, to get back to good water again. Previously, they had threaded the Narrows at Three Crossings—their third, fourth and fifth crossings of the river—or avoided those fords altogether by way of the accurately named Deep Sand Route. From Three Crossings sixteen more miles took them to Sixth Crossing, where the Oregon Trail crossed the river about three miles southwest of today’s Sweetwater Station at the intersection of U.S. Route 287 and Wyoming Highway 135.

The route between the fifth and sixth crossings was mostly dry. It passed Ice Slough and Warm Springs Creek, but water at both those places was alkaline. Most emigrant parties camped at Sixth Crossing—on one side of the river or the other. Many mentioned crossing another stream soon after crossing, but this in fact was a second channel of the river itself.

Norton Jacob, traveling in 1847 with the first company of Mormon pioneers to cross the Rocky Mountains, wrote of this approach to the Sweetwater on June 24, “[W]hile we were descending a long sandy hill, suddenly through a small grassy bottom, winding, appeared [the Sweetwater’s] sparkling waters, a welcome sight to man & beast.”

The way had been difficult, Jacob’s entry continues, with “tired teams, several having failed on the way by reason of the heat of the Sun & fatigue of the Journey.”

Not all diary entries convey this sense of struggle, however. On the same day, William Clayton, with the same company, noted, “The feed here is very good and plenty of willow bushes for fuel.” A member of Clayton’s company picked up an “Indian arrow point … almost as white as alabaster.”

Nothing so interesting caught the eye of Riley Root a year later. He wrote, “Here the country is a barren waste, except along the river where a little grass is found. Back from the river, nothing grows but wild sage.”

The years 1849 and 1850 brought a huge flood of traffic along the trails—the great majority of it headed for the gold fields of California. Tens of thousands of people and their livestock consumed water, wood and grass as never before.

After fording at Sixth Crossing on July 2, 1849, Patrick McLeod wrote, “We could find no grass to noon on the river.” Worse yet, when his company drove up out of the Sweetwater valley, “The wind blew furiously, raising clouds of sand, cold and disagreeable.”

But next day, July 3, 1849, Ansel McCall’s party evidently crossed at a different spot, finding “a beautiful green meadow in a bend of the river, where there was very fine grazing.” Charlie, one of McCall’s oxen, died there, however. “No more fitting resting place for his old bones could have been found,” wrote McCall, “than that sweet meadow on the bank of this murmuring stream in the heart of the ‘Old Rockies.’”

“Grass very scarce, no wood,” Augustus Burbank wrote on July 5, 1849. “I have seen 8 dead and 2 disabled cattle today.”

Emigrants were sometimes forced to leave useful items along the trail, Burbank noticed. “Wagons, boxes, chains, lead, stove, guns, axes, I saw wedges, clothing & c. was among the sundry articles that lay by the way side.” Burbank also saw “gold dust” in the Sweetwater that turned out to be mica.

Later that month, on July 29, J. Goldsborough Bruff seemed much struck by the view just before the descent to the crossing. “From the edge of the bluff above, we had a beautiful view of the Stream, meadow, and camps below, and the mountains around, in every shade of distance.”

Better yet, Bruff said, he “was informed here, that a few miles below, on the other side of the Stream, were plenty of buffalo and antelope.”

On June 12, 1850, James Shields’s party camped at the crossing, where he reported, “Grazing is very poor.” His diary entry continues, “There were about 60 teams camped near by us. All of us are pretty well done for by today’s travel.”

“[W]ater 18 inches deep, good crossing, grass scarce, willow bushes for fuel,” was Isaac R. Starr’s brief comment on July 7, 1850.

Travel was still difficult in 1853. Although on July 4 Andrew S. McClure noted, “plenty of grass, plenty of water, plenty of wood, plenty of sage,” he also saw, a mile up the river from the crossing, “plenty of hungry cattle.”

No doubt echoing the experience of so many emigrants, McClure added, “The valley in the vicinity of the ford is dotted with cattle. There is little for them to eat there and this is the foundation of so much suffering on this road.”

About three miles west of Sixth Crossing, emigrants sometimes crossed the river twice more at two crossings half a mile apart—the seventh and eighth crossings of the Sweetwater. These fords allowed them to avoid a climb up over a steep, sandy hill on the north side of the river. The approaches to the crossings were swampy, however, and had to be avoided when the route was wet. Ruts over the sandy hill remain today, and are deep and well preserved.

After that, the trail left the river for a far more difficult stretch—over Rocky Ridge.

It was at Sixth Crossing in late October 1856 that the 500 members of the Willie Handcart Company, nearly all of them Mormon converts who had traveled that year from factory cities of the English Midlands, finally stalled. They were starving, freezing and completely out of food, and nine of them died here, shortly before the rest were reached by rescuers with wagons and supplies from Salt Lake City.

Sixth Crossing is now on private land, but a visitor’s center maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is open to the public. It stands on a hill just south of U.S. route 287 and a mile or so east of Sweetwater Station.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Bruff, J. Goldsborough. Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, Captain, Washington City and California Mining Association, April 2, 1849–July 20, 1851. 1 vol. edition. Ed. by Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.
• Burbank, Augustus Ripley. Overland Diary, 1849. Manuscript. MSS P-A 304, Bancroft Library. Typescript.
• Clayton, William. The Journal of William Clayton. Salt Lake City, Utah: International Society of Utah Pioneers, 1945, reprinted 1994.
• Jacob, Norton. The Mormon Vanguard Brigade of 1847: Norton Jacob’s Record. Ed. by Ronald O. Barney. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2005.
• McCall, Ansel J. The Great California Trail in 1849: Wayside Notes of an Argonaut. Bath, N.Y.: Steuben Courier Printing, 1882.
• McClure, Andrew S. The Diary of Andrew S. McClure, 1853. Eugene, Ore.: Lane County Pioneer-Historical Society, 1959. Typescript.
• McLeod, Patrick H. Diary, 1849. Manuscript Collection No. WC001, Philip Ashton Rollins Papers, Box 11, F1, Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. Richard Rieck transcription.
• Root, Riley. Journals of Travels from St. Joseph to Oregon. Oakland, Calif., 1955, reprinted from the Galesburg, IL, Gazeteer and Intelligencer, 1850.
• Shields, James G. Overland Journey from St. Joseph to Sacramento, 9 April to 13 August 1850. WA MSS 423, Beinecke Library. Typescript.
• Starr, Isaac R. Diary, 1850. Manuscript and Typescript, MSS 2473, Oregon Historical Society.
• Woodworth, James. Diary of James Woodworth: Across the Plains to California in 1853. Eugene, Ore.: Lane County Pioneer-Historical Society, 1972.

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.
• Long, Gary Duane. The Journey of the James G. Willie Handcart Company, October 1856. Published by the author, 2009, pp. 66-73.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, “5th 6th 7th and 8th Crossings of the Sweetwater." Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed April 17, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/6th,7th,8thcrssngs.htm.

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-Tribuneof 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.

Moving west from Pacific Springs, Oregon Trail emigrants came in succession to three branches of the Sandy—Dry, Little and Big. At Parting of the Ways, they had chosen between the Sublette Cutoff, heading west, and the Fort Bridger road, heading southwest toward Fort Bridger.

Both routes took them across the Little Sandy and, finally, Big Sandy.

After crossing Big Sandy, Sublette Cutoff travelers faced the Colorado Desert, 40 miles with neither water nor grass. Travelers bound for Fort Bridger and Salt Lake had an easier time. They stayed close to Big Sandy after crossing it, because that trail more or less followed the creek. Still, the way was long and difficult.

“This is a flat running stream over a sand bottom,” wrote former mountain man James Clyman on June 15, 1846. “[W]e found its Bank full from the thawing of the snow on the wind river mountains in which it rises.”

The next year, after crossing Big Sandy on the Fort Bridger route, Orson Pratt with the first party of Mormon pioneers wrote on June 29, 1847, “We travelled 17 miles this afternoon without grass or water, although in about 12 miles water might have been obtained from the Big Sandy, which runs about half a mile to the left of our road.”

Isaac Wistar, whose party took the Sublette Cutoff in 1849, wrote on July 2 of that year, “We camped here to rest the stock and prepare to cross the ‘Jornada del Muerte,’ a waterless desert extending fifty miles or more to the Green River of the Colorado.”

Knowing they could not allow themselves to be caught without food or water on this trek, emigrants prepared carefully. “Repacked wagons,” Wistar’s diary entry continues, “[and] filled every vessel that would hold water and overhauled the mules’ shoes and harness.”

The California Gold Rush brought hordes of travelers in 1849 and 1850. H.C. St. Clair traveled on the Sublette Cutoff. On July 8, 1849, he noted “100 wagons camped here [at Big Sandy] and as many more a few miles below, all awaiting to cross the cutoff [desert] tomorrow night.”

Though travelers could not cross the whole desert in a single night, the dark hours brought cooler temperatures and, at dawn, possibly some dew for thirsty livestock.

Despite difficult conditions and fatigue, diarists found time to describe their surroundings. “The soil, hereabouts, is curious,” wrote Joseph Sedgley July 17, 1849, on the Sublette Cutoff. “In some places it is red, in others yellow, and in still others, green.”

Israel Lord, also traveling on the Sublette, wrote on July 22, 1849, “A few trees are left standing (i.e., if any more ever stood there) alone in their glory just above the [Big Sandy] crossing, which here is six or eight rods wide [a rod is 5.5 yards], and two feet deep—a fine stream. The whole country is one vast sand bed, poorly covered with sage and bunch grass.”

The Wind River mountains, visible from the Sublette Cutoff, caught the notice of many travelers, evoking a sense of wonder. On Aug. 4, 1849, California-bound J. Goldsborough Bruff wrote, “The Wind-river chain of Mts’ trending off to the N. W. their dark jagged and lofty snow-patch’d fronts within 25 ms. And their northern portion fading away in the blue distance.”

Mendal Jewett’s party took the Sublette Cutoff in 1850. To cross the desert, he and his fellow travelers planned to start in late afternoon “and drive all night,” Jewett wrote on June 4. “We are now pulling grass though not 6 inches high to bait our animals on the route.”

Later that month, on June 18, Clark W. Thompson noticed the array of possessions others had left behind on the Salt Lake road. “We see many pieces of wagons that their owners have cut the spokes,” he wrote, “and other parts to make pack saddles of and parts of harness left, the balance being taken to strap the saddles.”

Thompson’s group also found “water kegs, clothing, bags and boots, axes, guns, tolls and even jugs of vinegar.”

Despite the occasional good fortune of useful objects salvaged along the trail, some travelers were disheartened by the bleak terrain. “The face of the country presented an extremely desolate and forbidding appearance,” Elisha C. Winchell wrote on June 28, 1850.

The landscape “was varied only by banks, hillocks and irregular, shapeless mounds or broken heaps of sandy earth, producing no green thing save the ever present wild sage and a most miserly sprinkling of grass blades,” Winchell’s account continues. Only the “majestic chain of the Wind River mountains” relieved the eye and spirit from the “dreary monotony and beggarly sterility” of the route.

Nine years later, on Aug. 4, 1859, Eva Morse’s report of the Big Sandy crossing was terse and to the point. “Found a stage station, some wigwams, and what was a greater sight—a cat, a pig and some chickens. Last but not least, a white woman.”

Richard Burton, the British adventurer and travel writer, passed through on Aug. 21, 1860. He found the Fort Bridger route crossing a pleasant place. The creek ran “with a clear swift current through a pretty little prairillon [small prairie], bright with the blue lupine, the delicate pink malvacea, the gold helianthus, purple aster acting daisy, the white mountain heath, and the green Aselepias tuberosa [butterfly milkweed].”

Burton added, “The Indians, in their picturesque way, term this stream Wágáhongopá, or the Glistening Gravel Water.”

The Fort Bridger Route crossed the Big Sandy at present Farson, Wyo. State Highway 28 running southwest from Farson continues to parallel the route. Swales are often visible alongside the highway, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.

Just past the intersection of Highway 28 and U.S. Highway 191 in Farson are two historical markers. A few yards south of these markers, a modern bridge crosses the Big Sandy. This is also where the main route forded. The Sublette Cutoff crossed the Big Sandy nine miles west of Parting of the Ways, northwest of present Eden Reservoir. That crossing is difficult to reach because of irrigation canals.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Bruff, J. Goldsborough. Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, Captain, Washington City and California Mining Association, April 2, 1849–July 20, 1851. 1 vol. edition. Ed. by Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.
• Burton, Richard F. The City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California [1860]. London, UK: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861. American edition, New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1862. Reprinted as TheLook of the West, Overland to California, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.
• Clyman, James. James Clyman, Frontiersman [1844, 1848]. Ed. by Charles L. Camp. Portland, Ore.: The Champoeg Press, 1960.
• Jewett, Mendal. Journal to and from California. C MSS -M400, Denver Public Library. Typescript.
• Lord, Israel. Typescript of the manuscript, Huntington Library, San Marino, published as: “At the Extremity of Civilization.” Ed. by Necia Pelton Liles. Foreword by J.S. Holliday. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1995.
• Morse, Eva. Diary. Typescript of the manuscript in Brigham Young University Library.
• Pratt, Orson. “Interesting Items Concerning the Journeying of the Latter-day Saints from the City of Nauvoo, Until Their Location in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake (Extracted from the Private Journal of Orson Pratt)” [1847]. Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, Compiled as The Orson Pratt Journals. Ed. by Elden J. Watson. Salt Lake City, Utah: E.J. Watson, 1975.
• Sedgley, Joseph. Overland to California in 1849. Oakland, Calif.: Butler & Bowman, 1877. Photocopy.
• St. Clair, H.C. Journal of a Tour to California [1849]. WA MSS S-1449, Beinecke Library. Typescript.
• Thompson, Clark W. Diary. University of Washington Library. Typescript.
• Winchell, Elisha C. Journal Kept in Crossing the Plains in the Summer of 1850. Papers, ca. 1850–1913. MSS 74/175 c, Bancroft Library. Richard L. Rieck transcription.
• Wistar, Isaac Jones. Diary in Autobiography of Isaac Jones Wistar, 1827–1905: Half a Century of Peace and War. Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 1937.

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.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Big Sandy Crossing.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed March 25, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/big_sandy.htm.

Illustrations

The aerial photo of Farson and the Big Sandy River is by the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. Used with permission and thanks. The photo of the Big Sandy about a mile downstream from the historic trail crossing is by Randy Brown. Used with permission and thanks.

Soldier, artist, bugler, wolf killer and conservationist George Nicholas Ostrom was born in 1888, in Spencer, Iowa, a small town in the northwestern part of the state. After playing in a band in Iowa, homesteading in North Dakota, driving cattle in Texas and working as an artist in Minneapolis, 25-year old George eventually moved with his widowed mother to the hamlet of Springwillow, 20 miles east of Sheridan, Wyo., in 1913.  

Doubtless to fill his pockets with some additional spending money, young George joined Sheridan’s National Guard Company D. That same year he acquired a colt, “a very beautiful sorrel, two white stockings and silver mane and tail and a blazed face,” he remembered years later, that he named Redwing. As a young man, George showed considerable artistic and musical talent, and received a limited amount of professional art training.

On June 18, 1916, the Wyoming National Guard was activated for service on the Mexican border. By that time, George was Staff Sgt. Ostrom, the company bugler.  As a bugler, George was responsible for signaling all military events using bugle calls.

Leaving his beloved colt, Redwing, in pasture at the family homestead, George trained at Camp Kendrick on the grounds of the Cheyenne Frontier Days from June to September 1916. He then served at Camp Deming in Deming, N.M., from Sept. 30, 1916, through March 1, 1917.

Congress declared war on Germany April 7, 1917. Ostrom enjoyed a pleasant three weeks’ vacation at home before he was recalled to federal service, eventually finding himself on the western front of the Great War. In France between July and November 1918, Ostrom’s unit, Battery E of the 148th Field Artillery participated in every major campaign of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF).

During his World War I service, a contest was held in the battalion to design a distinctive unit emblem. George created what may be the earliest rendition of Wyoming’s famed “bucking broncho,” as he spelled it, using military black camouflage paint on the head of a drum. He had managed to smuggle Redwing with him to France, and based the image on his colt.

When George showed up with his drawing, the contest was immediately terminated, and he was declared the unanimous winner. Ostrom’s iconic emblem, used on 148th Field Artillery guns and vehicles during WWI, eventually would be redrawn in 1935 by artist Allen True at the direction of Wyoming Secretary of State Lester Hunt for use on Wyoming’s license plates. The first plates were issued in 1936 and the state has used the image ever since.

Throughout his military service on the Mexican border and in France, Ostrom prepared nearly 20 drawings of military life—in combat and behind the lines. He originally made these sketches in pencil in the field, on whatever paper he could scrounge. His son, George Ostrom Jr., recalls that after he returned home, his father would spend his evenings inking in the pencil sketches on the family’s kitchen table.

Following his discharge in 1919, George returned to Sheridan, and initially hunted wolves. At the time, the state of Wyoming still paid bounties on wolves, ranging, he remembered, from $100 to $500, a healthy paycheck. Wolves preyed on livestock, and the federal government employed full-time wolf hunters in the West. Ostrom was one of these wolf hunters, serving with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Biological Survey of Predatory Animal Control from 1919 through 1929, by which time the wolf had been all but eliminated from the state. 

Ostrom also worked as a commercial artist, painting signs for the city of Sheridan and highway billboards, and created a wealth of art based on his own experiences as a soldier, hunter, rancher, musician and cowboy.

Later in his life, Ostrom regretted his role in destroying the wolf population of Wyoming and became an active conservator, urging their return to the state. He preserved the lives and activities of wolves, with which he was intimately familiar as one of Wyoming’s last wolf hunters, through numerous drawings.

Today, his sketches are considered a national treasure of soldier art, and his wildlife and Wyoming artwork are considered among the finest created by a Wyoming artist.

Ostrom was active in veterans’ organizations and bands throughout his life.  He was a popular character at veterans’ reunions, where with a stick of chalk he was known to draw the “bucking broncho” on sidewalks for drinks.  George and his bugle were a fixture at Wyoming veterans’ ceremonies and funerals.

He died in Sheridan in 1982 at the age of 97. His family remains in Sheridan, and has entrusted his military drawings and artifacts with the Wyoming Veterans Memorial Museum in Casper.

Resources

• Sources

• “Chauchat.” Wikipedia, accessed May 18, 2017 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauchat. 
• “Gray Wolf Timeline for the Contiguous United States.” International Wolf Center, accessed may 16, 2017 at http://www.wolf.org/wow/united-states/gray-wolf-timeline/.
• Hein, Rebecca. “Wyoming’s Long-lived bucking horse.” WyoHistory.org, accessed May 16, 2017 at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyomings-long-lived-bucking-horse.
• Ostrom, George, Jr. and Ostrom family, Sheridan, Wyoming. Informal conversations with author, 2017.
• Slack, Judy. George Nicholas Ostrom: Pioneer, Preservationist, Painter, 1888-1982. Sheridan, Wyo.: Big Horn City Historical Society and Sheridan County Historical Society, 2013.

Illustrations

The photo and the drawings are all from the collections of the Wyoming Veterans Memorial Museum in Casper, Wyo. Used with permission and thanks. Ostrom’s enormously detailed drawings are quite large, some of them 30 inches wide or more. They will be on display in a special show at the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyo., from Oct. 6, 2017 through Jan. 14, 2018.

Out of nearly 200 people who died from murder or other homicides on the Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s, only one lies in a grave with a known location. Missourian Ephraim Brown, a leading figure on a wagon train bound for California, was killed near South Pass in 1857 in what appears to have been a bitter family dispute. Details, however—who killed him, why and how—are frustratingly sketchy.

Arguments and fights were frequent on the overland trails, and murders happened from time to time. The many irritations of the journey tended to make for short tempers. Disagreements over divisions of property, not to mention outright theft, led to conflict and, once in a while, killings.

For the years 1841 through 1865, Richard L. Rieck, the leading expert on trail deaths, has documented 89 murder victims by name and another 83 “unknowns” who were slain by their fellow emigrants. During that time as many as half a million people made the trip west. Rieck’s numbers do not include another dozen or more anonymous individuals reported as dying after incidents of violence, and many more reported cases of attempted murder.

Bodies of obvious murder victims were occasionally found on the trail. Most often the perpetrators were unidentified and escaped punishment. Others who killed emigrants in fights or in self-defense were sometimes banished from their company. Still, there were 21 reported murder trials that resulted in executions on the trail.

But of the graves of the nearly 200 people involved in these incidents, only one survives, that of Ephraim Brown, killed in 1857 on the trail at Rock Creek near South Pass.

Ephraim Brown and his family

Ephraim James Brown was born in Kentucky about 1823. In 1846 he married 16-year old Nancy Ann Sheckles. They settled on a farm in Ralls County, in northeast Missouri near the Mississippi River. Nearby were several farms occupied by her extended family.[1] Among these were two of Nancy’s married sisters, Rebecca Sheckles Witt and Mary Frances Sheckles Menefee, wife of Nimrod W. Menefee. The Menefees lived with an aunt next door to the Browns; Ira Sheckles, the sisters’ younger brother, also lived there. All told, these relatives numbered 33 people at the time of the 1850 census. Many of them would be in the wagon train of 1857.

About 1852, Ephraim Brown and Nim Menefee, brothers-in law, went to California where for a year or two they were partners in a general store in Sacramento. After saving a portion of their profits and perhaps selling the store—the record is unclear—they returned to Missouri with a plan of returning to California with their families.

The ensuing wagon train of 1857 became a general migration of many members of these extended families, including Nim’s father, Arthur Menefee, and several more of his grown children and teenage daughters. By then Arthur, age 61, had married the young widow Rebecca (Sheckles) Witt, then about 24, the sister of Nancy (Sheckles) Brown and Mary (Sheckles) Menefee.

Ephraim and Nancy Brown were the parents of four children, of whom only three can now be identified—William, Ann and Harriet.[2]

The only account of the journey is Arthur Menefee’s diary. It is short on detail and lacks a company roster. Some members of the company can be identified, however, including three unmarried brothers of Nancy Brown: Ira, Napoleon and Jackson Sheckles. The count for the number of people in the wagon train comes to 27, but the list is probably incomplete. The center of authority in the company was the trio of Arthur Menefee, his son Nim Menefee and Nim’s brother-in-law Ephraim Brown. All three were married to daughters of Paulina and Ira Sheckles, Sr.: Rebecca, Mary and Nancy.

Arthur Menefee’s account

So it was a big company comprised primarily of kinfolk, perhaps a dozen wagons and many animals including least 125 head of loose cattle. They left home on May 13, 1857, apparently in different contingents, for on May 24 while camped at the Grand River in western Missouri, Arthur Menefee wrote: “Nim and Ephraim coming up about 1 o’clock. Great joy in camp. All supted together in mutual friendship & harmony and continued until next morning when a little storm rose between Mary & Nancy.”

Arthur Menefee was a dispassionate and impersonal diarist. After June 4, when he briefly described the marriage of his daughter, Mrs. L. Underwood, to J. Westfall, while they were in St. Joseph, he rarely mentioned anyone by name. Even on the day Ephraim Brown was killed, he remained uncannily reserved.

On August 2, the company was camped at Rock Creek about 15 miles east of where the trail crosses the Continental Divide at South Pass. Arthur Menefee wrote: “Next morning at the point of leaving a conflict took place, which terminated in the death of E. Brown. Buried him & left at 12 A. M. traveling over a tolerable road until we arrived at the Mormon Station, distance 11 miles.” The Mormon Station was a post maintained by the short-lived Brigham Young Express service on the south side of the upper Sweetwater. “Still not satisfied with the justice unfortunateness of the past day,” Menefee continued, “owing all the Women’s tounge [sic]. I feel somewhat better health.” He never commented on the incident again, at least in his diary.

Clues to a killing

What happened? After his entry of May 24 Menefee made no other reference to disagreements between the women of the train until his “owing all the Women’s tounge” comment. In two obituaries in 1936 for Anne Louise Brown, the daughter of Nancy and Ephraim, it is written: “[Ephraim] Brown was fatally shot in a quarrel shortly after the trek began.” The second obituary adds that when the quarrel took place, they were “standing guard over the stock to prevent Indian raids.”

It is not known if the fight was prompted by a quarrel between Nancy Brown and Mary Menefee, who after all were sisters, and it is useless to speculate. On Aug. 11 while they camped east of Commissary Ridge on the Sublette Cutoff, about 100 miles west of South Pass, Menefee wrote: “Here we tried the Boy & dismissed him from the Train after finding him guilty, thence pursuing our journey….” The “boy,” presumably E. Brown’s antagonist, is unidentified.

Aftermath

While traveling down the Humboldt River in western Nevada on Sept. 19, Menefee wrote: “Nancy Brown left us & four other wagons,” so there the company broke up, but it is not known who split off with Nancy, perhaps one or more of her brothers.

The remainder of the Menefee company reached Eagle Valley, present Carson City, Nev., on Oct. 11. Most of them went on to California, but Arthur Menefee stayed in the valley and died there two months later.

Nancy Brown also remained in the valley for the winter and did not proceed to California until the following year. She married ex-Forty-niner Chester Swift in Sacramento in 1859 and had several more children. Swift was a teamster for the Nevada mines, but also a habitual gambler. He lost their home in Carson City sometime in the 1870s and then deserted the family.

Nancy made a meager living as a cook and by selling pies but was forced to give up her three young Swift children to an orphanage in Vallejo, Calif. She appears in the 1880 census living alone in Bodie, Calif., apparently running a rooming house. Soon thereafter she went to Merced, Calif., where her daughter Ann Louise Brown Carter was living with her husband and family.

Not having heard from her husband Chester Swift in many years, Nancy married William Newman in 1882 and then was able to retrieve her children from the orphanage. When Chester Swift showed up not long after, the marriage to Newman was dissolved, and then both men abandoned her and the children. She never married again.

In the 1890s Nancy Brown Swift moved with her daughter Lillie May Swift French to a ranch near Winslow, Ariz., where Nancy died March 22, 1901. The location of her grave, unlike the grave of her first husband Ephraim Brown, is now unknown.

Resources

Sources

• Ancestry. “Johnson Barnard.” “Nancy Sheckles.” “Arthur Menefee.” ”Ephraim Brown.” “Paulina Nelson.” ancestry.com
• Brown, Randy. “The Grave of Ephraim Brown.” The Overland Journal. Vol. 7. Number1. (1999). 25 – 27.
• Find a Grave. “Ann Louise Brown Heffner.” findagrave.com.
• French, Inez Eleanor. Letter to Raychell Sumner, containing “Notes for Lillie May Swift,” 1983. Cited in email message to author from Paul Carter. April 25, 2017. E-mail.
• Menefee, Arthur M. “Travels Across the Plains, 1857.” Nevada Historical Quarterly 9. (1966). 1–29.
• U.S. Census. Missouri, Ralls County, District 73. 1850.
• “Mrs. Annie Heffner.” Obituary clipping, unknown date, unknown newspaper, author’s collection.
• Rieck, Richard L. E-mails to author. May 1, 2017.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Ephraim Brown Grave,” accessed June 6, 2017 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/epriambrown.htm.

Illustrations

• The photo of the grave in the sagebrush is by the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. The close-up of the gravestone is by the author. Both are used with permission and thanks.

In the summer of 1878, William O. “Billy” Owen was working with a surveying crew high in the Medicine Bow Mountains, about 36 miles west of Laramie, Wyoming Territory. “Over that vast forest,” he later wrote, “the moon’s shadow was advancing with a speed and rush that almost took one’s breath.” This was the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878.

“It was terrifying, appalling,” Owen’s account continues, “and yet possessed a majestic grandeur and fascination that only one who has seen it can appreciate.”

Worldwide, solar eclipses occur relatively often, at a rate of two to five per year. In a solar eclipse, the moon passes between the earth and the sun, sometimes blocking part of its light and at other times, all. A complete blockage is a total eclipse, and the zone of the earth traversed by the moon’s shadow is called the path of totality. The width, length and route of the path all differ from one eclipse to the next.

“Totality” is the brief period of darkness on Earth when the sun is completely obscured. Totality can last less than one minute or more than seven. During totality, astronomers have a unique opportunity to study the “night” sky around the sun. Because the light of the sun itself is blocked, they can also observe the corona—the sun’s outer atmosphere—otherwise invisible.

Besides the 1878 eclipse observed by Owen and his party, two other total solar eclipses since territorial times crossed present Wyoming before 2017—in 1889 and 1918. These were important opportunities for astronomers with enough personal or institutional means to travel to a choice location and to pay for shipping the necessary equipment. In two of the three eclipses, the totality paths crossed the line of the Union Pacific railroad in Wyoming, greatly simplifying all logistics.

The 1878 eclipse

The path of totality of the July 29, 1878, eclipse crossed most of Wyoming Territory in a swath from northwest to southeast. It was 191 kilometers wide—about 118 miles. Darkness on the centerline of the path lasted three minutes, 11 seconds.

Wyoming residents watched the eclipse through smoked glass, as did Owen and his companions. They also viewed part of the eclipse using their Burt’s solar compass, a large brass surveyor’s device with a mirror and other attachments that allow the user to find true north using the angle of the sun, instead of magnetism.

Such a simple setup was not sufficient for the professional astronomers who spent ten days or more in Wyoming Territory, however. They were there to gather data available only during totality and had to work fast and with the best possible tools.

The inventor Thomas Edison traveled with a party that set up a temporary observatory near Rawlins, Wyo., attracting substantial local publicity. Edison was eager to test his new tasimeter, a highly sensitive heat-measuring device. The July 30, 1878, Laramie Daily Sentinel reported that seven experts, some with their wives as assistants, were working at the observatory. Henry Draper of New York, director of the Rawlins observatory, was the most eminent astronomer in the party.

Draper was a pioneer, perhaps the first, in the young science of astrophotography. He planned to photograph the corona, and delegated other important observations to his colleagues. Draper reported their findings in the September 1878 American Journal of Science and Arts.

The scientists hauled nearly a ton of equipment, including at least four telescopes and accessories plus chemicals needed for the wet-plate collodion photographic process. The best system available at the time, it required the glass plate to be coated, exposed and developed, usually in a portable darkroom, all within about 15 minutes.

At Separation, a railroad station 14 miles west of Rawlins, the Canadian-American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, was in charge of a small party, one of two from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Newcomb was director of the Nautical Almanac, which provides astronomical data for celestial navigation and is still published by the U.S. Navy.

There was nowhere to sleep at Separation except in tents; the stationmaster’s wife cooked for the party. On July 24, Newcomb traveled to Rawlins to meet British astronomer J. Norman Lockyer, founding editor of the prestigious science journal, Nature. Lockyer had led eclipse expeditions to Sicily in 1870 and India in 1871, but this time was traveling alone and intended to assist Newcomb and the other American astronomers. After spending a night in the Separation depot, Lockyer returned to Rawlins to stay at the Railroad Hotel, quarters for the Draper expedition.

At Creston, the station 12 miles west of Separation, the second party from the U.S. Naval Observatory, led by William Harkness, enjoyed more conveniences than did Newcomb and his assistants.

Harkness, Otis F. Robinson, Alvan G. Clark and a few others slept in the railroad car that had delivered their equipment, and enjoyed the cooking services of soldiers sent from Fort Steele, where the railroad crossed the North Platte River, 41 miles to the east. The Harkness party’s temporary observatory had a canvas roof for quick removal before observations.

Harkness and his party spent the days leading up to the eclipse rehearsing, and testing equipment for the big event, down to the tiniest details. To establish their precise latitude, Harkness used a sextant and artificial horizon—a basin of mercury under glass. To find their longitude, Harkness received telegraph signals at the Creston station, helping him compare local time with the time at locations where longitude was already known, in Utah, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C.

At the observation point of an eclipse, knowledge of the exact latitude and longitude enabled astronomers to compare the predicted path of the moon’s orbit with its actual path, and therefore to make needed corrections.

Alvan Clark was a maker of fine scientific instruments. The company Alvan Clark and Sons had received a medal from the French Academy of Sciences for making huge telescope lenses, many of which had been installed in the best American telescopes, including some shipped to Wyoming for the eclipse.

At Creston, Alvan Clark was to photograph the corona. During the party’s many drills, Clark inserted a plate into his camera, exposed it, removed it and inserted a new plate. Otis Robinson tested a polariscope, which might offer clues to the nature of the corona—did it shine by its own light, or was it just reflected somehow from the sun? To study the chemical composition of the corona, Harkness practiced with his spectroscope, which, by isolating different parts of a star’s spectrum, made it possible to determine the different chemical elements in the star.

The men drilled from 7:30 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., with breaks for lunch, supper and an evening walk. All the expeditions performed similar drills, day after day, to perfect their routine so no time would be wasted during the brief totality.

Another American astronomer, James C. Watson from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, traveled with his wife and set up a Clark and Sons telescope near Rawlins. Like Lockyer, Watson and his wife stayed at the Railroad Hotel.

Watson had high hopes that during totality he would be able to see Vulcan, supposedly a new planet orbiting between the sun and Mercury. The existence of Vulcan had been proposed to account for a known disturbance in Mercury’s motions.

The Sentinel captured the excitement of the scene near Rawlins in the days leading up to the eclipse. The visiting astronomers, the Sentinel reported, were kind and courteous. They “furnished a rare opportunity to us frontier residents to enjoy some of the wonders of science … and they never tired of showing and explaining … the use of the instruments, and showing [curious citizens] the wonders of the heavens through their glasses.”

The visitors, too, appreciated the treatment they received. Draper later wrote, “Of the citizens of Rawlins it is only necessary to say that we never even put the lock on the door of the Observatory, and not a thing was disturbed or misplaced during our ten days of residence, though we had many visitors.”

Lockyer, Newcomb and others reported their findings in or were interviewed by The British Journal of Photography, Scientific American, The Washington Post, the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., the New-York Tribune, the New-York Daily Tribune and the American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Lockyer reported that he was convinced that Watson had, in fact, seen Vulcan. It would be nearly 37 years before Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity would account for this disturbance, and rule out the existence of Vulcan.

The weather was clear for all observers.

The 1889 eclipse

The path of the total eclipse of Jan. 1, 1889, crossed just a small piece of Wyoming—across the far northwest corner of Yellowstone Park. Totality on the centerline lasted two minutes, 17 seconds, and was 175 kilometers, or about 108 miles, wide.

Apparently, few astronomers visited Wyoming Territory for this eclipse, probably because transportation to Yellowstone was still difficult. Besides, there were plenty of other good locations in the country for viewing totality.

The Cheyenne Daily Leader reported on Jan. 6, 1889, “The eclipse was seven eighths total here. The sky was perfectly clear and darkness settled down as on a cloudy day. The air became decidedly cooler. Observations were taken by Prof. Garrard of Kentucky and Prof. John Harrington and Dr. Glover of the Thirty Society of this city.”

“Hundreds of Laramie people viewed the eclipse through smoked glass,” reported TheLaramie Boomerang on Jan. 2, 1889. “During the [partial] obscuration Venus could be plainly seen.”

The 1918 eclipse

Totality for the June 8, 1918, eclipse lasted two minutes, 23 seconds, and the path was 112 kilometers (about 69 miles) wide, crossing the southeast corner of Wyoming, including Rock Springs and Green River.

At least six well-known astronomers visited Wyoming for this eclipse. The Green River Star reported on June 14, 1918, that the town “probably never again will … see so many great astronomers at any one time. Professors Frost, Hale, Barnard, Ellerman, Parkhurst, Anderson and many others have been located here for some time.”

The Star goes on to describe the “wonderful clock-driven heliostat” owned by the Yerkes Observatory, of the University of Chicago. The heliostat—a mirror geared to a clock in order to continue reflecting the sun’s light at a single target as the sun moves through the day—threw the sun’s rays into a horizontal telescope and kept the light “steadily in one direction, without deviation for any length of time,” The Star reported.

Complete with “gigantic cameras and spectrographs,” the Yerkes telescope was set up near a local outcrop known as Teapot Rock—not to be confused with the better-known rock in central Wyoming that gave its name to the Teapot Dome oilfield.

The Yerkes party, a total of 16 observers, included Edwin Brant Frost, co-editor of the international Astrophysical Journal and professor of astrophysics at the Yerkes Observatory, as well as Edward Emerson Barnard, whom Isaac Asimov described in 1975 as “perhaps the keenest-eyed astronomer in history.”

The September 1918 Monthly Evening Sky Map published a photograph taken by Barnard of solar prominences, one of them more than 47,000 miles high. A solar prominence is an incandescent stream of protons, extending beyond the corona’s normal edge.

A party from the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory near Los Angeles, Calif., was led by George Ellery Hale. Hale was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and established the Astrophysical Journal in 1895. He had been associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Chicago and had obtained all the funding for the Yerkes Observatory. In 1904, Hale founded and also raised money for the Mount Wilson observatory, and became its director.

Like the Yerkes party, the Mount Wilson expedition set up its temporary base near Green River. In addition to hauling the 30-inch mirror from their prized Snow telescope—a permanent fixture at Mount Wilson—the scientists brought three cameras and three spectrographs. A spectrograph is a device for isolating a portion of a star’s spectrum, and recording this data with a camera.

Clearer skies than in Illinois

Jacob Kunz and Joel Stebbins, a two-man expedition from the University of Illinois Observatory at Urbana, set up their equipment about two miles south of Rock Springs, Wyo. Their account of the expedition and its results, published in the December 1918 Popular Astronomy, is the most extensive and least technical of all the visiting astronomers’ reports.

To measure the brightness of the corona, Kunz and Stebbins hauled more than 400 pounds of equipment, including electric lamps, batteries and galvanometers. A galvanometer measures or detects a small electric current by movements of a coil or a magnetic needle. Kunz and Stebbins achieved their goal of comparing the corona with light sources of known strength, including a candle and an electric light bulb.

“Before leaving Urbana where smoke has been a nuisance for a dozen years,” Kunz and Stebbins reported, “we vowed that with several hundred miles of eclipse track to choose from we would make sure that this trouble at least would be left at home.” Except for two coal mines about a mile away, in Wyoming they were “as secluded as though we had been far from any town.”

A local contractor, Mr. Kellogg, built the shelter that was their temporary observatory, and Kunz and Stebbins also recruited two local assistants, “Messrs. Homer Coté and Paul Freeman, two mining surveyors.”

The performance of their equipment was superb. “Being far from traffic, the galvanometers were perfectly steady, and the dry air of Wyoming eliminated troubles with electrical insulation.” Their report continues, “Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before, and it remained for our cozy little hut in the desert to demonstrate what a model laboratory should be.”

They described in detail the partly cloudy sky, and the suspense they endured right up until two minutes before totality. They were the luckiest of the 1918 parties: At the critical time, thin clouds had covered the eclipse near the Green River observatories.

The June 8, 1918, Laramie Republican noted, “[O]ne may look at … [the eclipse] through a pinhole in a piece of paper or through a dark glass … easily smoked by a candle or oil lamp.” The Republican cautioned, “One must be very careful to have the glass so dark that the sun does not dazzle the eye at all.”

Kunz and Stebbins noted in their Popular Astronomy article that although Stebbins had witnessed two other total eclipses, he “was quite unprepared for the weird effect of the ashy light on the desert landscape shortly before totality, and for the spectrum colors in the clouds about the sun as they were breaking at the last minute.”

As in 1878, visitors were pleased to find the inhabitants so friendly. “We received uniform courtesy and aid from the people of Rock Springs,” wrote Kunz and Stebbins, “and in particular enjoyed the hospitality of the mayor, Dr. E. S. Lauzer.”

Except for the wind, which can disturb the precision of astronomical instruments, Wyoming is an ideal place to observe a solar eclipse. High altitude, fair weather and clear air, far from polluting population centers yet near sources of food, shelter and building services, attracted experts to these early eclipses from the United States, Great Britain and Europe. In turn, their discoveries advanced the science of astronomy worldwide.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Anderson, J.A. “The Expedition of the Mount Wilson Observatory to the Solar Eclipse of June 8, 1918.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 58:4, 1919, 255-258. Accessed April 27, 2017, at http://www.jstor.org/stable/984401.
• Barker, George F. “On the Total Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 18:102, July-December 1878, 103-114. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://www.jstor.org/stable/982766.
• Barnard, E.E. “The Large Prominences on the Sun’s Western Limb at the Total Eclipse of the Sun, June 8, 1918.” The Monthly Evening Sky Map, XII: 41, September 1918. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://books.google.com/books?id=pmxCAQAAMAAJ&pg=PT130&lpg=PT130&dq=parkhurst+wyoming+eclipse+1918&source=bl&ots=OjY_f6CeA9&sig=FxVdO30uLmhm8Qnz2zsYmpbusD8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis2rvsysXTAhWrwlQKHRn0AygQ6AEINzAF#v=onepage&q=parkhurst%20wyoming%20eclipse%201918&f=false.
• Draper, Henry, M.D. “The Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” American Journal of Science and Arts, September 1878, 227-230. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/113467#page/1/mode/1up.
• “The Eclipse.” New-York Tribune, July 31, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The Eclipse of the Sun, July 29, 1878.” Scientific American, XXIX: 7, Aug. 17, 1878, 96. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/scientific-american-1878-08-17.
• Frost, Edwin B. “Results of Observations of the Eclipse by the Expedition from the Yerkes Observatory.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, LVIII, 1919, 282-288. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://scans.library.utoronto.ca/pdf/4/33/proceedingsofame58ameruoft/proceedingsofame58ameruoft.pdf.
• ———. “Total Solar Eclipse, June 8, 1918.” Popular Astronomy, Vol. 26, 458-461. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1918PA.....26..458F.
• Kunz, Jacob, and Joel Stebbins. “The Illinois Eclipse Expedition to Rock Springs, Wyoming.” Popular Astronomy, XXVI: 10, December 1918, 665-676. Accessed May 24, 2017, at https://books.google.com/books?id=o8EzAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA665&lpg=PA665&dq=parkhurst+wyoming+eclipse+1918&source=bl&ots=GrAQkGfR4b&sig=v6SbLnpnxPHEUWCnPYC4wPoo27g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis2rvsysXTAhWrwlQKHRn0AygQ6AEIMzAD#v=onepage&q=parkhurst%20wyoming%20eclipse%201918&f=false.
• Lockyer, J. Norman. “The Recent Eclipse.” The British Journal of Photography, Aug. 30, 1878, 412-414. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The New Planet: Professor Watson’s Report of His Observations During the Eclipse—Mr. Swift’s Observations.” Courier-Journal [Louisville, Ky.], Aug. 25, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• Owen, William O. Unpublished autobiography, c.a. 1930, 28. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, William O. Owen collection, #84, Box 1.
• “Professor Lockyer’s Idea. A Conversation with the Great English Scientist.” The Washington Post, Aug. 9, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• Rae, W. Fraser. “With the Astronomers.” New-York Daily Tribune, Aug. 13, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The Total Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” The American Catholic Quarterly Review, October 1878. Accessed Feb. 9, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/AmeriCatholicQRevV03.
• Wyoming Newspapers. Accessed Dec. 19, 2016, Dec. 20, 2016, May 17, 2017, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov:
  • The Carbon County Journal, Jan. 5, 1889.
  • The Cheyenne Daily Leader, July 27, 1878, July 31, 1878, Jan. 2, 1889, Jan. 6, 1889.
  • The Cheyenne Daily Sun, July 29, 1878, Aug. 1, 1878.
  • Cheyenne State Leader, June 8, 1918.
  • Cheyenne Weekly Leader, Aug. 8, 1878.
  • The Green River Star, June 7, 1918, June 14, 1918.
  • The Laramie Boomerang, Dec. 31, 1888, Jan. 2, 1889.
  • Laramie Daily Sentinel, July 30, 1878.
  • The Laramie Republican, June 8, 1918.
  • Laramie Weekly Sentinel, July 20, 1878.
  • Riverton Chronicle, June 14, 1918.
  • Rock Springs Miner, June 14, 1918.
  • The Sheridan Enterprise, June 9, 1918.
  • Wyoming State Tribune, June 10, 1918.

Secondary Sources

• Asimov, Isaac. Eyes on the Universe: A History of the Telescope. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975, 91-94, 110-117, 122-159, 181-182.
• Baron, David. American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2017, 105-118, 133-149.
• “Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses -1999 to +3000 (2000 BCE to 3000 CE).” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Accessed May 23, 2017, at
• https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Secat5/Secatalog.html#cattab.
• “Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses 1801 to 1900 (1801 CE to 1900 CE).” NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/SE1801-1900.html.
• "Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses 1901 to 2000 (1901 CE to 2000 CE)." Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Secat5/SE1901-2000.html.
• "George Ellery Hale." Accessed May 18, 2017, at https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/fac/facch04_01.html.
• "Golden Era of Refractors." American Institute of Physics. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/cosmology/tools/tools-refractors....
• “The Nautical Almanac.” Accessed June 12, 2017, at http://aa.usno.navy.mil/publications/docs/na.php.
• Rea, Tom. "A Kid in Hell on Wheels: Laramie as the Railroad Arrived." WyoHistory.org. Accessed May 23, 2017, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/kid-hell-wheels-laramie-railroad-arrived.
• Roberts, Phil. "Edison, the Electric Light and the Eclipse."Annals of Wyoming, 53:1, Spring 1981, 54-62. Accessed May 3, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/annalsofwyom53121981wyom.
• ———. "Edison, the Light Bulb and the Eclipse of 1878." WyoHistory.org. Accessed May 3, 2017, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/edison-light-bulb-and-eclipse-1878.
• Sheehan, William, and Richard Baum. "Vulcan Chasers."Astronomy, December 1997, 42-47. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/vulcan.pdf.
• “Simon Newcomb (1835-1909).” From a St. John’s University astronomy course, accessed June 27, 2017 at http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/astro/newcomb/SNewcomb.html.
• “Spectroscopy and the Birth of Astrophysics.” American Institute of Physics. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/cosmology/tools/tools-spectroscopy.htm.
• Struve, Otto. "Biographical Memoir of Edwin Brant Frost."National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: Biographical Memoirs, Vol. XIX, 25-51. Accessed May 18, 2017, at http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/frost-edwin.pdf.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1878 July 29". NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=18780729.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1889 January 01." NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=18890101.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1918 June 08." NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=19180608.
• “What does a spectroscope do?” Telescopes from the Ground Up, accessed June 27, 2017 at https://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/lesson/basics/g23/.

Illustrations

• The photo of Billy Owen is from the American Heritage Center. Used with permission and thanks.
• The color maps of the paths of the totality of the solar eclipses of 1878 and 1889 are from NASA. Used with thanks.
• Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s image of the 1878 eclipse and the photos of Henry Draper and George Ellery Hale are from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image of Henry Draper’s phototelespectroscope is from his report in The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Jul.-Dec. 1878, p. 105. Used with thanks.
• Edward Emerson Barnard’s 1918 photo of the sun's corona is from The Monthly Evening Sky Map, September 1918.
• The image of part of the front page of the June 18, 1879 Cheyenne State Leader is from Wyoming Newspapers. Used with thanks.
• The image of Kunz and Stebbins’ 1918 temporary observatory is from their report in Popular Astronomy, December 1918.

The National Road, the first federally sponsored highway, enters Indiana just east of the town of Richmond, passes directly through it and heads for Centerville six miles west. From there it continues across the Wayne County toward Indianapolis. Funneling traffic west, the road was extremely busy during the peak years of the California Gold rush, 1849 and 1850.

During the Gold Rush years beginning in 1849 there was a very large emigration of men from the towns, villages and farms of Wayne County. Out of about 110 graves that can be identified on the Oregon-California Trails across the West, 53 are in Wyoming. And remarkably, three of these Wyoming graves are graves of Wayne County people.

Two of the Wyoming graves, of Alva Unthank and Martin Ringo, are in Converse County, Wyoming, a mere eight miles apart, just a little nearer than their homes had been in Indiana. There is no other connection between the two. Unthank died in 1850, Ringo in 1864.

The third grave of a Wayne County resident is that of Daniel Lantz of Centerville. He is buried about five miles north of present Granger, Wyo., near the near the western border of Sweetwater County in southwestern Wyoming.

Daniel Lantz was a native of Fairfield County, Ohio, where he was born about 1803. In 1832 he married 16-year-old Mary Elizabeth Wilson of Pittsburgh, Pa. In 1833 they moved to Centerville, where Daniel’s wagon-making business took off. Business was so good that in 1835 the couple could afford to buy a substantial brick home on Centerville’s Main Street, the local name for the National Road.

They built a substantial two-story residence that was connected to the shop by a spanner arch, through which Daniel could wheel his completed wagons and present them for sale. The Lantz home is a landmark in the town to this day.

Daniel Lantz was a member of Centerville’s Oddfellow’s Lodge, Hoosier Lodge No. 23, I.O.O.F. Their lodge meetings were held in a room above the shop in the Lantz house. Access to the room was limited to a single doorway just inside the arch. The door at the top of the narrow stairway has peepholes, and there are pulleys above the windows that were used to lower blinds to insure lodge privacy.

By 1850 Daniel and Mary Lantz were parents of five surviving children. Henry, the oldest, was 15, followed by John, 13, Thomas, 6, Amanda, 4. Lewis, the baby, was just 2. When the census taker came in August, Mary estimated the value of their real estate as $2,600—that magnificent house and wagonmaker’s shop. By then, probably unknown to Mary, her husband was already dead.

That spring Lantz had joined a company of men from Centerville, including diarist James Seaton. They traveled first to Cincinnati and then by steamboat down the Ohio and up the Missouri River to St. Joseph, Mo., where they joined up with a company from Richmond. Smaller contingents from the neighboring towns of Economy and Boston, Ind. also joined the party. The “Richmond boys,” as they were called, included diarist Henry Starr. Thus, two excellent journalists, Seaton and Starr, described the company’s travels and eventually the illness and death of Daniel Lantz.

On July 3 the company reached the Parting of the Ways west of South Pass between Dry Sandy and Little Sandy creeks and turned left toward Fort Bridger and the Salt Lake Valley beyond it. They celebrated the Fourth of July in grand fashion and all seemed well, but on the following day James Seaton wrote: “This day D. Lantz was taken quite sick.”

On July 6 three more members of the company were stricken with what Starr called the “flu.” Seaton called it “the bloody flux”—dysentery—very likely the correct diagnosis. They stayed in camp all day and tended the men who were ill. All except Lantz improved and eventually recovered.

On July 7, Seaton wrote that Lantz thought he was able to go on, so they drove 10 miles to the Green River and ferried their wagons across. The river was very high; they did not succeed in getting the cattle to swim the river until the evening of July 8. The next day they went 18 miles to the Blacks Fork of the Green River and camped near the road about a half-mile from the river where, according to Starr, they found excellent pasture for their stock.

Seaton wrote on July 10: “As Lantz was getting worse it was agreed to stop until there was a change in him for better or worse.” Starr wrote: “We had to ly by today. D Lance having got worse and being considered by the Physician unfit to travel … we have a beautiful camping Place “

The company doctor was Dr. David S. Evans of Boston, Ind.

Seaton on July 11: “As Lantz was not improving any it was now feared he could not live. The Dr. said he could do nothing for him and did not believe he would live another morning.”

On the morning of the third day at their camp at Blacks Fork Daniel Lantz died. Seaton wrote: “Mr. Lantz is still alive but insensible. He lived until 9 ½ o’clock A. M. When he was no more he was buried at sunset near the road in a very decent manner. His grave was marked by a neat stone. His disease was the bloody flux. There are 10 more get the same disease but none dangerous.”

Starr: “D Lance died this morning In him we lost a most exemplary man one whom we always found cheerful and resigned come what would. We gave him as good and decent a Burial as we could. but it looked hard to consign him to the grave Coffinless.”

Someone in the company carved an inscription on the headstone that read: “Daniel Lantz of Centreville, Wayne County, Ind. Died July 12. 1850. Age 47 years.”

Near the top of the stone were carved three linked rings with the initials F, L and T, one letter in each link, representing Friendship, Love and Truth, a symbol of the Odd Fellows Lodge. Fragments of this stone still lie over the grave.

On July 13 the company rolled on toward California and Seaton wrote: “This morning we again started but [with] feelings of regret for having to leave a friend behind.”

It’s not known when Mary Lantz learned of her husband’s death, but on Oct. 23 a death notice appeared in the Richmond Palladium that is somewhat judgmental in tone and misspells his name. It reads in part: “Mr Lautz was an honest, industrious man, and was acquiring at his business a competency before he left home—but ambitious for sudden wealth he concluded to try his fortune in the far West.”

We cannot know for certain whether Lantz expressed any regrets in his final days when it became evident that death was near. Still, Henry Starr’s diary entry may give us a clue: “… [A] most exemplary man one whom we always found cheerful and resigned come what would.”

If in fact Daniel Lantz’s last words were “cheerful and resigned,” we might infer that any feelings of regret were not bitter ones, and that at the end he did not condemn himself for having been foolish. Like so many others in the Gold Rush, Daniel Lantz gambled and lost.

Resources

Sources

• Brown, Randy. “Daniel Lantz and the Wayne County Companies of 1850.” Overland Journal. Vol. 9, Number 3. Fall, 1991. 2 – 13.
• “California Items.” Richmond Palladium. October 23, 1850. p. 1.
• Seaton, James A. “Recollections of James A. Seaton.” Richmond Palladium, July 10, 1942. Randy Brown transcription.
• Starr, Henry W. Diary, 1850. Typescript, Indiana State Library.

Illustrations

• The photo of the historic Daniel Lantz house in Centerville, Ind., is from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks. The photo of the grave is by the author. Used with permission and thanks.

A.A. Anderson’s favorite self-description was “artist-hunter.” In his autobiography he wrote, “The two ruling passions of my life have always been hunting and painting.” But Anderson, who founded the Palette Ranch west of Meeteetse, Wyoming Territory, in the 1880s, played other roles, too: Rancher, conservationist, author, publisher, philanthropist, world traveler, patron of aviation, and celebrity networker.

And the best window into this man and the challenges of his times may come from his brief, controversial time as a forester—as superintendent of the Yellowstone Forest Reserve from 1902–05.

Artist, hunter and hobnobber

Abraham Archibald Anderson was born in Hackensack, N.J., in 1846. Little is known about his early life. He was one of 10 children; his father was a civil engineer turned pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church. Anderson received a good high school education but apparently didn’t attend college or fight in the Civil War; he claimed to have briefly studied medicine and succeeded in the dry goods and manufacturing business. According to his autobiography, when he sold a painting for $800, presumably in the mid-1870s, he decided to sail to Paris to study art.

Probably a contributing factor in that decision was his 1876 marriage to heiress Elizabeth Milbank. Her fortune gave him freedom to pursue his passions. They had a long marriage; Elizabeth pursued her own passions, mostly in New York City where she was a noted philanthropist. Their daughter, Eleanor A. Campbell, became a medical doctor and founded a successful low-income health clinic on the Lower East Side; their son died in childhood.

But the public self-image that Anderson stewarded rarely featured his family. Instead he called himself “independently wealthy,” which was probably fair by the standards of his day. He used that wealth to spend several years in Paris, studying under top names in the pre-Impressionist era. He once won a gold medal at a Paris salon. He eventually gained particular acclaim as a portraitist; his 1890 portrait of Thomas Edison hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

But Anderson was perhaps more notable for his social network. He bought a mansion on the Boulevard du Montparnasse and used it to establish the American Art Association of Paris, a center of expatriate life. Prominent Americans visiting Paris would stop by; sometimes Anderson painted their portraits and often he became a friend. He knew Mark Twain, for example, and claimed to have served as Edison’s Parisian interpreter.

To pursue his other passion, hunting, Anderson traveled to frontier Wyoming. During his first visit, probably in the 1880s, the Bighorn Basin was sparsely inhabited; the towns of Cody, Powell, Basin and Meeteetse did not yet exist. For years after Anderson decided to buy a ranch on the upper Greybull River, it was a two- or three-day trek from the nearest railhead at Red Lodge, Mont.

But Anderson was drawn to these easternmost foothills of the mountains southeast of Yellowstone National Park because they featured abundant wildlife. They served as winter range for elk herds that summered in the park. And with elk, of course, came Anderson’s arch-nemesis, the grizzly bear. He claimed to have killed 39 in his lifetime, including four on a single day.

At the Palette Ranch—where the colors included reds and russets of the riverside cliffs, spring greens of grasses or autumn yellows of cottonwoods, the whites of the snowcapped Absaroka peaks, and the blue of the never-ending sky—Anderson built a European-style hunting lodge. Its huge living room featured tapestries, fur rugs, hunting trophies, and a stone fireplace that could fit four-foot logs. The guest room boasted silk sheets and a crystal mantelpiece from Japan. The grounds included a swimming pool and small golf course as well as a painting studio.

He built another studio far out in the mountains. At the remote studio he would sometimes paint from nude models, and today the river there is still known as Warhouse Creek, presumably a more printable approximation of what some area cowboys believed was really going on. Today that studio, located inside Washakie Wilderness in the Shoshone National Forest, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The upper crust

Although Anderson was a unique character, his establishment of the Palette Ranch reflected a wider trend: wealthy hunters as western pioneers. Most famously Theodore Roosevelt (another friend of Anderson’s) spent large portions of the years from 1884 to 1887 in North Dakota.

Likewise, Anderson’s upper-Greybull neighbor Otto Franc was born a German nobleman. These aristocrats wanted to hunt the West’s extraordinary wildlife. They became interested in conservation as they saw declining game populations threaten their pastime.

Anderson was “perhaps the most influential individual in bringing eastern aristocracy to this corner of Wyoming,” wrote Robert E. Bonner in William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows. Anderson continued to introduce prominent members of his social network to northwest Wyoming well into the 20th century.

For example, in 1908 he invited his friend William Robertson Coe to the Palette Ranch for a hunt. Delighted with the trip (they killed four grizzlies and two elk) Coe purchased area property from William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody the following year. Coe, whom the New York Times described as a “sportsman and racehorse owner” in a notice of his marriage, later became a major Wyoming philanthropist; the William Robertson Coe Library at the University of Wyoming bears his name and the family remains prominent in Wyoming politics and philanthropy.

In 1913 Anderson hosted Prince Albert of Monaco; after their successful hunt at the Palette Ranch, Buffalo Bill joined them for a second expedition near Pahaska Tepee just east of Yellowstone Park, which was so well publicized that it may be the most famous hunt in Wyoming history.

Especially in early years, eastern aristocrats sought to have an impact on conservation in the West. Roosevelt, for example, co-founded the Boone and Crockett club in New York in 1887. He hoped it would do for animals what the Audubon Society did for birds: advocate for laws that would benefit their habitat.

Similarly, Anderson was a charter member of the Camp Fire Club, formed in 1897 to “further the interests of hunting and conservation.” Designed to be less hoity-toity than Boone and Crockett, less focused on social standing, the Camp Fire Club has ended up with a lower historical profile. But its members included noted conservationists such as Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, who later founded the U.S. Forest Service, and William Hornaday, founder of the Bronx Zoo. The club also played a role in protecting American bison, Alaskan fur seals and Glacier National Park. A.A. Anderson served as the organization’s president for its first decade.

Wahb, the bear Anderson couldn’t kill

In Paris, Anderson had met another American artist-hunter married to an heiress. Ernest Thompson Seton would soon achieve fame as an author-illustrator of children’s books about nature, and as a co-founder of the Boy Scouts. In Paris, Seton was frustrated that the establishment came to prefer Impressionism to his realistic, sometimes lurid paintings of bears and wolves. Anderson was equally dismissive of Impressionism, and by 1895 both men had left Paris for the New York area.

Seton too was active in the Camp Fire Club (he would eventually succeed Anderson as president), and in 1897 the club’s Recreation magazine asked him to do a series of articles on wildlife in Yellowstone. Seton brought his wife Grace to Yellowstone; Anderson, wife Lizzie, and perhaps daughter Eleanor met them near today’s Roosevelt Lodge in the northeastern quarter of the park for several days of fishing and camping.

The Setons had so much fun that they returned to Wyoming the following autumn. Anderson met them in Jackson Hole with two men and a 16-horse pack train. They camped their way back to the Palette, tracking elk, hunting antelope, and enduring a three-day snowstorm. Along the way, and during their subsequent sojourn at the ranch, Anderson continually told tales of a glorious, gigantic bear that he called Wahb (supposedly Shoshone for “white bear”).

Wahb had menaced area cattle herds for years, consistently eluding the guns and traps of Anderson and his neighbors. And at least in Anderson’s stories, Wahb was everywhere: Wahb must have made the 14-inch track that Grace saw on the Upper Wiggins Fork north of Dubois, “big enough for a baby’s bath tub,” she wrote. Wahb could well have been the gigantic bear Ernest had seen the previous summer while hiding in a garbage pit behind Yellowstone’s Fountain Hotel. Grace wrote, “I had heard so many tales of this monster that when I gazed upon his track I felt as though I were looking at the autograph of a hero.”

Over the next year Seton consolidated and embellished those stories into perhaps his best-known book, Biography of a Grizzly. It was a story told from Wahb’s perspective—and, despite the factual-sounding title, clearly invented.

Seton dedicated the book to Anderson. But there’s no record of how Anderson reacted to its sentimentalized, anthropomorphized portrait of a bear that lived with dignity and died of natural causes. To Anderson, bears were enemies, and needed to be personally vanquished. In 1915, a full 17 years after Seton’s visit, Anderson finally killed a bear he believed to be Wahb—and announced his triumph in a front-page article in a Cody newspaper.

The Yellowstone Forest Reserve

A major early victory of the aristocratic sportsmen was the 1891 creation of the world’s first national forest, the Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve. The Yellowstone reserve and a host of other forest reserves established the following decade generally lacked organization and purpose, however. They were governed out of the often-corrupt General Land Office of the Department of Interior, and had minimal on-site staff. The Yellowstone reserve, for example, did not get a superintendent until 1898—and that man, a political appointee named A.D. Chamberlain, rarely left Cody or even his hometown of Evanston to spend time on the reserve itself.

As a preservationist, Anderson was concerned. To him, the purpose of a reserve was to preserve wildlife habitat. Yet without enforcement of its regulations, people treated it like other not-yet-homesteaded government land: they cut trees, grazed cattle and sheep, and even built cabins and tended crops. Anderson had particular disdain for sheepmen. Their herds overgrazed the range, and, he believed, they frequently set forest fires.

In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt reorganized and expanded the northwest Wyoming forest reserves. Roosevelt then appointed Anderson general superintendent of four divisions (Absaroka, Shoshone, Wind River and Teton) on the newly named Yellowstone Forest Reserve. According to Anderson, it was all Anderson’s idea, and he even helped Roosevelt draw lines on the map for the reserve’s boundaries.

This was three years before the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service. Rangers, hired for their outdoor skills, usually lacked any background in forestry or range management, and received little training. They were generally expected to police grazing and timber cutting, improve trails, eject squatters, settle disputes, and put out fires. They also did a great deal of paperwork on timber and grazing permits. In the winter, when Anderson was in New York, applications had to be routed through him there.

Furthermore, although Anderson was working for his friend (and fellow Camp Fire Club member) Gifford Pinchot, organizational structures and missions were still poorly defined. Thus Anderson got to put his own imprint on operations. For example, he had his rangers appointed assistant Wyoming state game wardens, without pay, to give them more authority in dealing with poachers. He implemented a military structure with rangers ranking from privates to lieutenants. Anderson designed a military-style uniform and insisted that rangers wear it. In print he was always known as “A.A. Anderson”; to friends he was apparently “Abram” or “Triple-A”; but from this point forward he enjoyed being called “Colonel.”

Anderson was superintendent during construction of what is known today as the nation’s oldest ranger station, in Wapiti, Wyo, about 20 miles west of Cody. However, that distinction is not nearly as impressive as it sounds: It was the first station to be constructed with government funds. Rangers across the country used many, often improvised, structures as home base. For example, in Sunlight Basin, northwest of Cody in 1903, ranger Jesse W. Nelson took over an old illegal homesteader’s cabin. Other rangers built structures without government funds. (They had to supply their own horses, bedrolls and other equipment, so building their own cabins would have seemed consistent with the terms of the job.)

Anderson’s other accomplishments included a boundary survey of the reserve, anti-rustling enforcement, and banning hunting on the reserves by Native Americans. (Anderson was sympathetic to natives. He later wrote, “Our treatment of the Indians is a blot on American history.” But on the reserves his primary concern was the health of wildlife populations, and American Indians, from his point of view, killed too many antelope.) He also claimed to have reduced demand for illegally killed elk by helping to convince the Elks Clubs, the nationwide Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, to abolish elk eyeteeth as an official emblem.

Unpopular permits

In the big picture, however, he saw his accomplishments primarily in terms of grazing. Early rangers confirmed Anderson’s fears of overgrazing. For example, C.N. Woods, working south of the Greybull River, reported that his unit “was very heavily stocked with sheep … Sometimes we rode for miles without finding enough grass on which to [graze horses overnight at a] camp.” On one occasion, Anderson claimed, he learned that 60,000 sheep from Utah were trespassing on the reserve, guarded by 40 armed sheepherders. He assembled 65 rangers and drove them off.

Although Anderson believed that regulating out-of-state sheep would improve conditions for locals, many locals disagreed. After all, Anderson was implementing a permit system that also restricted locals’ grazing on public lands. They opposed any reductions in sheep, any regulation of the open range. Once upon a time, grazing on these lands had been free; then it required a free permit; in this era the government began charging fees for the permits. Anderson became the local face of this unpopular policy.

In his autobiography, Anderson wrote, “When the reserve was first organized every paper in Wyoming except one—and that one I owned—attacked me most severely.” As evidence of the irrationality of those attacks, he cited a quote from Meeteetse’s Big Horn County News (Meeteetse was part of Big Horn County until 1909): “Mr. Anderson can, by a single stroke of his diamond-bedecked hand, put out of existence that noble animal that clothes his unclean body.” Anderson further claimed that sheepmen threatened his life, and that they may have set a 1902 fire that nearly burned down his ranch.

Bigger forces at play

In northwest Wyoming, it was easy to see these dramatic events as related to the outsized personalities of Anderson and his antagonists. But in truth all of these people were caught amid larger forces. For example, Anderson was correct that wildlife populations were declining—but merely putting an end to overgrazing on the reserves wasn’t going to be enough to reverse that trend. The bigger problem was the development of Wyoming’s frontier, including the loss of winter range and increased hunting pressures, which had combined to create an unsustainable situation for wildlife.

Sheepmen, meanwhile, were correct that grazing fees and restrictions threatened their livelihoods. But the bigger problem was scarcity: There wasn’t enough free range to support them all indefinitely. Their communities were unsustainable.

Even the forest reserves were unsustainable. Gifford Pinchot believed that all the fees and paperwork would create a system by which forest stewardship could pay for itself. Progressives such as Pinchot and Roosevelt saw a great deal of waste in private enterprise, including timber management. They believed this waste could be eliminated by efficiencies such as putting limits on grazing and timber cutting, organizing in Anderson’s military style and preventing forest fires. It took several years for them to accept the failure of that vision; in some ways Pinchot never quite did.

Finally, amid all of these limits and unsustainabilities, Anderson’s forestry career played out in the middle of violent class struggles across the West. In Idaho, the 1899 Coeur d’Alene riots led to the 1905 assassination of former governor Frank Steunenberg. In Colorado, a series of miners’ strikes in 1903–04 were particularly violent. In Wyoming in 1902, Tom Horn was convicted of murder in association with assassinations of small ranchers. In the Bighorn Basin particularly, it was a time of heated violence between cattle and sheep interests, culminating in the Spring Creek raid of 1909.

If there were limits to wildlife habitat, grazing lands or timber—and if complicated corporate or government entities were required to oversee the exploitation of Wyoming’s resources—then who would control and who would benefit from this newly closed frontier? Capital or labor? Rancher or homesteader? Cattle or sheep? Private citizen or government authority? Wyoming resident or eastern aristocrat?

Anderson in trouble

In the years 1903–05, popular opinion turned increasingly against Anderson’s role in the forest reserve. Much of it was opposition to the reserves themselves: their inherent curtailment of homesteading and grazing. Part of it was due to what opponents saw as Anderson’s egotistical, imperious style. But Anderson the “hunter-artist” was also in a unique position regarding the preservation/conservation divide.

Today we often associate that divide with naturalist John Muir, favoring preservation of scenery in national parks, versus Gifford Pinchot, favoring sustained yield of timber and other resources in national forests (the successor to forest reserves). But those two men did not invent the divide; indeed, it may be better represented by the rift between by A.A. Anderson and the residents of northwest Wyoming. Anderson wanted to preserve habitat and scenery. The residents wanted to graze their livestock, cut timber and establish and maintain their homesteads.

Atwood C. Thomas, the business manager of the Big Horn County News in Meeteetse, painted Anderson as a rich outsider who wanted to lock up public lands for the private benefit of his wealthy friends. In an Oct. 21, 1905, story titled “Anderson Protects Private Game Preserve,” for example, the News quoted rangers who said that Anderson had ordered them to frighten elk away from local hunters near the Palette Ranch. And when Anderson’s eastern friends come to visit, the rangers said, they were instructed to shoo the elk toward the hunters.

That same month the News highlighted a line from a nearby newspaper, the Basin Rustler: “It seems the animus behind the forest reserve policy is the creation of immense game preserves where the idle rich may come to shoot elk and deer.” And from the Cody Enterprise: “If America is for Americans, why preserve vast areas of public domain for wild beasts, and a few sportsmen, and deprive a lot of good Christian Americans of the opportunity of making a home for themselves and families.”

The News promoted a petition calling for Anderson’s removal. It got at least 15 other newspapers to editorialize in favor of the petition. In lonely support of Anderson was the Meeteetse Standard, the newspaper he owned.

Anderson ousted

In some ways you could see this as an old-fashioned newspaper war, with opposing publications taking opposing sides on a hot local issue. Such conflicts were common enough; 16 years later Caroline Lockhart and Len Leander Newton would engage in a delicious one in Cody.

But if this was a war, the combatants’ lineups didn’t match well. Thomas of the Big Horn County News was a state senator and literally a town founder—he’d surveyed and platted the Meeteetse townsite in 1896. His editor, F. H. Barrow, went on to a lengthy career in Wyoming journalism.

By contrast, the Meeteetse Standard was never prominent enough to even be indexed by today’s Wyoming Newspaper Project; its only meaningful appearance in the Library of Congress database is as the source of a poem later reprinted in another paper: “But of country life he soon grew tired / There wasn’t much to see. / Says he: ‘I’ll find a lively town’ / He now resides in Meeteetse.” The News asserted that Anderson subsidized the Standard’s operating expenses just because he was rich and wanted a newspaper to spout his views.

In late 1905 the political pressure associated with the petition grew. The Interior Department reassigned Anderson from “special superintendent” to “inspector”—but critics charged that he continued to run the reserve as if it were his. Finally, on Dec. 15, 1905, Thomas received a telegram from J.A. Breckons, an assistant to Wyoming’s U.S. Sen. Francis Warren in Washington, D.C.: “Reliable information has been received here that an indefinite furlough has been given Forest Inspector (formerly Superintendent) A.A. Anderson, of the Yellowstone forest reserve.”

The News printed it under a headline, in lurid red, taking up almost half the front page. “Anderson OUSTED: Victory for the People.”

Two weeks later Anderson submitted a letter of resignation, citing his need to go abroad with his sick wife. He didn’t mention any controversies, and said he appreciated the support of Gifford Pinchot. But the News reminded readers of “his unfair treatment of old-time settlers, while showing favors to intimate and influential friends in the matter of letting them use the reserve for grazing lands.”

The preservation/conservation divide had claimed a victim: Anderson had failed to reconcile his love for wildlife habitat with the democratic needs of Wyoming’s citizens. He paid for that failure with his job. Of course he was rich enough not to need a job—but Wyoming and the nation might have benefitted if he’d found a way to bridge that gap.

Aftermath

Anderson lived a long and productive life before dying in 1940 at age 93. He continued to hunt in Wyoming with aristocratic friends. He authored a rather self-serving autobiography. He became fascinated by aviation, and applied his money and networking to the new field. Perhaps most memorably, he commissioned the acclaimed Bryant Park Studios building in New York City, where he and Elizabeth lived in a penthouse apartment described by The New York Times as “one of the most beautiful in the country” until the end of their lives.

But his particular role in the Yellowstone Forest Reserve has an interesting coda. The month after his resignation, Anderson sued the Big Horn County News for libel. His lawyer, Orin Woods of Basin, sought $10,000. The News was represented by W.L. “Billy” Simpson of Cody, father of future Wyoming Gov. Milward Simpson and grandfather of future U.S. Sen. Al Simpson and his brother, Pete, longtime Wyoming legislator, educator and university development officer.

The suit dragged on for almost 18 months. Finally in June 1907, came an announcement: “Sale of the Big Horn County News, a weekly newspaper published here, to A. A. Anderson, a New York artist and friend of Chief United States Forester Gifford Pinchot, involves the withdrawal of a $10,000 suit for defamation of character which Anderson some time ago brought against the News.”

Attorney Woods took over as the newspaper’s manager. Anderson’s Meeteetse Standard, Woods said, would soon move to Greybull (in fact it apparently shut down). “We have no ulterior or hidden motive,” Woods said. “We believe that it is a good business venture, and that is all.” Anderson himself did not comment. He was off on his next adventure in Alaska.

Primary sources

• Anderson, A.A. Experiences and Impressions (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1933). The privately printed autobiography deserves some skepticism.
• Pinchot, Gifford. Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947; Washington: Island Press, 1988). Does not mention Anderson but discusses views of early forestry, especially p. 121.
• Seton, Grace Gallatin, A Woman Tenderfoot (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900).
• Thompson, Ernest Seton, “Elkland,” Recreation 7 (1897), 199. [Before 1900, he published under his birth surname Thompson, using Seton as a middle name. Later he reversed the names, and that’s how he’s generally known. Thus in the text he’s Ernest Thompson Seton, but in this reference he’s Ernest Seton Thompson.]
• Newspapers in Meeteetse and Cody regularly wrote about Anderson; researchers can search on his name at http://newspapers.wyo.gov/. See especially:
  • “Anderson Ousted,” Big Horn County News, December 10, 1905, p. 1.
  • “’Wab,’ Wisest of Bears, Falls Victim to Anderson’s Rifle After Many Years of Defiance,” Park County Enterprise, September 22, 1915, p. 1. [Seton’s book established the spelling of “Wahb.” But Anderson or the Enterprise here used an alternate.]
• USDA Forest Service and Cody Lions Club, “Shoshone National Forest: Golden Anniversary,” August 1941. This booklet at the Park County Historical Archives contains several reminiscences by early forest rangers.

Secondary sources

• Allan, Esther B. “History of Teton National Forest.” Jackson, Wyo.: Bridger-Teton National Forest, 1973, pp. 107-120, accessed July 3, 2017, at https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd534131.pdf. Relies on Anderson’s autobiography as validated by unspecified Forest Service records.
• Anderson, H. Allen. The Chief: Ernest Thompson Seton and the Changing West (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1986) is a good biography with some discussion of A.A. Anderson.
• Bonner, Robert E. William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007) covers Anderson in relation to Buffalo Bill.
• Burns, Emily C., “Revising Bohemia: The American artist colony in Paris, 1890-1914,” in Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter, Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914: Strangers in Paradise, Ashgate Publishing, 2015.
• Clayton, John, Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon (New York: Pegasus, 2017) has a chapter on Ernest Thompson Seton in Wyoming, including his interactions with Anderson.
• Daugherty, John et. al., A Place Called Jackson Hole: A Historic Resource Study of Grand Teton National Park. Chapter 17: Conservationists. Grand Teton National Park and Grand Teton Natural History Association, 1999. Brief discussions of Anderson’s forestry from a Jackson Hole perspective.
• Dearinger, David Bernard, Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design: 1826-1925 (Hudson Hills, 2004), pp. 16-17.

Archives and collections

• Anderson’s papers are at the American Heritage Center in Laramie: https://rmoa.unm.edu/docviewer.php?docId=wyu-ah05630.xml
• Yellowstone National Park also has a small collection of Anderson papers, as described here: https://www.nps.gov/yell/blogs/lost-to-history-a-a-anderson.htm
• A.A. Anderson vertical file, McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody Wyoming. The McCracken also has a copy of a limited-edition book by Robert Eldon Harvey, The Art of Abraham Archibald Anderson, 1870–1940 (Stamford, CT: The Ashforth Company, 2007).

For further reading

• Anderson is in the Wyoming Outdoor Hall of Fame: https://wgfd.wyo.gov/Get-Involved/Outdoor-Hall-of-Fame/Abraham-Archibald-Anderson
• Anderson’s painting studio in the Washakie Wilderness is on the National Register of Historic Places, and recently underwent architectural study. http://wyoarchaeo.state.wy.us/index.php/learn/wyoming-archaeology-awareness-month/project-a-day/63-september-8-anderson-lodge
• Jeremy M. Johnston provides background in the introduction to a recent reissue: Ernest Thompson Seton, Jeremy M. Johnston (ed.), and Charles R. Preston (ed.), Wahb: The Biography of a Grizzly (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015). Johnston’s article “On the Trail of a Bear Named Wahb” describes Anderson’s ranch and his relationships with Seton and the giant grizzly Wahb.
• For Anderson’s genealogy, including his deceased son, see: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=geer%5Ffamily%5Ftree&id=I473203
• The legend of Warhouse Creek is discussed (although not well documented) at http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/cody4.html
• For the legacy of the Camp Fire Club, see: https://www.campfirefund.org/camp-fire-club-legacy/
• A fascinating history of the Bryant Park studios: http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-1901-beaux-arts-studios-80-west.html

AA’s article from Annals, 1927

• http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Publications/region/2/yellowstone/YellowstoneForestReserve.htm
• AHW item: https://www.historicwyoming.org/historicplacesblog/aa-anderson-lodge

Illustrations

• The 1913 photo of A.A. Anderson and others at Camp Monaco, the photo of the Palette Ranch lodge and the photo of Anderson’s studio on Warhouse Creek are all from the Park County Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of A.A. Anderson on horseback is No. PN.89.106.21000.01 from the Jack Richard Collection at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Used with permission and thanks.
• Anderson’s portrait of Thomas Edison hangs at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. This image is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image of the Big Horn County News front page on Dec. 10, 1905, is from the Wyoming Newspapers website. Used with thanks.

On Oct. 5, 1857, a band of Mormon militia attacked U.S. Army supply wagons in three different places in what’s now southwest Wyoming, burning 76 wagons altogether and running off a great deal of livestock. No one was killed in these skirmishes.

Best known of the attacks was at a low spot in the sagebrush along the trail later named Simpson's Hollow, about 10 miles southwest of present Farson, Wyo., on Wyoming highway 28. The place is named after Lew Simpson, the wagon master. There, the militiamen captured and burned 26 wagons, and stampeded hundreds of army mules.

The supply wagons were part of an army of U.S. troops, 2,500 strong but marching in many small groups, advancing on Utah in the summer and fall of 1857 to enforce federal law in Utah Territory. Mormons had first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Utah had been a territory since 1850, with Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—serving also as territorial governor and chief federal officer of Indian affairs.

Growing friction between the Mormons and federal judges and other territorial officials through the 1850s, however, together with widespread anti-Mormon feeling in the East, led newly elected U.S. President James Buchanan to appoint Alfred Cumming as the new governor for Utah. Buchanan ordered the army, under the command of Col. Albert Sidney Johnston, to ensure that Cumming and other federal officials could take up their new offices.

Buchanan and others expected trouble in dislodging Young. Although his term had ended in 1854, he had legally kept his post because the only replacement named before Cummings had refused to serve.

The militia, under the command of Capt. Lot Smith, was under orders from church authorities to harass and resist the army, bloodlessly if possible. They burnt supply trains, stampeded stock and burned as much grass as possible, to deprive the animals of feed.

Reports of the skirmish began reaching the East the following month.

On Nov. 14, William Carter, traveling on the Oregon Trail, wrote, “[We] came suddenly upon the smoldering ruins of 26 wagons which were corralled on each side of the road when burned by the Mormons.”

Four days later, on Nov. 18, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported, “The trains were altogether without any escort, and the teamsters made no defense of resistance whatever. … The contents were, I believe, mostly commissary stores. The supply sent out was estimated for a force of twenty-five hundred men for eight months.”

“The Utah expedition was supplied with full provisions for one year,” reported The Tennessean of Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 21.

“I am authorized to say,” the account continues, “that the expedition will suffer not the slightest inconvenience from the loss of the destroyed trains, and that the force under Col. Johnston – two thousand men all told – are in no peril whatever from either the Mormons or the season.”

This would prove highly inaccurate, as winter was coming on, Johnston’s plans upset and provisions were drastically reduced. The army spent a very hungry winter near Fort Bridger—which also had been burnt by the Mormons—in what’s now southwestern Wyoming. Negotiations the following spring allowed the conflict to be settled peaceably.

In 1859, travelers on the Oregon Trail could still see traces of the burned wagons, and knew of the episode, although not necessarily the precise date of its occurrence. On June 23, 1859, more than a year and eight months later, emigrant J. A. Wilkinson wrote, “We saw today where the Mormons had burned a government train a year ago, giving the teamsters what provisions they could pack on their backs and drove the oxen to Salt Lake.”

“We passed more dead cattle today than any day yet, all of an ancient date however, we saw where several wagons had been destroyed by the Mormons,” John McTurk Gibson wrote on July 19, 1859.

British travel writer and adventurer Richard Burton rode in a stagecoach along the Oregon Trail in 1860. On Aug. 21 of that year, he wrote, “[W]e passed through a depression called Simpson’s Hollow, and somewhat celebrated in local story. Two semicircles of black still charred the ground; on a cursory view they might have been mistaken for burnt-out lignite. Here, in 1857, the Mormons fell upon a corralled train of twenty-three wagons, laden with provisions and other necessaries for Federal troops.”

Thus, Simpson's Hollow became notorious. The destruction of wagons in the vicinity, the burnt grass and evidence of other guerrilla tactics used by the Mormon church against the U.S. government marked an episode in what historians David L. Bigler and Will Bagley have called “America’s first civil war.”

On the north side of State Highway 28, there is a historical marker about Simpson's Hollow, and on the south side, Pilot Butte Interpretive Site, with more recent information.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Burton, Richard F. The City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California [1860]. London, UK: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861. American edition, New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1862. Reprinted as The Look of the West, Overland to California, University of Nebraska Press, 1963.
• Carter, William A. “Diary of Judge William A. Carter Describes Life on the Trail in 1857.” Annals of Wyoming 11:2 (April 1939), 75–113.
• Gibson, John McTurk. Journal of Western Travel. Manuscript at Saunders County Historical Society Museum, Wahoo, Nebraska. Typescript.
• “Interesting Letter from South Pass, Route of the Army to Utah.” New Orleans Times Picayune, Nov. 18, 1857, p. 4, col. 1.
• “The Mormon Attack on the Government Trains-The Condition of the Utah Expedition.” The Tennessean, Nashville, Tenn., Nov. 21, 1857, p. 2, col. 4.
• “The Mormon War Begun.” Ottawa Free Trader, Ottawa, Ill., November 21, 1857, p. 2, col. 2.
• “The News from the Plains.” Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio, November 25, 1857, p. 4, col. 3.
• Wilkinson, J. A. Journal: Across the Plains in 1859. Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill. Richard Rieck transcript.

Secondary Sources

• Bigler, David L., and Will Bagley. The Mormon Rebellion: America’s First Civil War, 1857-1858. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011, 203-231.
• Brown, Randy. Oregon-California Trails Association. WyoHistory.org offers special thanks to this historian for providing the diary entries and newspaper excerpts used in this article.
• Ramos, Donna G. “Utah War: U.S. Government Versus Mormon Settlers.” History.net. Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://www.history.net.com/utah-war-us-government-versus-mormon-settlers.htm.
• Wyoming Historical Markers. “Simpson’s Hollow.” Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMFBQK_Simpsons_Hollow.
• Wyoming Places. “Simpson's Gulch.” Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://wyld.sdp.sirsi.net/client/en_US/places/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ASSET$002f0$002f1012917/ada?qu=Simpson%27s+Hollow&qf=SOURCE%09Source%09Places%09Places&te=ASSET.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Simpson’s Hollow.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed July 6, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/simpson's_hollow.htm.

Illustrations

• The photos of the Simpson’s Hollow markers are from Waymarking.com. Used with thanks.
• The photo of the Oregon/Mormon trail in the sagebrush near Simpson’s Hollow is by Tom Rea.

Moving west from Pacific Springs, Oregon Trail emigrants came in succession to three branches of the Sandy—Dry, Little and Big. At Parting of the Ways, they had chosen between the Sublette Cutoff, heading west, and the Fort Bridger road, heading southwest toward Fort Bridger.

Both routes took them across the Little Sandy and, finally, Big Sandy.

After crossing Big Sandy, Sublette Cutoff travelers faced the Colorado Desert, 40 miles with neither water nor grass. Travelers bound for Fort Bridger and Salt Lake had an easier time. They stayed close to Big Sandy after crossing it, because that trail more or less followed the creek. Still, the way was long and difficult.

“This is a flat running stream over a sand bottom,” wrote former mountain man James Clyman on June 15, 1846. “[W]e found its Bank full from the thawing of the snow on the wind river mountains in which it rises.”

The next year, after crossing Big Sandy on the Fort Bridger route, Orson Pratt with the first party of Mormon pioneers wrote on June 29, 1847, “We travelled 17 miles this afternoon without grass or water, although in about 12 miles water might have been obtained from the Big Sandy, which runs about half a mile to the left of our road.”

Isaac Wistar, whose party took the Sublette Cutoff in 1849, wrote on July 2 of that year, “We camped here to rest the stock and prepare to cross the ‘Jornada del Muerte,’ a waterless desert extending fifty miles or more to the Green River of the Colorado.”

Knowing they could not allow themselves to be caught without food or water on this trek, emigrants prepared carefully. “Repacked wagons,” Wistar’s diary entry continues, “[and] filled every vessel that would hold water and overhauled the mules’ shoes and harness.”

The California Gold Rush brought hordes of travelers in 1849 and 1850. H.C. St. Clair traveled on the Sublette Cutoff. On July 8, 1849, he noted “100 wagons camped here [at Big Sandy] and as many more a few miles below, all awaiting to cross the cutoff [desert] tomorrow night.”

Though travelers could not cross the whole desert in a single night, the dark hours brought cooler temperatures and, at dawn, possibly some dew for thirsty livestock.

Despite difficult conditions and fatigue, diarists found time to describe their surroundings. “The soil, hereabouts, is curious,” wrote Joseph Sedgley July 17, 1849, on the Sublette Cutoff. “In some places it is red, in others yellow, and in still others, green.”

Israel Lord, also traveling on the Sublette, wrote on July 22, 1849, “A few trees are left standing (i.e., if any more ever stood there) alone in their glory just above the [Big Sandy] crossing, which here is six or eight rods wide [a rod is 5.5 yards], and two feet deep—a fine stream. The whole country is one vast sand bed, poorly covered with sage and bunch grass.”

The Wind River mountains, visible from the Sublette Cutoff, caught the notice of many travelers, evoking a sense of wonder. On Aug. 4, 1849, California-bound J. Goldsborough Bruff wrote, “The Wind-river chain of Mts’ trending off to the N. W. their dark jagged and lofty snow-patch’d fronts within 25 ms. And their northern portion fading away in the blue distance.”

Mendal Jewett’s party took the Sublette Cutoff in 1850. To cross the desert, he and his fellow travelers planned to start in late afternoon “and drive all night,” Jewett wrote on June 4. “We are now pulling grass though not 6 inches high to bait our animals on the route.”

Later that month, on June 18, Clark W. Thompson noticed the array of possessions others had left behind on the Salt Lake road. “We see many pieces of wagons that their owners have cut the spokes,” he wrote, “and other parts to make pack saddles of and parts of harness left, the balance being taken to strap the saddles.”

Thompson’s group also found “water kegs, clothing, bags and boots, axes, guns, tolls and even jugs of vinegar.”

Despite the occasional good fortune of useful objects salvaged along the trail, some travelers were disheartened by the bleak terrain. “The face of the country presented an extremely desolate and forbidding appearance,” Elisha C. Winchell wrote on June 28, 1850.

The landscape “was varied only by banks, hillocks and irregular, shapeless mounds or broken heaps of sandy earth, producing no green thing save the ever present wild sage and a most miserly sprinkling of grass blades,” Winchell’s account continues. Only the “majestic chain of the Wind River mountains” relieved the eye and spirit from the “dreary monotony and beggarly sterility” of the route.

Nine years later, on Aug. 4, 1859, Eva Morse’s report of the Big Sandy crossing was terse and to the point. “Found a stage station, some wigwams, and what was a greater sight—a cat, a pig and some chickens. Last but not least, a white woman.”

Richard Burton, the British adventurer and travel writer, passed through on Aug. 21, 1860. He found the Fort Bridger route crossing a pleasant place. The creek ran “with a clear swift current through a pretty little prairillon [small prairie], bright with the blue lupine, the delicate pink malvacea, the gold helianthus, purple aster acting daisy, the white mountain heath, and the green Aselepias tuberosa [butterfly milkweed].”

Burton added, “The Indians, in their picturesque way, term this stream Wágáhongopá, or the Glistening Gravel Water.”

The Fort Bridger Route crossed the Big Sandy at present Farson, Wyo. State Highway 28 running southwest from Farson continues to parallel the route. Swales are often visible alongside the highway, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left.

Just past the intersection of Highway 28 and U.S. Highway 191 in Farson are two historical markers. A few yards south of these markers, a modern bridge crosses the Big Sandy. This is also where the main route forded. The Sublette Cutoff crossed the Big Sandy nine miles west of Parting of the Ways, northwest of present Eden Reservoir. That crossing is difficult to reach because of irrigation canals.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Bruff, J. Goldsborough. Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, Captain, Washington City and California Mining Association, April 2, 1849–July 20, 1851. 1 vol. edition. Ed. by Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.
• Burton, Richard F. The City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California [1860]. London, UK: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861. American edition, New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1862. Reprinted as TheLook of the West, Overland to California, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.
• Clyman, James. James Clyman, Frontiersman [1844, 1848]. Ed. by Charles L. Camp. Portland, Ore.: The Champoeg Press, 1960.
• Jewett, Mendal. Journal to and from California. C MSS -M400, Denver Public Library. Typescript.
• Lord, Israel. Typescript of the manuscript, Huntington Library, San Marino, published as: “At the Extremity of Civilization.” Ed. by Necia Pelton Liles. Foreword by J.S. Holliday. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1995.
• Morse, Eva. Diary. Typescript of the manuscript in Brigham Young University Library.
• Pratt, Orson. “Interesting Items Concerning the Journeying of the Latter-day Saints from the City of Nauvoo, Until Their Location in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake (Extracted from the Private Journal of Orson Pratt)” [1847]. Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, Compiled as The Orson Pratt Journals. Ed. by Elden J. Watson. Salt Lake City, Utah: E.J. Watson, 1975.
• Sedgley, Joseph. Overland to California in 1849. Oakland, Calif.: Butler & Bowman, 1877. Photocopy.
• St. Clair, H.C. Journal of a Tour to California [1849]. WA MSS S-1449, Beinecke Library. Typescript.
• Thompson, Clark W. Diary. University of Washington Library. Typescript.
• Winchell, Elisha C. Journal Kept in Crossing the Plains in the Summer of 1850. Papers, ca. 1850–1913. MSS 74/175 c, Bancroft Library. Richard L. Rieck transcription.
• Wistar, Isaac Jones. Diary in Autobiography of Isaac Jones Wistar, 1827–1905: Half a Century of Peace and War. Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 1937.

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.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Big Sandy Crossing.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed March 25, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/big_sandy.htm.

Illustrations

The aerial photo of Farson and the Big Sandy River is by the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. Used with permission and thanks. The photo of the Big Sandy about a mile downstream from the historic trail crossing is by Randy Brown. Used with permission and 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.

Like many of their faith, Charlotte and Robert Dansie converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while still young adults in England. After 13 years of marriage they determined to make their way with other Mormons to their Zion in the Salt Lake Valley. Crossing an ocean and a continent, would prove too much, however, and Charlotte, pregnant with her eighth child, would fail to finish the journey.

Charlotte Rudland and Robert Dansie were married April 8, 1849, in the parish church at Newton Green, Suffolk, England. They were residents of Boxford, Suffolk County, northwest of London. Robert was a blacksmith. Robert had been born Feb. 5, 1825, in Boxford and Charlotte Feb. 10, 1832, in nearby Newton. Their houses of birth still stand in their respective Suffolk villages. Robert described Charlotte to his grandchildren as a “beautiful wife,” small in stature with black hair and dark, flashing eyes.

Shortly after their marriage, the Dansies joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then moved to Barking, Essex, a town near London. Disapproval of their new religion by their families and friends prompted the move. Robert became a gardener and took care of the grounds and flower gardens of a wealthy landowner. They left for America on May 12, 1862, with their five offspring, leaving behind in England the graves of two other children.

They sailed from Liverpool on May 14 aboard the sailing ship William Tapscott, which had been chartered by the church to bring 850 English saints to the United States. They arrived in New York on June 25 and docked the next day, arriving after 42 long days at sea, a voyage that harmed the health of many of the passengers.

The church had chartered a train to take the converts to Florence, Neb., the gathering point near Omaha on the Missouri River, where Mormons gathered to outfit for the trip to the Salt Lake Valley. The Dansies were assigned to the company of Capt. Ansil P. Harmon, who led one of six companies of teams sent east from Utah that year—so-called church trains—to bring Mormon emigrants to the valley. The Harmon company consisted of 48 wagons and nearly 500 individuals. They left Florence on Aug. 2.

John D.T. McAllister was elected president and chaplain of the company and unofficial journal keeper. He had made several similar trips between Salt Lake and Florence in previous years and now was returning from missionary work in Birmingham, England. From his journal we learn there were eight deaths while the company camped at Florence and probably at least 25 more, the majority children, many of them from measles, before the company in the third week of September reached a camp on the Sweetwater River a mile east of Twin Mounds as they approached South Pass.

Charlotte Dansie was expecting the birth of an eighth child, but we do not know how far along her the pregnancy was. She had suffered during the voyage, and her health had continued to deteriorate during the wagon journey. On the night of Sept. 20 the baby was born prematurely and lived just long enough for his parents to name him Joseph.

A Dansie descendant would remember years later that “before grandmother died she was in such pain that she told [her husband] she could stand her suffering no longer and asked him to pray to God that she might be released and return to her maker. Grandfather did pray and it was only a matter of minutes until both she and the baby died.”

The journal of John D.T. McAllister, president and chaplain of the company, notes, “September 21, Sunday. At 7 ½ o’clock a few of us went ahead to dig a grave for the body of Sister Charlotte Dansie, wife of Robert, age 32, who died early this morning of a “Miscarriage” and general debility. One mile brought us to the Summit or pass. Three more we made the Pacific Spring, one mile farther we crossed Pacific Creek and dug her grave on the right of the road[. W]hile [we were] digging the grave, Captain Harmon rode up and informed us that Caroline Myers, aged 25 was dead. She died of bilious fever just after the wagons left camp. We widened the grave for both bodies. We stopped there three hours then traveled 11 miles to Dry Sandy.”

Little is known about Caroline Myers (or Meyers) except for the sad circumstances of her death. She seems to have been traveling alone with no other family members, and does not appear on the list of passengers from the William Tapscott.

Caroline had probably been sick for several days, but on the morning of the 21^st she began that day’s journey by walking ahead of her team. Diarist William Priest wrote, “When the wagons came, the teamster reported another death a young woman belonging to Bro Jarmin’s tent. She started to walk a little from camp but had to sit down on the road. The teamster of the wagon she belonged to would not take her up. The captain had her put in another wagon. She had only been in a few minutes and she died. The camp stopped to water the oxen where they was all buried.” [The passage has been edited for readability.]

Robert Dansie put a strand of blue beads around Charlotte’s neck and, from the family belongings, tore the lid off a large trunk, its brass hinges stamped with images of the British lion, and placed it over Charlotte’s body in the grave. The baby was buried in the arms of its mother who lay beside the body of Caroline Myers. After the burial a large rock was placed over the grave.

The Harmon company arrived in Salt Lake on Oct. 2. In December Robert married Jane Wilcox, who also had been a member of the company. They settled in Herriman, Utah, and had nine children together. In all, Robert and his two wives, Charlotte and Jane, had 13 children who lived to have families of their own, by which the Dansie family has continued to multiply and prosper in Utah and Idaho.

Some of Robert’s children later tried to locate Charlotte’s grave, but without success. In 1939 some members of the next generation, armed with an earlier letter to the family from D.T. McAllister, made another attempt. When they reached Pacific Springs they found a man they described as a “Mexican sheepherder” camped nearby. They asked him if he knew of any old graves in the area. He told them that some other sheepherders had dug into a grave he had noticed nearby, but when they found that three people were buried in the grave, two adults and a baby, it had been covered back up.

After they questioned him further, it began to appear to the Dansies that the man himself had dug up the grave. Becoming frightened, they said, he admitted to it and produced a string of blue beads that he had found in the grave. The necklace was recognized as the one placed by Robert around Charlotte’s neck before her burial.

At the grave, scrap metal from the trunk, copper rivets, brass hinges and lock engraved with the image of the lion, and old pieces of leather were scattered around the grave. All this evidence led the family members to believe that they had finally relocated the grave of Charlotte and Joseph Dansie and Caroline Myers.

Little more than a month later, the present monument and fence were installed and dedicated by more 80 members of the Dansie family. The senior Dansie present for the ceremony was Sarah Ann Dansie, Charlotte’s last surviving child, who had been 4 years old when she witnessed her mother’s burial 77 years before.

In 1958 President Eisenhower authorized the Secretary of the Interior to convey an acre and a quarter of land to be used as a grave site and memorial to Charlotte Rudland Dansie. The Dansie Family Organization now has a deed to this property, where every few years they hold family reunions.

The words quoted on the monument are from the Mormon rallying anthem, “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” written by William Clayton of the 1847 Mormon Pioneer Company that led the way into Salt Lake Valley. Clayton wrote the words while camped in Iowa 43 days out on the journey from Nauvoo to Winter Quarters—later Florence—in 1846. The fourth verse is as follows.

And should we die before our journey’s through,

Happy day! All is well!

We then are free from toil and sorrow too;

With the just we shall dwell.

But if our lives are spared again,

To see the Saints, their rest obtain

Oh, how we’ll make this chorus swell –

All is well! All is well!

Resources

Sources

• Brown, Randy. “The Grave of Charlotte Dansie.” Headed West: Historic Trails in Southwest Wyoming. Brown, ed. Mike W. and Gorny, Beverly. Sweetwater County Joint Travel and Tourism Board. Printed for the Oregon–California Trails Association 10^th Annual Convention in Rock Springs, Wyoming. 1992.
• Dansie, Julian LeGrande. “Robert Dansie: Devoted Pioneer Father, Faithful Latter-Day Saint.” Privately printed. Dansie Family Association. 55 pages. No date.
• Dansie, Marvin. “Finding the Pioneer Grave of Charlotte Rudland Dansie after Seventy-five years.” Unpublished monograph, 6 pages. No date.
• Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel. Priest, William, "A record of my life, 1828," 42-62. https://history.lds.org/overlandtravel/sources/17501/priest-william-a-record-of-my-life-1828-42-62.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Charlotte Dansie Grave.” Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming, accessed May 2, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/charlottedansie.htm.

Illustrations

The photo of the grave is by the author. The photo of Robert Dansie is from the author’s collection, courtesy of the Dansie family.

As they made their way toward the sixth crossing of the Sweetwater River, emigrants found the Oregon Trail descending a steep bluff of sand and gravel. Half a mile later, the trail split, and half a mile after that the trail crossed the river in two different spots.

The travelers were glad, at this point, to get back to good water again. Previously, they had threaded the Narrows at Three Crossings—their third, fourth and fifth crossings of the river—or avoided those fords altogether by way of the accurately named Deep Sand Route. From Three Crossings sixteen more miles took them to Sixth Crossing, where the Oregon Trail crossed the river about three miles southwest of today’s Sweetwater Station at the intersection of U.S. Route 287 and Wyoming Highway 135.

The route between the fifth and sixth crossings was mostly dry. It passed Ice Slough and Warm Springs Creek, but water at both those places was alkaline. Most emigrant parties camped at Sixth Crossing—on one side of the river or the other. Many mentioned crossing another stream soon after crossing, but this in fact was a second channel of the river itself.

Norton Jacob, traveling in 1847 with the first company of Mormon pioneers to cross the Rocky Mountains, wrote of this approach to the Sweetwater on June 24, “[W]hile we were descending a long sandy hill, suddenly through a small grassy bottom, winding, appeared [the Sweetwater’s] sparkling waters, a welcome sight to man & beast.”

The way had been difficult, Jacob’s entry continues, with “tired teams, several having failed on the way by reason of the heat of the Sun & fatigue of the Journey.”

Not all diary entries convey this sense of struggle, however. On the same day, William Clayton, with the same company, noted, “The feed here is very good and plenty of willow bushes for fuel.” A member of Clayton’s company picked up an “Indian arrow point … almost as white as alabaster.”

Nothing so interesting caught the eye of Riley Root a year later. He wrote, “Here the country is a barren waste, except along the river where a little grass is found. Back from the river, nothing grows but wild sage.”

The years 1849 and 1850 brought a huge flood of traffic along the trails—the great majority of it headed for the gold fields of California. Tens of thousands of people and their livestock consumed water, wood and grass as never before.

After fording at Sixth Crossing on July 2, 1849, Patrick McLeod wrote, “We could find no grass to noon on the river.” Worse yet, when his company drove up out of the Sweetwater valley, “The wind blew furiously, raising clouds of sand, cold and disagreeable.”

But next day, July 3, 1849, Ansel McCall’s party evidently crossed at a different spot, finding “a beautiful green meadow in a bend of the river, where there was very fine grazing.” Charlie, one of McCall’s oxen, died there, however. “No more fitting resting place for his old bones could have been found,” wrote McCall, “than that sweet meadow on the bank of this murmuring stream in the heart of the ‘Old Rockies.’”

“Grass very scarce, no wood,” Augustus Burbank wrote on July 5, 1849. “I have seen 8 dead and 2 disabled cattle today.”

Emigrants were sometimes forced to leave useful items along the trail, Burbank noticed. “Wagons, boxes, chains, lead, stove, guns, axes, I saw wedges, clothing & c. was among the sundry articles that lay by the way side.” Burbank also saw “gold dust” in the Sweetwater that turned out to be mica.

Later that month, on July 29, J. Goldsborough Bruff seemed much struck by the view just before the descent to the crossing. “From the edge of the bluff above, we had a beautiful view of the Stream, meadow, and camps below, and the mountains around, in every shade of distance.”

Better yet, Bruff said, he “was informed here, that a few miles below, on the other side of the Stream, were plenty of buffalo and antelope.”

On June 12, 1850, James Shields’s party camped at the crossing, where he reported, “Grazing is very poor.” His diary entry continues, “There were about 60 teams camped near by us. All of us are pretty well done for by today’s travel.”

“[W]ater 18 inches deep, good crossing, grass scarce, willow bushes for fuel,” was Isaac R. Starr’s brief comment on July 7, 1850.

Travel was still difficult in 1853. Although on July 4 Andrew S. McClure noted, “plenty of grass, plenty of water, plenty of wood, plenty of sage,” he also saw, a mile up the river from the crossing, “plenty of hungry cattle.”

No doubt echoing the experience of so many emigrants, McClure added, “The valley in the vicinity of the ford is dotted with cattle. There is little for them to eat there and this is the foundation of so much suffering on this road.”

About three miles west of Sixth Crossing, emigrants sometimes crossed the river twice more at two crossings half a mile apart—the seventh and eighth crossings of the Sweetwater. These fords allowed them to avoid a climb up over a steep, sandy hill on the north side of the river. The approaches to the crossings were swampy, however, and had to be avoided when the route was wet. Ruts over the sandy hill remain today, and are deep and well preserved.

After that, the trail left the river for a far more difficult stretch—over Rocky Ridge.

It was at Sixth Crossing in late October 1856 that the 500 members of the Willie Handcart Company, nearly all of them Mormon converts who had traveled that year from factory cities of the English Midlands, finally stalled. They were starving, freezing and completely out of food, and nine of them died here, shortly before the rest were reached by rescuers with wagons and supplies from Salt Lake City.

Sixth Crossing is now on private land, but a visitor’s center maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is open to the public. It stands on a hill just south of U.S. route 287 and a mile or so east of Sweetwater Station.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Bruff, J. Goldsborough. Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, Captain, Washington City and California Mining Association, April 2, 1849–July 20, 1851. 1 vol. edition. Ed. by Georgia Willis Read and Ruth Gaines. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.
• Burbank, Augustus Ripley. Overland Diary, 1849. Manuscript. MSS P-A 304, Bancroft Library. Typescript.
• Clayton, William. The Journal of William Clayton. Salt Lake City, Utah: International Society of Utah Pioneers, 1945, reprinted 1994.
• Jacob, Norton. The Mormon Vanguard Brigade of 1847: Norton Jacob’s Record. Ed. by Ronald O. Barney. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2005.
• McCall, Ansel J. The Great California Trail in 1849: Wayside Notes of an Argonaut. Bath, N.Y.: Steuben Courier Printing, 1882.
• McClure, Andrew S. The Diary of Andrew S. McClure, 1853. Eugene, Ore.: Lane County Pioneer-Historical Society, 1959. Typescript.
• McLeod, Patrick H. Diary, 1849. Manuscript Collection No. WC001, Philip Ashton Rollins Papers, Box 11, F1, Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. Richard Rieck transcription.
• Root, Riley. Journals of Travels from St. Joseph to Oregon. Oakland, Calif., 1955, reprinted from the Galesburg, IL, Gazeteer and Intelligencer, 1850.
• Shields, James G. Overland Journey from St. Joseph to Sacramento, 9 April to 13 August 1850. WA MSS 423, Beinecke Library. Typescript.
• Starr, Isaac R. Diary, 1850. Manuscript and Typescript, MSS 2473, Oregon Historical Society.
• Woodworth, James. Diary of James Woodworth: Across the Plains to California in 1853. Eugene, Ore.: Lane County Pioneer-Historical Society, 1972.

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.
• Long, Gary Duane. The Journey of the James G. Willie Handcart Company, October 1856. Published by the author, 2009, pp. 66-73.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, “5th 6th 7th and 8th Crossings of the Sweetwater." Emigrant Trails throughout Wyoming. Accessed April 17, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/6th,7th,8thcrssngs.htm.

Soldier, artist, bugler, wolf killer and conservationist George Nicholas Ostrom was born in 1888, in Spencer, Iowa, a small town in the northwestern part of the state. After playing in a band in Iowa, homesteading in North Dakota, driving cattle in Texas and working as an artist in Minneapolis, 25-year old George eventually moved with his widowed mother to the hamlet of Springwillow, 20 miles east of Sheridan, Wyo., in 1913.  

Doubtless to fill his pockets with some additional spending money, young George joined Sheridan’s National Guard Company D. That same year he acquired a colt, “a very beautiful sorrel, two white stockings and silver mane and tail and a blazed face,” he remembered years later, that he named Redwing. As a young man, George showed considerable artistic and musical talent, and received a limited amount of professional art training.

On June 18, 1916, the Wyoming National Guard was activated for service on the Mexican border. By that time, George was Staff Sgt. Ostrom, the company bugler.  As a bugler, George was responsible for signaling all military events using bugle calls.

Leaving his beloved colt, Redwing, in pasture at the family homestead, George trained at Camp Kendrick on the grounds of the Cheyenne Frontier Days from June to September 1916. He then served at Camp Deming in Deming, N.M., from Sept. 30, 1916, through March 1, 1917.

Congress declared war on Germany April 7, 1917. Ostrom enjoyed a pleasant three weeks’ vacation at home before he was recalled to federal service, eventually finding himself on the western front of the Great War. In France between July and November 1918, Ostrom’s unit, Battery E of the 148th Field Artillery participated in every major campaign of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF).

During his World War I service, a contest was held in the battalion to design a distinctive unit emblem. George created what may be the earliest rendition of Wyoming’s famed “bucking broncho,” as he spelled it, using military black camouflage paint on the head of a drum. He had managed to smuggle Redwing with him to France, and based the image on his colt.

When George showed up with his drawing, the contest was immediately terminated, and he was declared the unanimous winner. Ostrom’s iconic emblem, used on 148th Field Artillery guns and vehicles during WWI, eventually would be redrawn in 1935 by artist Allen True at the direction of Wyoming Secretary of State Lester Hunt for use on Wyoming’s license plates. The first plates were issued in 1936 and the state has used the image ever since.

Throughout his military service on the Mexican border and in France, Ostrom prepared nearly 20 drawings of military life—in combat and behind the lines. He originally made these sketches in pencil in the field, on whatever paper he could scrounge. His son, George Ostrom Jr., recalls that after he returned home, his father would spend his evenings inking in the pencil sketches on the family’s kitchen table.

Following his discharge in 1919, George returned to Sheridan, and initially hunted wolves. At the time, the state of Wyoming still paid bounties on wolves, ranging, he remembered, from $100 to $500, a healthy paycheck. Wolves preyed on livestock, and the federal government employed full-time wolf hunters in the West. Ostrom was one of these wolf hunters, serving with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Biological Survey of Predatory Animal Control from 1919 through 1929, by which time the wolf had been all but eliminated from the state. 

Ostrom also worked as a commercial artist, painting signs for the city of Sheridan and highway billboards, and created a wealth of art based on his own experiences as a soldier, hunter, rancher, musician and cowboy.

Later in his life, Ostrom regretted his role in destroying the wolf population of Wyoming and became an active conservator, urging their return to the state. He preserved the lives and activities of wolves, with which he was intimately familiar as one of Wyoming’s last wolf hunters, through numerous drawings.

Today, his sketches are considered a national treasure of soldier art, and his wildlife and Wyoming artwork are considered among the finest created by a Wyoming artist.

Ostrom was active in veterans’ organizations and bands throughout his life.  He was a popular character at veterans’ reunions, where with a stick of chalk he was known to draw the “bucking broncho” on sidewalks for drinks.  George and his bugle were a fixture at Wyoming veterans’ ceremonies and funerals.

He died in Sheridan in 1982 at the age of 97. His family remains in Sheridan, and has entrusted his military drawings and artifacts with the Wyoming Veterans Memorial Museum in Casper.

Resources

• Sources

• “Chauchat.” Wikipedia, accessed May 18, 2017 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauchat. 
• “Gray Wolf Timeline for the Contiguous United States.” International Wolf Center, accessed may 16, 2017 at http://www.wolf.org/wow/united-states/gray-wolf-timeline/.
• Hein, Rebecca. “Wyoming’s Long-lived bucking horse.” WyoHistory.org, accessed May 16, 2017 at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyomings-long-lived-bucking-horse.
• Ostrom, George, Jr. and Ostrom family, Sheridan, Wyoming. Informal conversations with author, 2017.
• Slack, Judy. George Nicholas Ostrom: Pioneer, Preservationist, Painter, 1888-1982. Sheridan, Wyo.: Big Horn City Historical Society and Sheridan County Historical Society, 2013.

Illustrations

The photo and the drawings are all from the collections of the Wyoming Veterans Memorial Museum in Casper, Wyo. Used with permission and thanks. Ostrom’s enormously detailed drawings are quite large, some of them 30 inches wide or more. They will be on display in a special show at the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyo., from Oct. 6, 2017 through Jan. 14, 2018.