Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
The sun was low in the west, almost below the horizon as I drove to Shoshoni late last Friday afternoon. It is a trip I know well, but the light of a winter afternoon shining pink and lavender off the Owl Creek Mountains remains remarkable, even after at least 3,500 trips to Shoshoni from Riverton.
Before you cry foul, or maybe refer to something produced by a male Angus, I can do the math for you for that 3,500 number.
I taught for 15 years at Shoshoni and coached three sports most of the time. That’s 200 trips from our old house on Eastview Drive and our present home on Gasser Road each year. Most years, it was more than 200 with 180 contract days and multiple Saturdays for football and basketball games or to load the bus for track meets long before the Wranglers had their own 400-meter oval.
Add in 29 years as a sportswriter with a minimum of 10 trips a year for those same sports I once coached, and 10 or so trips up the Wind River Canyon with another dozen or so to Casper each year and the 3,500 number might be a bit conservative if you do the math and add 290, 290 and 345 it’s well over the estimate.
I’ve been writing and researching a lot lately about life in Fremont County, and Wyoming as a whole a century or more ago.
It was cold, but not brutally cold last Friday as I dropped down the hill to the Boysen Causeway. I often think of the Shoshone and Crow people who called this area home for thousands of years, and of the Arapaho and Sioux who were driven from their ancestral lands by a trail of broken treaties in the mid-19th century.
How did these people handle the extremes of winter without all of our modern conveniences? The answer is in their incredible creativity, adaptability and ability to utilize the natural materials that surrounded them.
If you said the buffalo was the key to their existence, you are correct, but so are the elk, deer, coyote, fox, moose, and every other living thing, both plant and animal, that filled the natural world that was once Fremont County.
Jump ahead to 1906, and settlers were rolling into Shoshoni for the opening of the ceded area of the Wind River Reservation that we now call home from Riverton west to Crowheart.
These people had to deal with the extremes of cold, drought and howling winter blizzards just as the Native Americans before them did. It wasn’t for the faint of heart. While the Native people utilized teepees of heavy buffalo hide, many of the early farmers dug their first home in the ground.
Arriving in Shoshoni just before the girls’ varsity teams took the floor from Wind River and the host Lady Blue was a trip down memory lane in the faces, handshakes and smiles of the people filling the stands for both teams.
As I often do with games in Fremont County, I scanned the stands and of the estimated 500 people watching the game, I knew all but 50 of them well enough to strike up a conversation.
That’s an example of roots, roots that can’t be purchased but must be gained through one-on-one contact over decades.
One of my favorite films is “Field of Dreams.” Some think it trite, fanciful and far-fetched; I agree, it is all of those things and I love it for them.
One of the central characters of the film is a dual performance by the venerable Burt Lancaster as the aged Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham. Frank Whaley plays Moonlight as a teenager and it’s this connection over time of a young man with his entire life awaiting him and an old man in his final days that provides the powerful moment to me.
As Ray Kinsella interviews the 80+ year old Dr. Graham in his downtown office in Chisolm, Minnesota, after magically being transported back to 1972 (Come on, it’s a movie) he asks the doctor about his brief major league baseball playing career.
“Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came within, came this close. It would kill some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. God, they’d consider it a tragedy,” Kinsella says.
“Son, if I’d only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy,” the smiling old physician says. “This is my most special place in all the world, Ray. Once a place touches you like this, the wind never blows so cold again. You feel for it, like it was your child. I was born here, I lived here, and I’ll die here, with no regrets.”
There are times when I feel that way about Fremont County.
Don’t get me wrong, I get just as annoyed, maybe more so than the average guy at petty politics, too much drama and self-centeredness. Thankfully, at least in my corner of the world, I don’t encounter these types very often. I actively seek to avoid them at every opportunity.
We should all be thankful we live in a place where your word still matters, where a handshake over a business deal has more binding power than a hundred page contract written by an army of attorneys, where you can stand your ground and not worry about the consequences. (Unless it somehow makes the national news and the professionally offended show up)
The pink slopes of the Owl Creeks called me back to a distant time, a time when Shoshoni was a big town in Fremont County. When Gebo, just on the other side of those mountains, routinely beat Riverton and Lander in football, and when hopes ran high that railroads would make this mountain valley a place as viable as Chicago, Kansas City or Denver.
None of that ever came to pass, but who cares. This is the best place on earth, even when the temperatures dip well below zero.
It’s tempting to isolate ourselves, build barriers and keep others out, we don’t need to do that. We do need to explain how things are done around here, and why to our newly arrived friends.
Too many people say, “Welcome to Fremont County, we don’t care how you did things back home.” We understand the message, but experience, both positive and negative is always better than a lecture.
Long shadows, and long memories on a winter’s afternoon. It was magical.