By Rebecca Hein
Impractical decisions, made by men thousands of miles away from the relevant location, are a feature of the history of the American West. So it was with surveying the land in a grid. Government surveyor Billy Owen, working in the 1880s, found the country in central Wyoming “generally rolling with some hilly and mountainous land.”

Not the simplest job to survey, perhaps, and an issue I didn’t think about for many decades. In the 1980s, flying between Chicago and Denver, I saw a mostly flat grid below, stretching for miles, and thought vaguely about an orderly network of county roads. The consequences of laying a grid over the rugged mountains of the West didn’t occur to me.

Heavy stones set in concrete may seem permanent, yet as I’ve been researching Wyoming’s historical markers and monuments, I’ve found they can surprise you—by jumping rivers, say, or clinging to bygone roads.

When I first started to investigate the story around Wyoming’s Oregon Trail Commission (1914-1923), I assumed the placement of monuments would be obvious: on the Oregon Trail. But debates that emerged in the correspondence I read proved me wrong. The initial placement of a monument or marker depended on old-timers locating certain forts or battle fields or how close a road or access point was to the trail being marked. Typically, they attempted to put the marker right next to the trail or historic site. Occasionally, though, I would find a marker located off the trail but close to the highway for those just passing through to take notice. After all, what good is a marker that no one stops to see?

By Rebecca Hein
Why would a man portrayed as respectable participate in a lynching? For years I didn’t think about this, although the question had been floating in front of me since childhood, when I read and re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series.

In 2014, at age 58, I read lawyer/historian John Davis’ WyoHistory.org article on the 1909 Spring Creek Raid, a bloody episode in which seven cattlemen killed three sheep ranchers, kidnapped two others and slaughtered sheep and sheep dogs near Spring Creek south of Ten Sleep, Wyo. This led me to Davis’ book, Goodbye, Judge Lynch. In this book I learned that White-on-White lynchings were common on the American frontier, sometimes even after a criminal justice system had been established.

At the annual meeting of the Wyoming Historical Society this month in Wheatland, we bumped into historian and Wheatland Middle School teacher Mary Jo Birt. We were happy to see her; year after year Birt’s students do very well in Wyoming History Day competitions and she’s always full of new teaching ideas.

She showed us a photo of her 7th graders standing behind a Wyoming map that took up most of the floor of their classroom. On the map were many 3-D objects, but it was hard to tell just what they were.

By Rebecca Hein
Big Nose George: His Troublesome Trail, by Mark E. Miller, with a foreword by former WyoHistory.org Assistant Editor Lori Van Pelt. High Plains Press, 2022, 136 pages. $19.95 paperback.

Possibly the most tantalizing sentence in this tale of murder, lynching and postmortem gruesomeness is, “If only each murderer had kept his mouth shut” nobody would have connected the outlaws with their crimes. Outlaw groups were, in the late 19th century West, “[A] fluid and dynamic mix of miscreants and evildoers, never staying together very long, and certainly not holding powerful allegiances among group members.”

Nonetheless, in 1878 George Parott recruited his Powder River gang to rob the eastbound Union Pacific train in Carbon County, Wyoming Territory. Outlaws had learned from a recent issue of the Laramie Daily Sentinel that pickings were much better on the eastbound train than the westbound.

From this fast-paced, well-written narrative, we learn things that never cross our minds in the age of the automobile.

By John Clayton

It was January 2019. I had just bundled off to my editor the manuscript for my book Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands. I was free to investigate new projects—ideally smaller ones! For example, somewhere I’d picked up the piece of trivia that famed Abstract Impressionist painter Jackson Pollock had been born in Cody, Wyo. Was there a story there?

I will always remember leaving the library at Montana State University-Billings, and starting my walk back to the car. I’d been stymied in my quest. I looked up “Wyoming” in the index of several Pollock biographies. Most confirmed the piece of trivia: he was born in Cody on January 28, 1912. A few mentioned that his family had soon moved away. But that was it.

News this week of the pope’s visit to Canada caught us off guard. We hadn’t known he was coming. When he spoke, he offered an apology the size of a continent: “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” he said, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter. “I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.” Applause and shouts of approval from a largely Native audience greeted his remarks, the New York Times reported.

Beginning in the late 19th and running through most of the 20th century, the Canadian government subsidized Indian boarding schools. Nearly all were run by religious denominations, about 70 percent of them by Roman Catholics and the rest by Protestants. The former Ermineskin Residential Indian School, now demolished, was one of the largest and was run by Catholics on Cree land south of Edmonton, Alberta. There, last Monday in a powwow ring, the pope offered his apology.

When Martha Gellhorn married Ernest Hemingway at the Cheyenne depot in November 1940, he was only a week or two divorced from his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, while Gellhorn was only 10 or 11 months back in the States from covering the war in Finland. Finland? you might ask. There was a war in Finland?

By Rebecca Hein
​Have you ever experienced a moment when the person you’re talking to doesn’t get it? For me, such an event was connected to a long, preparatory journey of awareness. It started in the early 1980s, when I was living in Wisconsin, a farming state that depends on summer rainfall. Being from Wyoming, I didn’t think much about rain, only about what pleasant weather we were having. But I gradually understood, hearing my Wisconsin neighbors talk about the drought and understanding an economic disaster was in progress.

A few years later, when regularly visiting our cabin in the Black Hills of South Dakota, I became acutely aware of the danger of forest fire and realized we could easily lose our beloved cabin.

On moving back to Wyoming in 1992, and a decade later moving to the base of Casper Mountain, I began to notice the weather patterns more than I had while living in town.

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