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.
We often forget the people who created the places that become just names, names without any context, history, or special meaning to the uninformed. When someone says the Riverton Raiders are playing a double-header at Peck Field every baseball fan knows where the diamond is located. But how many understand the incredible contribution the late Roy Peck made to Riverton athletics and baseball in particular?
The same is true when a concert takes place a half-mile to the southwest at the Peck Center.
Yes, it’s a fabulous auditorium with state-of-the-art lighting and sound, but the memory of the great Robert Peck who envisioned Central Wyoming College over half a century ago is fading.
Soon football, track, and basketball fans won’t remember who Harold Bailey, Alfred Redman, and Bob Carey were, and what they contributed to Shoshoni, Wyoming Indian, and Lander Valley High School.
I was guilty of this as a college student.
One of my favorite places on campus during my final two years was atop Coe Library located at the center of the campus, the Grace Raymond Hebard Room.
I read her name dozens of times as I entered this inner sanctum of historical research. We just called it the Hebard Room, without regard for the strides its benefactor had made especially in women’s rights in our far right, conservative state.
Hebard was arguably a greater leader in women’s rights than the more familiar Nellie Tayloe Ross, (how many youngsters even know Ross was our only female governor?)
Hebard had a PhD in history, earned in 1894, she fought the biased, bastion of male dominance her entire career. Her efforts were finally recognized when they named the University of Wyoming Archives after her.
Those archives were why I was on the top floor of the library so many times.
My favorite professor, Dr. E.B Long, was named the director of the archives by the university. He held that title since they didn’t know what to do with old E.B.
Long was a junior at Northwestern University in 1943, when he decided to quit school and become a war correspondent. An avid cross-country skier he joined the 10th Mountain Division in the Italian Campaign as a correspondent.
As he often joked to me and other kids in his classes, “I don’t have a bachelor’s degree, but I have a dozen honorary doctorates, they don’t know what to do with me.”
Long was a fascinating lecturer, a great storyteller, and a fabulous mentor. I sometimes just dropped by to see him in the evenings and talk about “Our War” as he described our mutual fascination with the American Civil War.
In one of his seminars, I was writing a paper on the Confederate gunboat Arkansas, operating briefly late in the war on the Yazoo River. There wasn’t much information in the general circulation at Coe Library, and research was actually that, not just a mouse click and a phrase typed into a Google search bar.
He suggested the Hebard Room.
During the day you could ask for access and sign in. A library aide would escort you to the room. When you were finished you had to sign out. That wasn’t a problem, but it was only open from 8 am to 5 pm. I’ve always done my best research late at night or early in the morning. My best results come between 10 pm and 5 am.
As a 20-something it was the 10 pm to 1 am time slot, now I find it more along the lines of 4 am to 7 am.
In one of my visits with E.B., I expressed the time limits being a problem. It wasn’t a problem for long. He said, “I have a spare key, just lock up when you’re finished.”
“Perfect,” I thought. I rolled in one night just a little after 9 pm, opened the room, and started digging through old newspapers, original manuscripts, and diaries. Great stuff.
A security guard came in an hour or so later and asked what I was doing.
When I explained that Dr. Long had given me a key, his demeanor changed. “What are you working on,” he asked.
I explained about the CSS Arkansas and we exchanged a few stories on local history in Fremont County on my end, and Crook where he had grown up long ago.
I progressed to a research paper the following year on the Wyoming Central Irrigation Company. For those who don’t know about it, it was the scandal-ridden, corrupt agency that started the Midvale Irrigation District in the early 20th century.
The archives, plus BLM and Bureau of Reclamation records in Riverton and what remained of the tribal records at Ft. Washakie (after a fire in 1938) provided all the information I needed.
Jump ahead four decades and I’m back at original research. The stories I’m writing on this platform about country stores, veterans, and #lookback features offer me another chance to interview individuals for first-hand narratives, dig through microfilm, dust off old, long out of print, books, and explore newspaper archives for information.
There is no comparison between finding a tidbit of information on the back of a photograph from someone’s family album or a snippet of script on the inside page of a book to modern “research” via mouse click.
You often hear “experts” claim they’ve done their research because they did a perfunctory search on Google. That’s an insulting joke in comparison to true research, yet it surrounds us today.
The “medical” experts in the anti-vaccination crowd and the other true believers in a cause quickly resort to easily dispelled conspiracy theories when their “research” is dashed against the rocks of expert evidence. It doesn’t matter to the fanatics, conspiracy is all they care about, but it matters to me.
Digging (literally in a few cases) up information on defunct stores, events, trails, and highways that once existed is exhilarating. No, it’s not easy, if it was, everyone would do it rather than just regurgitate their favorite biased online website.
E.B. started me on the path.
In that first term paper, I wrote 18 old-style double-spaced, cited, formatted pages on the Arkansas.
He gave me a C+ and offered me a chance to rewrite it.
My unforgivable error came in referring to the CSS Arkansas as a ship. E.B. circled every reference to ship in the paper, and on the final page wrote, “A ship sails on the ocean, a boat sails on fresh water.”
The Arkansas was sunk soon after it set out onto the Mississippi from the Yazoo, overwhelmed by sheer numbers of Union gunboats.
I took the good professor up on his offer and retyped the entire 18 pages on an IBM Selectric (the one with the white correction ribbon option) in an office in the Student Union and dutifully changed ship to boat 13 times. The second try was an A.
The old boy passed away in 1981, but I can still hear his voice and taste his wife Barbara’s chocolate chip cookies she always offered every time I dropped in.
Modern digital research has its place, as does distance education but you’re fooling yourself if you think if offers even a fraction of true academic interaction between student and professor or the thrill that comes with the hard work of real research.