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.
They’re all gone now, many just a memory in a faded yearbook. Others have crumbling buildings to remind the dwindling communities they once represented of better times, times when small towns mattered.
It was called the Texas Trail Conference. I coached there at Niobrara County High School in Lusk from 1980 to 1983. In those days the Texas Trail stretched from Cheyenne north to Lusk and through Sybille Canyon to Medicine Bow, Hanna, and Saratoga in the west. It was a huge conference, the biggest in Wyoming geographically and in total number of member schools.
As big as it was in those relatively recent times, it was much larger in its heyday.
Lusk and Torrington were “big schools” that sent their junior varsity and freshman teams to compete against now defunct programs that clustered within 50 miles of U.S. Highway 85, the old Denver to Deadwood stagecoach route, that ended in Newcastle before continuing north into the Dakotas.
The Albin Wildcats were the last of the small towns that once played 6-man and 8-man football in the shadows of the Rockies on the farthest western edge of the Great Plains to feel the axe of consolidation.
The Albin girls lost the 1997 Class 1-A state championship to Southeast Goshen on a last-second shot 54-52. Ironically, the kids living north of Albin went to school in Southeast the following spring.
Southeast itself is a conglomeration of three schools that were once bitter rivals in Yoder, Veteran, and Huntley.
I watched the Huntley Cardinals, with their strange “West Pointer” haircuts, consisting of bangs with a shaved head, dismantle arguably the best Dubois Rams team to ever take the floor in opening round state tournament action at Half-Acre Gym in Laramie way back in 1973.
The Cardinals, along with their Goshen County rivals the Veteran Eagles and the Goshen Hole Spartans were all victims of the consolidation movement of the late 1960s and ’70s that shut down schools across the state and bused students to a central location. Pavillion and Morton fell victim to the same trend 55 years ago when Wind River was created.
The southeastern counties of Wyoming fell hard to consolidation, a movement that has thankfully escaped Fremont County aside from Jeffrey City, Hudson, and the Panthers and Broncs of Pavillion and Morton.
It hit the Big Horn Basin hard, with Riverside a combination of Basin and Manderson, and Rocky Mountain the consolidation of the Deaver-Frannie Trojans, Cowley Jaguars and Byron Eagles.
The Carpenter Coyotes, Hawk Springs Hawks, and Lagrange Longhorns all became part of Burns as did the Hillsdale Pioneers. Burns fluctuates between being the largest Class 2-A school or the smallest Class 3-A during every two-year enrollment cycle. You get an idea of how small these schools must have been to combine five different districts and still barely have 180 high school students.
Hillsdale still has a remembrance in the Burns FFA Chapter that still bears the name “Burns-Hillsdale.”
Lagrange closed in 1992, but not before a battle with the unified school board. Two ranchers, with a lot of money invested in Torrington banks, had children in high school when consolidating Lagrange with neighboring districts in Torrington and Southeast Goshen was first presented. After the vote to consolidate passed, the ranchers moved all of their accounts from Torrington banks to nearby Scottsbluff, Nebraska. With a couple of Torrington bankers on the board, an emergency meeting soon followed, and consolidation was delayed until the youngest children of those two families graduated from Lagrange. As they often say in small towns, truth is stranger than fiction and you just can’t make this stuff up.
Just to the west of all that Goshen and Laramie County consolidation, the same trend was taking place in Platte County.
Though it is declining in enrollment now, Wheatland was one of the big schools back in the 50s and 60s that routinely played Cheyenne and Casper in football and basketball.
Guernsey had a long tradition as the Longhorns, but in the fall of 1963 joined with the Sunrise Miners to form Guernsey-Sunrise, the home of the Vikings.
In 1970 the Ft. Laramie Pioneers packed the trunk for a final time and began riding the bus 20 miles east to Lingle to go to high school. The Lingle-Ft. Laramie Doggers are a familiar face in Class 1-A athletics.
In 1980 I took my first coaching position at Lusk. Though I had a few paychecks with Niobrara County School District #1 on them, I never thought what it might actually mean. The first football game I coached in August of that year was against Medicine Bow. We routed the Wranglers 44-8 that evening and in 1998, Medicine Bow closed for good, joining with Hanna to form the state’s longest high school name, the Hanna-Elk Mountain-Medicine Bow Miners.
At the homecoming game a few weeks later, we came out of the locker room to a giant “N” wrapped in burlap and soaked in diesel, blazing away in the east end zone.
I asked the other assistant coach what the N was for. He replied, “We’re Niobrara County, not Lusk, Don’t ask that around somebody from Manville or you’ll get an ear full.”
The Manville Panthers played their final games in 1953. They were alive and well in the memories of a handful of fans that night 27 years later and remain so today.
That’s how it is in small towns.
Chugwater and Glendo are among the smallest schools in all of Wyoming. Some years Glendo has just five high school students. Despite the miniscule enrollments the towns that house these tiny educational bastions still cling to life with restaurants, convenience stores, bars, and churches.
You won’t find much of that in the towns that once held those small schools in the 50s, 60’s, and early 70’s. What you will find is a gas station/convenience store, maybe an isolated rural bar and crumbling old buildings with sun lightened facades.
Take a look at the difference between Byron and Cowley after the new Rocky Mountain High School was built in Cowley. New businesses line Highway 310 in the historic little town just six miles west of Lovell. Friends in the Basin tell me of the blooming economy, and even recommend new restaurants if we’re on the way north to Billings.
As schools go, so go small towns. The quickest way to kill Pavillion, Shoshoni, Burlington, Cowley, and dozens of other little towns is to bus their kids to a bigger school nearby.
Once they’re gone, they never come back.