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 stage coach 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.
I was at courtside, on “Press Row”, sitting with my friend and fellow County 10 sports guy John Gabrielsen. As the tight game closed to the final minute, I said to John, “I hope these kids win.”
John, ever the cynical commentator, quipped, “Why, they won’t have a place for the trophy.”
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 the Dubois Rams in opening-round state tournament action at Half-Acre Gym in Laramie way back in 1973.
Dubois was loaded that year with John Burns, Jim Hart, Mike Hesseltine, and John Detimore, but Cardinal head coach Ron Moore and his three sons were too much for the Rams. They beat Dubois 62-57 in the Half Acre Gym at UW in a tournament delayed four days by a massive March blizzard.
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 Big Horn and Fremont Counties for most schools.
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 bank presidents 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, the 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 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.
Ironically, Medicine Bow constructed a new school just a few hundred yards from the historic Virginian Hotel, a school that never opened, never had a child run through the halls or graduate a senior.
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, Mike Hart, 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 earful.”
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.
The neighboring communities in Niobrara County, once towns with businesses, churches, and hopes for the future, have become “wide spots” in the road. Van Tassel, Lost Springs, and Keeline had basketball teams, as did Shawnee just across the county line in Converse County. A forgotten town called Iowa Center in Goshen County went 33-25 over the six years they fielded a boys basketball team in the mid-1930s. Almost every vestige has returned to the prairie grass.
In 1933, Laramie doubled up Gebo, that’s right, Gebo, the ghost town north of Thermopolis, 36-18. It was the Miners’ only appearance at the state tournament.
That’s how it is in small towns.
Chugwater and Glendo were among the smallest schools in all of Wyoming. Some years, Glendo has just five high school students; now, neither one has any. Chugwater closed and became Prairie View Community School; they occasionally have athletes at the Class 1-A state track meet.
Jeffrey City played boys’ basketball for 18 seasons and a girls’ team for 14, but the economic consequences of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island ended the Longhorns and Lady Longhorns by 1992.
The towns that housed these tiny, once 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, 60s, and early 70s. What you will find is a gas station, maybe an isolated rural bar, and crumbling old buildings with sun-lightened facades.
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.