By Rebecca Hein

Gillette, Christine Scoggan. A Story Nearly Told: Histories of a Wyoming Homestead. Self-published 2020, 322 pages. $25.00 paperback. Charles and Mary Spencer, the author’s great-grand parents, moved from their farm near Traverse City, Mich., to Wyoming by train on Memorial Day 1910. There they filed on a homestead and started a ranch about seven miles west of Upton, Wyo., in Weston County. Two of their five children, along with later generations, wrote of their experiences, providing abundant information for this family saga

By Tom Rea

Some books tell their stories in blunt chronology: First this happened, then this, this and this, and finally this. Others work differently, blending events from different periods that rhyme, resonate, advance or recircle in ways they would not do if told in order. Last fall at the approach of November, Native American Heritage Month, we heard from a writer wondering if we’d like a piece on the diarist John Hunton’s experiences of the Indian Wars. We answered that we already had several articles on major events of those times, but we had next to nothing about Hunton, and would like to learn more.

1. “Individual Towels”
Sign, posted in 1868, promoting one of the best features of a hotel in Ben­ton, Wyoming Territory, now a ghost town in Carbon County. Other less exclusive establishments did not make such claims.

2. “Since man to man has been unjust
  I scarcely know what man to trust.
  I’ve trusted so many to my sorrow—
  So pay today and I’ll trust tomorrow.”
—Poetic sign over Belander’s Butcher Shop, Carbon, 1880s

3. “All you prospector boys, drop in and get a map of your mugs.”
Newspaper ad for Ferris Photo Shop, Dillon Doublejack, 1900

By Rebecca Hein

One fine summer day in 1925, Floyd Bard was riding to his camp in the Bighorn Mountains when he saw “ten young ladies standing there on the edge of the East Fork of Big Goose Creek. All they had on was their bathing suits that Mother Nature had given them, probably eighteen or twenty years back.” These young women could have been part of a group Bard guided during his 22 years as an outfitter in the Bighorns, but they were actually staying at a nearby dude ranch.

Bard, born in 1879, spent much of his life on horseback. When he was 3 years old, his parents settled on a homestead south of Sheridan, Wyo., and at age 10 he took his first of many horse wrangler jobs. In late fall 1891, three Bard family neighbors were murdered just a few months before the invasion of Johnson County in April 1892, when Bard was 13.

For many roundup seasons, Bard herded and grazed cowboys’ horses, fencing or hobbling them and in other ways managing and looking after them. In 1900, he began breaking horses for use in the Boer War and, starting in 1915, was breaking and also purchasing more horses for World War I. In both cases, the Malcolm and William Moncreiffe ranch had contracted to supply horses to the British government.

By Phil Roberts

Christmas was celebrated in territorial Wyoming much like it is today with family dinners, parties, church services and school programs. Festive occasions were reported in the newspapers of the time and press accounts reveal some of the interesting ones.

In Cheyenne in 1877 the ladies of the African Methodist Church cooked a Christmas dinner for church members and friends. “About 250 presents hung upon the tree,” the newspaper item reported.

The Presbyterian Sabbath School in Cheyenne elected new officers for the coming year, according to the same 1877 Cheyenne newspaper. Elected secretary-treasurer was photographer-banker D. D. Dare who several years later fled to the Near East after two banks in which he had an interest failed.

The Evanston newspaper mentioned a Christmas present given to the local judge. It was a “magnificent gold cane,” the judge told the Evanston editor.

By Rebecca Hein

Early in my cello career in performance and teaching, I got a glimpse into the mind of a cellist far above me in ability and position. Two of my students, both cello performance majors at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, were also there to see.

It was the mid-1980s and we were attending the Third International Cello Congress at Indiana University in Bloomington—home to one of the best and largest schools of music in the world.

Many world-class cellists were there, plus professionals and students like our little group. The featured guest that afternoon was Ronald Leonard, principal cello of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Everyone in the auditorium knew he was the equal of any international soloist because the principal chairs of major orchestras are among the best musicians in the business.

The topic was orchestral auditions. At some point, an audience member asked Leonard to demonstrate the notoriously difficult opening of the Offertorio section of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass.

Recently we received a note from a Frenchman now living in the U.S.A., with a link to a family-history blog he’s posted, rich in history and pictures. Philippe Boucher’s great-grandfather, Henri Lebreton, apparently an investor in Belgian- and French-owned oil companies, visited here sometimes for months at a time in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War I in Europe. By that time, oil was a fast-growing industry in Wyoming; the war brought on a boom.

We were interested to learn this week that the surviving members of the Black 14 and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are again teaming up to deliver free food to hungry people. In October 1969, University of Wyoming football coach Lloyd Eaton kicked 14 Black players off the team for asking, ahead of time, to wear black armbands when they suited up to play BYU, in protest against the Mormon Church’s racist policies. Eaton’s action deprived the athletes of their scholarships, sending them down far different paths in their lives than they would otherwise have followed. It also caused deep divisions in Wyoming, and decimated the football program for years.

By Tom Rea

Last summer we found ourselves for a couple of days in Valentine, Nebraska, on the Niobrara River 180 miles downstream from where it flows out of Wyoming. The town lies just over the state line from the Rosebud (Sioux) reservation in South Dakota. Early one morning we went for a walk on a path that runs through town on an old Chicago and North Western right of way. The color was faded, but you could tell someone years ago had spray painted on the concrete: “Your on Native Land.” 

Pretty good thing to keep in mind in North America, we agreed, especially here in the West where the transfer of control of that land is so recent. It’s a little over 150 years since the Shoshone, Arapaho, Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow and Ute tribes that roamed constantly through Wyoming were confined to reservations, and many of their children sent away from their families to White-run schools.

As a friend of ours likes to remind us, American Indians gave up more or less all the land in North America—for promises. How good a job have we done keeping those promises?

By Rebecca Hein

I was rolling around in bed, flipping my pillow and rearranging the blankets every few minutes. Finally, my husband turned over and put his arms around me.

“Becky. Settle down.” In Ellis’s tone and touch I recognized the calm authority that soothed our two preschool children when they became agitated.

“That’s easy for you to say,” I retorted. “You’re not facing potential humiliation in front of hundreds of people.”

“True; that’s a decision I made years ago … and so did you. Now go to sleep.”

For the past few days, I’d been waking up in the morning wondering why I felt like I was going to soon face a firing squad. Then I’d remember. The last Wyoming Symphony Orchestra concert of the 1996-1997 season was coming up in about two weeks, and I was going to be playing a duo with our guest artist, Mark O’Connor. A Grammy award-winning country fiddle player, he was ascending rapidly, and was already collaborating with many world-famous classical artists such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

My principal cello job required me to perform whatever solo parts that were required, and when I first ran through my part for “Limerock,” an old country tune in an arrangement by O’Connor and others, it seemed playable enough. Next, I listened to the recording he had provided, but I didn’t recognize the piece I’d just sight-read because the tempo was insanely fast. When I discovered this, I saw the magnitude of my task.