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 widowed 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 Ephraim 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. (1989). 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, 1918 Cheyenne State Leader is from the Wyoming Newspapers website; see http://newspapers.wyo.gov.  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.

The pack train moved slowly through the remaining snowdrifts of late spring in the Tetons, heading for the mountain valley ahead. The buckskin horses were led by a tall-for-his-time trapper with thick red hair and beard whom the Shoshone sometimes called Ingapumba (redhead), but more often he was known to his neighbors as “Beaver Dick” or “Uncle Dick.”

Following behind were his Shoshone wife, Jenny, and his children riding burros. They were leading pack horses loaded with supplies for a long season of camping, hunting and trapping in the high valley that even then was known as Jackson’s Hole.

In his 68 years, Beaver Dick Leigh fought in the Mexican War, guided government expeditions through the Yellowstone region and led hunting parties from the East—and enjoyed life among the Shoshone and Bannock tribes. With his red hair, blue eyes and freckles he certainly stood out from most of those around him, but despite his rough life he was an inveterate reader of books, magazines and newspapers. He kept a diary during his time in the mountains. He spelled his words as he spoke them, often dropping the “h” in keeping with his English-accent pronunciation.

Richard Leigh was born in Manchester, Lancashire, England, in 1831. When he was 7 years old he emigrated with his sister to America.

Dick and his sister, Martha, stayed in Philadelphia for a time, then moved on to Mount Hope, Pa. From there he later left his sister and joined the Hudson Bay Company, which sent him to the Northwest where his education as a trapper began. He never looked back, nor saw his sister again. He appears to have stayed in touch, however, as he later referred to his brother-in-law, Henry Wall.

Beaver Dick made his way from Canada back to the States to join the U.S. Army toward the end of the Mexican-American War (1846-48), in which he served under Lt. Col. Henry Wilson. He was possibly part of the siege of Vera Cruz and was stationed there through the end of the war.

Following his discharge, he travelled from the Rio Grande to the Salt Lake Valley where he resumed his prior trade as an independent trapper. Moving north into what would become Idaho Territory, he continued the trapper’s life, finally choosing the Snake River Valley as a favorable place for a homesite. This initially meant long pack trips south for a number of years to sell his furs in Utah Territory.

On one of these trips, in 1862, to Corrine, near the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake, he camped near a Bannock couple—a man known as Bannock John to the whites, and his wife, Tadpole, a sister of the local Shoshone chief, Taghee. Tadpole was in the midst of a difficult labor and, with no other help available, Dick rendered assistance to the father in delivering the baby.

The new arrival was named Susan Tadpole by the couple. Her parents promised her to Dick to be his wife when she reached maturity. As he was 31 at the time, it no doubt was a kind gesture of gratitude that had little expectation of coming to fruition.

Before he returned to his base camp at the confluence of the Snake and Teton rivers on the west side of the Tetons, Dick Leigh married a 16-year-old Eastern Shoshone girl from Chief Washakie’s band in 1863. The ceremony was performed by a minister, but with no existing records, the bride’s Shoshone name is not known. Dick gave her the English name of Jenny.

Dick was obviously proud of Jenny’s work ethic and her contributions to their life together, for he often told his friends and wrote in his diary about her many good traits. The next few years were apparently happy for the couple. Five children arrived in the following years. Dick, Jr., was born in 1864, Anne Jane in 1866, John in 1868, William in 1870 and Elizabeth in 1873.

Dick’s homestead on the west side of the Tetons continued to expand with additions of milk cows and more of the buckskin horses he was so fond of. His diary continued to reflect his pride in his oldest son’s abilities and accomplishments. When it was time to go on the annual hunting trips over the mountains, Dick took the entire family along.

The geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden, who had been in the valley with an army expedition led by Capt. William Raynolds in 1860, returned in 1871 at the head of a civilian, government-funded expedition to explore the Yellowstone region. Artist Thomas Moran and the photographer William Henry Jackson were also along. Hayden’s extensive promotion, along with Moran’s paintings and Jackson’s photographs, positively influenced the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.

Hayden returned to the region with another survey party the following year to explore the area’s resources more extensively. On this trip, he employed Leigh as a guide. Hayden and his men were so impressed with the abilities and hospitality of Dick and Jenny that they named the lakes at the base of the Tetons for them: Leigh Lake, Jenny Lake and Beaver Dick, now known as String Lake.

Beaver Dick joined the expedition at Eagle Rock, present Idaho Falls, and traveled north to Eagle Nest Ford, at what’s now St. Anthony, Idaho, in order to cross the Snake River safely. Leigh’s family accompanied the survey group, pitching their lodge near the main camp. Jackson photographed the family in front of their tipi. This is the only known photograph of Jenny.

Camping in the valley below the Tetons created a strong desire among some of the men to climb the tallest peak, despite Beaver Dick’s warnings. He told them the mountain had never been summited due in part to jumbled rock and timber around the base.

Nonetheless, a party of 14 was assembled, and the trek toward the top of Grand Teton began. Of those who started, five reached what is now known as the saddle. Nathaniel Langford and the climbing group’s leader, James Stephenson, continued to the peak, becoming the first known climbers to make the ascent. During their climb, Beaver Dick and another guide scouted a route through the Tetons and hunted meat for the camp.

The group continued to travel north about 20 miles and split up when they reached Conant Creek. Jenny, who was pregnant, and the Leighs’ four children returned to their homestead on the Teton River, while Beaver Dick continued on with the expedition party. After the family reunited at their home, they celebrated the birth of another daughter, Elizabeth, their fifth child.

Leigh’s diaries give an in-depth picture of the challenges they faced on the frontier. Whether he was setting his trap lines, hunting with his son Dick, Jr., leading hunting parties or assisting any of the increasing number of new settlers arriving in the Snake River valley, Beaver Dick Leigh was a busy and well-respected member of the community.

He also built a ferry at the Eagle Nest Ford on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake, which was free for anyone to use. He even acted as liaison between the tribes and authorities at the new Fort Hall Reservation, advising them about Indian movements on and off the reservation. .

The next few years passed peacefully until the winter of 1876, when an Indian woman seeking food visited the Leighs. They did not know that she had been infected with smallpox. All of the Leigh family as well as another hunter caught the disease. Between Christmas Eve and Dec. 28, 1876, all of Beaver Dick’s family died; he and the hunter barely survived.

For two years, Dick suffered and struggled to maintain as normal a life as possible on the homestead. In the summer of 1878, some Bannocks left the reservation in a protest over the government’s failure to send promised food and supplies, in a series of events that came to be known as the Bannock War. Beaver Dick and his friends Bannock John and Tadpole laid low, staying out of sight to “keep their hair,” as he put it—that is, to remain unscalped.

In the spring of 1879, Dick Leigh, at age 48, married 16-year-old Susan Tadpole, who had been promised to him at her birth. The couple had three children: Emma, born in 1881; William, born in 1886; and Rose, born in 1891.

As before, when it was time to head to the mountains to hunt and fish, Dick took his new family with him. While camped near Two Ocean Creek on the Continental Divide in the fall of 1891, they were visited by Theodore Roosevelt and his hunting party. Beaver Dick and Teddy conversed for a spell, sharing stories and hunting tales.

Dick continued to guide hunting parties as long as his health permitted. Eventually he had to turn over this business to his son William. He also kept in touch with the many friends he had made over the years, writing letters to a lengthy list of correspondents.

Beaver Dick Leigh died March 29, 1899, age 68, in the company of family and friends. He is buried beside his family on a high terrace overlooking his ranch near Rexburg, Idaho.

His memory and legacy are well preserved in his letters and diaries, as well as the namesake features in the Jackson Hole valley he loved.

(Editor’s note: Special thanks to “Chronicle,” the newsletter of the Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum, in which an earlier version of this article appeared in the Winter 2014-15 issue.)

Resources

• Calkins, Frank. Jackson Hole. New York: Knopf, 1973.
• Daugherty, John, Crockett, S., Goetzmann, W. H., Jackson, R. G. and United States. A Place Called Jackson Hole: The Historic Resource Study of Grand Teton National Park, 1st ed. Grand Teton National Park: National Park Service, 1999.
• Nelson, Fern K. Mountain Men of Jackson's Hole: Colter, Hoback, Jackson, Leigh. Jackson, Wyo.: Jackson Hole Museum, 1989.
• Thompson, Edith Schultz, & Thompson, William Leigh. Beaver Dick, the Honor and the Heartbreak: An Historical Biography of Richard Leigh. Laramie, Wyo.: Jelm Mountain Press, 1982. The book quotes extensively from Beaver Dick Leigh’s diaries and letters. William Leigh Thompson is Beaver Dick’s great-grandson.

For further reading and research

• Beaver Dick Leigh’s diaries from 1875, 1876 and 1878 are in the collections of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. At http://digitalcollections.uwyo.edu/luna/servlet, enter “Leigh, Richard” in the search window for access to the diaries in PDF format.

Illustrations

• All photos are courtesy of the Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum. Used with permission and thanks.

In late September 1913, a hunting party made its way up the North Fork of the Shoshone River, north of the hunting lodge at Pahaska Tepee just east of of Yellowstone National Park. In some ways it must have been like any hunting party: Men awed by the scale of the wilderness, engaged by the camaraderie of their companions and eager to bag big game.

Yet because of who those men were, the hunting party was unique. Prince Albert I of Monaco was the first reigning European monarch to visit the United States. Col. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a form of American royalty in his own right, was an entertainer perhaps even more internationally famous than Albert. Their presence made this arguably the best-known hunt in Wyoming history.

A Fair Visitor

The trip was organized by A.A. Anderson, an artist, hunter, socialite and former superintendent of the Yellowstone Forest Reserve. During his sojourns in Europe, Anderson had met the prince. He invited Albert to join him on a hunt near his ranch in the mountains above Meeteetse, Wyo. But when Albert’s private train arrived in the town of Cody on September 15, 1913, he found a good deal else too.

The Park County Fair was underway, with rodeo events and Crow Indian dances. Furthermore, the fair was being filmed by a company co-owned by Buffalo Bill. This was in the early days of movies, two years, for example, before the silent blockbuster Birth of a Nation.

The Cody footage was intended for a film, The Indian Wars, which would set standards for the infant industry’s production values, narrative tropes, and attitudes toward Native Americans. Its climax was intended to be a sympathetic reenactment of the 1890 Ghost Dance tragedy, followed by scenes approvingly showing Natives assimilating into white culture.

While other company employees, including retired Army general Nelson A. Miles, began arrangements on the Lakota Sioux Reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Buffalo Bill instructed cameraman Charles Kaufman to capture plenty of scenes of the prince exchanging gifts with Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow.

Albert was also invited to oversee other fair activities, which were covered in newspapers as well as by Kaufman. The prince enjoyed this celebrity so much that he delayed the start of his hunt with Anderson. At the time, he needed some good publicity—because not all was well in Monaco. His tiny principality in southern France was known primarily for the gambling mecca of Monte Carlo. Gambling made the royal family rich and eliminated any need to tax citizens.

But Albert was an absolute monarch who had been facing three years of protests from subjects who wanted to establish a republic. Citizens were banned from the high-toned casinos, yet the small nation also lacked factories or farmland, and as a result unemployment was high. In 1911, Albert had created an automobile race and established a constitution, but neither had much immediate impact.

Meanwhile, the prince’s real love was outdoor life, especially oceanography. He owned research yachts and had made four cruises to the Arctic. Many of the cultural and business advances in Monaco itself—such as establishing an opera, theater and ballet—resulted from the work of his second wife, Alice Heine, from whom he was estranged.

At some point during the Park County Fair, or perhaps during preparations for it, Buffalo Bill inserted himself into the hunting plans. At the time, Buffalo Bill too was in bad need of good publicity. Now 67 years old, he was struggling to keep up with the times and nearly broke. His famed Wild West show could not compete with movies. Transport of performers and livestock to each venue was cripplingly expensive.

The latest version of Buffalo Bill’s show, a partnership with Gordon William “Pawnee Bill” Lillie, had recently been foreclosed on and its assets sold at a sheriff’s auction. Furthermore, Bill’s highly publicized 1904 divorce suit had tarnished his family-friendly image, though he and his wife had reconciled in 1910. Positive publicity could help his public image and his cinematic ambitions.

The hunt

After the fair ended, Albert and Anderson spent a week successfully hunting on the Greybull and Wood rivers in the mountains above Meeteetse. Then on September 28 they traveled with Buffalo Bill from Cody towards Yellowstone Park up the North Fork of the Shoshone. Given the celebrity of Prince Albert and Buffalo Bill and the fact that they would be traveling with a film crew, dozens of others wanted to join them.

For example, Charles G. “Spend a Million” Gates, gadabout heir to a barbed-wire fortune who once bragged that he spent a million dollars a year in tips alone, stayed overnight with them at Pahaska Tepee, Buffalo Bill’s lodge near the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Although Gates had hired guides through Buffalo Bill, the next morning the Gates party (and guides) left Pahaska in a different direction from the royal party.

That party was quite large. Members included Prince Albert; A.A. Anderson; Buffalo Bill; Dr. Louet, Prince Albert’s physician, often misspelled Loucet; Capt. Henri Bourée, Albert’s aide-de-camp; artist Louis Tinayre; filmmaker Charles Kaufman; Buffalo Bill’s son-in-law Fred Garlow; forest ranger Harry Miller; chief guide Fred Richard; cook Dave Shaw and several more guides, wranglers and camp tenders.

They made camp about 10 miles north-northeast of Pahaska at Torrent Creek. On a massive spruce tree five feet in diameter at the center of the camp, Tinayre carved out an area that he painted with a bearpaw print and the words “Camp Monaco 1913.” In one famous photograph, Albert, Dr. Louet, Bourée, Anderson and Tinayre posed in the snow around the tree.

Several other photographs recorded camp life, as did some film footage. Kaufman filmed Buffalo Bill doing chores, including chopping wood; the implication was that the trip’s organizer was too busy and important to participate in the hunt. In fact, however, Buffalo Bill and Kaufman left Camp Monaco almost immediately after arriving, because their film crew was overdue to shoot at Pine Ridge.

The hunt was successful: Albert had a wonderful time; he shot and killed a bull elk and a large black bear. The Northern Wyoming Herald reported that he was “well pleased.” He spent an extra several days in camp, delaying the departure of his private train from the Cody station.

Stories and images from Camp Monaco permeated the press. For example, the Denver Post ran the Camp Monaco story under a full-page headline. The Post’s owners happened to be Buffalo Bill’s financier-partners in the film company; they also sent a reporter to chronicle the filming at Pine Ridge.

The Camp Monaco sojourn turned out to be the last big hunt of Buffalo Bill’s life. He died four years later. However, the movie resulting from his film company’s footage, The Indian Wars, flopped. (The nitrate film has disintegrated over time, and only a few scraps remain.) He had not been able to adjust to this new era; his final years involved continued financial difficulties.

However, publicity surrounding the royal’s visit and the hunt proved beneficial to the local hunting and dude ranching industries. Cody became known as a destination for trophy-level hunting.

Legacy

Camp Monaco inherited the fame of its inhabitants. The site, which today features the stump of the old spruce tree, regularly appears on area maps and in hunting magazines. The 200-plus-year-old tree was one of the most famous victims of the 1988 Yellowstone fires; the fires killed it but did not consume it. In 1994, a 5,000-pound portion of the spruce containing the campsite sign was removed by helicopter. It’s now in the collection of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody.

Albert’s great-grandson, Prince Albert II of Monaco—the principality is now a constitutional monarchy—has visited Cody three times, and on his 2015 visit spent three days at the old campsite. As keenly interested in environmental affairs as his ancestor, Albert II has endowed a Camp Monaco Prize of $100,000, which is awarded every three years by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West to support integrated scientific research and public education initiatives.

The notion of Buffalo Bill’s last hunt still seems poignant, especially in light of the image of his chopping wood in camp, and of his attempt to evolve from Wild West impresario into a movie maker friendly to Indian people.

From one point of view, he is redeemed in his old age, having progressed from hunter and scalp-taker to caretaker with progressive attitudes toward indigenous cultures. In another interpretation, the Camp Monaco experience—with the triumphant frontiersman demoted to working basically as a servant to a moneyed class from elsewhere—is a metaphor for the decline of the romance of the West.

As sportsmen’s magazine Outdoor Life described the view of guide Lee Livingston in 2014, Camp Monaco represented “the transition of a frontier buffalo hunter to a big-game outfitter, the violent American West reduced to a vacation destination for Europe’s royalty. This wilderness went from a landscape to be feared to one to be protected.”

Resources

Primary Sources

• Anderson, A.A. Experiences and Impressions. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1933.
• Cody, William F. Letter to Clarence W. Rowley, Sept. 24, 1913. The William F. Cody Archive. Accessed Oct. 10, 2017, at http://codyarchive.org/texts/wfc.css00277.html.
• “Prince at Camp Monaco,” Northern Wyoming Herald, Oct 3, 1913, p. 1. Accessed Oct. 10, 2017, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “Prince Of Monaco Expects First Shot At Bear And Promises Friends Steaks For Supper.” The William F. Cody Archive. Accessed Oct. 10, 2017, at http://codyarchive.org/texts/wfc.nsp11329.html.

Secondary Sources

• Bonner, Robert E. William F. Cody's Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007, 237-240.
• Campino, Gualtiero. “The Paradox; How Late Prince Had Fairly to Force Constitution on His Reluctant People.” New York Times, July 2, 1922. Accessed Oct. 15, 2017, at http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9C04E3DB1039E133A25751C0A9619C946395D6CF.
• Houze, Lynn Johnson. Images of America: Cody. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.
• McKean, Andrew. “Back Country Adventures: The Ram of Monaco.” Outdoor Life, Sept. 3, 2014. Accessed Oct. 10, 2017, at http://www.outdoorlife.com/articles/hunting/2014/09/back-country-adventures-ram-monaco.
• Sagala, Sandra K. Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen: The Films of William F. Cody. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013, 72-76.
• Warren, Louis S. Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, 537-540.

For further reading and research

• Clayton, John. Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon. New York: Pegasus, 2017.
• Hall, Alice J. and Amos, James L. "Buffalo Bill and the Enduring West." National Geographic 160, No. 19 (1981): 98.
• Rea, Tom. “Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express: Fame, Truth and Inventing the West.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Oct. 23, 2017 at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/buffalo-bill-and-pony-express-fame-truth-and-inventing-west.

Field Trips

Visitors to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West (details below) can see a display that includes the trunk of the Camp Monaco spruce tree with its distinctive sign.  

Illustrations

• The photo of Prince Albert and his entourage by the Camp Monaco tree is from the Park County Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Used with permission and thanks.

Percy Metz was born under a lucky star. He may not have believed that during the morning of April 3, 1909, when, as the young and inexperienced Big Horn County Attorney, he was suddenly confronted with a political triple murder in his county. But the killings, soon to be forever known under the rubric of the “Spring Creek Raid,” proved not to be the professional disaster he must have feared, but the catalyst for a remarkably successful life.

Percy Wendell Metz was born in Odell, Illinois, on October 12, 1883 to William S. Metz, a lawyer, and Jennie Gammon Metz, the daughter of a distinguished Chicago family. Only six months later, the Metz family moved to Sundance, Wyo., where William practiced law and Percy enjoyed an idyllic childhood in and around the frontier town of Sundance. In 1892, the family moved again, this time to Sheridan, Wyo., where Percy continued his enthusiastic pursuit of all things outdoors.

He was bright and ambitious, graduating from Sheridan High School in 1899 before his 16th birthday. For four years he worked various jobs, then entered the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Metz graduated from law school in 1906, at 22 the youngest man in his class. Also in 1906, apparently before he left Lincoln, he married Mamie Miller; his brother, Charles, was his best man.

An immediate job opening was available at his father’s Sheridan law firm of Metz and Sackett. Percy accepted, but did not go to Sheridan, instead going to a new branch office of the firm (to be known as Metz, Sackett, and Metz) in Basin City, Wyo., the county seat of Big Horn County.

Practicing law in Basin

Soon to be referred to as just “Basin,” the town had been founded only 10 years earlier. It was growing fast as the county seat of a county that encompassed almost the entire Big Horn Basin, a valley in north central Wyoming, surrounded by mountains, of some 10,000 square miles. Agriculture was the engine of growth for the area, as large irrigation canals –the Cody Irrigation Canal, the Sidon Canal, the Big Horn Canal, the Lower Hanover Canal, and the Upper Hanover—were dug between 1900 and 1905.

And in 1906, the Burlington Railroad drove from Montana deep into the Basin, constructing its line to a point south of Worland, Wyo. People flooded into the Big Horn Basin to start farms or to live in adjacent towns that serviced the needs of farmers.

Little is known about Percy’s law practice in Basin other that he did some domestic relations work. But if his experience was like that of other young lawyers in the small towns of the Big Horn Basin, he no doubt touched nearly every corner of the law, including wills, deeds, simple contracts, defending people charged with crimes in the justice and district courts, boundary disputes, and suits for failure to pay debts. This practice would not have been fast paced, but a slow enterprise compared to those of larger towns and cities.

In 1908, however, Metz decided to run for the office of Big Horn County attorney, a position that would increase his workload, and, probably, his paycheck. The weakness of his candidacy was his lack of experience. His father, William, a very experienced attorney, proclaimed that if Percy was elected and he got in over his head, he (William) would help his son and assist in the case without charge.

Percy Metz campaigned vigorously all over the sprawling county, presented himself as a likeable and earnest young man, and was elected, despite his opponent’s sneering reference to him as a “high school kid.” Perhaps the electorate felt that it was unlikely Percy would be faced with a big, challenging case in sleepy Big Horn County. But only three months after assuming office, County Attorney Percy Metz was confronted with what remains the most important case in the county’s history.

About 9:50 a. m., April 3, 1909, Walter Fiscus, the proprietor of the hardware store in Ten Sleep, Wyo., placed an urgent call to Felix Alston, the Big Horn County sheriff. Fiscus told Alston about a sheep raid that had occurred the night before on Spring Creek, seven miles south of Ten Sleep, wherein three men were killed, dogs and sheep shot down, wagons burned, and two men kidnapped. Sheriff Alston immediately contacted the county attorney, Percy Metz, and the two of them set out for the all-day buckboard trip south to Ten Sleep.

A plague of sheep raids

In the two decades before 1909, cattlemen’s raids against sheepmen had plagued Wyoming: at least six men had been shot and killed, tens of thousands of sheep killed, and a great amount of property destroyed. These were brazen, political crimes intended to send a message, and not a single one had ended in conviction. Many cattlemen strongly supported those charged with crimes and prevented any convictions. Metz and Alston were aware of these facts and while determined to vigorously pursue criminal charges, must surely have feared for the outcome.

But things had changed by 1909. There now was some hope of successful prosecution of sheep-raid crimes. Communication was more efficient, with telephone lines available throughout the Big Horn Basin. B. B. Brooks, governor of Wyoming, a sheepman from Casper, was determined to put an end to the raids. The Wyoming Wool Growers Association, organized to protect sheep interests, had been founded in 1903.

The help of Gov. Brooks and the Wool Growers proved crucial: The governor assisted in part by authorizing the use of Wyoming militiamen at the time of trial, preventing cattlemen from flooding Basin with menacing thugs, as they had during a Sundance, Wyo., trial in 1908.

The Wool Growers loaned their crack detective, Joe LeFors, to Big Horn County and forwarded money—necessary for many things, but especially useful to hire experienced attorneys necessary to try the cases of the men arrested for the raid. Perhaps most significantly, demographic changes in the Big Horn Basin meant that a trial jury of farmers—neutrals neither sheepmen nor cattlemen—could be seated.

Following a vigorous investigation, seven cowmen were charged with multiple offenses, including first-degree murder.

The first man tried was Herbert Brink. Three outside attorneys presented the case on behalf of the state: E. E. Enterline and William Metz—Percy’s father—from Sheridan, and Billy Simpson from Cody. The prosecution presented a strong case, and on Nov. 11, 1909, to the surprise of people all over the state of Wyoming, the jury convicted Brink of first-degree murder. This conviction was followed by four more, as the remaining charged defendants pleaded guilty. Two of the raiders had turned state’s evidence, testifying on behalf of the prosecution at the trial. They were not charged with crimes. These convictions stopped forever the killing in sheep raids in Wyoming; thereafter there were only two minor raids in the state.

Percy Metz’s participation at the trial was minimal, although he was extensively involved in the background work of the case. But because Metz was the prosecuting attorney under whom the convictions were obtained, he gained a major reputation. The reputation lasted the rest of his life, surviving such adversities as his failure to gain re-election in 1910, apparently because he too vigorously enforced state laws against gambling.

Judge Metz takes office

When, in 1913, the Big Horn Basin was split into four counties and the new Fifth Judicial District was created, requiring a district judge, Metz was selected by Wyoming Governor Joseph Carey as the first judge of this new district. He was twenty-nine years old, said to be the youngest district judge in the country.

Metz served as the district judge of the Big Horn Basin for the next 38 years, re-elected nine times. It seemed back then that “district judge” meant Percy Metz, and “Percy Metz” meant district judge. As a judge in the beginning years of his service, Metz had the advantages and disadvantages of his youth and short experience. A vigorous man who spent as much time hunting and fishing as he could, he was a vigorous district judge, too.

He had a special touch with the voters of the Fifth Judicial District, and he skillfully maintained that good relationship until his retirement. But his relationship with the attorneys practicing before him was not always as good. Attorneys sometimes found him to be overbearing. One lawyer said he was “cocky.” Attorneys had to admit, though, that Metz was not afraid to make a decision, meaning that he was decisive, an important trait in a district judge. He also had a good sense of humor, very welcome in the tense atmosphere of a trial.

Metz’s private life, however, was sometimes not as happy as his career. His wife, Mamie, died about 1930. The couple had one child, Louise, born in 1916. Louise married Ken Hunton. They had no children. In 1932, Percy married Cornelia Britton, and she survived him upon his death.

Percy had received $35,000 in 1916 from the sale of his interest in the Good Drilling Company, a small company that drilled oil wells in Wyoming. That money, the equivalent of more than $800,000 now, enabled him to travel and to undertake ambitious hunting and fishing expeditions both before and after his retirement as district judge. After Metz retired in 1950, he toured a number of Wyoming county historical societies, telling their members about the Spring Creek Raid, still a major topic of interest in Wyoming.

Tapes were made of some of his talks, and they are fascinating. Metz briskly and authoritatively takes his listeners through the inside story of the prosecution following the raid. His voice has the cadence of a New Englander, though not the same accent. In the talks, however, he seemed to rely solely on his memory, which was sometimes inaccurate.

Late in his life Metz also entertained thoughts of writing a book about the Spring Creek Raid. In addition to his insider knowledge of the case, he possessed highly important written materials, including, for example, notes setting out the entire strategy of the prosecution and a transcript of the grand jury testimony.

But he apparently sickened before he was able to write his book, and he turned over all his materials to his niece, Lola Homsher, longtime director of the Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department. Eventually, Metz’s items were housed at the University of Wyoming records, and have provided rich source materials for researchers—this writer among them—focusing on the Spring Creek Raid and other topics.

His last illness was prostate cancer, and though he fought it for years, he succumbed in Basin in 1964 at the age of 80.

Resources

• Davis, John W., A Vast Amount of Trouble: A History of the Spring Creek Raid, Niwot, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 1993; Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. The Lola Homsher collection at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo., provided much of the source material for this book about the Spring Creek Raid.
•                          . The Spring Creek Raid: The Last Murderous Sheep Raid in the Big Horn Basin. WyoHistory.org. Accessed Nov. 21, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/spring-creek-raid-last-murderous-sheep-raid-big-horn-basin.
• Northern Wyoming Daily News, May 8, 1974, 1.
• Metz, Percy W. collection; American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
• Homsher, Lola collection; American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
• Saban, Vera. He Wore a Stetson: The Story of Judge Percy W. Metz. Basin, Wyo.: Big Horn Book Company, 1980.
• The Washakie Museum, Worland, Wyo., holds 20-25 audiotapes of Judge Metz’s speeches to Wyoming State Historical Society chapters.

Illustrations

• The photo of Percy Metz in 1914 is from the author’s collection. The photo of Metz and the moose is from the Wyoming State Archives. The photos of the five defendants and the militia in front of the Big Horn County courthouse are from the Washakie Museum and Cultural Center. All are used with permission and thanks.

On Aug. 8, 1919, young Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in Cheyenne with a long line of military cars, trucks and motorcycles. The Transcontinental Motor Truck Convoy entered the city on the Lincoln Highway during an evening thunderstorm.

The soldiers had spent 11 hours on the road that day, traveling from Kimball, Neb., to Cheyenne. Today, drivers on Interstate 80 can easily make the 66 miles between Kimball, Neb., and Cheyenne in less than an hour.

A few days before, on August 5, after leaving North Platte, Neb., the daily convoy log noted that many of the trucks had to be pulled through a 200-yard stretch of quicksand, resulting in a delay of seven hour and 20 minutes. A large, heavy truck called the Militor was able, after five unsuccessful attempts by other vehicles, to pull out one of the lighter trucks that had sunk into sand deep enough to cover both right wheels and its differential.

The purpose of the cross-country trip—never attempted before—was to determine the condition of the roads nationwide. The Cheyenne StateLeader article explained that the 72 vehicles and personnel “showed signs of the road, but both were eloquent evidence of the efficiency” of the United States’ effort that helped win World War I the year before.

The push for better roads

The nation’s roads and efforts to improve them had long been a concern. “Since the late 19th century,” writes author Sarah Laskow, “the Good Roads Movement had been advocating for upgrades to the dirt and gravel tracks that connected cities to one another—and forming associations to finance and build them.”

Author Tom Lewis traced the Good Roads Movement to Albert A. Pope, a Union Civil War veteran who, in 1878, created a “safety bicycle.” Pope organized the League of American Wheelmen, which advocated better roads through a variety of efforts including financing road-engineering courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By 1900, according to Lewis, 300 companies produced more than a million bicycles per year, and “the ‘good roads’ movement was sweeping the country.”

In 1913, the Lincoln Highway, one of the earliest transcontinental highways for automobiles, was dedicated. The 3,400-mile highway route crossed 13 states from New York to San Francisco. For many years, however, it remained a route only—with roads that varied widely in their quality.

On July 16, 1916, Woodrow Wilson signed the first Federal-Aid Road Act into law. The act created the Bureau of Public Roads and allocated $75 million for next the five years, with federal funds to pay states half the cost for building or improving federal roads. At the time, there were more than 21 million horses, 3.5 million cars and 250,000 trucks in the United States, according to Lewis.

During World War I, troops drove new Army trucks and material from factories in the Midwest to Eastern ports where they could be shipped to Europe. In December 1917, the first convoy took three weeks to drive from Toledo, Ohio, to Baltimore.

Other factors also led to the push for better roads. Trucks, more convenient and better able to go more places, were gradually becoming competitive with trains as a way to move freight. But trucks weighed much more than automobiles, and their tires were solid rubber; paved roads crumbled under the wear.

By 1919, the BPR had spent only about a half million of the $75 million allotted, and only 12 and a half miles of roads had been constructed.

Ike’s 1919 journey

The members of the convoy that Eisenhower traveled with in 1919 discovered that the nation’s roads, especially those west of Nebraska, were in rough condition. The soldiers faced mechanical breakdowns, quicksand, and in Utah and Nevada, rationed food and water. They traveled more than 10 hours daily at an average speed of about 5 miles per hour. On some days, they covered as little as three miles.

The convoy left Washington, D.C. July 7, 1919, to head for San Francisco. The caravan stretched for three miles. Eisenhower and his friend, Maj. Sereno Brett, had served as tank officers together during World War I. They were among the 24 officers and 258 enlisted men on the journey, accompanied by a 15-piece band courtesy of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

“In the Rockies of Wyoming and Utah and across Nevada, they went where few automobiles had gone before,” Lewis writes. The convoy log of the journey between Kimball and Cheyenne noted “The effect of altitudes exceeding 6000’ very noticeable in connection with the starting and operation of motors.”

On August 8, Gov. Robert Carey and a host of other dignitaries met the convoy at tiny Hillsdale, Wyo., 17 miles east of Cheyenne, to welcome them to the state. A wild west show was held in their honor at Frontier Park in Cheyenne. Following the show, the soldiers stopped at Fort Russell for a meal and the opportunity to bathe and rest. A dance was also held in honor of the visitors. In appreciation of the “distinctive” welcoming, the Leader report explained that the convoy would carry “cloth posters”—proclaiming “Stop Your Roaming, Try Cheyenne Wyoming”—and declaring that Wyoming was spending $7 million on roads.

Crossing Wyoming, the convoy encountered daily breakdowns and obstacles. Two-hour delays to repair mechanical problems were not unusual. The August 14 entry in the log noted the rough roads after departing Tipton Station west of Rawlins early in the morning. “Bad, sandy trail, very rough, with drop-offs over shelves of rock just below surface. 7 mi west a bad sandy stretch was negotiated more easily by F.W.D.s than other makes.”

Eisenhower noted in a November 1919 report about the trip that in addition to the Militor, which once pulled four trucks at one time, four-wheel drives (F.W.D.s), 2-wheel rear drive vehicles and Mack trucks with chain drives were among the vehicles that made the trip. Because the vehicles each operated at different speeds, keeping the convoy in formation was troublesome. Ike explained that the one-and-a-half ton Packard trucks performed in “remarkable” fashion throughout the trip.

Much of their route across southern Wyoming was not on roads at all, but on the old Union Pacific right-of-way, abandoned after 1899 when the railroad had straightened its routes and improved its grades. The old route was often very winding, soft and sandy, with wobbly, rickety bridges and culverts the trucks broke through.

And although the soldiers were feted in towns at various stops along the way—a Red Cross canteen offered refreshments in Rock River, and the people of Medicine Bow put on a street dance—the daily routine was wearing. Dust choked up the carburetors, and unrelenting, bleak terrain was hard on the men. “The intensely dry air, absence of green trees and vegetation,” the log notes in its description of the stretch between Point of Rocks and Medicine Bow, “and parched appearance of the landscape exerted [a] depressing influence on personnel.”

The convoy left Evanston, Wyo. at 12:30 p.m. August 17 and crossed into Utah that afternoon.

Eisenhower joined the convoy “partly for a lark and partly to learn,” he wrote many years later. Ike recalled the time in Wyoming with fondness. His wife, Mamie, and her family, met the “truck train” in the middle part of Nebraska and traveled with them as far as Laramie, Wyo.

Ike recounted these stories in his 1967 book, At Ease: Stories I Tell Friends, in a chapter entitled, “Through Darkest America with Truck and Tank.”

Eisenhower and his friend Maj. Brett enjoyed playing some practical jokes along the way, especially enjoying the surprises they foisted on Easterners, like warning them of hostile Indian attacks in western Wyoming. No such attacks actually happened, of course. Another time, Ike “aimed the pistol in the general direction of the North Pole and fired,” to shoot a jackrabbit that he had shot hours before and that Brett posed beside a bush away from the road. Brett, to impress the Easterners, proclaimed what an excellent shot Ike was, holding the dead rabbit by its ears at a distance to disguise its stiff condition.

Hijinks aside, the 62-day journey stayed with Ike for years and impressed upon him the need for good highways throughout the nation.

Highway funding after World War I

In 1921, the Federal Highway Act increased funding for federal roads to $75 million per year. Lewis explains that by the end of the 1920s, the BPR had spent $750 million for roads. The 1921 act, he writes, “made real the idea of a national road system. Each state would designate seven percent of its roads to be linked with those in other states.” In the 1920s, the numbering system for U.S. highways began. The portion of the Lincoln Highway from Pennsylvania through Wyoming became U.S. Highway 30.

In 1922, the Bureau of Public Roads commissioned Gen. John J. Pershing, who had been a son-in-law of Wyoming’s U.S. Sen. Francis E. Warren, to draw a map that could be used for the construction of roads and also for the purpose of clarifying which roads would be most important for defense if the nation became involved in a war.

The “Pershing Map” became the first official topographical map of the United States. Pershing had commanded the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) on the Western Front during World War I. He also became a mentor to a number of other illustrious United States generals, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In the late 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed routes for a transcontinental system of roads to the chief of the BPR, but World War II and then the Korean War interrupted the plans.

Lewis explains that 1953 was a turning point in American transportation history. Eisenhower, who had served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II, became the first Republican president elected in two decades, and he “brokered an armistice in Korea, thus enabling the United States to return to full peacetime production.”

More people could purchase cars than before. Between 1950 and 1960, Lewis writes, the number of families owning automobiles increased from 60 percent to 77 percent. During the same decade, the number of railway passenger cars decreased from 37,359 to 25,746. “Since 1936 [railroad] passenger operations had made a net profit only during the war when the government had curtailed automobile travel.”

By the time he became President of the United States in 1953, Eisenhower had driven on the German autobahns and had appreciated the ease and speed of travel on those highways. The 1919 transcontinental trek across the United States had convinced him that the nation needed better roads. He wrote, “The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.”

Lewis explained, “After V-E Day, when he traveled the autobahn, Eisenhower learned firsthand the value of modern highways to defense.”

By the time Eisenhower became president, the nation felt itself under threat of nuclear attack. An interconnected highway system could facilitate routine travel and could provide an efficient escape route in the event of an attack.

The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956

On June 29, 1956, Congress authorized the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, approving $25 billion for the completion of 41,000 miles of highways within a decade. The interstate was the largest public works project approved in the nation’s history.

The Bureau of Public Roads eventually became part of the Federal Highway Administration, formed on April 1, 1967, as a part of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike, a 162-mile stretch completed in 1940, became part of Interstates 70 and 76—one of the earliest interstate highways. However, in 1956, Missouri claimed to have been the state with the first contracts signed and Kansas claimed status as the first state to begin paving. Nebraska, on Oct. 17, 1974, became the first to complete all of its interstate highway system.

A treacherous stretch through Wyoming

In the late 1950s, the interstate was planned to run through a 77-mile section of Wyoming between Laramie and Walcott Junction. Despite objections from locals, Bureau of Public Roads officials determined to place the highway closer to Elk Mountain on a more direct route, rather than following the path of U.S. Highway 30—the Lincoln Highway—where it swings north through Rock River and Medicine Bow.

Historian John Waggener writes, “After three years of debates, and after receiving no federal support for locating I-80 along U.S. 30, state highway officials accepted defeat. On May 15, 1959, the Wyoming State Highway Commission approved the direct route. All that they could do was delay construction while the rest of I-80 was completed across the state. Under pressure from the BPR after a seven-year delay, construction finally began in the summer of 1966.”

The stretch from Laramie to Walcott opened Oct. 3, 1970. Waggener writes, “On October 7, an early-season storm caused havoc for drivers on the new highway just as Wyomingites warned would happen. It took only four days for I-80 to become The Snow Chi Minh Trail [italics in original]”—a Vietnam-era nickname that, though fading, is still in use. The section has suffered a high accident rate and frequent wintertime road closures ever since it opened.

Nationally, the interstate system also took longer to complete than had been planned. Author Tom Lewis explains that it “took 40 years not 13 as specified by the legislation President Eisenhower signed in 1956 to build the Interstate Highway System.”

In 1991, the interstate, according to Lewis the “largest engineered structure in the world,” was named the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. On Sept. 12, 1991, Interstate 90 between Seattle, Wash., and Boston, Mass., became the final coast-to-coast interstate highway completed. Today, the interstate system consists of about 47,856 miles of completed highways, and in terms of 2016 dollars, the cost of construction was approximately $526 billion.

Resources

• “Daily Log of the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy, Washington D.C. to San Francisco, Cal., July 7^th to Sept. 6, 1919.” Eisenhower Archives. Accessed Dec. 22, 2017, at https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/1919_convoy/daily_log.pdf.
• Distance between Cities. Accessed Dec. 2, 2017, at https://www.distance-cities.com/distance-kimball-ne-to-cheyenne-wy.
• “Eisenhower’s Army Convoy Notes 11-3-1919, Rock Island Arsenal.” U.S. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration. Accessed Dec. 22, 2017, at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/convoy.cfm.
• Eisenhower, Dwight D. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967, 155-168.
• Federal Highway Act of 1921. Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_1921.
• “Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.” Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 15, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956.
• “Information about the Lincoln Highway.” Lincoln Highway Association. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/info/.
• “Interstate Highway System.” Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 15, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System.
• “John J. Pershing.” Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Pershing.
• Laskow, Sarah. “In 1919, Eisenhower Suffered Through History’s Worst Cross-Country Road Trip.” AtlasObscura.com. Accessed Nov. 6, 2017, at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1919-dwight-d-eisenhower-suffered-through-historys-worst-cross-country-road-trip. This article contains a link to the convoy log.
• Lewis, Tom. Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life. New York: Viking, 1997, 4, 7-8,10-11, 13,16,18-19, 50-51, 61,71-72, 81, 84, 86, 88-90, 98, 105, 107, 108, 112-113, 201, 294.
• “Lincoln Highway.” Wikipedia. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway.
• Thompson, Helen. “How a Hellish Road Trip Revolutionized American Highways.” Smart News, Smithsonian. Accessed Dec. 16, 20117, at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1919-ike-took-hellish-road-trip-across-us-180956284/.
• “Trucks of Transcontinental Motor Convoy Cross the Continental Divide in Wyoming.” YouTube. Accessed Dec. 22, 2017, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRXkh_WjWBc.
• Waggener, John Richard. Snow Chi Minh Trail: The History of Interstate 80 between Laramie and Walcott Junction. Wheatland, Wyo.: Wyoming State Historical Society, 2017, 343-345.
• “Wild Western Reception Given Motor Convoy by Old Cheyenne.” Cheyenne State Leader, Aug. 9, 1919, 1. Accessed Dec. 13, 2017, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.

Illustrations

• The photo of the convoy stopped in Rock River is from the Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks. The rest of the photos are from the Eisenhower Archives, via an article on mashable.com that offers large-sized versions of the photos. Used with thanks.

Carrie Burton (1888-1975) prospered despite the odds stacked against her as a young African-American woman growing up in Laramie, Wyo. She entered the University of Wyoming in 1903 at the age of 15.

Carrie’s mother, Katie, was from Missouri where she had been born into slavery and married a man named Carroll. Together they had a son, Benny. Carroll died about 1887; Katie and son moved to Laramie and took in laundry for a living.

Katie then married John R. Burton and soon Carrie was born. Burton, however, was arrested and convicted for burglary and attempted rape in 1890. He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Illinois.

Later in life, Carrie said that she never really knew her father. Instead, she recalled that her stepfather, Katie’s third husband, Thomas Price, had a major influence on her musical career.

Young Carrie suffered through several very painful experiences. A “fortune teller” molested her at the age of 12. He was subsequently arrested and convicted of his crime. In summer of that same year her half-brother Benny drowned in the Laramie River.

Later an older girl who had stolen money to pay for train tickets talked her into running away to Cheyenne. The pair was arrested and returned to Laramie. Carrie was released without charges being filed.

The family was also subjected to indignities because of their race. (Beginning in 1869, Wyoming Territory initially outlawed interracial marriages and allowed for segregated school districts. Those laws were later repealed, but versions of them returned in state law and lasted well into the 20th century.) When Carrie was a child, she was frequently taunted with racial epithets by other children. The local newspaper noted that Carrie succeeded in life despite the “prejudice against her race.”

Yet, Carrie did not hold a grudge against the Laramie community. In fact, one of her best friends was Miriam Corthell, daughter of wealthy local attorney Nellis Corthell. In an oral history in 1969, Carrie stated, “I have found there is no place like Laramie for good people. Everybody helped. Everybody in town felt we were family. “ (Emphasis in original transcript.)

Could it be that these remembrances may have been colored by the passage of time?

Carrie was a very good student and an excellent pianist, often called on to perform for community events. Her talents opened a world of opportunities for her. At age 15, having completed eight grades in the public schools, she entered UW, which at that time still offered high school as well as college-level courses.

In the UW Preparatory School, Carrie finished her high school requirements. In the School of Commerce, she obtained a certificate in stenography and in the School of Music she took college-level classes and honed her piano skills.

After four years at UW, Carrie was accepted at Howard University in Washington D.C. To help cover the cost of moving, local ladies, with Jane Ivinson, wife of Laramie banker and philanthropist Edward Ivinson, in the lead, sponsored a 1908 fundraising concert for Carrie. Her successful performance received high praise.

Dr. Aven Nelson, a well-known botanist and later president of the university, and others at UW encouraged Carrie to attend Howard. They wrote glowing letters of recommendation and corresponded with both the music department head and the president of Howard University.

At first, her experience in Washington D.C. was trying. Her stepfather died around this time, and Carrie’s mother joined her in the city; for a time the two were barely able to make ends meet. Carrie corresponded with Laramie through a letter published in the Laramie paper, mentioning illness and hard work in her new environment. “I … worried myself sick and was under the doctor’s care for three weeks,” she wrote.

Eventually she found her footing and was very happy with life in Washington. She received a music diploma from Howard in 1913 and, soon after, married George Overton, principal of the “colored schools” in Cumberland, Maryland. The couple, who had no children, moved to New York City in the early 1920s. Working a series of stenography jobs all along—for the NAACP, the Democratic National Committee and the Community Church of New York City—she also continued her musical education. From 1932 to 1941 she studied at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, winning a diploma in piano and a certificate in music theory during that time.

As a crowning achievement, Carrie composed an original musical work—unfortunately now lost--based on African folk songs that was performed at Juilliard in May 1940 and hailed as a success.

She continued her academic studies by entering Columbia University. There she was awarded both bachelor and master’s degrees.

Despite working and studying full time in New York, Carrie never forgot her Laramie roots. She returned for a visit in 1921. In 1960, she and her school administrator spouse came back to Laramie for that year’s homecoming festivities.

Carrie Burton Overton also played a role in the fundraising efforts of the Laramie Plains Museum. In January 1972 she was encouraged by UW Professor Robert Burns to write the story of her work for the Ivinson family as part of efforts to publicize the mansion that the museum hoped to purchase.

The story was expanded upon by museum fundraiser and supporter Alice Hardie Stevens and carried in the Laramie Boomerang on March 1, 1972. It recapped Carrie’s employment as a stenographer and musician for Jane Ivinson and noted Carrie’s fondness for the “Lady in the Mansion.”

Over the next few months, Prof. Burns also tried unsuccessfully to secure an honorary UW degree for Carrie Burton Overton. Despite polite answers from UW President William Carlson and Dave True of the board of trustees, no action was taken.

Carrie Burton Overton died in New York City in December 1975 after a long illness. She persevered in the face of early poverty and discrimination. She tied her accomplishments to her upbringing in Laramie. In a 1942 letter to the Laramie paper, she put it this way, “In all these things I have tried to repay the good people of Laramie for the faith they had in me.”

Editor’s note: We are grateful to the Albany County Historical Society, which first published this article Jan. 6, 2018, at https://www.wyoachs.com/new-blog/2018/1/6/carrie-burton-overton-first-african-american-girl-to-attend-uw, and to the editors of Annals of Wyoming, which published a longer version in its Autumn 2017 issue, Vol. 89 No. 4.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Buffum, Burt C. Papers. Collection 400055. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
• Burns, Robert Homer. Papers. Collection 400002. Box 3, Folder 13. American Heritage Center. University of Wyoming.
• McWhinnie, Ralph Edwin. Papers. Collection 400054. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
• Overton,  Carrie Burton. Collection UP000340. Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich.
• Overton , Carrie Burton. Oral History, LOH002299.  Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University. Detroit, Mich.
• Tuason, Lee Anne, Juilliard School. Email to author, Oct. 28, 2015.
• Viner, Kim. “Carrie Burton Overton,” Annals of Wyoming, 89:4 (Autumn 2017), 2-17.
• Wilk, Jocelyn, Columbia University. Email to Jonel Wilmot, Laramie Plains Museum Curator, Nov. 19, 2001.
• Letter Carrie Burton Overton to Alan Lomax 22 November 1940. Letter Alan Lomax to Carrie Burton Overton 2 December 1940. Email from Todd Harvey, Library of Congress, to Betsy Bress, Curator Laramie Plains Museum, 21 October 2015.

Secondary Sources

• Clough, W.O. A History of the University of Wyoming 1887-1937. Laramie, Wyo.: Laramie Printing Co., 1937.
• Dale, Harrison Clifford. A Sketch of the History of Education in Wyoming. Cheyenne, Wyo: State of Wyoming, Dept. of Public Instruction, 1917.
• Guenther, Todd. “'The List of Good Negroes': African American Lynchings in the Equality State.” Annals of Wyoming 81 (Spring 2009): 2–33.
• Hardy, Deborah. Wyoming University: The First 100 Years, 1886-1986. Laramie, Wyo.: University of Wyoming, 1986.
• “Juilliard School.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 23, 2018, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juilliard_School.
• Lee, F. W. “Laramie Public Schools,” Wyoming School Journal 2, No. 9 (May 1906).
• Noble, Robert F. The College of Education: 72 Years of Teacher Preparation for Wyoming's Schools. Laramie, Wyo: University of Wyoming, 1986
• University of Wyoming. The Wyoming Student. Laramie, Wyo: Students of the University of Wyoming, March 1907.

Illustrations

• The photo of Carrie Burton and other UW music students is from the Buffum Collection at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of the Ivinson Mansion is from the Laramie Plains Museum. Used with permission and thanks.

June Etta Downey, longtime professor of psychology at the University of Wyoming in the early 20^th century, loved science, scholarship and creative pursuits with equal fervor. She was the first woman ever to head a psychology department at a state university, and her work won acclaim both nationally and internationally.

Near the end of her life, poking gentle fun at her own profession, she wrote,″Those who read extensively in the literature of mental hygiene [psychology] often sigh because they suspect that much of the charm of life comes from the irrelevant, the irresponsible, the not wholly sane. … They are glad that the mental hygienist never got his fingers on [the poets] Shelley, nor Byron.″

Background and education

Downey’s father, Stephen W. Downey, fought in the Civil War in the Union Army and moved to Laramie, Wyo., in 1869 where he practiced law. In 1871, he served his first of seven terms in the Wyoming Legislature. The following year, he married Eva Owen, sister of Wyoming surveyor William O. Owen.

June Downey, the second of their 10 children, was born July 13, 1875, in Laramie. After attending public school and the University of Wyoming Preparatory School in Laramie, she went on to the University of Wyoming, graduating in 1895 with degrees in Greek and Latin. During the following school year, 1895-1896, Downey taught in the Laramie public schools.

She studied psychology at the University of Chicago from 1896-1898, earning her Master of Arts degree.  During this time, her first professional article, ″A Musical Experiment,″ was published in The American Journal of Psychology.

When she returned to Laramie, she taught English and philosophy at the University of Wyoming. At that time, science was considered a branch of philosophy. In 1905, Downey was promoted to professor of philosophy. Between 1898 and 1906, she published two more professional articles—in The Psychological Review and The Psychological Bulletin, plus seven essays, poems and stories in popular journals and a book of poetry, The Heavenly Dykes. Dedicated to her late father, the book was titled for its first poem, a rhapsody to the springtime sky that compares trees to dikes holding back the “azure floods of the air.”

In 1906, she returned to the University of Chicago’s department of psychology to pursue her doctorate in philosophy, completing her dissertation and graduating magna cum laude the next year. Downey then returned again to the University of Wyoming and taught there for the rest of her life. She eventually became professor of philosophy and psychology and in 1915 was appointed head of the department of philosophy and psychology. She was the only woman in the country to head a psychology department at a state university. She never married.

Colleagues and former students unanimously described her as modest, hardworking and almost painfully shy except in front of a class when she inspired her students with her curiosity and drive to explore. Reportedly she allowed students great latitude in their own research.

Studies in graphology

Downey’s doctoral dissertation, ″Control Processes in Modified Handwriting,″ centered on handwriting and what the study of someone’s handwriting could reveal about personality. Graphology, in 1906, meant two different things: a branch of psychology, and also what Downey and her colleagues termed a pseudoscience, ″on a level with other pseudo-sciences which look for a facile interpretation of one’s mental make-up from a reading of the lines in the palm of the hand or the bumps on the head,″ Downey wrote in a subsequent book on her handwriting studies.

Downey and other psychologists were interested in handwriting as an automatic motor activity that could be impaired or disturbed in various ways with its results quantified. Impairments included writing blindfolded, in mirror image, with the non-dominant hand and with the dominant hand ″in a strained position.″ Distractions included counting aloud, reading silently or aloud and counting the recurrences of a given word in a passage the experimenters read aloud. The subjects’ handwriting changed in size, slant and legibility, as well as rate of execution.

For the next 12 years, Downey continued her handwriting studies, publishing the results in her book, Graphology and the Psychology of Handwriting. She dedicated the book to her uncle, ″William O. Owen, in recognition of his devotion to Truth as an Ideal.″ Cautious in her conclusions, Downey wrote, ″[T]here is reason to believe that … extreme variability [in size, slant, alignment and other graphic elements] is evidence of the possession of specific mental traits.″

Personality tests

By 1916, Downey was already a nationally recognized expert in personality testing. In April of that year, James Howell, a prisoner in the Carbon County jail in Rawlins, Wyo., assaulted the jailer and tried to escape. When the jailer subsequently died of his injuries, Howell was tried for murder. His attorney entered a plea of insanity because Howell appeared unable to answer even simple questions. Many believed he was faking.

In the Jan. 13, 1917, Survey, a national journal on social problems and charities, Downey reported on her role in this case. In the presence of the judge and jury, she administered to Howell the new Binet Intelligence Test, developed in 1906 by French psychologist Alfred Binet and later adapted by Stanford University. At the suggestion of Howell’s attorney, Downey provided the judge and all members of the jury with blank score sheets so they could follow the progress of the test and do their own scoring. By this means, she convinced the jury that Howell, about 25, had a mental age of between 6 and 7 years. Howell was subsequently sent to the Wyoming State Hospital.

″Apart from the intrinsic interest in the case itself, and one’s sense of justice that revolts at any brutality of method that might lead to hanging a brain-sick man,” Downey wrote, “the case is worthy of remark for two other reasons. In the first place, we must welcome every innovation in the direction of bringing into court not only the expert witness only, but the scientific evidence upon which he bases a positive opinion. Secondly, any enlightenment of the public as to the need of intimate investigation of the life and mind of the so-called criminal should be welcomed. More and more we realize that there are criminal acts but no criminals, and that society, if properly alive to the problem, could protect itself and the unfortunate man who may become a so-called criminal, by discovering him before he commits a crime.″

Eventually Downey became internationally known for her work in personality testing. Believing that the new field of intelligence testing should not be limited to measuring the intelligence quotient (IQ), Downey was among the first to develop a test for non-intellectual traits and believed that personality should be studied as an integrated whole.

Her book, The Will-Temperament and its Testing, published in 1923, reviewed the current research and thinking on personality testing and included a description of her own methods plus the results of others’ use of her tests. Downey tested for traits such as speed and fluidity of reaction, aggressive or inhibited tendencies, gender factors, resistance to opposition, finality of judgment and carefulness and persistence of reaction.

In Chapter 11, “Testing the Will-Temperament Test,” Downey cited several criticisms of her test, among them that “it is a mistake to label the … [12 subtests] with the name of specific personality traits.” For example, a test of an individual’s ability to disguise his or her handwriting should be labeled as such rather than as a test of flexibility, as Downey had it labeled.

With a remarkable absence of defensiveness, Downey wrote, ″A new departure such as that of temperamental testing rightfully calls down a fire of criticism directed both at the general project and at the way in which the project has been carried out. Specific criticisms, especially those based upon experimental work, are bound to be of the greatest value.″

Creativity studies

Downey’s study, ″The Imaginal Reaction to Poetry,″ was published in 1911. She presented 12 subjects with about 100 fragments of different styles of poetry and cataloged their responses, including visual imagery, emotional stimulation and sensory images.

Downey herself wrote poetry, plays, essays and short stories, some of which were published in popular journals. She also composed both the words and music for ″Alma Mater,″ still the University of Wyoming college song.

She published many other articles on creativity as well as two books on the subject: Plots and Personalities in 1922, co-authored with Edwin E. Slosson, former professor of chemistry at the University of Wyoming; and in 1929, Creative Imagination.

Publications, honors and awards

During her long-lived career, Downey published seven books, including The Kingdom of the Mind, an informal book to educate children about psychology. She also published 74 professional articles and 23 reviews. Two of her articles were published in the Encyclopedia Britannica. She was also editor or contributing editor for three professional journals, and a member of many professional organizations. She served on the council of the American Psychological Association, a distinctive position for a woman in that era.

She was listed in prominent notable achiever lists, such as The Psychological Register, Leaders in Education, Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education and American Men of Science. In the 1927 edition of the latter, Downey’s name was starred as an exceptional scientist, one of only 100 starred names out of the 13,500 listed. (In a 1941 edition of Men of Science, fewer than 3 percent of the scientists listed were women; it seems likely that in 1927 the percentage was considerably smaller than that.)

For much of her adult life, Downey suffered from a ″nearly debilitating″ illness, which sources do not identify. However, all sources contain remarks about her outstanding dedication to teaching and research in the face of this problem.

In August 1932, while Downey was in New York to address the American Psychological Association and to attend the Third International Congress of Eugenics, she became ill and was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She died at her sister’s home in Trenton, N.J., on Oct. 11, 1932. She was buried in Laramie’s Green Hill Cemetery. On Sept. 28, 1933, university officials dedicated a bronze plaque in memory of her life and services to the university and installed it in Old Main, a building on the university campus.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Downey, June E. ″Automatic Phenomena of Muscle-Reading.″ The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 5, no. 24 (Nov. 19, 1908): 650-658. Accessed Dec. 1, 2017, via JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/i308894.
• ———. ″Control Processes in Modified Handwriting: An Experimental Study.″ The Psychological Review 9, no. 1 (April 1908): 1-148.  Accessed Dec. 15, 2017, at www.search.ebscohost.com. Database at the University of Wyoming Coe Library. Available to faculty, staff and currently enrolled students. Also available at the Casper College Goodstein Foundation Library, Casper, Wyo., to any patron presenting a library card from any Wyoming library, or a Wyoming driver’s license, or a Wyoming ID.
• ———. Creative Imagination: Studies in the Psychology of Literature. International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.
• ———. ″An Experiment on Getting an After-Image from a Mental Image.″ The Psychological Review 8 (1901): 42-55. Accessed Nov. 30, 2017, via www.search.ebscohost.com.
• ———. Graphology and the Psychology of Handwriting. Baltimore: Warwick & York, Inc., 1919.
• ———. The Heavenly Dykes. Boston: The Gorham Press, 1904.
• ———. ″The Imaginal Reaction to Poetry: The Affective and the Aesthetic Judgment.″ University of Wyoming Department of Psychology, Bulletin No. 2. Laramie, Wyo.: The Laramie Republican Company, 1911.
• ———. The Kingdom of the Mind. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1927.
• ———. ″A Mental Examination in Open Court.″ The Survey, Jan. 13, 1917, 427-428. Accessed Dec. 1, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/surveyoctmar1917surv.
• ———. ″A Musical Experiment.″ The American Journal of Psychology, 9, no. 1 (Oct. 1897): 63-69. Accessed Nov. 29, 2017, at www.jstor.org. Database at the University of Wyoming Coe Library. Available to faculty, staff and currently enrolled students. Also available at the Casper College Goodstein Foundation Library, Casper, Wyo., to any patron presenting a library card from any Wyoming library, or a Wyoming driver’s license, or a Wyoming ID.
• ———. ″Normal Variations in the Sense of Reality.″ The Psychological Bulletin 2, no. 9 (Sept. 15, 1905): 297-299. Accessed Nov. 30, 2017, at www.ebscohost.com.
• ———. ″Psyclones: Some Comments on the Winds of Doctrine.″ Journal of the American Association of University Women. 27, no. 2 (1934): 88-91.
• ———. ″The Variational Factor in Handwriting.″ Popular Science Monthly 75 (Aug. 1909): 147-156. Wikisource. Accessed Dec. 1, 2017, at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_75/August_1909/The_Variational_Factor_in_Handwriting.
• ———. The Will-Temperament and its Testing. Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: World Book Company, 1923.
• Slosson, Edwin E. and June E. Downey. Plots and Personalities: A New Method of Testing and Training the Creative Imagination. New York: The Century Co., 1922.
• University of Wyoming Faculty. In Memoriam: June Etta Downey, 1875-1932. Laramie, Wyo.: 1934.

Secondary Sources

• Bazar, Jennifer. “Profile of June Etta Downey,” 2010. In Psychology’s Feminist Voices Multimedia Internet Archive, A. Rutherford, ed. Retrieved Nov. 2, 2017, from http://www.feministvoices.com/june-etta-downey/.
• Eastman, Tyler. ″Stephen Downey.″ WyoHistory.org. Accessed Dec. 5, 2017, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/stephen-downey.
• Hardy, Deborah. Wyoming University: The First 100 Years, 1886-1986. Laramie, Wyo.: University of Wyoming, 1986, 18, 50-51, 80, 142, 232.
• Keen, Ernest. A History of Ideas in American Psychology. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001.
• Nelson, Elmer ″Kim.″ ″Aunt Norn and Uncle Will: Memories of the Downey Family of Laramie.″ Annals of Wyoming 69, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 35-42. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017, at www.archive.org/details/annalsofwyom69141997wyom.
• Van Horn, Christina. ″June Etta Downey: She Reached Far Into the Scientific and Creative Beyond.″ Annals of Wyoming 88, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 2-18.
• Viner, Kim. West to Wyoming: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Stephen Wheeler Downey. Laramie, Wyo.: Laramie Plains Museum Association, 2017.
• Wupperman, Alice. “Women in "American Men of Science". A tabular study from the sixth edition.” Journal of Chemical Education, 18:3 (March 1941), p. 120. Accessed Jan. 24, 2018 at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed018p120?journalCode=jceda8&.

Field Trip

• For more on June Etta Downey and the Downey family—scrapbooks, photographs, business records and more—browse the American Heritage Center’s collection of Downey Family Papers online or visit the center at the University of Wyoming:

Illustrations

• All three photographs are from the Downey Family Papers at American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming; the postcard of Old Main is also from the AHC. Used with permission and thanks. The  copy of The Heavenly Dykes shown here is from the Natrona County Public Library.

With another British royal wedding slated for May 2018, many observers have remarked on the unusual interest these events seem to hold for Americans. They say it seems paradoxical that citizens of a nation that broke away from a hereditary monarch more than two centuries ago would have such interest in a personal milestone of a faraway prince.

Such observations are nothing new. In 1876, as the nation was celebrating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, America hosted the first-ever visit by a reigning royal head of state to the United States. The visiting monarch wasn’t from Britain. He was Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil.

To many Americans, bewildered by rapid industrialization, social upheavals from immigration and the recent end of slavery, the visit by a royal personage may have brought some yearnings for the apparent stability of hereditary rule. Some simply viewed the visit as a mere curiosity. To others, it was an awkward intrusion of an anti-egalitarian symbol at the very time when the country was celebrating the anniversary of independence from another empire.

In his own nation, Dom Pedro was widely popular. He was 50 years old and had been on the throne for 44 of those years, since 1831 when his father, Pedro I suddenly abdicated.

Brazil was a parliamentary monarchy, with well-defended freedoms of speech and the press. Politicians of all factions seem to have agreed that the monarchy provided the nation a reliable, positive stability.

Before going to the festivities in Philadelphia for the Fourth of July 1876, the emperor traveled to every region of the United States. Huge crowds greeted his train in Chicago as he set out for a trip to the West. Newspaper coverage was extensive with every reporter seeking an interview. Some got an audience with the emperor; others had to settle for somewhat less.

It was the middle of the night when Dom Pedro’s train passed through Cheyenne. A reporter for the Cheyenne Daily Leader, unable to land an interview, still had to come up with an eyewitness story. So, on the morning of May 3, 1876, he paid a visit to the sleeping monarch. “He arrived here at 4:30 this morning,” the reporter wrote. “He didn’t climb down out of his royal car and saunter about the city in search of sights, because he was still dreaming of his far-off palaces when the train reached the Magic City.”

The account continued: “This reporter was permitted to gaze upon his sleeping majesty and listen to the imperial snore which may be described—the snore we mean—as a cross between the sonorous nose-buster of a bullwhacker and the quivering wail which issues from the proboscis of a lovely woman when her bronchial tubes are affected by a bad cold.”

The reporter had his brief look, got off the train and left the depot platform. The train continued on. Nonetheless, the reporter had his story. Not much of a story, perhaps, but Wyoming readers wanted to know every tiny detail of the emperor’s visit to their town. Even in the wild west of Cheyenne in 1876, royalty held some fascination. Many 21^st century Wyomingites watching the royal wedding likely follow in that singular tradition.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Cheyenne Daily Leader, May 3, 1876, p. 3, c. 4.
• Sidney (Neb.) Telegraph, May 6, 1876

Secondary Sources

• “Pedro II of Brazil.” Wikipedia, accessed Feb. 19, 2018 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_II_of_Brazil.
• Phil Roberts, "'All Americans are Hero-Worshippers': American Observations on the First U.S. Visit by a Reigning Monarch, 1876,"Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7 (October 2008): 453-477.

Illustrations

• The image of the emperor’s portrait is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image from the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, 1876, is from Norton Frank, ed., Frank Leslie's Historical Register of the United States Centennial Exposition, 1876 (New York,1877), p. 81. Used with thanks.

On Nov. 10, 1887, during the reign of Umberto I as the second king of the unified Italy, a farmer, Battista Gamarra, stepped into the town hall to register the birth of his first son by his wife Maria Notario. At that time, fancy names were not in fashion, and the new father didn’t think twice before calling his son with his own name, which was also the name of his father.

Another Battista Gamarra was born, the third we know of.

The 1881 census tells us that San Benigno Canavese—in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, 20 kilometers northeast of Turin—was a farming village of just over 3,000 people.

Village life

The splendor of the medieval history of the rich and powerful Fruttuaria Abbey was already a distant memory, and even the short distance from Turin did not seem to have any positive influence on the economy and on the inhabitants’ lives. Only the Salesian priests’ house, established in 1879, contributed to modernity. The priests gave attention to young people with modest carpentry, tailoring and blacksmithing courses, and later with evening schools and an oratory hall. Almost all the people of the time led the hard and arduous life of farmers: a plot of land, several cows, the mass and the pub on Sundays.

If a christening or a wedding party happened, they would enjoy a nice lunch with agnolotti pasta and fried or boiled meat, which the women had cooked all together, singing and exchanging gossip. Then, the country folk would break into a dance on the farmyard to the sound of the accordion.

In August, having some extra money in their pockets after the harvest, they celebrated the patron saint’s festival. On the feast day, there were stalls with candies for the kids and a dance pavilion; the girls would dress up and the young men would strut around in white shirts and vests, and with their hats pulled back.

Battista went to school for just long enough to learn how to read and write and do arithmetic. He grew up well and enjoyed good health, while the family expanded with the birth of his sisters Maria and Teresa in 1890 and 1895.

It was not easy for a farmer to maintain a five-member family. He could reasonably hope for a suitable marriage for his daughters, whereas the boy had only one prospect: to become a farmer like his father and his grandfather.

The life became even more difficult when, in 1898, the father Battista died at the age of 49. The three children were somehow raised by the widow with the help of her brothers and her two sisters, the younger Battista’s aunts.

The daughters’ lives took their expected courses. Maria married Battista Grua, a building contractor, and Teresa married Luigi Costa, who first was a coachman and then a farmer. They became mothers, then grandmothers and their lives spanned the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th.

The young Battista tried to be a farmer, but the stories of those who had crossed the ocean and gone to America reached even San Benigno. They told of big cities, of wide-open spaces and job opportunities. Illustrated leaflets were handed out, evoking dreams for a better future.

The emigrant

Battista began dreaming of leaving the small world of the village, taking a train and then a ship, and getting to New York, although it was hard for him to believe that there really existed buildings high enough to touch the sky. His dreams, his hopes and the difficulties of a hard life with no prospects of improvement were the same that drove more than 8 million Italians to emigrate between 1900 and 1915. More than 800,000 of them were from Piedmont.

Young people and whole families set off from San Benigno. This remote Italian village with a strange name appears several times in American immigration records. Sometimes its name is twisted into Begnino, Fan Beniguo or Benignolane, as the birthplace of others named Gamarra and then Bertorello, Bosco, Tapparo, etc.

It was not easy to decide to leave the family and the village that represented his whole world, but in the end Battista made up his mind. He scraped together the sum requested by the shipping company’s agent who saw to everything: the passport, the train ticket and the ship pass. Battista, this 19-year-old boy who had only traveled as far as the nearby villages of Volpiano and Bosconero, set off on a journey of which he had only heard tales.

A sea voyage

He started from Le Havre, on the French coast of the English Channel, at the end of August 1907 on the ocean liner La Gascogne, a 150-meter ship traveling on the scheduled route from Le Havre to New York. The ship could carry 1,055 passengers: 390 in first class, 65 in second class and 600 in third class. Battista was certainly one of the latter with the other people from Piedmont, as well as Spain, Germany, and with many Turks, Greeks, etc.

The journey was not an easy one: The ship was overcrowded, the accommodations fairly Spartan, to say the least, but luckily the sea was quite calm, and the excitement and the enthusiasm of the youth helped overcome all problems.

Seeing the port of Le Havre, hearing so many different languages and dialects, Battista realized that the world was much bigger and more complicated than he imagined when he was daydreaming with his friends under the canopy of the market in the town square. But when he came to New York, he--like all the poor people from all over Europe--was really amazed. The harbor waters were crossed by a lot of boats, ferries, small boats and large barges carrying any kind of goods. He saw the biggest buildings he had ever seen, the tall skyscrapers; he saw the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.

The new land seemed to live up to his expectations.

Like all immigrants, Battista too had to submit himself to immigration checks, which he sailed through.

The documents tell us that he arrived in New York on Sept. 9, 1907, at 19, claiming to have $30 in his pocket, to be a laborer by profession, to know how to read and write and to want to reach his cousin Giovanni Bertorello in Pennsylvania. According to the papers, he was 5 feet 4 inches tall (about 1.60 meters), had a dark complexion and auburn hair.

In the transcript, the surname lost an “r” and became Gamara.

Pennsylvania coal mines

Battista Gamara began his new life in America.

From Pennsylvania Station, he took a train to Pittsburgh for a nearly 400-mile trip. There, only a few miles divided him from Claridge, one of the most important mining communities of western Pennsylvania where a lot of miners resided, working in the tunnels, living in the houses and buying goods in shops owned by the mining companies.

He, too, became part of the classic American story of European immigrants in the early years of the 20^thcentury: from Ellis Island to hard work in the mines with picks and shovels.

In Claridge, the first mine opened in 1880, the second in 1891 and other minor ones in the following years. The economy was booming and the Pittsburgh steel industry required large amounts of energy. And coal was there, around the corner; you only needed to extract it and upload it onto the Pennsylvania Railroad, and then many tons of it were transported by way of the Ohio River and the Mississippi all over the country.

Thousands of immigrants of all nationalities came to the United States, and for all the people the job was the same: down in the tunnels, digging in the dark in sweltering heat, covered with coal dust, exposed to the ever-looming risk of accidents, explosions and collapses.

Six days a week for ten hours a day; that would be cut down to eight hours only in 1912.

Battista didn’t feel dispirited. Like many others, he didn’t forget his country, and he thought that if he committed himself to saving some money, he would go back and settle down in Italy. It was difficult to start a family in America: The mining areas were full of young male workers whose social life was confined within ethnic groups that became, on the one hand, communities of solidarity, on the other, closed circles where no one from outside was let in.

Immigrants often sent pictures home showing that things were going right. Battista was not an exception. A year after his arrival, in November 1908, he sent two beautiful photos to his aunt Notario Nota who worked as a maid in Turin. In one, he looks serenely straight into the lens. He is wrapped up in a coat buttoned up to the neck, with his cap turned back-to-front. In the other, he is posing with a dog, a rifle and a cartridge belt on the waist, showing us two huge hares and a rabbit--game bag of a successful hunt. In the same period, he also sent home a photograph of himself in Pennsylvania with Italian relatives and friends.

In January 1910 he sent two other photos to the same aunt. In both of them, Battista has a bottle in his hand. One shows him with a group of friends at a party, while in the other he is wearing a smart dark suit, a white tie and a pocket watch.

Michigan copper mines

Later, he decided to move to Calumet, on the shores of Lake Superior on the upper Michigan peninsula, having accepted the invitation of the relatives already settled down in Michigan. They had followed in the footsteps of Pietro Notario, who had arrived from San Benigno on the Canadian border in 1897. In another photograph, Battista is the first on the left in the front row along with his work mates. According to the sign, they are all miners working in the Red Jacket shaft of the Calumet & Hecla mining company, in those days the largest producer of copper all over the world.

If we look at the photo, turning the blind eye to the joker in the last row who’s making “bunny ears,” we can notice the workers are bursting with pride: it was a big thing working in a shaft that had been dug vertically through the rock to the copper lode. It was considered the deepest shaft in the world with its 1,500 meters under the surface.

The history of the copper district of Calumet is the history of the paternalism of a capitalist who built houses, schools and libraries but whose mines, at the moment a crisis in prices and the collapse of production in 1913, became the theatre of a big miners’ strike.

The conflict was very serious. Even the National Guard was called. There were clashes and tragic events: 73 people, of whom 59 were children, died at a Christmas party in the Italian Hall, crushed in a stampede because someone, still unknown, had given the false fire alarm.

Battista was certainly involved in the employment crisis caused by the sharp decline in output that dropped from 45,000 tons in previous years to 30,000 in 1912, and fell to 21,000 tons in the year of the strike.

Coal again—in Kemmerer, Wyo.

Not being bound by family ties, he had no difficulty in changing places. Battista, some time later, moved farther west to Wyoming. There, large mining areas had been developed in the sparsely populated state, where until a few years before Crow, Arapaho and Shoshone tribes had roamed.

In a short time—seemingly out of nowhere—mining towns of Kemmerer, Cumberland and Sublet sprang to life. In the beginning, they were little more than encampments, and then gradually grew. The town that soon came to the forefront was Kemmerer. It became such an important mining city that in 1915, the local newspaper, the Kemmerer Camera, proudly flaunted this sentence as part of its masthead: “Kemmerer is the Railroad Center of the Largest Mining District of the West with a Payroll of $250,000.00 Monthly.”

Battista grew into a man and had already learned the ropes of his job. In order to integrate into the society, he enrolled in two fraternal organizations: Moose and Knights of Pythias.

In those days, the United States saw the rise of this kind of association, which had a social, charitable and benevolent purpose. The members stated that they believed in a supreme being, committed themselves to maintaining correct behavior, drinking moderately and not gambling. They met regularly to listen to edifying lectures, as well as for parties and celebrations and to discuss local issues.

Through these associations, Battista, commonly known as Batiste, became a valued member of the community and certainly began seeing tangible results of his efforts. In those years, the miners associated in a union and obtained wage improvements and better general employment conditions.

There are two professional pictures that certainly belong to that period: Battista had them taken at the Pohjola photograph studio in Kemmerer. In one of them he is with three friends; and in the other, with an important setting in the background, he is standing in a classic pose wearing a dark suit, his hand on the back of the chair. We can see that he is more robust and more mature, but always with the serene look of his clear eyes.

By Christmas 1915, Battista had been working in the American mines for eight years. The Kemmerer Cameraand the Kemmerer Gazettewere full of announcements of various celebrations and there was also a lot of diverse advertising: jewelry, toys, pans, corsets for the ladies and even special offers for the showers and the barber.

But fate decreed that Battista would not see that Christmas.

“Fall of Coal”

On Wednesday, December 15, he was working in the mine as usual, when, at 2:30 p.m. a big coal boulder suddenly fell from the ceiling of the gallery where he was digging and killed him instantly, while leaving his workmate unharmed.

There is an official report on the accident made by George Blacker, state inspector of the coal mines of Wyoming:

Fall of Coal.

December 15, 1915. Batiste Gamara. Italian. In the employ of company some years. Age 28. Miner. Was killed in the No. 2 Mine Cumberland. Property of the Union Pacific Coal Co.

Battista was an esteemed and appreciated man. The two lodges that he belonged to organized the funeral that took place, as always in these cases, on Sunday in order to allow the participation of co-workers.

On Sunday, Dec.19, 1915, at 10 a.m., a special train from Cumberland arrived in Kemmerer carrying the dead and colleagues.

His funeral, which the lodge brothers attended wearing black armbands, is described in the Kemmerer Cameraof December 22:

It was largely attended and the funeral procession was led by the band of Kemmerer, which played most appropriate music for the occasion. Gamara was 28 years of age and so far as known has no relatives in this country. He was held in the highest esteem wherever known and was a member of the Moose Lodge and the Knights of Pythias Lodge. The funeral occurring from the undertaking parlors, and interment being made in the Kemmerer cemetery. He carried some insurance in the orders he belonged to, and had saved up some money, but just what his estate amounted to is not known.

Once again, on Jan. 19 and 22, 1916, local newspapers published a notice from the Moose Lodge where members expressed condolences and the official appreciation for the services rendered by their brother Batiste.

We do not know how, but we certainly know that the news reached San Benigno, while Battista Gamarra, in American spelling Batiste Gamara, remained forever in Kemmerer.

His story is an emblematic story of many European immigrants who contributed with their work and their lives to build the industry and the economy of a great country such as the United States.

Today, more than a century later, his tombstone still stands in the Kemmerer cemetery, Lincoln County, Wyo. The care with which it is preserved is the moving evidence that the citizens of Kemmerer have not forgotten that their community was built by immigrants who arrived from all over the world.

Author’s Note:

We had only some pictures of this ancestor, and the only thing we knew is that he had died in the mines in the United States, place and date unknown. I wanted to learn more and, step by step, I managed to reconstruct the story of this forgotten young man who, like many others, sought his fortune by crossing the ocean in the early 20^thcentury. I have written this booklet to pay my respect to the people the memory of whom has been virtually lost within a few generations.

I was amazed to discover how many people and how many families had set off from San Benigno to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Colorado facing the hardships and difficulties of a new world, adapting to the hard and dangerous mining work which, in Wyoming alone, caused on average 1,500 accidents a year. I wonder if one day someone will write their stories.

Heartfelt thanks to the Grua cousins and, especially to Maria Teresa, for their support, the research of the photographic documentation and the suggestions.

Special thanks to Nancy Anderson, a real expert in local history and the curator of theHanna Basin Museumin Hanna, Wyo. With great courtesy, she provided me with information, tips and documents I needed for my research. I like to think of her as a friend from whom I’m divided only by a few thousand miles.

Resources

• “Fall of Earth Crushes Cumberland man.” Kemmerer Republican, Dec. 12, 1915, 4. Accessed April 10, 2018 via http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• Kemmerer Camera, May 5, 1915, 1. Accessed March 6, 2018, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “Popular Miner Killed.”Kemmerer Camera, Dec. 22, 1915, 5. Accessed March 6, 2018, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “Resolution.” Kemmerer Camera, Jan. 19, 1916, 8. Accessed April 10, 2018 via http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “Resolutions.” Kemmerer Republican, Jan. 22, 1916, 6. Accessed April 10, 2018 via http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “S/S La Gascogne, C.G.T.” Norway-Heritage, accessed April 10, 2018 at http://www.norwayheritage.com/p_ship.asp?sh=lagae.
• Wyoming Tales and Trails. Pages on Cumberland, Wyo., and Kemmerer, Wyo., accessed April 10, 2018 at http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/coalcumberland1.html and http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/kemmerer.html.

Illustrations

• The photos of Cumberland and Kemmerer are from Wyoming Tales and Trails. Used with thanks.
• All other images are from the booklet Gamarra Battista di Battista fu Giovanni Battista, Una storia di emigrazione da San Benigno Canavese, published by the author, Sergio Vedovato, in 2016. His English translation of the booklet is the text of this article. Used with permission and thanks.

In recent years, melting ice and mountain fires have revealed ancient human presence at elevations above 8,000 feet in northwestern Wyoming. Findings of archaeologists over the past decade, including a large, prehistoric village site near Dubois, Wyo., indicate humans lived high in the mountains as long as 10,000 years ago.

“We've constructed a fiction that mountains/wilderness are landscapes that have had only a limited, transient human presence,” notes Lawrence Todd, Colorado State University professor emeritus of anthropology. In reality, however, “the archaeological record indicates that native peoples have been a key component of mountain ecosystems and mountains have been important components of human socio-cultural systems.”

Five teams of professional archaeologists from three universities, together with amateur explorers, have studied areas in the Wind River and Absaroka ranges and in the Bridger-Teton National Forest for nearly 50 years. Much more recently, a combination of computer modeling, forest fires and melting ice have led to significant discoveries about ancient, high-mountain people. 

Probably summer residents, these people lived in conical timber lodges, sometimes referred to as wickiups. They may have eaten fish, and hunted mountain sheep, deer, elk and smaller mammals. Plant foods were also available at high altitudes, everything from roots to greens, berries and pine nuts.

Early high-altitude explorations

In the 1969 and 1970 field seasons, Colorado State University undergraduates Vaughn Hadenfeldt and Phillip Foss, Jr., found 19 prehistoric high-altitude sites, most above 10,000 feet, in two different drainages in the southern Wind River Mountains. Foss and Hadenfeldt wrote a 100-page term paper on the project, but their findings were not otherwise recorded at the time. Theirs was the first high-altitude archaeological survey in Wyoming, and one of the first in the Rocky Mountains.

George C. Frison, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, conducted an archaeological survey of the Bridger-Teton National Forest in field season 1974. Frison and his team found 33 sites including two fire pits, plus soapstone—more formally known as steatite—vessels, stone choppers and more than two dozen styles of projectile points.

The Burnt Wickiup Site and High Rise Village

Dubois, Wyo., outfitters and avocational archaeologists Tory and Meredith Taylor found a wickiup—a conical dwelling made of tree branches and bark—on the east side of the Wind River Mountains in the late 1990s. The Taylors found no artifacts in or around the wickiup, but after a forest fire destroyed it a few years later, they recovered artifacts of chipped stone and of ground stone. These had been exposed by the destruction of “pine duff”—decayed pine needles and other organic matter on the forest floor. In 2003, the Taylors showed the site to Richard Adams, now retired from the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist and an adjunct instructor at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins. Adams and the Taylors named it the Burnt Wickiup Site.

With this and other recent fire-related discoveries in mind, Adams, along with the Taylors and others, began investigating burned areas in the mountains of northwest Wyoming. In August 2006, they found a major prehistoric village in the northern Wind River Range near Dubois. More than 70 circular flat spots, dug into slopes that rise as steeply as 20 degrees, and fortified on the downhill side, were subsequently documented at this location. On a 20-degree slope, a downhill step of one foot in length is a drop of four and one-half inches.

The dirt circles, or lodge pads, were probably supports for wooden lodges such as wickiups. Four pads still had traces of these structures.

“Trudging up and down this slope made me realize that the site was as tall as a 30-story apartment [building],” Adams writes. “By any measure, a 30-story building is a high rise, hence … [we named it] High Rise Village.”

In subsequent field seasons, from 2007 through 2010, the group found five more similar villages, all in the Wind River Range. In 2015, Adams and Connor Johnen, a master’s degree student at the University of Wyoming, revisited the area explored by Hadenfeldt and Foss. They photographed some of the sites, drew site maps and completed site forms. They also found and recorded 11 new sites, but no villages.

Computer modeling discoveries

Matthew Stirn, director of archaeological research at the Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum, in Jackson, Wyo., joined Adams’ team in 2008, and developed a computer model to predict the locations of other high-altitude sites. Features included in the model were altitude, slope, sun exposure, warmth and possible vegetation. In field seasons 2010 and 2011, Stirn and his team found more than 50 new sites, including 13 alpine villages similar to High Rise Village.

“It was thrilling to put so much effort into a project and to have it work out so successfully,” Stirn writes. “That [first] summer of exploration and discovery was one of my most memorable and exciting in a decade of alpine archaeology.”

The Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology Project (GRSLE)

Since 2002, meanwhile, Lawrence Todd of CSU has been documenting sites and artifacts in the Absaroka Mountains, north of the Wind River Range. Wildfires from 2006 through 2011 revealed many new sites and artifacts. For example, after the Little Venus Fire of July and August 2006, Todd and his teams recorded about 1,600 percent more surface artifacts in the area. They also found a greater diversity of objects: ceramics, metal, glass beads, pieces of obsidian and faunal remains, like animal bones.

After the 2011 Norton Point Fire north of Dubois, Todd and his team coded more than 17,000 pieces of chipped stone in one 1,052-acre area. When ancient people made projectile points or other stone tools, they also left hundreds or thousands of stone chips behind, as well as the finished artifacts. Todd estimates that these pieces represent less than half the materials exposed by that fire in their survey area.

High-altitude subsistence

Intense summer heat, which often dries out the lower elevations in Wyoming by midsummer and causes wildlife to seek cooler, moister environments, also drove game of long ago high into the grass-rich mountain habitat. Ancient hunters almost certainly followed, as shown by drive lines and corrals for herding mountain sheep, plus stone blinds and other evidence of large-mammal harvesting found decades ago in high elevations. But the artifacts tell only part of the story.

Most or all the villages in the Wind River Mountains are near stands of whitebark pine trees, whose abundant, nutritious nuts may have been a staple for the people who lived there. Adams and his associate, Rhoda M. Schantz, have calculated that 10 kilograms of unshelled pine nuts, about 3,000 cones’ worth, is the meat equivalent of a large pronghorn antelope. Other likely plant foods were the biscuitroot, the sego lily bulb and yampah root. The presence of metates and manos—a mortar/pestle set of tools—also suggest the processing of various plant foods.

Site and artifact ages

Radiocarbon dates from High Rise Village range from about 4,500 years before the present (BP) to about 150 years ago—around the time the Union Pacific Railroad was built across Wyoming. The older dates might not reflect human occupation, because these dates correspond to the age of nearby stands of whitebark pine, which later occupants may have burned for firewood. The likelier High Rise dates are 2,800 to 150 BP, placing these sites and artifacts in the archaeological periods known as the Late Plains Archaic through the mid-1800s. However, some items suggest humans lived in the area much earlier. Todd and Tory Taylor have both found Folsom-era projectile points dating from approximately 10,000 or 10,500 years BP at high altitudes.

Ice-patch archaeology

“Because of global warming, high alpine ice is melting at an unprecedented rate,” writes Stirn. “[A]s a result, [it] is exposing cultural and biological material that has been encased and preserved for thousands or even tens of thousands of years.”

Less than one percent of all artifacts found in Wyoming have been found because of melting ice. However, these artifacts are often so well preserved that archaeologists can sometimes learn more from a single ice-patch artifact than from one discovered elsewhere.

“[M]ost tools used by past cultures were probably made of organic material,” Stirn notes, “and haven’t survived over the years. So, when we do find an ice-patch artifact it is especially exciting because it provides a rare glimpse into the past that we don’t normally get to witness.” Stirn explains that this is one reason archaeologists “are particularly alarmed at the extent that ice in Wyoming is disappearing, along with the fragile archaeological information preserved within.”

For the past four years, Stirn and Rebecca Sgouros, director of community archaeology for the Jackson Hole Archaeology Initiative, have been exploring ice patches in the Grand Tetons as part of the Teton Archaeological Project. In field season 2014, they found a stave-cut segment of whitebark pine, radiocarbon dated to approximately 2,700 BP, shown in the second photo in this article. A stave-cut piece of wood is cut out of a tree along the grain.

Dr. Craig M. Lee, of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado in Boulder, has been studying ice patches in the Greater Yellowstone Area for more than a decade. The Greater Yellowstone Area, about 24,000 square miles, includes Yellowstone National Park and five national forests surrounding it, Grand Teton National Park, most of the country along Idaho’s eastern border and the mountainous south-central portion of a small part of southern Montana, including the Gallatin and Absaroka mountain ranges.

Lee has documented about 25 organic artifacts, including wooden shafts and shaft fragments and one object of plaited leather and bark. An atlatl dart, about 10,300 years old, which Lee found in Wyoming, is the oldest known ice-patch artifact in the world. Atlatls were ancient dart-throwing devices used to kill game.

High-altitude environments “were totally and completely populated,” Lee notes, “and ice-patch recoveries help to back up, and to overcome our ignorance of, tribal oral histories about how the ancestors of today’s Native Americans lived up high.”

Through the Greybull River project in the Absaroka Range, Todd began researching ice patches in 2014. Beginning in 2015, Todd’s group studied 11 ice patches identified earlier by Lee, who used a computer model to predict locations likely to contain ancient perishable artifacts.

Todd and his team found thousands of items. These include two wooden bows and nearly 20,000 pieces of chipped stone in an area of about 430 acres. At about 10,350 feet elevation, they found the highest stone circle habitation sites in the GYA. In 2015 and 2016, Todd’s team found 7,000 pieces of chipped stone in an approximately 3 percent sample of the surface of one site that lies between 9,600 and 10,500 feet.

The occupants

Shoshone probably lived in the Absarokas and at High Rise Village and similar sites in the Wind River Mountains. Artifacts found at High Rise Village and associated with the mountain Shoshone include steatite bowls, which women used and passed down to their daughters. Another tool associated with women is the teshoa, made of stone and used as a knife and also for harvesting roots and other digging. Early white explorers observing the Shoshone noticed only women using the teshoa, but archaeologists don’t know whether it was actually a tool used exclusively by women.

Projectile points associated with the Shoshone and found at High Rise Village are of the desert tri-notch, cottonwood triangular and rose-spring style. Archaeologists have also found steatite pipes, beads and atlatl weights at other locations in Wyoming.

“None of those artifacts by themselves necessarily indicates Shoshone,” writes Stirn, “but if they are all found at one site we can be a little more certain.”

The ancient mountain Shoshone are probably the ancestors of the small groups of Shoshone who lived in the mountains of northwest Wyoming and who, in more recent times, became known as the Sheepeaters.

More modern migration

Ancestors of modern-day Northern Paiute, Ute and Shoshone are referred to as Numic speakers. Archaeologists generally hypothesize that some Numic speakers occupied, or at least migrated through, the Great Basin—the area encompassing most of Nevada and approximately the western half of Utah, plus small portions of southwest Wyoming, southeast Idaho, southeast Oregon and California east of the Sierras.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, discoveries of alpine villages in the Alta Toquima Range in Nevada and the White Mountains of California generated the hypothesis that these peoples migrated from west to east. Artifacts and sites in these locations date from approximately 2,500 BP or younger.

The earlier dates of artifacts in the Absarokas, and also High Rise Village, however, suggest that human occupation in high-altitude Wyoming may have predated occupation of the California and Nevada villages. This in turn could imply that Numic speakers actually migrated east to west, but more research is needed to corroborate this hypothesis.

Tough logistics—and new questions

Most high-altitude archaeological exploration in Wyoming occurs in wilderness areas or national parks. A week-long expedition is a backpack trip, sometimes or often including backcountry outfitters and pack animals. Many archaeologists take notes using only minimal technology. Some prefer paper and pencil to laptop computers, batteries and other digital equipment that must be hauled along and protected from harsh weather or falls from steep slopes. Most use digital cameras and GPS units.

At the same time, though many sites are difficult to reach and removing artifacts from public land is a crime, recreational looting of the areas continues to be a problem.

Until these recent discoveries, most archaeologists believed ancient peoples lived in lowlands, except when forced into higher elevations by extreme conditions such as population pressure, scanty hunting or famine. The mountain villages, sites and artifacts found by Adams, Stirn, Sgouros, Todd, Lee and their teams strongly suggest that earlier hypotheses are incorrect, however. The scope of these ongoing projects is likely much more far-reaching than previously realized, and scientists continue to search for more evidence to support and augment current theories.

[Editor’s Note: Those interested in learning more about the state’s archaeological finds and methods can learn more during Wyoming Archaeology Awareness Month, celebrated each September. A different archaeological site is featured each year, with a commemorative poster highlighting the location, and a variety of other activities occur to help promote the state’s archaeological advancements. For more information, visit the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office Archaeology Awareness Month website at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/aamonth/.]

Resources

Primary Sources

• Adams, Richard. Adjunct Instructor, Archaeology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colo. Emails to author, Feb. 19, 2018; March 18, 21, 2018.
• Lee, Craig, M. Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). University of Colorado, Boulder. Emails to author, March 16, 21, 2018.
• __________. Telephone interview with author, March 20, 2018.
• Stirn, Matthew. Director of Archaeological Research, Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum, Jackson Hole, Wyo. Emails to author, March 9, 12, 13, 19, April 15, 2018.
• Todd, Lawrence C. Colorado State University Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Fort Collins, Colo.Emails to author, March 19-21, 2018.

Secondary Sources

• Adams, Richard. “Archaeology with Altitude: Late Prehistoric Settlement and Subsistence in the Northern Wind River Range, Wyoming.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wyoming, 2010. Accessed Jan. 31, 2018, via www.proquest.com.
• Adams, Richard, Tory N. Taylor, Meredith E. Taylor, John B. Lund, Byron A. Schroeder, Orrin Koenig and Matthew A. Stirn. “Untrammeled by Man: Wilderness Archaeology in Wyoming.” The SAA Archaeological Record14, no. 2 (March 2014): 11-14. Accessed Jan. 20, 2018, at http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=201212
• Adams, Richard and Connor Johnen. “Revisiting 1969: Retracing an Early CSU Archaeological Survey of the Wind River Range, Wyoming.” Colorado State University: The Department of Anthropology and Geography. Accessed Feb. 14, 2018, at https://anthropology.colostate.edu/2015/10/wind-river-range-wyoming/.
• Anderson, Richard. “Fish stew, delving into the past at high camp: New tests, techniques offer details about ancient people’s lives in the Tetons.” Jackson Hole News& Guide. Nov. 25, 2015. Accessed Jan. 30, 2018, at http://www.jhnewsandguide.com/news/features/fish-stew-delving-into-the-past-at-high-camp/article_4ad98ff7-b47a-51a1-b064-36a62275d050.html.
• DePastino, Blake. “13 Ancient Villages Discovered in Wyoming Mountains May Redraw Map of Tribal Migrations.” Accessed Jan. 29, 2018, at http://westerndigs.org/thirteen-prehistoric-villages-discovered-in-wyoming-mountains-may-redraw-map-of-tribal-migrations/.
• ———. “Wyoming Wildfire Reveals ‘Massive’ Shoshone Camp, Thousands of Artifacts.” Accessed March 12, 2018, at http://westerndigs.org/wyoming-wildfire-reveals-massive-pre-contact-shoshone-camp-thousands-of-artifacts/.
• Dominick, David. “The Sheepeaters.” Annals of Wyoming 36, no. 2 (October 1964): 131-168. Accessed Feb. 20, 2018, at www.archive.org/details/annalsofwyom36121964wyom.
• Hughes, Susan S. “The Sheepeater Myth of Northwestern Wyoming.” Plains Anthropologist 45, no. 17 (February 2000): 63-83.
• Kornfeld, Marcel, George C. Frison and Mary Lou Larson. Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of the High Plains and Rockies. 3d. ed. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2010.
• Lee, Craig M., with contributions by Robert L. Kelly, Marcia Peterson, Matt Stirn, Rachel Reckin, Rebecca Sgouros and Lawrence C. Todd. “Frozen in Time: What Once Was Lost, Now is Found.” Flyer and poster for Wyoming Archaeology Awareness Month, Sept. 2018. Accessed April 10, 2018 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/AAmonth/Index.aspx.
• Lee, Craig M. and Kathryn Puseman. “Ice Patch Hunting in the Greater Yellowstone Area, Rocky Mountains, USA: Wood Shafts, Chipped Stone Projectile Points, and Bighorn Sheep (Ovis Canadensis).”American Antiquity82, no. 2 (2017): 223-243. Accessed March 15, 2018, at https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/5C2F5BADBFA1228081EC9C40E7B6F43B/S0002731616000329a.pdf/ice_patch_hunting_in_the_greater_yellowstone_area_rocky_mountains_usa_wood_shafts_chipped_stone_projectile_points_and_bighorn_sheep_ovis_canadensis.pdf.
• Lee, Craig M. “Withering Snow and Ice in the Mid-latitudes: A New Archaeological and Paleobiological Record for the Rocky Mountain Region.” Arctic 65, Suppl. 1 (2012): 165-177.
• Morgan, Christopher, Ashley Losey and Richard Adams. “High-Altitude Hunter-Gatherer Residential Occupations in Wyoming’s Wind River Range.” North American Archaeologist 33, no. 1 (2012): 35-79. Accessed Feb. 1, 2018, at https://www.unr.edu/Documents/liberal-arts/anthropology/cmorgan/Morgan_et_al_2012-High_Rise_Village.pdf.
• Schroeder, Byron. “How Much Difference is in a Thousand Meters? The Inconvenience of High Altitude on Local Residential Patterns.” The SAA Archaeological Record14, no. 2 (March 2014): 36-40. Accessed Jan. 20, 2018, at http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=201212.
• Sgouros, Rebecca and Matthew A. Stirn. “An Ice Patch Artifact and Paleobiological Specimen from the Teton Mountains, Wyoming, USA.” Journal of Glacial Archaeology 2, no.1 (2015): 3-24. Accessed Feb. 22, 2018, at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305185867_An_Ice_Patch_Artifact_and_Paleobiological_Specimen_from_the_Teton_Mountains_Wyoming_USA.
• Stirn, Matthew. “Modeling site location patterns amongst late-prehistoric villages in the Wind River Range, Wyoming.” Journal of Archaeological Science 41 (2014): 523-532. Accessed Jan. 26, 2018, at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262068198_Modeling_site_location_patterns_amongst_late-prehistoric_villages_in_the_Wind_River_Range_Wyoming.
• Stirn, Matthew A. “Why All the Way Up There? Mountain and High-Altitude Archaeology.” The SAA Archaeological Record14, no. 2 (March 2014): 7-10. Accessed Jan. 20, 2018, at http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=201212.
• Stirn, Matt. “Do You Love Camping in the Mountains? So Did People 11,000 Years Ago.” Oct. 19, 2016. nationalgeographic.com. Accessed Dec. 30, 2017, at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/destinations/united-states/wyoming/Alpine-archaeology-reveals-ancient-mountain-villages/.
• Todd, Lawrence. “A Record of Overwhelming Complexity: High Elevation Archaeology in Northwestern Wyoming.” Plains Anthropologist (Memoir 43) 60, no. 236: 67-86.
• Todd, Lawrence, Rachel Reckin, Emily Brush, Robert Kelly and William Dooley. “An Alpine Archaeological Landscape in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Wyoming.” Accessed March 19, 2018, at http://www.grsle.org/Conferences/Todd_etAl_SAA_2017.pdf.
• Todd, Lawrence, Emily Brush and Kyle Wright. “Forty Days in the Wilderness: 2015 Park County Historic Preservation Commission Archaeological Inventory and Assessment on the Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming. Accessed March 19, 2018, at http://www.grsle.org/Fieldwork/ToddEtAlPlains_2015.pdf.
• Todd, Lawrence, Rachel Reckin, Emily Brush and William Dooley. “Migration Corridors, Ice Patches, and High Elevation Landscapes.” Accessed March 19, 2018, at http://www.grsle.org/Conferences/Todd_et_al_2016_Elk&Ice.pdf.
• United States Department of Agriculture. National Forest Service, Intermountain Region, Ogden, Utah. “Archaeological Reconnaissance Survey of the Bridger-Teton National Forest.” George C. Frison. Report no. 1. January 1975.
• Young, Chris, Tory Taylor and Richard Adams. “A Folsom Point Fragment from 3300 m.a.s.l. in the Wind River Range, Fremont County, Wyoming.” Current Research in the Pleistocene 25 (2008): 128-129.

Illustrations

• The photos of the archeologist walking the edge of the ice patch, the artifact at the edge of the patch and the two men in the meadow are by Matt Stirn. The photos of the game blind and the two photos of crews with satellite receivers are by Larry Todd. The photos of Craig Lee and his artifacts, taken when he was visiting with students at Wyoming Indian High School in Ethete, Wyo., are by Tom Rea. Used with permission and thanks.

Recent discoveries show ancient peoples lived in the mountains of what’s now northwest Wyoming, probably in significant numbers. Some or many of these people were most likely ancestors of today’s Shoshone.

While sources generally agree that the subculture of mountain-dwelling Shoshone came to be called Sheepeaters, scholars prefer Mountain Shoshone as the more accurate term. By the mid-1800s, they were regarded as largely separate from the horse-owning, buffalo-hunting bands that roamed much of what are now southwestern and central Wyoming and came to be known as the Eastern Shoshone.

The Mountain Shoshone hunted bighorn sheep in the mountains, along with deer, elk and many smaller mammals. They also ate fish and insects. In his book on the Mountain Shoshone, amateur archaeologist and historian Tory Taylor of Dubois, Wyo., cites ethnologist J. H. Steward, who wrote in 1943 that Shoshones gathered, dried and stored crickets, cicadas and grasshoppers.

The Mountain Shoshone also gathered a large variety of plants for food or medicine. Taylor, taking as his guide the current presence of alpine plants in the northern Wind River Range, suggests they probably ate mountain sorrel, spring beauty, marsh marigolds, wild strawberry greens, wild chives and 14 varieties of berries, along with cattails, burdock, dandelion roots and greens plus more than 50 other native plants.

They crafted ladles from sheep horns and built conical log dwellings, usually called wickiups—some of which still stand—and were pedestrians who probably used dogs for hunting and packing.

In prehistoric times, there may have been many Mountain Shoshone, as evidenced by dense assemblages of projectile points and other tools found high in the Absaroka Range of northwest Wyoming. Above 10,000 feet elevation in the Wind River Mountains, the discovery of whole villages—including the remains of wickiups—shows that living in the mountains, probably in summer, was common among prehistoric people.

Shoshone-associated artifacts found at these villages include teshoas—knives used by Shoshonean women—soapstone vessels and chert, quartzite and obsidian projectile points of the desert tri-notch, cottonwood triangular and rose-spring style. About ten or twelve years ago, in a mountain meadow near timberline in the Wind River Mountains, one member of a team that included Tory Taylor found a rare soapstone carving among many other Shoshone artifacts near a major source of soapstone. Archaeologists have also found items often associated with other tribes as well as the Shoshone, including metates and manos—mortar-and-pestle stone tools—used for grinding food.

Some sources suggest that because the Mountain Shoshone had few or no horses, they were impoverished compared to their equestrian relatives. It’s not clear whether the supposedly “low-caste” Sheepeaters, as they came to be known, were actually poor and ragged, and thus disdained by whites and Indians alike. This may only have been a cultural distortion.

Poverty may not have been why most Mountain Shoshone lacked horses. In rough country, horses are less versatile pack animals than dogs, and also weren’t necessarily an advantage in an environment where game animals were grazing just over the next ridge, rather than miles away across the plains.

Mountain Shoshone crafts

The Mountain Shoshone tailored clothing from sheepskin and other animal skins. Historian David Dominick reports that they were said to be expert tanners and furriers, trading their sought-after sheepskin robes for buffalo robes and other Plains Indian products.

Working soapstone was another important Shoshone craft. Archaeologists have found bowl fragments and occasional intact bowls in shapes resembling flowerpots, round casserole dishes and smaller vessels the approximate size of a teacup. Pipes, sometimes decorated with engravings, are either tube-shaped, onion shaped—in profile resembling a small vase—or elbow-shaped. Only a few beads have been discovered, ranging from pea-size to quarter-size.

Mountain Shoshone also manufactured bows from the horns of mountain sheep, sometimes from a single large horn, more often from two. White explorers, including Capt. Meriwether Lewis, described these bows in detail in their journals, with close attention to their construction and ornamentation.

The bows apparently were powerful and deadly. Tory Taylor recently made a sheep horn bow with help from Tom Lucas, a white Wind River Reservation native and craftsman of museum-quality replicas. When Taylor tested his new bow, he reported, “[i]t performed sweetly.”

Sheep horn bow manufacture is uncommon because few Shoshone or whites know how to make them, and also because suitable horns are rare. However, residents of the Wind River Reservation practice a variety of other traditional crafts, including beadwork, hand-tanning leather from game animals, making drums and wooden bows. At present, few non-natives are learning these skills, possibly because there is no procedure in place to facilitate this.

An evolving name

Anthropologists now suggest that band names of a variety of Shoshone groups—“Sheepeater” is only one example—began as transitory labels denoting economic activity and locale, and only later became attached, sometimes inaccurately or even pejoratively, to specific groups.

During the first half of the 20th century, ethnologists and linguists noted that Shoshone used a variety of food-names to refer to each other. Sheepeater, Tukudekain the Shoshone language, was one of a half-dozen or more such terms. These names referred to the wide array of animals and plants that different people might hunt or gather at one time or another. Food-names may also have applied to the residents of regions where certain plants or animals predominated.

Historian David Dominick reported that in the late 1950s Sven Liljeblad, a linguist at Idaho State College, interviewed Northern Shoshone at the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho about these food names. An interviewee identified as W. G., age 65, told Liljeblad, “Just whatever they [other Shoshone] ate at that time is what I called them. We could even call them ‘coffee-drinkers.’” Dominick mentions five food-names in addition to Tukudeka.

Thus, by what may have been common practice, an extended family harvesting seeds became known as “seed eaters” to other Shoshone who saw what they were doing. A group who hunted rabbits was called “rabbit eaters.” When a group moved to a different area, the name changed. For example, if they moved to an area where pine nuts were abundant, they became known as “pine-nut eaters.” This is probably the genesis of the name “Sheepeater,” which described what almost any Shoshone might have been doing, or possibly, where they lived.

Vagueness and confusion about who the Sheepeaters were and are seems to stem from relatively few, but powerful misinterpretations combined with differing observations that took hold early in the history of white encroachment and continued through time. For example, Dominick cites the conflicting reports of fur trader Capt. Benjamin Bonneville and mountain man Osborne Russell, both from 1835. Bonneville found Shoshone in the Wind River Mountains and described them as “a kind of hermit race, scanty in number [and] … miserably poor.” By contrast, Russell saw “a few [Shoshone] Indians” in Yellowstone Park, “all neatly clothed in dressed deer and sheepskins of the best quality and seemed to be perfectly contented and happy.”

The food label slowly became a group label that eventually stuck. Early white trappers and explorers, and later military men and Indian agents, gained the impression that the Sheepeaters were a distinct sub-tribe of mountain-dwelling Shoshone whose predominant food source was mountain sheep. White men who saw groups of Shoshone in the mountains referred to them as Sheepeaters, no matter what game animal was most plentiful in the area.

Starting in the mid-1800s, Sheepeater guides were engaged by parties of white explorers in the areas in and around what became Yellowstone National Park. Capt. William A. Jones refers to Sheepeaters several times in his report of a reconnaissance expedition to northwest Wyoming in 1873. This suggests that the idea of a subgroup, called Sheepeaters, had already begun to coalesce around earlier misinterpretations of the name.

Anthropologist Susan Hughes proposes that the label continued to evolve along with changes in tribal structure brought on by the presence of whites. Before the reservation era began in the 1860s, the most organized political unit among the nomadic hunting and gathering Shoshone was the winter village. Such villages generally contained no more than 15 families.

Alliances formed among these villages, and during warmer seasons larger groups gathered for hunting or social functions, Hughes notes. Leadership and group structure were informal and transitory until Indians of all nations, the Shoshone included, gathered and traveled together to provide better protection from groups of whites. Indians who negotiated with U.S. government officials about treaties and other matters were usually tribal leaders. Hughes suggests that organized bands with formal, permanent leadership appear to have been a late development and in part, a white man’s construct.

Adding to the confusion, some Sheepeaters—the Northern Shoshone—hunted on the west side of the Tetons in present Idaho, while others—some of whom became known as Eastern Shoshone—lived farther east—sometimes in the Green River Valley and sometimes in the Wind River Valley in present Wyoming. Northern Shoshone groups ended up on the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho; the Eastern Shoshone, on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. To some extent, these may have been separate groups from earlier times, although all Shoshone people were and are related, regardless of the diversity of their ancestors’ hunting and gathering locales.

When Shoshone bands first came to the Eastern Shoshone Reservation, they generally lived in separate areas, elder John Washakie says now, and that pattern continued for some time. Distinctions “became more blurred” as people moved into modern housing, he said. Currently, the Shoshone who now identify themselves as Sheepeaters trace their lineage to one ancestor or another who was a Sheepeater, such as Togwotee, the well-known guide, for whom Togwotee Pass is named.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that ancient peoples lived in the mountains of northwest Wyoming and on the western side of the Tetons, probably in significant numbers. Drive lines, hunters’ blinds—either pits dug in the ground or stone structures—and remnants of corrals at the foot of short cliffs all point to the herding and slaughter of mountain sheep. It’s also certain that Shoshone food-names began as transitory labels denoting economic activity and locale and evolved into something more like the identity of a definite group.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Taylor, Tory. Telephone interviews with author, April 23, 24, 2018.
• Washakie, John. Interview with WyoHistory.org Editor Tom Rea, May 7, 2018.

Secondary Sources

• Adams, Richard. “Archaeology with Altitude: Late Prehistoric Settlement and Subsistence in the Northern Wind River Range, Wyoming.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wyoming, 2010.
• Accessed Jan. 31, 2018, at www.proquest.com. Database at the University of Wyoming Coe Library. Available to faculty, staff and currently enrolled students.
• DePastino, Blake. “Wyoming Wildfire Reveals ‘Massive’ Shoshone Camp, Thousands of Artifacts.” Western Digs. Accessed April 21, 2018, at http://westerndigs.org/wyoming-wildfire-reveals-massive-pre-contact-shoshone-camp-thousands-of-artifacts/.
• Dominick, David. “The Sheepeaters.” Annals of Wyoming 36, no. 2 (October 1964): 131-168. Accessed Feb. 20, 2018, at www.archive.org/details/annalsofwyom36121964wyom. The article includes the Sven Liljeblad interview with W. G. at the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho.
• Hughes, Susan S. “The Sheepeater Myth of Northwestern Wyoming.” Plains Anthropologist 45, no. 17 (February 2000): 63-83.
• Hultkrantz, Ake. “The Shoshones in the Rocky Mountain Area.” Annals of Wyoming 33, no. 1 (April 1961): 19-41. Accessed March 9, 2018, at www.archive.org/details/annalsofwyom33121961wyom.
• Jones, William A. “Report on the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming Made in the Summer of 1873.” Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874. Accessed April 23, 2018, at
• https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa&cc=moa&view=text&rgn=main&idno=AGH6142.
• Loendorf, Lawrence L. and Nancy Medaris Stone. Mountain Spirit: The Sheep Eater Indians of Yellowstone. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 2006.
• Stirn, Matthew. “Modeling site location patterns amongst late-prehistoric villages in the Wind River Range, Wyoming.” Journal of Archaeological Science 41 (2014): 523-532. Accessed Jan. 26, 2018, at
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262068198_Modeling_site_location_patterns_amongst_late-prehistoric_villages_in_the_Wind_River_Range_Wyoming.
• Taylor, Tory. On the Trail of the Mountain Shoshone Sheep Eaters: A High Altitude Archaeological and Anthropological Odyssey. San Bernardino, Calif.: Wind River Publishing, 2017.
• Todd, Lawrence. “A Record of Overwhelming Complexity: High Elevation Archaeology in Northwestern Wyoming.” Plains Anthropologist (Memoir 43), vol. 60, 2015, no. 236: 67-86.
• Todd, Lawrence, Rachel Reckin, Emily Brush, Robert Kelly, and William Dooley. “An Alpine Archaeological Landscape in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Wyoming.” Society for American Archaeology 82 Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Accessed March 19, 2018, at http://www.grsle.org/Conferences/Todd_etAl_SAA_2017.pdf.
• Todd, Lawrence, Emily Brush, and Kyle Wright. “Forty Days in the Wilderness: 2015 Park County Historic Preservation Commission Archaeological Inventory and Assessment on the Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming.” January 2015, Plains Anthropological Conference, Iowa City. Accessed March 19, 2018, at http://www.grsle.org/Fieldwork/ToddEtAlPlains_2015.pdf.
• Todd, Lawrence, Rachel Reckin, Emily Brush, and William Dooley. “Migration Corridors, Ice Patches, and High Elevation Landscapes.” Accessed March 19, 2018, at http://www.grsle.org/Conferences/Todd_et_al_2016_Elk&Ice.pdf.

Illustrations

• All photos are by Tory Taylor. Used with permission and thanks.

In the 1860s, the U.S. government negotiated two treaties with the Eastern Shoshone people that resulted in their taking up a permanent home in Warm Valley—the valley of the Big Wind River and its tributaries—in what is now west-central Wyoming.

The first treaty, signed in 1863, specified borders for a vast Eastern Shoshone homeland of around 44 million acres, which sprawled on both sides of the Continental Divide. The second treaty, signed in 1868, shrank this to a far smaller reservation—of around 3.2 million acres, with its heart in the Wind River Valley. Seventy more years of land cessions and court cases further reduced the reservation to its present size of around 2.3 million acres.[1] It is now home to two tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho, and since the 1930s has been called the Wind River Reservation.

Between 1778 and 1871, the U.S. government signed more than 600 treaties with tribes. These were similar to any treaties between sovereign nations, in that they were superior to state and local laws and equal in status to federal statutes passed by Congress and the Constitution itself. The U.S. Constitution requires that treaties between the United States and other nations, including Indian nations, once negotiated, must be ratified by a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate before they become law. After 1871, the government stopped making treaties with Indian tribes altogether.

The Fort Bridger treaties of the 1860s were born of conflicts and compromises rooted in changing tribal economies, white emigration on the trails to Oregon, California and Utah, a local gold-mining boom, general encroachment on Indian lands—and the approach of the transcontinental railroad.

Background

Shoshonean people have lived in and around the Great Basin of the interior West for thousands of years. They include members of the modern Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute, Gosiute, Ute and Comanche tribes, the Comanches having left the basin in the 1600s or earlier and migrated to the plains of present Texas and New Mexico. The languages of all these groups, anthropologists say, come from a similar Uto-Aztecan stock.

In the mid-1820s, trappers and traders of the Rocky Mountain beaver trade began holding annual rendezvous fairs on the Green and its tributaries, just west of the Continental Divide. By this time the eastern bands of Shoshone people were well-mounted, horse-culture Indians who hunted buffalo every year east of the divide. Further west, other Shoshonean tribes—Bannock, Lemhi, northern and western Shoshone groups, as well as Ute, Paiute and Gosiute bands, were not as well mounted as the eastern Shoshone and relied also on salmon fishing, root gathering and hunting smaller game for their livelihoods.

The rendezvous system strengthened the Shoshones by bringing guns, glass, metal and trade goods directly to them. Before then, they had been weakening due to increased pressure from better-armed tribes to the north and east—Blackfeet, Crow, Cheyenne and Arapaho.

By fur-trade times, the buffalo-hunting Shoshone bands had begun to coalesce as the Eastern Shoshone, “a political division,” writes historian Henry Stamm, “that increasingly found its future influenced by the machinations of the Americans.”[2]

Early in the 1840s, a trickle of Oregon-bound emigrants began following old native and trappers’ routes up the North Platte and Sweetwater rivers to the Continental Divide, down to the Green River, over another divide to the Bear River and on to the Northwest—the Oregon Trail. In 1843, former trappers Jim Bridger and Louis Vasquez established a trading post on the trail, Fort Bridger, on a fork of the Green River in what’s now southwest Wyoming. They prospered trading with the emigrants. Bridger and many other trappers took Shoshone wives and started families near the post.

In 1847, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—fleeing religious persecution in the Midwest, first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley by a route that went directly west from Fort Bridger. Thousands of Mormons began arriving every year. In 1848, gold was discovered in California. Traffic on the trails quintupled in 1849, and doubled again the following year. All these white people traveled with their livestock right through the middle of Shoshone country. Grass was suddenly scarce, and game much harder to find.

In 1851, under pressure from the plains tribes to compensate them for the enormous damage to their lands brought by all the new traffic, the U.S. government negotiated a treaty at Horse Creek , near Fort Laramie, with the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Crow tribes, as well as the tribes of the upper Missouri—Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara and Assiniboine. The treaty identified separate areas of the northern plains for each of these tribes, where, in exchange for annual payments from the government, they agreed to mostly live and hunt and through which to allow free passage to whites.

A delegation of about 80 Shoshone men and their families, led by a rising leader named Washakie and accompanied by Bridger, was also present. But for a bureaucratic reason the Shoshones were not invited to sign: Their lands were part of the areas administered out of Salt Lake City by an office of the U.S. Indian Bureau. The Fort Laramie Treaty negotiations, by contrast, were run by the bureau’s St. Louis office. Washakie and the Eastern Shoshones returned home knowing that the new treaty left their interests unprotected.[3]

By this time, meanwhile, the Mormons were hoping to extend their own influence eastward from the Salt Lake Valley. They hoped to compete with the former trappers for the Shoshone trade at Fort Bridger, and in the Green River Valley for the revenue from ferries over the Green River. Around 1855, Bridger and Vasquez lost control of their post. Mormon businessmen took over the lucrative ferries on the Green.

Warfare

White emigration traffic continued on the trails, dividing the great buffalo herds and shrinking them. Conflict increased among tribes trying to live on dwindling resources. The 1851 treaty identified lands for the Crows that stretched west and north from the Powder River into present Montana, over the Bighorn Mountains into the Bighorn Basin and south all the way the Wind River Valley—the same Warm Valley where the Eastern Shoshones also hunted in those years.

Conflict was probably inevitable. Historians are uncertain of the dates, but there appear to have been at least two large battles between Shoshone and Crow warriors in the Wind River Valley in the late 1850s.[4] After the fights, the Crows retreated to the north. Shoshones were more secure on Wind River, buffalo hunting was good and they were far from the constant emigrant traffic on the trails.

In 1857, local tensions between Mormons and non-Mormons combined with national ones to provoke the so-called Utah War, when 2,500 U.S. troops marched west to install a new territorial government in Utah and re-establish federal power. Mormon guerillas raided Army livestock and supply trains, but there was little or no bloodshed. The Eastern Shoshones remained neutral, though according to at least one account Washakie offered 1,200 warriors to the Army. General Albert Sidney Johnston advised the chief to take his warriors hunting instead.[5] In 1858, the U.S. Army acquired Fort Bridger and located a garrison there.

Year after year, the pressures on the tribes increased. In 1859, the government completed a new road, a shortcut west from South Pass across the Green River, the Wyoming Range and Star Valley to Fort Hall in what’s now southeast Idaho. The road was called the Lander Cutoff, for the engineer who supervised its construction. Traffic here, too, was immediately heavy. The road ran right through Shoshone lands, and the tribe, again, was not compensated

Relations between white travelers and the western Shoshone bands, meanwhile, went from bad to worse. Casual murders of Indians by white people traveling the trails were not unknown. In retaliation, young Shoshone men began raiding emigrants and even stagecoaches and stage stations on the trails.

In 1862, most U.S. troops were drawn east from garrisons at Fort Bridger and Fort Laramie to fight in the Civil War, and the trails were left unpatrolled. Eastern Shoshone raiders burned the all the stage stations between the North Platte and Bear rivers, running off all the horses and mules and leaving stagecoaches standing in the road. They killed a stage-station attendant at Split Rock.[6] Raids increased on the trails and stage route to the west.

A regiment of California volunteers, U.S. troops under Col. Patrick Connor, arrived at Salt Lake City in the late summer of 1862. Tensions increased; raids, hostage-taking and retaliations continued. In January 1863, Connor led about 300 troops in an attack on a western Shoshone village on Bear River, in what’s now southeast Idaho, north of Great Salt Lake. At least 250 and perhaps as many as 400 Shoshones died that day. By the following summer, all the Shoshone and related bands in the region were ready for treaty talks.

The Fort Bridger Treaty of 1863

Early in July 1863, the leaders of a variety of different Shoshone bands including Norkok, Bazil, Washakie and about 10 others, signed a treaty at Fort Bridger with representatives of the Indian Bureau.

The 1863 treaty included these provisions:

• There would be peace between Shoshone people and the people of the United States.
• Travel routes through Shoshone territory would stay open and safe. Ferries and stage stations would also remain unmolested.
• Stagecoaches and telegraph lines would be left alone.
• The route of a transcontinental railroad, now authorized by Congress, which the whites expected to be built in the next few years, would likewise be left alone.
• Shoshone territory would reach from the Snake River on the north to the Wind River Mountains on the northeast, down the Sweetwater to the North Platte on the east, south to the Yampa River of present Colorado and along the crest of the Uinta Mountains, which run east to west along the present Wyoming-Utah border. A western boundary was left undefined, apparently because Shoshone roamed so widely over the Great Basin. Still, modern historians estimate the extent of Eastern Shoshone territory described in the treaty at around 44 million acres—nearly 70,000 square miles.
• Shoshones, in return, would receive in payment an annuity in goods worth $10,000 per year for 20 years, with an up-front bonus of $6,000 worth of goods and presents at the time of the signing. Annuities would be distributed once a year at Fort Bridger.[7]

As summer turned toward fall, the government negotiated and signed four more treaties with western Shoshone groups with similar terms and varying annuity amounts: with Pocatello’s band of western Shoshones at Box Elder, Utah Territory, in July; with western Shoshones and root-gathering groups the whites called Diggers in the Ruby Valley of Nevada Territory on October 1; with Gosiutes in the Tooele Valley of Utah on October 12; and with Bannocks and mixed Shoshone-Bannock bands at Soda Springs in Idaho Territory on October 14.

At Soda Springs, the government negotiated terms under which the Bannock and mixed Shoshone-Bannock bands agreed to share the annuities as well as part of the territory—west of the Wind River Mountains—already promised to the Eastern Shoshones at Fort Bridger.

In any case, the Fort Bridger treaty did not actually protect Shoshone interests as intended. Increased travel on the trails and roads meant increased competition for grass and game. The best buffalo hunting inside the treaty-defined Shoshone territory was near its eastern edge, at the North Platte-Sweetwater confluence around Independence Rock—country that was also becoming heavily used by Arapaho bands and some Lakota hunters.[8]

Movement toward Wind River

As traditional sources of food dwindled in the Great Basin, more Shoshone and Bannock bands moved to the mountains and plains of what is now Wyoming, linking up with Washakie and taking him as leader. This added population and its accompanying political power in turn allowed Washakie to take more risks and make longer hunts for buffalo on the plains to the east and north. One result was more conflicts with other tribes doing the same thing.

By this time the only buffalo herds of any size were east of the Continental Divide. Shoshones began concentrating hunting and winter camps there. Conflict followed with Crows still hunting in the Bighorn Basin of what is now northwestern Wyoming, and with Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho people also beginning to hunt these lands. In the late 1860s, gold was discovered on the upper Sweetwater near South Pass. “These three human strains,” writes historian Henry Stamm—he means Shoshones, white miners and tribes from the plains to the east—“flowed toward the Wind River after 1863.”

Most of the Eastern Shoshone bands in these years gathered in late August or early September at the head of the Sweetwater for a large buffalo hunt, stopping either there or a short way north on Wind River. After the fall hunt, some made their way back to the Salt Lake and Bear River countries. The rest split into four bands to go into winter camps—one at the Sweetwater-North Platte confluence; one farther east to the Powder River; one that would skirt around Crow camps in the southern Bighorn Mountains also to stay on Powder River tributaries; and Washakie and his band to Wind River.

In spring, most hunted or fished near their winter camps while their horses grew stronger on the new grass. Then all came together for a big spring buffalo hunt on Wind River, and in the summer for the Sun Dance near Fort Bridger. After that they would break up into small family bands until gathering again for the big hunt in the fall.

Fort Bridger had been a regular part of Shoshone nomadic cycles since the 1840s when it was established. After the 1863 treaty, many were generally willing to wait at the fort late in the summer for the annual treaty payments and to postpone the buffalo hunt to Wind River—clear evidence they found the treaty goods valuable. Through the 1860s, Washakie’s bands continued to receive their annuities at Fort Bridger but made their winter camps east of the mountains.

Gold and a railroad

In 1864, war broke out east of the Bighorn Mountains along the Bozeman Trail, a route to the new gold fields of southwestern Montana Territory. Gold seekers were traveling through the heart of the Powder River Basin in direct violation of the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Arapaho, Cheyenne and Lakota warriors began raiding the freight and emigrant trains. And more people from these tribes, to escape the troubles, began hunting farther west, on Wind River.

The allure of gold drove events in the Wind River country, too. Despite the treaties, whites had been furtively prospecting in the Wind River and Sweetwater drainages since the 1850s. In 1867, they discovered the Carissa Lode on Willow Creek, a Sweetwater tributary near South Pass. The mining camps of South Pass City, Atlantic City and Miner’s Delight sprang up quickly; soon there may have been as many as 3,000 whites in the camps and gulches. Enterprising white farmers began growing vegetables near the Wind River, 40 miles to the north, to feed the people in the camps. Lakota warriors began attacking miners.

At the same time, construction had begun in earnest on the Union Pacific Railroad; passenger service reached Cheyenne in January 1868. With war on Powder River and railroad construction moving fast across the plains, Congress authorized a new peace commission, composed of Army officers and civilians, to negotiate with the plains tribes. The commission met at length with the tribes at Fort Laramie that spring.

In July 1868, commission members continued on to Fort Bridger. They were starting to understand some important factors. Whites in the Sweetwater mining camps and those living near Wind River would be likely to tolerate a Shoshone reservation nearby—as a buffer against the more hostile plains tribes raiding in the mountain valleys. Completion of the railroad would bring even more whites, and thus create more pressure on all Indian lands. And the government land grants to the railroad, which made the financing and thus construction possible in the first place, required that Indian claims to those lands be relinquished before they could be granted to the railroad.

The Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868

On July 3, 1868, leaders of Bannock and Eastern Shoshone bands signed a treaty with the following provisions:

• A reservation would be created in the Wind River Valley “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Shoshone Indians herein named …”
• Shoshones would not have to move there until the agency buildings were built.
• Shoshones could hunt off the reservation on “unoccupied lands” of the United States.
• Shoshone children would be educated to promote “civilization” among them.
• Land, seeds and farming tools would be allotted to heads of households.
• Clothing and other goods specified in detail would be distributed to Shoshones every September for 30 years.
• Bannocks would be assigned a separate reservation at a later time.
• Indians would become farmers.[9]

Shoshones come to Wind River

Unlike most reservations, the new one at Wind River had far more white people than native people living on it year-round. One historian estimates as many as 5,000 people lived in the gold-mining camps around South Pass and in the Wind River Valley 40 miles north, where they were beginning to raise crops and livestock to feed the miners.[10]

Eleven months after the Fort Bridger treaty was signed, the new Wyoming Territory got its first governor and Indian superintendent. John Campbell wanted the Eastern Shoshones to abandon their nomadic lives and settle on the reservation; at the same time he hoped the tribe could be persuaded to give up the southern third or so of the reservation where so many whites already were living. Campbell also knew that before that would be possible, he would have to meet treaty obligations requiring that the government provide agency buildings, irrigation ditches and farm implements.

Washakie, meanwhile, was reluctant to move too quickly. He insisted the Eastern Shoshones be allowed to continue their old pattern of summers on Wind River and winters at Fort Bridger, where they could continue to receive their annuity goods.

With more and more whites coming to what is now southeast Idaho, meanwhile, Chief Taghee’s Bannocks and Pocatello’s Shoshones continued to hunt buffalo with—and draw their annuities with—the Eastern Shoshones during these years. The Bannocks eventually moved to a reservation around Fort Hall, in Idaho, in 1873; Pocatello’s band would join them there in 1876.[11]

The Eastern Shoshones would continue to live in their Warm Valley on Wind River from that time forward. But within a decade, when the U.S. government located the Northern Arapaho on the same reservation, the Shoshones there would find themselves forced to share land they had thought was their own.

Resources

Sources

• Flynn, Janet. Tribal Government: Wind River Reservation. With an introduction by Scott J. Ratliff. Lander, Wyo.: Mortimore Publishing, revised edition, 1998.
• Fowler, Loretta.Arapaho Politics, 1851-1978: Symbols in Crises of Authority. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 48.
• Stamm, Henry E. IV. People of the Wind River: the Eastern Shoshones, 1825-1900. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. A useful, reliable source on the Eastern Shoshones of the 19th century, with emphasis too on their relations with their white and Arapaho neighbors.
• “Treaty with the Eastern Band Shoshoni and Bannock, 1868.” Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. II, Treaties, pp. 1020-1024. Kappler, Charles J., editor and compiler. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at http://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers/id/20698/rec/1 . Text of the 1868 Fort Bridger Treaty with the Eastern Shoshone and Bannock tribes.
• “Treaty with the Eastern Shoshoni, 1863.” Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. II, Treaties, pp. 846-848. Kappler, Charles J., editor and compiler. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at http://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers/id/20034/rec/1 . Text of the 1863 Fort Bridger Treaty with the Eastern Shoshone tribe.
• “Treaty with the Shoshonee and Bannacks, July 3, 1868.” Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum’s website. Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at http://jacksonholehistory.org/wp-content/uploads/1868-treaty.pdf .
• Trenholm, Virginia Cole and Maurine Carley. The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964, 100-222.

For further reading

• Separate lands for separate tribes: The Horse Creek Treaty of 1851
• Peace, War, Land and a Funeral: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868
• South Pass Gold Rush
• John Campbell and the Invention of Wyoming

Illustrations

• The two maps were prepared the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center at the University of Wyoming. Special thanks to Margo Berendsen, cartographer.
• The A.J. Russell photos of white buildings at Fort Bridger and of Shoshone men standing in a long line with women seated in front of them are from the collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Used with thanks.
• The other Russell photos are from the digital collections at the Oakland Museum of California . Used with thanks.
• The William Henry Jackson photo of the Shoshone village near South Pass, 1870, is from the Smithsonian; this scan is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.

In the spring of 1878, about 950 Northern Arapaho people arrived with an Army escort on the Eastern Shoshone Reservation in the Wind River Valley in central Wyoming Territory. The two tribes had been in open warfare as recently as four years before, and bad feelings lingered between them.

Ten years earlier, in 1868, the U.S. government had promised the Northern Arapaho a reservation of their own. Some Northern Arapaho at that time had agreed, reluctantly, that they might be willing to settle in one of three places: on the Missouri River with the Lakota Sioux, on the Yellowstone with the Crow or in Indian Territory—present Oklahoma—with their southern Cheyenne and Arapaho relatives.

Neither locating with their old enemies, the Crow, nor the Lakota, who were much more numerous and powerful, held much attraction for the Arapaho, however. And Indian Territory was hot, flat and too far from the country of the northern plains and mountains that the Northern Arapaho knew best.

Traders since earliest times, they had always moved about more than many other Plains tribes. In the years after the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, they kept moving, while the Army and the government, busy with other questions, left the question of an Arapaho homeland unresolved.

It would remain unresolved for ten more years, until the government located the Northern Arapaho a reservation guaranteed earlier exclusively to the Shoshone. Members of both tribes still reside on the Wind River Reservation, as the reservation was officially renamed in the 1930s.

Life on the northern plains

Ethnohistorians say the Arapaho people, under pressure from the north and east, moved out of northern plains and woodlands and crossed the Missouri River sometime in the mid-1700s, though Arapaho tradition places this event much earlier.

By 1806, white chroniclers recorded Arapaho people as far south as the Arkansas River in present southern Colorado; by the 18-teens, southern bands had congregated in that region, while northern Arapaho bands were ranging north from the mountain parks of Colorado, west of modern places like Fort Collins and Boulder. Northern Arapaho elders who live on the Wind River Reservation today say they still regard those parts of the northern Colorado plains and mountains as their spiritual and historic homeland.[1]

When Fort Laramie on the North Platte River and Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas were established in the 1830s along the Rocky Mountain Front, Arapaho and Cheyenne began trading at the forts. North-south divisions within the two tribes became more permanent: Northern Arapaho and Northern Cheyenne traded at Fort Laramie; Southern Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne traded at Bent’s Fort, in what is now southeastern Colorado.

In the 1840s, emigrant travel to Oregon, Utah and California swelled from a trickle to a flood. The Oregon Trail up the Platte, North Platte and Sweetwater rivers to the Continental Divide passed through the middle of northern Arapaho ranges and quickly began changing their lives. By the middle of the decade, it was already clear that emigrants and their livestock were to blame for the shrinking buffalo herds. Arapaho people told traveler and writer Lewis Garrard that “the white man was bad, that he ran the buffalo out of the country and starved the Arapahoes.” As resources dwindled, conflict and warfare among the plains tribes rose sharply.

Then gold was discovered in California and trails traffic swelled by a factor of ten. With the buffalo more scattered, the tribes needed horses more than ever. Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors began raiding the trails, especially for horses and mules.

Hoping to avoid conflict, yet at the same time aware the West was far too large to be militarily controlled, government officials decided it was time to make a treaty with the tribes of the northern plains.[2]

Arapahos and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851

In September 1851, about 10,000 Indians gathered near Fort Laramie to negotiate. Under the treaty signed that month, the tribes of the northern plains would allow the United States to establish Army posts and make roads through Indian territory. They also agreed to the government’s proposal to assign specific lands to specific tribes, as shown on a map drawn at the time by the Jesuit Catholic missionary Father P.J. de Smet. Tribes were allowed to live and hunt wherever they liked—on their lands or others—as long as they remained peaceful.

Lands north of the Arkansas River, east of the Continental Divide and south of the North Platte River were assigned jointly to the Arapaho and Cheyenne. (See map). This included most of what is now eastern Colorado plus large parts of southeastern Wyoming, western Nebraska and western Kansas.

In return, the government promised the tribes annual payments of $50,000 in goods, for 50 years. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in 1852, the year following the signing, but with an important amendment. The payments—annuities, they were called—would last only ten years, or 15 if the president chose to extend the term.[3]

Already, that is, the government seemed not to be taking the treaty seriously. War broke out between the Army and the Lakota just three years later.

A gold strike

In 1858, prospectors found gold near what is now Denver, right in the middle of the lands allocated to the Arapaho and Cheyenne by the Fort Laramie treaty. Within three years, 100,000 or more gold seekers and other whites poured in to what soon became Colorado Territory. Along the trails, conflict grew and intensified.

This influx of newcomers widened the old geographical divisions between northern and southern bands of Arapaho and Cheyenne people. Northern bands moved from the Colorado Front Range to the plains north of the North Platte River. Others stayed south, toward the Arkansas.

A treaty for the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho

In 1861, representatives of some of the southern bands signed a treaty at Fort Wise on the Arkansas ceding all the land promised them in 1851 in exchange for a small reservation between the Arkansas and a nearby tributary, Sand Creek. Many other Cheyenne and Arapaho people complained at the time that only a minority of chiefs had signed, however, and that many of them did not understand what they were signing. No Northern Arapaho chiefs signed the treaty.[4]

Sand Creek, more raids and an Army campaign

Late in 1864, Colorado troops massacred around 200 people, most of them women and children, in a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho village on Sand Creek. Shocked and angry, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakota people began making war in earnest along the trails.

In the winter spring of 1865, southern bands moved north to the Powder River Basin, still rich in buffalo. That July they attacked the Army post at Platte Bridge on the North Platte River; two dozen soldiers were killed that day.

By this time, there were three main bands of what would become known as the Northern Arapaho. Friday, a leader who had learned English in his youth, led an Arapaho band in the Cache la Poudre country around what is now Fort Collins, in northern Colorado. Medicine Man was a longtime leader of a group on the North Platte and Sweetwater ranges, where the buffalo hunting was good. His group sometimes came into conflict with Eastern Shoshone bands. Arapaho people led by Black Bear married frequently among the Lakota and ranged in the Powder River Basin, from the North Platte to the Bighorns and east to the Black Hills. As hostilities increased, most of Friday’s people joined the other two bands.[5]

In August 1865 the Army mounted a large campaign; one brigade attacked Black Bear’s band in a village in the Powder River Country. The attack devastated the Northern Arapaho. They were a small tribe of only 180 lodges—perhaps 1,100 people in all the bands combined, at a time when smallpox and cholera were also spreading among them. After the attack, the Northern Arapaho could no longer raise large war parties.[6]

Red Cloud’s War and a second Fort Laramie Treaty

Warfare continued to increase, especially along the Bozeman Trail, a new route from the Oregon Trail through the Powder River Basin to gold fields in Montana. The troubles came to be called Red Cloud’s war, after the Oglala Lakota war leader; Capt. William Fetterman and his 80-man command were all killed  in December 1866. Another fight nearby ended in a draw the following summer.

In the East, in the wake of the Sand Creek massacre and now the Fetterman fight, a peace faction had begun to emerge in Congress. The West, crisscrossed by stage lines, freight caravans, steamboat traffic on the Missouri and now a fast-building transcontinental railroad, was changing fast.

Early in 1868, government peace commissioners contacted the warring tribes. Commissioners paid Friday $315 to contact the Northern Arapaho bands with a clear ultimatum: Sign a treaty or there would be no more provisions.[7]On May 10, 1868, 150 lodges of Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho met the commissioners at Fort Laramie to sign a treaty.

Signing for the Northern Arapaho were Medicine Man, Black Bear, Little Wolf, Littleshield and Sorrel Horse. Spotted Tail signed for the Brule Lakota, but no other important Lakota leaders signed that spring and summer. Finally, in November, the Oglala leaders signed the document as well.

A large reservation for the Lakota would be set aside on the west side of the Missouri River in Dakota Territory—the western half of present South Dakota—and the tribes, including the Arapaho, could continue to hunt in the Powder River Basin.

The Arapaho agreed to settle within a year at one of three places: on the Missouri with the Lakotas, on the Yellowstone River in Montana Territory with the Crows or in Indian Territory—present Oklahoma—with their southern Cheyenne and Arapaho relatives.

This time, the government agreed to provide annuity goods for 30 years, plus schools, farm equipment and rations for Indians who settled permanently on the reservations.

But the Northern Arapaho, who disliked all three reservation alternatives offered them, continued to hope the government would find them a reservation of their own.[8]

The Shoshone Reservation

Also in the 1860s, the U.S. government negotiated two treaties with the Eastern Shoshone people that resulted in their coming to live in Warm Valley—the valley of the Big Wind River and its tributaries—in what is now west-central Wyoming,

The first treaty, signed in 1863, outlined a sprawling Eastern Shoshone homeland of around 44 million acres on both sides of the Continental Divide. The second treaty, signed in 1868, shrank this to a far smaller reservation of around 3.2 million acres, with its heart in the Wind River Valley. The new reservation, according to the treaty, was established “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Shoshone Indians herein named …”

And in 1867, meanwhile, gold was discovered near South Pass, near the southern edge of what soon would become the reservation. Unlike most reservations, therefore, the new one at Wind River had far more white people than native people living on it year-round. One historian estimates as many as 5,000 people lived in the gold-mining camps around South Pass and in the Wind River Valley 40 miles north, where whites were beginning to raise crops and livestock to feed the miners.[9]

Eastern Shoshone bands continued to live and hunt widely for another year or two before moving to the new reservation year-round.

In 1869, the new Wyoming Territory’s first governor and Indian superintendent arrived in Cheyenne. John Campbell wanted the Eastern Shoshones to abandon their nomadic lives and settle on the reservation.

Washakie, the leader of the Eastern Shoshones, was reluctant to move too quickly, however. He insisted the Eastern Shoshones be allowed to continue their old pattern of summers on Wind River and winters at Fort Bridger, where they could continue to receive their annuity goods.

Arapahos head to Wind River—the first time

Meanwhile, Northern Arapaho band leaders Medicine Man and Black Bear continued to press the government for a solution. They suggested a possible reservation on the North Platte River in Wyoming Territory near the old Platte Bridge, where an Army post had recently been abandoned. Government agents suggested they instead join their ethnic cousins the Gros Ventres on Milk River in northern Montana Territory. One hundred sixty lodges of Arapaho people spent the winter of 1868-1869 there, but a smallpox outbreak sent them on their way again in the spring.

The Arapaho chiefs had their eyes on Wind River and were hoping for some kind of accommodation with the Eastern Shoshone, their traditional enemies. Looking for a solution, Gov. Campbell and U.S. Army Gen. Christopher Augur set up a meeting for Washakie with Arapaho leaders Friday, Medicine Man and Sorrel Horse for October 1869.

A skeptical Washakie

When the Arapahos arrived, however, Washakie was off hunting in the Bighorns, probably an indication of his doubts about Arapahos moving to Wind River. Four months later, in February 1870, Arapahos Medicine Man, Black Bear, Sorrel Horse, Little Wolf and Knock Knees came for a second meeting. This time, according to Arapaho tradition, the Shoshones agreed for the Arapahos to settle—temporarily—on Wind River. Many Shoshones today say there was no such agreement at that time.

Arapaho arrival and retreat

Northern Arapaho people began arriving in March. Soon, white settlers blamed them for Indian attacks that killed seven miners. On March 31 a mob of 250 vigilantes, together with some Shoshone, attacked two groups of Arapaho moving from their camp on Wind River to trade in nearby Lander. About a dozen Arapaho were killed, including Black Bear.

Relations between the two tribes quickly deteriorated. The Arapaho began to leave. Medicine Man went to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte, and with the help of the trader and the post commander they convinced Territorial Gov. Campbell that Arapaho warriors had played no part in the attacks on the miners.[10]

The Eastern Shoshone, meanwhile, drew their annuity goods on Wind River for the first time that fall of 1870. Indian agents on the new reservation—the job turned over frequently—did little to curb the activities of the white miners, farmers and stock raisers who were now living illegally on Indian land.

The Brunot Cession

At the same time, the agents and Gov. Campbell began considering the idea of detaching the southern third or so of the reservation.

Under the terms of the Brunot Cession, negotiated in 1872 and ratified by Congress in 1874, the Eastern Shoshone tribe gave up around 700,000 acres—the valley of the Popo Agie River and areas around the town of Miner’s Delight near South Pass. In return, they received promises of $20,000 worth of cattle and $5,000 in cash, to be paid in annual installments over five years.

Cattle deliveries were slow in coming, however. And whites began taking up land in the ceded portions long before Congress finalized the deal. The local white economy began growing away from mining toward farming and ranching. The gold mines were about played out anyway. [11]

Northern Arapaho on the Move

By the winter of 1870-1871, the Northern Arapaho had left Wind River and were hunting in the Powder River Basin. Game was scarce, however. Friday’s band had joined the other Northern Arapahos by this time. With Friday as interpreter, the Arapaho leaders continued to cultivate friendships with Army officers, in hopes of winning their support for a new reservation.

In March 1871, Medicine Man, Friday, Littleshield and a new Arapaho leader named Black Coal agreed to draw their annuity goods with the Oglala Lakota at the Red Cloud Agency near Fort Laramie. But the Oglala treated them condescendingly. The Arapaho stayed out in the Powder River country as much as possible, despite the dwindling buffalo supply.

A raid on Trout Creek

At the same time, Lakota, Cheyenne and most likely some Arapaho warriors continued, from time to time, to raid white and Shoshone people on Wind River. In 1872, a large raiding party attacked a Shoshone camp on Trout Creek, near the Indian agency. Shoshones scouts knew the raiders were coming, however, and sent the women and children up into the foothills of the Wind River Range to the west, for safety. Then they dug rifle pits inside their lodges, rolled up the bottom edges of their tipis and thus were able to fire out at the approaching raiders from solid defensive positions. The raiders were driven off. “We like to think we chased them all the way to Casper,” meaning, where Casper is now, 150 miles to the east, Shoshone elder John Washakie says.[12]

In the summer of 1874, in apparent reprisal for Arapaho raids, about 160 Shoshone warriors—30 of them enlisted as Army scouts—plus 60 cavalry troopers from Camp Brown on the Wind River Reservation attacked an Arapaho village on Bates Creek in the mountains between the Bighorn and Wind River basins. Arapaho men managed to gather at the top of a cliff, fire down on the attackers and drive them off. But many of the lodges were destroyed, 200 horses were stolen and, the Army estimated later, about 24 Arapaho people were killed.[13]

Though the soldiers and Shoshone warriors counted the fight a victory, by further impoverishing the Northern Arapaho the battle led to a series of events that ended up limiting Shoshone control over the lands the Fort Bridger Treaty had guaranteed them back in 1868.

The loss of the Black Hills

By this time, the buffalo supply was shrinking fast, the old ways of the tribes were steadily becoming more difficult to sustain and the U.S. government was turning up the pressure.

In the summer of 1874, Lt. Col. George A. Custer led an expedition of 1,000 troops through the Black Hills of Dakota and Wyoming territories and found gold.

In 1875, the Oglala Lakotas relocated to a new Red Cloud Agency and the Brules to a new Spotted Tail Agency, both in northwestern Nebraska.

Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho people, still lacking an agency or reservation of their own, mingled with the Oglalas at Red Cloud Agency. Rations there were poor, the annuity flour was so bad the Indians sold it for horse feed and some Arapaho children starved to death. Arapahos near Fort Fetterman killed and ate their horses and begged at the post.[14]

The next year, the government began pressing the Lakota to sell the Black Hills. Among the Oglala, Red Cloud and others were ready to sign; Crazy Horse stayed out in the Powder River country and refused. In 1876, Army campaigns against the resisters resulted in the death of Custer and 267 of his men that June at the Little Bighorn.

Government officials began pressing even harder on the tribes at the Red Cloud Agency for sale of the Black Hills. All were reluctant, but again it came down to an ultimatum: Sign or starve. Together with the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne, the Northern Arapaho signed a document in September giving up their claims to the Black Hills. They agreed to settle with the Lakota near Fort Randall on the Missouri—or to head south to Indian Territory.[15]

Shoshone and Arapaho scouts in the Great Sioux War

As the so-called Great Sioux War—of which Custer’s campaign was only a part—was conducted by the Army in 1876 in the Powder River Basin, meanwhile, young Shoshone men from their reservation and young Arapaho men from the Red Cloud Agency realized that scouting for the generals offered both an honorable occupation and food for their families.

About 120 Shoshone warriors, led by Wisha, Nawkee and Luishaw, joined Gen. George Crook as scouts in his drive that ended at the Battle of the Rosebud, shortly before the Custer disaster. The Shoshone scouts received Army rations; while they were away, their families drew food rations from Army stores at Camp Brown.

For their part, Arapaho leaders still hoped that by cultivating friendships with officers they might yet find Army support for a reservation of their own.

As a result, both Shoshone and Arapaho scouts, together with 100 Pawnees and a few Lakota, were all with Gen. Crook during a campaign in November 1876 when his troops attacked a large Cheyenne camp under Dull Knife on the headwaters of Powder River. The Army pursued the remaining Oglala and Cheyenne bands through the winter. The following spring, all came in to the Lakota agencies. The wars of the northern plains were essentially over.[16]

The Northern Arapahos, however, still had no reservation.

The Northern Arapaho arrival on Wind River

According to the Arapahos, Gen. Crook in 1877 agreed to help them find a reservation on Tongue River, near the northern end of the Powder River Basin. Nothing would come of that, but other Army officers also pushed for a place for them north of the North Platte.

In September 1877, Friday, Black Coal, Sharp Nose and 16 Lakotas, including Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Interior Secretary Carl Schurz.

Black Coal made an eloquent plea for a home for the Northern Arapaho. “You ought to take pity on us and give us good land, so that we can remain upon it and call it our home,” he said to the president, the secretary and a group of Army officers.[17]

Hayes approved a temporary location for the Arapaho that winter on the Sweetwater—on the route they would need to travel from the Red Cloud Agency to Wind River. By this time, James Irwin, agent on Wind River at the time of the Brunot Cession, was now agent at the Red Cloud Agency. The Indian Bureau sent him to Wind River to talk with Washakie. According to Wind River Reservation farmer Fin Burnett, Shoshone leaders Washakie, Norkok, Wahwannabiddie, Moonhabe and Wesaw agreed to make peace with the Arapahos and to allow them a place—just temporarily—on their reservation.[18]

At Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska in the fall of 1877, the 950 or so Northern Arapahos were issued 155 cattle to feed them on their journey. They left Oct. 31. They arrived at Fort Fetterman on the North Platte on Nov. 13; by Nov. 18, they had killed and eaten all the cattle. Gen. Crook approved an issue of guns and ammunition to the men so that they could hunt. They continued moving and spent the coldest months of the winter near the Sweetwater-North Platte confluence, in the country around Independence Rock.

On March 18, 1878, 21 Arapaho lodges under Black Coal’s leadership arrived, with a military escort, on the Shoshone Reservation on Wind River and camped two days’ travel from the agency headquarters at Camp Brown.

Reluctantly, Shoshone Reservation Agent James Patten issued rations for the Arapaho. Within a few weeks, leaders of both tribes met informally. Patten reported the Shoshone continued to object, but were willing accept the Arapaho, for now. Both tribes continued to hope for a meeting with Gen. Crook—and a better solution. By May, most of the rest of the Arapaho had arrived on Wind River.[19]

“Thus began,” writes ethnohistorian Loretta Fowler about the Northern Arapaho, “a struggle to subsist on short rations, to counter the Shoshones’ efforts to have them removed, and to resist the government’s attempts to undermine tribal institutions.[20]” As for the Eastern Shoshones, they too faced a short food supply and government pressure against their traditions—and they were now forced to share their reservation with these newcomers, their enemies in warfare only a few years earlier, whether they liked it or not.

Resources

Primary sources

• “Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Sioux, etc.” In Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. 2, Treaties, editor and compiler Charles J. Kappler, 594-596, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904.) Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at http://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers/id/19154/rec/1. This is the text of the 1851 treaty of Fort Laramie. Charles Kappler’s seven-volume compilation contains the texts of all treaties, laws and executive orders dealing with Indian tribes. Volume 2 includes the texts of U.S. government treaties and agreements with tribes from 1778 to 1883. Vols. 1 and 3-7 include laws and executive orders from 1871 through 1970. All are available on line at the digital collections at the Oklahoma State Library.
• “Treaty with the Eastern Band Shoshoni and Bannock, 1868.” In Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. 2, Treaties, editor and compiler Charles J. Kappler, 1020-1024. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at http://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers/id/20698/rec/1. Text of the 1868 Fort Bridger Treaty with the Eastern Shoshone and Bannock tribes.
• “Treaty with the Eastern Shoshoni, 1863.” In Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. 2, Treaties, editor and compiler Charles J. Kappler, 848-849. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at http://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers/id/20034/rec/1. Text of the 1863 Fort Bridger Treaty with the Eastern Shoshone tribe.
• “Treaty with the Shoshonee and Bannacks, July 3, 1868.” Posted on the Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum’s website about the Wind River Reservation. Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at http://jacksonholehistory.org/wp-content/uploads/1868-treaty.pdf. A more readable pdf version than the Kappler text, with added comment by historian Henry Stamm.
• “Treaty with the Sioux, Brule, Oglala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arcs, and Santee, and Arapaho, 1868.” In Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. 2, Treaties, editor and compiler Charles J. Kappler, 1003-1006. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at http://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers/id/20643. Text of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.
• Washakie, John. Conversations and emails with WyoHistory.org Editor Tom Rea, spring 2018. John Washakie is a direct descendant of Chief Washakie.
• White, Nelson and Crawford. Conversations with WyoHistory.org editor Tom Rea, September, November 2017. Brothers Crawford and Nelson White are elders of the Northern Arapaho Tribe.

Secondary sources

• Drake, Kerry. “The Wagon Box Fight, 1867.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed June 10, 2018, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wagon-box-fight-1867.
• Flynn, Janet. Tribal Government: Wind River Reservation. 1991. Reprint, Lander, Wyo.: Mortimore Publishing, 2008. An extremely useful look at the history of government and leadership on the Wind River Reservation, with clear details on the treaties, agreements and lawsuits.
• Fowler, Loretta. Arapaho Politics, 1851-1978: Symbols in Crises of Authority. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. An excellent ethnohistory of the Northern Arapaho people, with emphasis on their constantly evolving leadership and governance structures over time.
• “Friday, the Arapaho Interpreter.” Arapaho Legends, March 3, 2016. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017, at http://www.arapaholegends.com/friday-the-arapaho-interpreter/.
• More detail on the life of Friday, long time Arapaho leader and interpreter.
• Hein, Ellis. “The Battles of Platte Bridge and Red Buttes.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/battles-platte-bridge-station-and-red-buttes. This and the following detail important Indian fights and campaigns on the North Platte and Powder Rivers in 1865.
• ____________. “Connor’s Powder River Expedition of 1865.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/connors-powder-river-expedition-1865.
• Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum. “An Introduction to Wind River Reservation.” Accessed Dec. 3, 2017, at http://jacksonholehistory.org/an-introduction-to-the-wind-river-indian-reservation-of-wyoming/. This website offers a wide range of articles and documents pertaining to the reservation, with more information on the Eastern Shoshone than the Northern Arapaho.
• Ostlind, Emilene. “Red Cloud’s War.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/red-clouds-war. An account of the conflicts along the Bozeman Trail, 1864-1868, which led from the North Platte through the heart of the Powder River Basin to the gold fields of Montana.
• Rea, Tom. “Gathering the Tribes: The Cheyennes Come Together after Sand Creek.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Nov. 20, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/gathering-tribes-cheyennes-come-together-after-sand-creek. Narrative based on Cheyenne mixed-blood George Bent’s account of the tribe’s move north into the Powder River Basin after the Sand Creek Massacre, 1864-1865.
• _________. “Peace, War, Land and a Funeral: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Dec. 8, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/peace-war-land-and-funeral-fort-laramie-treaty-1868. Article takes the funeral of Mni-Akuwin, Spotted Tail’s daughter, as a place to begin telling the story of Lakota-white relationships surrounding the1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.
• Robinson, Gerry. “The Dull Knife Fight: Troops Attack a Cheyenne Village on the Red Fork of Powder River, 1876.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed Nov. 26, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/dull-knife-fight-1876-troops-attack-cheyenne-village-red-fork-powder-river. An account of the fight on the Red Fork of Powder River in which the Northern Cheyennes suffered a defeat that led them to come in to the reservation the following spring. Author Gerry Robinson is an enrolled Northern Cheyenne.
• Smith, Shannon. “New Perspectives on the Fetterman Fight.” Accessed June 10, 2018,at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/new-perspectives-fetterman-fight.
• Stamm, Henry E. IV. People of the Wind River: The Eastern Shoshones, 1825-1900. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. A useful, reliable source on the Eastern Shoshones of the 19^thcentury, with emphasis too on their relations with their white and Arapaho neighbors.
• Troyer, Michael D. “Treaty of Fort Wise.” Colorado Encyclopedia. Accessed Nov. 25, 2017, at https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/treaty-fort-wise. Details and background on the treaty in which some leaders of the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho tribes signed away all the land between the North Platte and Arkansas rivers for a much smaller reservation near Sand Creek.
• WyoHistory.org. “Coming to Wind River: the Eastern Shoshone Treaties of 1863 and 1868.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed June 10, 2018 at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/coming-wind-river-eastern-shoshone-treaties-1863-and-1868.
• Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Excellent source for the conflicts and treaties of the western plains in the second half of the 19^thcentury, with valuable insights into the national politics and ideas of reform that informed the presidency, the Indian Bureau and the Army in their dealings with tribes.
• “Wind River Treaty Documents. Treaties and Agreements Between the Eastern Shoshones and the United States.” Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum website on the Wind River Reservation. Includes commentary about and links to full texts of the Fort Bridger treaties of 1863 and 1868, plus the 1872 Brunot cession, the 1896 Big Horn Hot Springs cession and the Land cession of 1904. Accessed Dec. 12, 2017, at http://jacksonholehistory.org/wind-river-treaty-documents/.
• Wischmann, Lesley. “Separate Lands for Separate Tribes: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.” Wyo History.org. Accessed Nov. 19, 2017, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/horse-creek-treaty. Political events and historical context for the 1851 treaty at Fort Laramie.

Illustrations

• The photo of Sharp Nose in uniform is from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.
• All other photos are from the collections of the Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne. Used with permission and thanks.
• The map showing Father de Smet’s original map and a contemporary map of the lands assigned tribes in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was prepared by former Casper College GIS student Danielle Murphy. Used with thanks.
• The map of the Brunot Cession was prepared by the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center at the University of Wyoming. Special thanks to WyGISC and to Margo Berendsen, cartographer.

Copyright © 2018 by WyoHistory.org

Just before sunset, on Oct. 31, 1903, 18-year-old Hope Clear, an Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, dismounted from her horse to open a gate near Lightning Creek on the Dry Fork of the Cheyenne River about 50 miles northeast of Douglas, Wyo. Two little boys were with her, helping her trail some loose ponies. They had ridden ahead of several of the wagons driven by others in the group. The Indians, headed back to the reservation after a trip to search for medicinal plants, planned to camp near the creek.

But the teenager “saw the white men aiming their guns at me, so I started back to the wagons as fast as I could go.” Shots rang out. Clear did not hear any warnings before the gunfire began. One bullet hit the horse that 11-year-old Peter White Elk rode. The horse fell. The boy scrambled up “and started to run and then he got shot.”[1]

The fighting lasted no more than five minutes. Seven people, including Peter White Elk and Sheriff William Miller, died of wounds incurred during the battle. The white men that Hope Clear saw were members of a posse headed by Miller, sheriff of Weston County, Wyo. The confrontation was in Converse County; Miller was in fact out of his jurisdiction.

Posse members said later that they shouted warnings to the Indians to stop, but that the Indians fired first, in contrast to Clear’s recollection. Miller had tried to arrest the Indians for violating state game laws the day before, but Charles Smith, the Oglala leader of the party that Clear was traveling with, had convinced the Indians that they should return to the reservation rather than going to Newcastle, Wyo., with the sheriff.

Smith, known to the Indians as Eagle Feather, had attended the Carlisle Indian School. He had told the sheriff that he didn’t live in Newcastle and wasn’t going there. One posse member recalled that the sheriff told Smith he didn’t want trouble and wanted the Indians to come peacefully, but Smith replied, “I know the law, and I know your duty as well as you do, and what they expect of you, but you can’t take me.”[2]

Tensions grew over hunting rights

John Brennan, the U.S. Indian agent at the Pine Ridge Reservation, had granted passes to the Indians to leave the reservation for the purpose of “gathering herbs, roots and berries.” He gave passes to two parties in the fall of 1903: to William Brown on Sept. 30 and to Charles Smith on Oct. 20. This practice was not uncommon for Brennan, but he “made it a special point,” he noted later, “to caution all Indians going through Wyoming and Montana not to hunt while on their trip”[3] and instructed them to get permits from the proper officers if they did want to hunt.

Hunting had been an issue for many years. The disagreement about hunting rights occurred in part because the state of Wyoming’s laws had been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in the Ward v. Race Horse case as superior to treaty agreements made previously by the U.S. government with the Indians. Concerns also arose prior to Race Horse that overkill of Wyoming’s game would discourage wealthy easterners who came to the state to hunt for sport. A lack of game thus could mean decreased state income.

Still another factor contributed to the increasing tensions when, in the early 1900s, rations provided by the U.S. government for Indians living on reservations were reduced.[4]

In Oct.1903, Sheriff Miller in Newcastle received word that Indians had been hunting illegally in southern Weston County and on the northern border of Converse County and that they had also been killing cattle. According to Weston County Clerk A.L. Putnam, “… so explicit and positive were these statements that, although no complaints had been filed by the stockmen, Sheriff Miller thought it his duty to look after the matter and put a stop to the lawbreaking and to protect the property of our citizens, which it was said was being destroyed.” The reports had come into the office between Oct. 20 and Oct. 22. The sheriff organized a posse of six that left Newcastle on Oct. 23. The sheriff could not leave until the next day and met the posse at a prearranged place.[5]

They found some Indians near Lance Creek, disarmed them, and three of the posse members took them to Newcastle. Another man joined the main posse, which continued for several days to Black Thunder Basin, where Indians had been reported, but they had gone before the posse arrived. The posse continued until they found the William Brown and Charles Smith parties on the Dry Fork of the Cheyenne River north of present Bill, Wyo. The Brown and Smith parties had met accidentally and were on their way back to the reservation. A broken wagon wheel, repaired travois-style with a pole that dragged the ground, left a trail that posse members followed.[6]

The lawmen arrived at the place where the Indians were camped at about noon. William Brown’s wife prepared a meal which posse men ate as they waited for Charles Smith to return. Later that afternoon, Smith came back and “had upon his horse … an antelope.”[7]

Miller tried to arrest them, but Smith refused to go to Newcastle, although others in the party were willing to. One posse member recalled that the sheriff read the arrest warrant to the Indians twice. The Indians broke camp, and although there was reportedly some confusion about whether the Indians were going to Newcastle, they instead went in the direction of the reservation. The sheriff and the posse decided not to follow at that time, but they warned the Indians they would be back. The lawmen then stayed at the Fiddleback Ranch about 20 miles away. The sheriff requested men from local ranches join the posse.[8]

Further complicating the matter, Charles Smith and Sheriff Miller reportedly disliked each other, having exchanged words in 1901 about illegal hunting.[9]

Bloodshed on Lightning Creek

On Oct. 31, 1903, the sheriff’s posse caught up with the Indians in the late afternoon at Lightning Creek. The Indians had traveled about 50 miles from the place where Sheriff Miller had first attempted arrest. Some of the Oglalas were traveling in wagons, and some were riding horses. They were in a procession about a quarter- to one-half mile long. “The approach of the sheriff and his posse, after they left the road and took up a dry gulch under the creek bank, was threatening and menacing,” according to a statement issued later by U.S. District Attorney for Wyoming Timothy Burke, implying that the posse had set up for an ambush.[10] Hope Clear, like many of the Indians that day, fled when the shooting started. Peter White Elk, the boy helping her, was shot in the head and killed instantly. Others killed were Sheriff Miller, who bled to death from a severed femoral artery about 30 minutes after the fight; Deputy Louis Falkenberg, who was shot in the neck and died instantly; Charles Smith, who died the next day; Black Kettle; and Gray Bear. Susie Smith, Charles’ wife, who was shot in the shoulder, died a few days later. Last Bear, wounded in the back, recovered.[11]

Miller had been moved to the nearby Mills Ranch cabin, where he died. Posse members guarded the cabin throughout the night, concerned that an attack might occur. The next morning, two posse members, James Davis and Ralph Hackney, took the bodies of Miller and Falkenberg to Newcastle. Other posse members returned to the scene of the fight to search the Indians’ wagons and found that several Indian women had built a fire and were tending the injured Charles Smith there. Smith was taken to the Mills cabin, and posse member Stephen Franklin took the women to Lusk where he sought a doctor. Smith died that night.[12]

Another posse formed at Newcastle, this one organized by Crook County Sheriff Lee Mather, to capture the Indians who fled the scene. Some managed to go back to the reservation. Others were arrested in Edgemont, S.D., charged with murder, and these men were taken to Douglas, Wyo. The Converse County sheriff released the women and children to the custody of Indian Agent John R. Brennan. Brennan requested the release of the nine men, but Wyoming’s Acting Gov. Fenimore Chatterton refused. [13]

A preliminary hearing—the only legal proceeding in the case—was held in Douglas, Wyo., the county seat of Converse County, on Nov. 14, 1903, two weeks after the confrontation. Because of federal obligations to the tribes, U.S. District Attorney for Wyoming Timothy Burke represented the Oglalas in this state case. He did not call them to testify that day, but traveled to Pine Ridge later to take their statements because he could not find a place of appropriate secrecy to take their statements in Douglas, and because he believed that the case of the Weston County prosecutor, W.F. Mecum, was weak.[14]

Acting Gov. Chatterton, along with Wyoming Congressman Frank Mondell, who was from Newcastle, and U.S. Sen. Francis E. Warren, supported the posse members and were dissatisfied with the results of the hearing. Charges against the Oglalas were dropped after the hearing, and they were released. No members of the posse were charged. Mondell and Warren used their influence to ensure a thorough investigation was made. They hoped the publicity would help highlight the state’s rights. In addition to the involvement of Burke and Special Indian Agent Charles S. McNichols, Maj. B.H. Cheever of the 6th Cavalry was sent by the War Department to attend the Douglas hearing, and the president’s secretary requested that the U.S. attorney general report to the cabinet at its next meeting.[15]

Burke’s conclusions

After examining the evidence, Burke issued a detailed report wherein he questioned Sheriff Miller’s legal jurisdiction to arrest the Indians. The sheriff’s warrant was issued in Weston County, Wyo., and the arrest was attempted in Converse County. Burke also wrote that the evidence did not show that the Indians were in violation of the law “unless the testimony is to be accepted that the Indian Smith had upon his horse, when he returned to his party at the time the sheriff first visited them, an antelope, which fact is denied by a number of the Indians in their evidence.”[16]

Burke determined that “the Indians were legally justified in resisting arrest under the conditions shown, but not to the extent of using deadly weapons, unless the sheriff’s posse first used their guns, and as that fact is in such hopeless uncertainty I can not believe that any thing is to be gained by further prosecution, for were proceedings to be had against either party the proper application of the rule of reasonable doubt would acquit the accused. A decision resulting from either race prejudice, supercilious generosity, or from a guess would but make a bad matter worse.”[17]

Indian Agent McNichols noted in his report that the trouble at Lightning Creek, resulting in part from a “local sentiment of race hatred, has stained a page in Wyoming’s history.”

Newspapers gave front-page space to the events, especially focusing on the fight and often referring to the Indians—in the vernacular of that era—as bucks, braves, squaws and redskins.

The weekly Newcastle Times on Oct. 30, 1903, carried an item about Miller and his posse searching for the Indians because reports had been received that “… several bands of Indians were scattered thru [sic] the Black Thunder basin, some seventy miles from Newcastle and were unlawfully killing antelope and cattle.” The article also stated, “One witness alone said he could under oath say that he had passed five carcasses of steers killed by gunshot wounds in the country where the Indians were hunting.”

The Wyoming Tribune, a daily newspaper, reported on the battle in its Nov. 2, 1903, issue. The report stated “… it is probable that in the event the governor fails to call out troops a small regiment of men will set out … tomorrow morning, all bent on avenging the death of the officers.” The newspaper also included information about a second battle wherein a posse formed to catch the Indians who fled the Lightning Creek fight and that ten Indians were killed. The next day, the newspaper explained there had been “great exaggeration” in the first report and also noted that the report of a second battle was “purely imaginary.”

The Newcastle Times in its Nov. 6 report, stated that “like a Custer [Sheriff Miller] held his ground. What matter were the odds two to one in the enemies’ favor; what matter were the bullets flying all around. He knew the peril and risk, and was only doing his duty as an officer when lo! a bullet struck him high up in the left hip severing the femoral artery and breaking the bone.” The  Grand Encampment Herald carried “the true story … as told by Johnnie Owens, the celebrated scout and Indian fighter.”

A few days later, Cheyenne’s Wyoming Tribune carried an item from the Denver News with Buffalo BillCody’s opinion on the Wyoming incident and hunting rights. The famed western showman admitted he had “only glanced over the newspaper accounts, which are not all alike.” However, he believed that tribes “have a right to shoot game--not for the sake of slaughter, but for personal use. We must make allowance for the fact that they and their ancestors have lived largely by the chase, so some concession along that line should to my way of thinking, be granted them.” [18]

But Burke, as might be expected for an attorney, gave thoughtful consideration to the evidence and further, he interpreted the language of the treaties and referred to the 1896 Race Horse case. He explained, “… I do not find from a reading of the various treaties made with the Oglala Sioux that they had reserved any right to hunt off their reservation after the buffalo should cease to exist in ‘numbers as to justify the chase;’ their treaty of 1868 being merely that they should have the right to ‘hunt so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase’ being an entirely different provision from that made by the Crow and the Shoshone and other Indians, which are to the effect that they should have the right to hunt upon the unoccupied lands of the United States Government so long as the game should exist in sufficient quantities to authorize the chase. The latter provision as it appears in a number of treaties, however, has been construed against the Indians’ right, in violation of State law subsequently enacted, in the case of Ward, Sheriff, v. Race Horse(163 U.S. Rep. 504).”[19]

The Lightning Creek battle has been called the “last blood-spilling fight” between whites and American Indians in Wyoming. The conflict was not the last in the West, however. Armed skirmishes, many with bloodshed, continued intermittently until 1924.[20]

Resources

• “A Great Exaggeration of Fight with Indians.” Wyoming Tribune, Nov. 3, 1903. Accessed July 16, 2018, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “American Indian Wars.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 20, 2018, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars#Last_conflicts.
• “Battle with Indians: Law Breaking Sioux Resist Arrest and Start a Fight, Two Whites and Five Bucks Dead.” Grand Encampment Herald, Nov. 6, 1903, 1. Accessed July 6, 2018, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• Boyer, Lee R. “Conflict over Hunting Rights: Lightning Creek, 1903.” South Dakota History 23: 4. (301-320). Accessed April 20, 2018, at https://www.sdhspress.com/journal/south-dakota-history-23-4/conflict-over-hunting-rights-lightning-creek-1903/vol-23-no-4-conflict-over-hunting-rights.pdf.
• City of Douglas, Wyo. “Douglas Park Cemetery, A Walking Tour.” Accessed March 22, 2018, at https://www.cityofdouglas.org/DocumentCenter/View/43.
• “Indians.” Newcastle Times, Oct. 30, 1903, 1. Accessed July 18, 2018, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• “May Kill Game.” Wyoming Tribune, Nov. 15, 1903, 2. Accessed July 18, 2018, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.
• Moss, Bill. Grandson of Lightning Creek battle eyewitness Foster Rogers. Email interview with author, July 12 and 17, 2018. Rogers herded sheep for Jake Mills at the time of the incident.
• Richardson, Ernest M. “Battle of Lightning Creek.” Montana the Magazine of Western History, (Summer 1960): 42-52.
• Tysdal, Bobbie Jo. Director, Anna Miller Museum, Newcastle, Wyo. Telephone interview with author. May 4, 2018. The museum has a collection with hundreds of papers and photographs of Sheriff Miller and his family.
• U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Indian Affairs. “Encounter Between Sioux Indians of the Pine Ridge Agency, S. Dak., and a Sheriff’s Posse of Wyoming.” 58th Cong. 2nd Session, 1903, S. Doc. 128.
• Timothy Burke’s Dec. 17, 1903, statement appears on pages 54-56; John Brennan’s statement appears on pp 30-31; Hope Clear’s testimony appears on pages 48-49; Charles McNichols’ letter appears on pages 11-16; Weston County, Wyo., Clerk Arthur Putnam Nov. 10, 1903, letter to Acting Gov. Fenimore Chatterton, pages 5-7; Hackney testimony, p. 77. Sheep herder and eyewitness Foster Rogers’ testimony appears on pages 94-95. A copy of the Wyoming Game and Fish Laws, 1903, appears on pages 98-109. The articles from the Newcastle Times and the Douglas Budget appear on pages 17-20.
• Van Pelt, Lori. “Willis Van Devanter: Cheyenne Lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court Justice.” WyoHistory.org. Accessed May 8, 2018, at https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/willis-van-devanter-cheyenne-lawyer-and-us-supreme-court-justice.
• Voigt, Barton. “The Lightning Creek Fight.”  Annals of Wyoming 49 (Spring 1977): 5-22. Accessed May 9, 2018, at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom49121977wyom#page/n3/mode/2up.
• “Wyoming Becomes the Scene of a Bloody Conflict Between Sioux Indians and a Posse: Sioux Indians Kill a Wyoming Sheriff.” Wyoming Tribune, Nov. 2, 1903. Accessed July 16, 2018, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.

Illustrations

• The photos of the nine Oglala men, Timothy Burke and Frank Mondell are all from Wyoming State Archives. Used with permission and thanks. Burke, who was U.S. attorney for Wyoming at the time of the Lightning Creek fight in 1903, was serving in Wyoming’s second Legislature about 10 years earlier when this photo was taken.
• The photo of Pine Ridge Indian Agent John Brennan is from the archives of the South Dakota Historical Society. Used with permission and thanks.
• The photo of Sen. Francis E. Warren is from the Library of Congress via Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Sheriff William Miller is from the Anna Miller Museum in Newcastle, Wyo. Used with permission and thanks.

By the early decades of the 20thcentury, memories of rougher times in the American West were already beginning to fade from recent memory. The gilded age of rich industrialists and new modernity had moved into the Progressive Era; war clouds were gathering in Europe.

At the same time, Americans around the country were fascinated by stories of the Old West and had begun thinking of American Indians not as individual people or tribes facing individual challenges but collectively—and nostalgically—as a “vanishing race.” (In fact, though Indian population levels had sunk very low around the year 1900—in Wyoming as elsewhere—by the nineteen-teens they were beginning to rise again, and tribal identities remained strong.)

Driven by mixed motives of helping Indian people survive by seeing them “assimilated” into the larger Anglo culture of the United States, two men from much different backgrounds pooled resources and ideas in an attempt to achieve their goals.

Rodman Wanamaker of Philadelphia, son of John Wanamaker, the founder of Wanamaker department stores, was a wealthy businessman who traveled in the high-society circles of J.P. Morgan. The younger Wanamaker, born in 1863, used his money to fund budding inventors, but he also held a keen interest in any venture relating to the West.

Joseph K. Dixon seems an unlikely friend of Wanamaker. He was relatively poor, and did not move in the same social circles. Much of Dixon’s background remains unknown. He was born in 1856 in Germantown, Pa., and earned a bachelor of divinity degree from the Rochester Theological Seminary in upstate New York. For 30 years, his whereabouts are unknown.

By 1908, Dixon had surfaced as a self-proclaimed “author, explorer, ethnologist, and authority on the American Indian.” His theological degree may indicate that he had worked as a missionary to American Indian tribes, but that cannot be confirmed. His “expertise” on Indians drew him to Wanamaker, in whom he found a cash cow—a man with seemingly limitless resources.

Dixon began working for Wanamaker by leading what they called “expeditions” to various Indian reservations across the country. He would travel with a photographer who used a Kodak camera and return with “casual” photographs, which were in fact, staged. The photographer’s name has not survived. These photographs were displayed in various institutions for wealthy patrons to admire.

Dixon had completed two of these expeditions, one in 1908 and one in 1909, when a fortuitous dinner with Wanamaker, famous scout and showman William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and artist Frederic Remington spawned his most ambitious expedition yet.

At the meeting, Cody brought up an idea that Wanamaker had envisioned previously: creation of a large monument to honor all of the Indian tribes in the United States, a statue larger than the Statue of Liberty with a museum in its base.

The men saw the memorial not as an apology for past injustices, but rather a commemoration of a “race” they saw as “vanishing” and of a victory over the wild West. The Philadelphia North American expressed widely held views of the time when it ran an editorial calling “such racial extinctions … stern necessities,” but also a “poignant tragedy.” Following the dinner, the men immediately put into place plans to begin designing the memorial and with it, the largest expedition of Dixon’s career.

The proposed memorial

The memorial was designed by architect Thomas Hastings, whose work by this time included the Henry Clay Frick house on Fifth Avenue in New York and the New York Public Library. For this $500,000 project, a 165-foot bronze sculpture of an Indian would be placed atop the museum. A Sioux man was chosen as the model.

The informal memorial association recruited an elite committee of wealthy businessmen partly to give the project credibility, but also to persuade Congress to allow the use of government land for the structure. Committee members included Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Randolph Hearst, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan and Ralph Pulitzer. After two years of political struggle, Congress on Dec. 8, 1911 granted use of land at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, N.Y., for the memorial. But Congress granted no other funds.

Publicity for the groundbreaking, to be held on Washington’s Birthday, Feb. 22, 1913, promised “thirty of the most famous Chiefs from the Indian Reservations” would be present. Only seven tribes were represented, however, and only men who were the most striking in appearance or whose features fit stereotypes of Indian faces were allowed to participate. Dixon encouraged them to come dressed in traditional ensembles and to bring bone tools. This caused a frenzy among city-dwelling New Yorkers and reporters who had never seen such a sight.

Many of the American Indians found the gathering unusual as well. Reginald Oshkosh, a Menominee graduate of the Carlisle Indian School, commented to a stunned reporter, “You must think I look quite aboriginal tricked out in this outfit.” Many journalists were shocked to discover that the Indians spoke better English than they did, and that the Indians were essentially acting in roles of uneducated barbarians for the public’s amusement.

President William Howard Taft made a short speech that clearly reflects the attitude of the time, that Indians’ loss of land and power was somehow just and right. Taft remarked, “This monument to the red man, recalling his noble qualities, of which he had many, and perpetuating the memory of the succession from the red to the white race of the ownership and control of the Western Hemisphere … tells the story of the march of empire westward and the progress of Christian civilization.”

To physically break the ground, Taft used a silver spade as well as a bone tool that had actually been found on the site. Then, to the cheers of onlookers, the 32 Native Americans in traditional garb all also broke ground on the memorial. Oddly, a military brass band played what they called “original Indian music,” which may not have sounded familiar to the Indians. Following the musical program, all the Indians signed or marked with a thumb a Declaration of Allegiance to the United States.

The ceremony ended with the raising of the American flag, and the presentation of 100 new Indian Head nickels to the audience as the event coincided with the official release of the Indian Head or Buffalo nickel by the U.S. Mint.

The expedition

Now Dixon’s work began. For the Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian, Dixon planned to visit 89 Indian reservations beginning June 7, 1913. The 20,000 mile train expedition would last about six months.

Dixon brought with him another photographer with a Kodak camera, a wax cylinder of a speech by President Woodrow Wilson that had been recorded personally by phonograph inventor Thomas Edison, another wax cylinder of a speech by Wanamaker, the Declaration of Allegiance that had been signed by the Indians at the groundbreaking ceremony, the U.S. flag raised at that event, and commemorative flags to give to the tribes.

The declaration amounted to a loyalty oath. It noted, “We greatly appreciate the honor and privilege extended to us by our white brothers who have recognized us by inviting us to participate in the ceremonies on this historic occasion.”

Dixon’s expedition arrived in Wyoming on Oct. 18, 1913, to visit the Shoshone Reservation, and departed on Oct. 20. By that time Arapaho people, too, had been living on the reservation for 35 years. A brief advance in the local Wyoming State Journal noted that Dixon planned to visit people of both tribes, and that the expedition’s purpose “is to arouse patriotism and bind the Indian tribes closer together.” The tribes would also be asked to send delegations to Fort Wadsworth in New York harbor when the memorial monument was erected.

Most of the reactions by the tribes were positive, but a few were skeptical of signing another document with the United States government. Many believed they were Americans already and did not need to sign a Declaration of Allegiance to prove it. Resistance to signing was strongest among the Hopi, Pueblo and Navajo people.

Results of the expedition

During the journey, Dixon’s views of native people appear to have changed. After the trip, he took a more sympathetic view and attributed their poor living conditions to the actions of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s agency responsible for carrying out federal obligations to the tribes.

Dixon then lobbied for better social and health conditions on the reservations and advocated citizenship for all American Indians. In 1914, Dixon and Wanamaker published a large-format book of photographs and Indian oratory, The Vanishing Race: The Last Great Indian Council.

Officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs saw little value in Dixon’s expedition. According to historian Russell Barsh, the flag at the center of Dixon’s ceremonies on the 89 reservations disappeared sometime before he died. The original declaration ended up in private hands. As recently as 1980 it was resold.

Dixon’s expedition stayed in the public eye for six months as it traveled around the country winning local news coverage and creating a good deal of public support for the idea of citizenship. For some tribes, the anniversary of Dixon’s visit became an annual holiday. In 1924, more than 1,000 members of the Makah tribe gathered at Neah Bay, at the northwestern tip of Washington state, to commemorate Dixon’s 1913 visit, using the original flag that he had given them 11 years before.

Also in 1924, the U.S. government granted citizenship to native Indians through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, known also as the Snyder Act. There is little question that public sympathy for Indian men’s combat service in World War I helped make passage of the act possible, as did broader sympathies raised by Wanamaker and Dixon.

At the same time, scholars maintain the Snyder Act was as much a result of Congress’ desire to assimilate tribal identities into the mainstream of American culture—and eventually do away with them—as it was an attempt to protect and expand Indian rights. Many states kept most Indians from voting for 25 more years, or even longer. Not until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 were Indian voting rights secured nationwide.

As for the memorial on Staten Island, it was never built. Despite having organized a committee of some of the wealthiest businessmen in the world, only $143.10 was raised for its construction. This was likely due, in part, to the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914. Other matters seemed far more pressing.

Wanamaker soon tired of financing Dixon’s adventures and instead began putting his money into new inventions rather than expeditions. Although much of the 1913 expedition seems like a charade to us now, it did create public awareness for the plight of Native Americans and likely had an impact on the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. And Dixon’s expedition left us some remarkable photographs of native people around the nation in a changing time.

Resources

• Barsh, Russell Lawrence. “An American Heart of Darkness: The 1913 Expedition for American Indian Citizenship.” Great Plains Quarterly, 751 (1993). Digital Commons at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Accessed July 10, 2018, at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/751/.
• “Buffalo Nickel.” Wikipedia. Accessed July 10, 2018, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_nickel.
• “Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.” Wikipedia. Accessed July 10, 2018, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act.
• “Joseph K. Dixon.” Worldcat.org. Accessed July 10, 2018, at http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n92005262/
• “Profile: Joseph K. Dixon.” History Commons. Accessed Aug. 7, 2018 at http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=joseph_k__dixon_1.
• “Rodman Wanamaker.” Wikipedia. Accessed July 10, 2018, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodman_Wanamaker.
• “Staten Island’s Colossal Native American Monument That Wasn’t.” Staten Island Real-Time News. July 18, 2010. Accessed July 10, 2018, at http://www.silive.com/news/2010/07/rehashing_staten_islands_colos.html.
• “The Purpose and Achievements of the Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian.” Library of Congress. Accessed July 10, 2018, at https://www.loc.gov/item/96227697/.
• “Thomas Hastings, architect.” Wikipedia. Accessed July 10, 2018, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hastings_(architect).
• “Wanamaker Expedition Will Be in Lander Oct. 18-20.” Wyoming State Journal, Sept. 26, 1913, 1. Wyoming Newspaper Project. Accessed July 10, 2018, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov.

For further reading

• Krupicka, Katrina. “Cody and Wanamaker: The Foundation of American Indian Citizenship.” Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Points West Online. Accessed Aug. 11, 2018 at https://centerofthewest.org/2017/09/29/points-west-cody-wanamaker-american-indian-citizenship/.

Film clips of the 1913 Citizenship Expedition

Dixon and Wanamaker also commissioned films of the expedition, some of which have survived. The first of these, about seven minutes long, includes shots of the groundbreaking ceremony Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. The second, nearly nine minutes long, shows flag-raising and pledge-signing ceremony on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux, with troops of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry on hand, followed by a flag-raising back at Fort Wadsworth at the end of the expedition. The third film, about 11 minutes long, shows some of the same footage at Pine Ridge, followed by a signing ceremony with the Otoe, Missouri, Kaw, Ponca and Tonkawa tribes on the Otoe Reservation in Oklahoma and finally a flag-raising ceremony with the warrior Two Moons of the Northern Cheyenne, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana.

The fourth film, more than 15 minutes long, shows signing ceremonies on 15 reservations, including the Crow Creek Reservation of the Lower Yankton Sioux in South Dakota; the Rosebud Reservation of the Brule and Yanktonais tribes in South Dakota; the Tuscarora Reservation of the Tuscarora Tribe in New York State; the Tonawanda Reservation of the Tonawanda Tribe of the Seneca Nation in New York; the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Cattaraugus, Seneca, Cayuga and Onondaga nations in New York; the Alleghany Reservation of the Alleghany Seneca Nation in New York; the Onondaga Reservation of the Onondaga and Oneida nations in New York; the Mohawk Reservation of the Mohawk Tribe off the Iroquois Nation,  in New York; the Mescalero Reservation of the Lepan Mescalero and Geronimo Apaches in New Mexico; the Isleta Pueblo with First Mesa and Second Mesa bands of Hopi in Arizona; the Colorado River Reservation of the Mojave Tribe in Arizona; the San Carlos Reservation of the San Carlos and White Mountain Apaches in Arizona; and the Blackfeet Reservation of the Blackfeet, Piegan and Blood tribes in Montana.

All the film clips are from the National Archives, via YouTube. Used with thanks.

Illustrations

• The sketch of the National American Indian Memorial, from the cover of the program for the 1913 groundbreaking ceremony, and the photo of the Indian chiefs at the groundbreaking are from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The four portraits and the picture of the flag raising ceremony are from a collection of Dixon photos made on the Shoshone Reservation in 1913 and acquired in 2018 by the Wyoming Veterans Memorial Museumin Casper. Used with permission and thanks.
• The image of Joseph K. Dixon in Belgium in 1921 is from the Wanamaker Collection at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University. Used with thanks.

In the summer of 1952, Finis Mitchell was hiking alone in the northern Wind River Mountains in western Wyoming. Descending to a nameless lake in the Fremont River gorge, a 74-pound pack on his back, Mitchell came to a 40-foot cliff. Tying his rope to a spruce near the brink, he let himself down. As he neared the bottom, a limb broke off the tree. He landed on his pack among the rock debris at the base of the cliff.

“I named this lake ‘Suicide Lake,’” he wrote, two decades later. “If you want to commit suicide, it’s pretty easy to do it here. … [Some of] the ledges run sheer into the water.”

Mitchell, nearly 51 at the time of his fall, had been exploring the Wind River Mountains all his life, learning more about the ups, downs, ins and outs of the range’s 3,500 square miles than even the professionals who mapped it and the U.S. Forest Service officials who maintained its trails. Eventually he acquired the nickname “Lord of the Winds” for his curiosity, enthusiasm and expertise.

Early life

Finis Mitchell, whose name is pronounced Fine-us, was born in Missouri on Nov. 14, 1901. When he was about 5 years old, his father sold the family farm to buy 160 acres in Wyoming, sight unseen. Henry and Fay Mitchell and their three children traveled west in a boxcar with their livestock and all their other possessions. Their new land turned out to be at the base of the Wind River Mountains on the western side, near present Boulder, Wyo., but it was too dry, barren and cold for farming. To survive, “[w]e hauled rough lumber and freight to our community store,” Mitchell told Backpacker magazine 60 years later. “[We] just about lived on fish, antelope and potatoes.”

From the day they arrived, the beauty and grandeur of the Wind Rivers fascinated Finis. At age 8, on an October elk hunt, he climbed to a high point and gazed at the vast spectacle of mountains and snow-capped peaks, as far as he could see.

In 1915, Henry and Fay Mitchell moved to Rock Springs, Wyo., where Henry worked in a coal mine. When he developed lung problems, Finis left school after the eighth grade and worked at a sawmill to help support the family. Though he never returned to school, he continued his education with correspondence courses.

The Union Pacific Railroad Company hired Mitchell in 1923 as a carman, which meant he was responsible for maintenance and repairs. Two years later, on June 4, 1925, Finis married Emma Nelson. She taught at an isolated one-room schoolhouse. The couple lived in Rock Springs; Finis continued to work for the Union Pacific until he was laid off in 1930 near the start of the Great Depression. During these years, they had two children, Anna and William.

Mitchell’s Fishing Camp

“In June 1930,” Mitchell wrote, “my wife and I bought a tent, borrowed horses and saddles [from local ranchers] and started our Mitchell’s Fishing Camp in the Big Sandy Openings … on Mud Lake” in the southern Wind Rivers. They obtained a Forest Service lease, “followed the sheep wagon road to its end and set up our tent.”

Describing their camp’s operation, Mitchell wrote, “We would take the people fishing on the horses and be sure they caught their fish. Our guide service was for free. … We charged a dollar and a half a day for horses. We kept the dollar and gave fifty cents to the people we borrowed the horses from. … We also served meals in the tent for fifty cents a meal.” During the winter, Finis worked for local ranchers. Finis and Emma ran the camp for seven years. After Finis’ mother, Fay, died, his father helped Finis and Emma. Emma also took care of her brothers and sisters after her mother died.

Stocking lakes and streams

To increase the number of fish for the success of their camp, and also as part of a larger citizen volunteer effort coordinated by the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission to introduce more trout species into the waters of the Wind Rivers, Finis and Henry hauled in small trout—fingerlings—to lakes near their camp. In 1931, Finis and his father took six horses, each loaded with two milk cans of water containing about 1,000 fingerlings, up rough trails to empty the cans into various lakes. The fingerlings were supplied by the fish hatchery at Daniel, Wyo.

In this tricky process, the water in the cans had to be oxygenated by sloshing around. Burlap covered the cans, letting air in but keeping the trout from spilling out. During the 1930s, Finis, by his own estimate, stocked about 2.5 million fingerlings in 314 lakes.

Return to Rock Springs

When the Union Pacific rehired Mitchell in 1940, the family moved back to Rock Springs, where they settled. Mitchell worked again as a carman and later as a car foreman. At every opportunity during the warm weather, he photographed, hiked and climbed in the Wind Rivers, gaining comprehensive knowledge of trails, peaks and watersheds. By the early 1940s, he was presenting slides and talking to local groups, promoting the Wind Rivers and emphasizing the need for conservation.

From 1955 through 1958, Mitchell served in the Wyoming House of Representatives. In 1966, he retired from the railroad. A few years later, he began printing and selling postcards featuring his scenic photos. He also sold photograph albums, including a guide to hiking trails in the Wind Rivers commissioned by the U.S. Forest Service.

In 1975, Mitchell published Wind River Trails: A Hiking and Fishing Guide to the Many Trails and Lakes of the Wind River Range in Wyoming. In addition to hand-drawn maps showing innumerable lakes, streams and peaks, plus detailed directions for accessing and negotiating more than 50 trails, this 142-page book includes black-and-white photographs of lakes, peaks and glaciers plus a few of Mitchell’s Fishing Camp. The book is sturdily bound yet small enough to fit in a hiker’s pocket.

The author’s homilies, suggestions and general observations about the area enliven the narrative. On gear: “Never wear shoes with leather soles in mountains. They get as slick as greased glass.” On summertime, high-altitude snowstorms: “[J]ust hole up somewhere [in your sleeping bag] and don’t panic. … There’s no use getting excited and trying to run out of the mountains because it’s just a summer storm and to be expected.” Directions for the Mill Creek Route to Faler Lake and Bear Lake once the trail disappears: “You can’t go anywhere but the right place because you’re surrounded by thousand foot ledges.”

National recognition

In 1973, the United States Geological Survey, suspending its policy against naming landforms for living persons, named a peak in the southern Wind Rivers near Cirque of the Towers after Mitchell’s family. They installed a bronze plaque commemorating his 11 ascents. After that, he climbed Mitchell Peak seven more times.

In July 1977, the University of Wyoming awarded Mitchell an honorary Doctor of Laws degree for outstanding service in environmental awareness and conservation. Around this time, national press coverage of Mitchell’s activities began. Backpacker magazine interviewed him for its October 1977 issue. An undated Los Angeles Times clipping at the Wyoming State Archives gives Mitchell’s age as 77, which would date the article about 1978. The article quotes the noted Wyoming geologist David Love on Mitchell’s knowledge of the Wind Rivers: “He is the authority on Wind River geography.”

In 1979, the Wall Street Journal also featured Mitchell, reporting that the USGS was consulting him about their maps of the Wind Rivers. Mitchell corrected the locations of Klondike Peak and Alpine Lakes from his encyclopedic knowledge of the area.

On March 20, 1980, Mitchell presented a lecture and slide show to the Sierra Club’s Chicago, Ill., group at the Chicago Academy of Science. The poster advertising his talk noted, “He will also discuss the scandalous way America’s public lands are managed.” While in Chicago, he was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. Later that year, the U.S. Forest Service bestowed a conservation award on Mitchell and four other individuals.

By 1981, Mitchell was guiding groups of hikers in the Wind Rivers, outpacing many younger people and choosing the trails. During the 1980s, more publications, including Union Pacific Info, Rocky Mountain Magazine and Audubon featured stories about Mitchell. He went on more speaking tours and won more awards, including honors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Izaak Walton League and honoraria from the state senates of Wyoming and California. In the 1990s, Western Wyoming Community College in Rock Springs dedicated its dining room to Finis and Emma. In 1992, Sports Afield published an article about him.

Later years

Though slowed by aging, a stroke in 1982 and a serious knee injury from a fall into a glacier crevasse in 1985, Mitchell continued hiking in summer and promoting the Wind Rivers in winter. Katharine Collins, author of a feature about Mitchell for the Casper Star-Tribunein the 1990s, recalls that “people from all over the country would come to see him” at the Mitchell home in Rock Springs. He had a “little routine” in which he showed his photographs, honors and awards and told stories.

Finis’ and Emma’s granddaughter, Sandra Snow, remembers that “he was [a] pretty scary [driver] because he would be gawking at the scenery instead of the road. … [W]hen he was taking pictures he would wait for hours for the clouds to get in the right position. If he was taking shots of people he was just as bad about making you wait.”

And the woman behind the man? Emma Mitchell’s fruitcake, by Finis’ description, “has everything the body needs,” and he always took it on his backpack trips. Snow says that her grandmother, only about 5 feet tall, “was a tiny little dynamo. She was the glue that kept all the extended family on both sides together. She never complained about ... anything she had to do. She catered to Grandpa's every need although she used to get irritated when he couldn't find things.”

Mitchell’s knee injury caused major circulatory problems, and eventually his leg was amputated. He died on Nov. 13, 1995, one day before his 94^thbirthday, in a Pinedale, Wyo., nursing home. Emma survived him by about two years, leaving two children, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Legendary status

Pinedale resident Ric Samulski plays the part of Finis Mitchell at the annual Wind River Mountain Festival, held in Pinedale, Wyo., on the west side of the Wind Rivers, every July. Samulski did not know him, but it is a measure of Mitchell’s stature that “somebody has to impersonate Finis” at this festival, “so I do.” Samulski adds, “The legend has become larger than the man.”

Before Mitchell explored the Wind River Mountains—though others had preceded him—the area was much less well known to early tourists than the nearby Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. Thanks to his enthusiasm and tireless promotion, hundreds of thousands of hikers and climbers now enjoy that vast range every season—often with his little book in a backpack pocket.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Blundell, William E. “A Mountain Man, Aged 77, Still Has Some Peaks to Climb.” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 20, 1979. Box 1, Folder 1, Finis Mitchell Papers, Collection 03190, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyo. (Hereafter AHC). Also Finis Mitchell OH-2010, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne, Wyo. (Hereafter WSA).
• Collins, Katharine. Telephone interview with author,May 14, 2018.
• Fogarty, Jim. “Wyoming’s Man of the Mountains.” Union Pacific Info, June 1981, 21-22. Box 8, Folder 17, Finis Mitchell Papers, Collection 03190, AHC.
• Gustkey, Earl. “The mountain man: He names the peaks he climbs, talks to sheep and elk and travels alone.” Los Angeles Times, n.d. Finis Mitchell Collection OH-2010, WSA.
• Junge, Mark. Finis Mitchell Oral History, WSA. Accessed May 18, 2018, at http://spcrphotocollection.wyo.gov/luna/servlet/view/all/what/Wyoming+Album-Mark+Junge+Collection?showAll=where&sort=oh_%2Cproject%2Cinterviewed%2Cnarrator&os=150.
• Kerasote, Ted. “Finis Mitchell—Caretaker of the Winds.” Sports Afield, Dec. 1992, 42, 44. Box 8, Folder 17, Finis Mitchell Papers, Collection 03190, AHC.
• Mitchell, Finis. Wind River Trails: A Hiking and Fishing Guide to the Many Trails and Lakes of the Wind River Range in Wyoming. Salt Lake City, Utah: Wasatch Publishers, Inc., 1975, 6-15, 32, 50.
• Robinson, Doug. “The Hidden Mountains.” Rocky Mountain Magazine, July-Aug. 1981, 53-55. Box 8, Folder 17, Finis Mitchell Papers, Collection 03190, AHC.
• Samulski, Ric. Actor, Pinedale, Wyo. Telephone interviews with author. May 18 and 21, 2018.
• Snow, Sandra. Granddaughter of Finis and Emma Mitchell. Emails to author. May 8-11, 15-16 and Aug. 14, 2018.
• Udall, James. “Finis Mitchell, Lord of the Winds.” Audubon, July 1986, 72-87. Box 8, Folder 16, Finis Mitchell Papers, Collection 03190, AHC. Also available online. Accessed May 2, 2018, at https://randyudallenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/FINIS-MITCHELL.pdf.
• “The Wind River Mountaineer/Photographer: Finis Mitchell.” Backpacker, Oct. 1977, 30-35, 70-72. Box 8, Folder 17, Finis Mitchell Papers, Collection 03190, AHC.

Secondary Sources

• “Big Sandy Trailhead.” United States Forest Service. Accessed Aug. 17, 2018, at https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/btnf/recreation/hiking/recarea/?recid=71741&actid=51.
• Nichols, Jeffrey. “These Waters Were All Virgin: Finis Mitchell and Wind River Wilderness.”Annals of Wyoming 76, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 26-35. Accessed April 26, 2018, at www.archive.org/details/annalsofwyom76142004wyom.
• _____________. “These Waters Were All Virgin: Finis Mitchell and Wind River Wilderness.” Unpublished manuscript, 2003. Personal collection of Sandra Snow. This is a longer version of the Annals article cited above.
• “Wind River Mountain Range.” VisitPinedale.org. Accessed May 22, 2018, at http://www.visitpinedale.org/explore/mountain-ranges/wind-river-mountain-range.
• Woods, Rebecca. Walking the Winds: A Hiking and Fishing Guide to Wyoming’s Wind River Range.2d ed. Jackson, Wyo.: White Willow Publishing, 1998.

Illustrations

• The photos of Finis and Emma Mitchell, the Sands Café and the image of the cover of the Union Pacific Railroad magazine are all from the collections of the American Heritage Centerat the University of Wyoming. Used with permission and thanks.