She was the belle of the valley. The charming, beautiful, talented daughter of William T. Judkins. Lenore was renowned for her singing voice, her acting abilities and her innocent, natural beauty. She attended Baylor University before graduating with a teaching degree from the University of Wyoming in May of 1918.
She signed a teaching contract with the tiny Crosby School, near the town of Lenore, named in her honor by her father in 1906. She traveled back to Riverton for the Thanksgiving break after teaching the young children of the Crosby School for almost three months.
Tragically, she never returned to her classroom. Lenore fell ill and died in just five days after contracting the Spanish Flu. She was one of an estimated 50,000,000 victims that fell to the worst pandemic in human history.
The Riverton Chronicle edition on December 13, 1918, said it all.
MISS LENORE JUDKINGS WAS LAID TO REST THURSDAY AFTERNOON
On Thanksgiving event, bright, full of life and vigor, mixing among her friends in her usual manner, then on last Friday evening was whispered from one to another on the streets of Riverton the sad and shocking news, “Lenore Judkins is dead.”
It was hardly believable. But few of her friends had ever heard that she was ill. She attended the Thanksgiving dance at Lawer Hall on the evening of November 28th, and the following morning had a sore throat. Spanish Influenza and pneumonia developed, and in just five days, or at six o’clock on the evening of Friday Dec. 3rd, her soul had taken flight, and Lenore Judkins was no more.
There was no other young lady more esteemed in the community than Lenore Judkins. She was loved by all who knew her. Bright, cheerful, always the same amiable and friendly, approachable and lovable Lenore. The news was a shock indeed, and there were none who heard it that did not sincerely and deeply mourn her death.
Lenore’s father was one of the first to buy a homestead on the newly created parcel of land purchased from the Shoshone Tribe in 1906 on land north of the Wind River. He settled on a bend in the Wind River in the western portion of the settlement area.
William Judkins stayed at his Lenore homestead for just two years before selling it to Frank Forney and moving to Riverton.
Judkins owned and operated the Crow Creek Trading Company, a successful rural store supplying the other early homesteaders of the area.
He sold his store, stock, merchandise and auxiliary buildings to Forney on February 8, 1908.
Judkins went on to become the Wyoming Game Warden, a title that is now changed to Director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
Forney owned the store and surrounding property for just a few years, before Shoshoni entrepreneur Charles H. King took notice of the opportunity it offered.
King was the epitome of a mover and shaker in the early days of Fremont County.
The grandfather of future president Gerald Ford, King opened the First National Bank of Shoshoni in the present brick building that was once the Yellowstone Drug Store, ran a lumber yard, supplied the troops at Ft. Washakie with provisions, had a contract for provisions on the newly arrived Chicago North Western Railroad and ran thousands of sheep on land throughout Fremont County.
King was a big-time player in Fremont County, a business partner with J.A. Delfelder, and Dr. Albert B. Tonkin in the Riverton State Bank and a silent partner with Dr. Frank Welty, Eugene Amoretti and W.P Nobel in endeavors across the county.
He was engrained in the business of the rapidly growing agricultural, mining and oil industry in Fremont County, but his reach extended his grasp when it came to the townsite of Lenore.
King had a tendency to overuse the court system in filing foreclosures on homesteaders across the county, and property owners in Shoshoni, Riverton and Lander.
His reputation limited his effectiveness as a land broker.
In December 1906, King filed a lawsuit against the widow of E.J. Walsh, the founder of the Pioneer Townsite Company that sold lots in the growing little town of Shoshoni. King’s litigious nature knew no bounds.
In 1915, King purchased Lenore from Forney and renamed the townsite King. It wasn’t a great move on his part since his well-known eagerness to foreclose on landowners preceded his development of King.
Also in 1915, he began advertising property at King, the former Lenore in western Fremont County. He advertised in the Wyoming State Journal, the Copper Mountain Miner, the Lander Clipper, the Wind River Mountaineer and the Riverton Review.
His media blitz was a century ahead of its time, and he was able to garner interest from prospective clients.
George Masterson built the first house in Lenore in the fall of 1915 as reported in a December 3, 1915, edition of the Wyoming State Journal.
One of those prospective clients was Frederick “Roughlock” Smith.
Smith came to Crowheart just after World War I. The nickname “Roughlock” came in reference to his abundant white hair.
Smith was a well-educated man, a rarity in the wild days of the early 20th century in the Upper Wind River Basin.
Smith and his wife brought three adult sons with them, all World War I veterans. Harry, Charles, and Willis joined their parents in ranching along the Wind River. Roughlock purchased grazing land on three ranches from J.K. Hill near the highway and Crowheart Butte.
Smith also owned land near Lenore. He purchased sections from C.H. King’s son Leslie, owner of the Riverton Lumber Company. Charles King’s son Leslie was future president Gerald Ford’s biological father.
The family operated the store at Lenore, primarily for the family and neighbors in 1919 along the main highway from Riverton and Lander to Yellowstone. That highway was gravel west of Riverton to Lenore, but from there to Dubois was just dirt. The final 25 miles from Lenore to Dubois was often impassable due to wet, muddy conditions.
“The Lenore Store was the foundation of their careers,” Smith’s great-grandson Steve Peck said.
Smith depended on highway traffic to keep the store profitable, and the hope for everyone in the upper country was for a railroad to extend from Shoshoni.
The “highway” was one in name only before the construction of US Highway 26/789 in the early 1930s. Wyoming Highway 87 West was a gravel road leading west from Riverton to Lenore, and from there it was just a two-track road across the prairie into Dubois.
The Smith brothers ran the Lenore Store and the Willow Creek Station at a time when getting supplies was a challenge. When Roughlock and his sons came to Riverton for supplies it almost always made the social pages of the local newspapers. Their truck often broke down on the trip and that made local news as well.
Part of King’s marketing strategy was a constant litany of a trunk line of the Chicago North Western Railroad extending from Shoshoni, through the growing agricultural town of Pavillion, through Lenore and on to Dubois and possibly the tourist Meccas of Jackson Hole and Moran Junction, the gateway to Yellowstone National Park.
King repeatedly leaked rumors to local newspapers that officials from the Chicago North Western was about to build the line to Lenore. King spread the rumor that a triangular railway from Shoshoni to Lenore, then back to the Chicago North Western’s terminus at Lander was soon to arrive.
The planned “Triangular” railway would connect the line from Shoshoni to Lander with both terminals joining at Lenore. The dreamed of railroad never materialized, but the Riverton Reclamation Project did. The project diverted the Wind River below Crowheart to bring irrigation water to tens of thousands of acres of land in the area around Pavillion and Riverton.
“A lot of things changed when Diversion Dam was built,” Peck said. “The highway no longer went through Lenore and Harry, the oldest brother died. They could still graze cattle, but my grandfather’s family moved up the hill to the plateau. The Lazy Double X was higher near the present-day highway and close to the Crowheart Store.”
A lane of old cottonwood trees still grows at the site where Peck’s mother, Cordelia Smith was charged by a ram as a child.
Peck’s grandfather, Charles Smith married Sarah Ina Rogers from Chicago. The couple both had college degrees. Charles studied law at the University of Missouri. He was the middle son, born in 1895. She went by Ina Smith.
Charles was a decorated officer in World War I. He carried a scar from a German bayonet. The company cook stopped the bleeding by stuffing the wound with flour.
King’s ploy was effective, but the name King was a problem. His propensity to foreclose was well known, and when he lost several lawsuits for evicting homesteaders from his property before the lease expired the name King was a detriment, not an asset.
He changed the name of his townsite back to Lenore and hired an intercessory agent to remove himself from the prospective homesteaders.
It worked. Lenore turned into a vibrant little community with a store, hotel, saloon, school, and blacksmith shop.
One of the most popular features of the store was the icehouse. The Smiths cut ice in the subzero depths of winter from the nearby Wind River and hauled it into Lenore to a log and earth structure where they covered the large carved chunks of ice with layers of sawdust. The naturally insulated building kept the ice solid through the summer and supplied the smaller iceboxes, the precursor to modern refrigerators, to ranchers throughout the area until the winter returned the following year.
The future was bright for Lenore.
That future was dimmed a bit by the condition of the Yellowstone Highway, a highway in name only once the gravel roadbed ended at Lenore and changed to unimproved dirt until it reached Dubois 25 miles distant.
Rumors surrounded King. In a May 18, 1906, edition of the Lander Clipper it was reported that King had purchased the Welty Store in Dubois from Frank Welty. Two weeks later the Clipper printed a retraction, the purchase never happened.
Change came again when the federal government withdrew grazing rights in the area in 1938, giving the land back to the tribes.
“My grandparents, my mom, and her little sister moved to the Willow Creek Store, right across the road from the butte,” Peck said.
A driveway that makes a half-moon circle then comes back out still marks the location. In the little half-moon between the highway and where the driveway circles back, was the gas station.
King appeared in almost every edition of newspapers printed in Riverton, Lander, Shoshoni and Hudson. His actions made exciting reading for the people of Fremont County.
Lenore became such an established community that the Riverton Review newspaper, a weekly publication, had a special section devoted to just news from Lenore. It later added news from Burris and Lenore, but the effect was the same.
There were hundreds of homesteaders that depended on the Lenore Store. The now nearly vacant area of Fremont County was a burgeoning community along the banks of the Wind River.
That all changed when the new highway was constructed. After years of informal and formal complaints by residents of Lenore demanding the Wyoming Highway Department improve the roads, the department listened and the federal government intervened, building the present U.S. Highway 26/789 from Riverton to Dubois.
The highway was built four miles south of Lenore. The stores at Crowheart and Burris were able to be moved, but it was literally a bridge too far for the community of Lenore.
The railroad never materialized, and when the highway was built south of Lenore, it met the same fate as Lost Cabin did when the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad was built through Lysite, rather than the hoped for location that King contemporary John B. Oakey had established in Lost Cabin.
King didn’t help himself with his constant litigation, including a case filed against William T. Judkins back on June 12, 1908, that was dismissed by the judge with King forced to pay court costs as claimant in a frivolous lawsuit against Judkins.
With the railroad never arriving, and the highway built miles away to the south, Lenore began to die.
The final blow came when the federal government closed the area north of the Wind River and west of Bull Lake to non-native settlement. Without the tribal lands, there wasn’t enough grazing land for the sheep and cattle of the area and the ranchers either moved or shut down their operations.
The farms and ranches east of Lenore as far as Black Mountain were abandoned via the federal order and the customers at the Lenore Store disappeared.
King’s dream of a fortune garnered from brokering 200,000 acres of farm and ranch land ended.
All that remains of Lenore are a few lots owned by Lyle Alexander and Bill Sniffen.
The modern Lenore Bridge crosses the Wind River about 200 yards south of the old iron bridge across the Wind.
The townsite of Lenore is still platted but is just open brush growing alongside a bend in the Wind River. It is an undeveloped area, but upon close inspection you can still see the foundations and basements of the hotel, blacksmith shop, saloon, store and school.
Lenore was a beauty in her day, as was the town that almost made it named in her honor.
All that remains are the sounds of cottonwood trees whispering in the wind of a town that almost was.