He was born with the proverbial “silver spoon” in his mouth, the eldest of three children born to Dr. William Thompson Okie and Mary Getrude Thompson Okie. John Brognard Okie had big shoes to fill. His father, Dr. Okie, graduated from the Philadelphia School of Medicine in 1862, at 21 years of age, and was promptly commissioned as a surgeon on the Regular Army Medical Staff of the Army of the Potomac. He served from February 1862 to June 29, 1865.
Okie was named after his paternal grandfather, John Brognard Okie. He preferred to be called J.B. rather than his full name.
Born in 1864, J.B. left home at 17, taking the Union Pacific to Rawlins, Wyoming, where he worked one season as a cowboy. He returned to Washington, D.C., in 1882,and talked his mother into loaning him $4,500.
On his return to Wyoming in November 1882, he used the loan to purchase 1,000 ewes, 16 rams, a couple of teams of horses, and a wagon. J.B. and Mary Gertrude agreed to split the profits; she provided the capital, and he provided the labor.
J.B. saw tremendous potential in the Wyoming Territory, quickly realizing the big money was in sheep, not cattle, on arid, sagebrush-covered hills that made up much of the state. Isolated streams and rivers were havens for sheep ranches, and J.B. found water and grazing along Beaver Creek, the Sweetwater River, and Badwater Creek, all water sources that flow year-round.
The only drawback to his money-making scheme was his inability to manage sheep.
He spent the first winter on Beaver Creek, west of present-day Sweetwater Station, and the future town of Hailey, owned by Ira Signor.
He overgrazed the native grass along Beaver Creek, ruining the pasture and shorting his ewes on feed. A blizzard hit, and J.B. lost half of his herd.
J.B. was a quick study; he knew his limitations, so he joined with another sheep rancher and worked as a herder for $40 a month, learning the trade of sheep ranching. He sold property he owned in Washington, D.C. for $300 and invested it in more sheep.
He moved to Badwater Creek in 1883, and the following year, Fremont County was formed from Sweetwater County.
In 1884, he built a home on the Badwater at the future site of Lost Cabin, a town named for a legend of gold hidden in a lost cabin by prospectors who were killed in an “Indian raid” sometime in the 1860s. No one has ever found the cabin or the gold, but the legend persists.
Though strained at times, his business agreement with his mother was fulfilled in 1885, just after J.B. turned 21. He’d made enough profit to pay off the $4,500 he’d borrowed from his mother.
The timing was fortuitous because the following year brought disaster to cattle and sheep ranchers alike across the Great Plains and in the foothills of the Rockies.
The winter of 1886-87 was nothing any of the settlers had seen before, only the winter of 1949 rivals it in Wyoming history.
Snow came early, and with it, weeks on end of 20 to 40 below zero temperatures. Vast herds of open-range cattle and sheep died.
Only a quarter of Okie’s sheep lasted until spring.
A bright spot to the end of a disastrous winter came in the spring of 1887, when J.B. was on a trip to Rawlins to catch a train. He met Jeanette Anderson, a 20-year-old daughter of Swedish immigrants.
After a brief meeting in Rawlins, they wrote to each other the entire summer and married in the fall. J.B. brought Jeanette to Lost Cabin.
Jeanette quickly learned the business of raising sheep. She learned to shear, often cooked for the entire crew of hired men, and served as a mom to the younger workers and a nurse to injured men.
Their family grew quickly, and eventually they had eight children, seven of whom lived to adulthood. J.B. then built a larger cabin on Badwater Creek.
The Badwater Country was good to J.B. Okie; by 1891, his herd had grown to 12,000, and he was one of the leading sheepmen in the state.
In 1893, he formed the Big Horn Sheep Company in the soon-to-be-booming oil town of Casper. He expanded into the mercantile business at the same time, purchasing the Smith Mercantile Company and renaming it the Casper Mercantile Company. Retail stores would become a major part of the Okie empire. He hired his younger brother, Fred, to run the store.
In 1895, he opened another store, the Big Horn Sheep Company Mercantile Store in Lost Cabin.
His stores soon expanded to Arminto, Moneta, Lysite, Kaycee, and Shoshoni. Each of these small towns was a hub for raising sheep.
Tragedy struck the Okie family in 1902 when their four-year-old son, Paul, died of diphtheria.
Okie built stores and shipping facilities at Arminto, Moneta, and Shoshoni on the Chicago North Western Railroad, opening each of them in 1906 as the railroad headed west from Casper to Lander.
J.B. trailed his sheep to Arminto and Moneta from his range along the Badwater. At these railheads, the sheep were dipped to prevent scabies, shorn, and the market lambs were shipped east to Omaha and Chicago.
Okie was well-liked by his many employees and respected as a businessman as far east as the Nebraska border, but he had a dark side, especially when it came to women.
In 1904, he met Clarice Lovett, a woman from the Wind River Mountaineer newspaper, printed in Lander, described as the most beautiful woman in Wyoming. J.B. was smitten.
In 1906, Okie purchased a “Great Smith,” considered to be the first automobile in Fremont County.
J.B. was moonstruck. He divorced Jeanette, to the disgust of their seven children in 1907. In the same year, Clarice divorced her husband Herbert Lovett in Cheyenne. J.B. and Clarice were married the following day.
Clarice was 24 years younger than J.B., 19 years younger than Jeanette, and only 21 when they were married. The rumors, gossip, and associated scandal spread across the state, but J.B. didn’t care; he had the most beautiful woman in Wyoming.
In 1907, he opened a store at Lost Cabin. It was a huge hit, and the most profitable enterprise aside from sheep that Okie operated.
Until he opened the store, people around Wyoming referred to the Badwater area as just that, Badwater. Some with a knowledge of the sheep industry called it Okie’s Ranch; it wasn’t until the store opened that Lost Cabin became the official name of the town and adjoining post office.
The store did a brisk business from the onset. A traveler commented to Okie, “The store looks to be a gold mine.”
The comment prompted J.B. to think of the legendary gold hidden somewhere in the “Lost Cabin,” and the name stuck.
Before the arrival of the two railroads, shipping costs were astronomical. Ranchers and farmers had the choice of taking a buckboard, and up to a week to travel to Casper or Rawlins to get supplies, or they could pay higher prices at one of Okie’s stores.
Okie stocked merchandise suited to agriculture and to supplying the wives and families of the men with food, supplies, and sometimes a few frivolous items.
Sewing machines, a recent invention, were popular, and J.B. carried all types of cloth for farm women to fashion tablecloths, curtains, and clothes.
He carried women’s hats, paying close attention to the ads in regional newspapers in ordering the latest styles.
Like every thriving general store in America, J.B. opened lines of credit. His customers usually carried debt until shearing, sale, or harvest, then paid Okie in full.
J.B.’s standard interest rate was 12%. A high rate in the 21st century, aside from the usury of credit card companies, but the going rate was as high as 40% in Casper, with the average around 20%.
In 1913, another railroad, the Chicago Quincy and Burlington, was inching down the Wind River Canyon from Billings and moving west from Orin Junction towards the tiny rail town of Bonneville, three miles north of Shoshoni.
Okie gambled, and for once in his life, lost in guessing the railroad was going through Lost Cabin. It went a few miles north, to Lysite. The line was completed in 1914.
Not to be deterred, he bought the townsite and moved his store from Lost Cabin to Lysite.
J.B. was a businessman, but he had a fanciful side, his few detractors would call it frivolous.
He had big plans for his town of Lost Cabin. Perhaps the biggest was the “Big Teepee” as local Native Americans called the Okie Mansion. Nothing like it had ever been built in Fremont County before; it rivaled the biggest plantation houses that were once the center of society in the pre-Civil War American South.
His first wife, Jeanette, worked like a man, contributing to Okie’s fortune and bearing eight children; his second wife, the term today would be “Trophy Wife.” Though Jeanette toured the states and Europe with J.B., Clarice never experienced the drudgery Jeanette endured.
Clarice was treated like a queen, and J.B. routinely took on grand vacations, the first just a few months after they were married in November 1908.
Okie met his daughter, Saint Clair, in Cheyenne with his new bride, and the party of three boarded the Overland Limited Express on the first leg of a trip around the world. They traveled to Annapolis, where J.B.’s son Jack was a cadet at the United States Naval Academy, then boarded a steamer on December 2, headed for Naples, Italy. They toured the Mediterranean Sea, then passed through the Suez Canal.
Their trip took them to Bombay, India, with stops at other ports in India. They spent two months at their next destination, China, using a first-class, European-style hotel in Peking as their launching point.
After extensively touring inland China, they spent a week in Japan, then took another steamer to Honolulu before arriving in San Francisco and boarding a Union Pacific Express back to Cheyenne. They then took the Chicago North Western to Moneta and returned home.
In 1915, they boarded a Chicago Quincy and Burlington passenger train at Bonneville and headed to Seattle for another trip to Japan. This time to witness the coronation of Emperor Taisho and Empress Teimei of Japan. Taisho, also known as Mikado, was crowned emperor in a ceremony in Kyoto.
The trip and invitation to the elaborate ceremony were arranged by Wyoming Representative Frank Mondell, a personal friend of Okie’s.
As the song says, “When you’re in love with a beautiful woman you look for lies.” J.B. was a jealous man. At an event at his Lost Cabin dance hall in 1921, he thought Clarice was paying too much attention to another man. J.B. was furious and moved out of the home. Clarice tried to reconcile, but he’d have none of it and divorced her.
The divorce was a surprise to the people of Fremont County.
Earlier in 1919, a drought threatened grazing across Wyoming. Rather than lose his herd, Okie shipped 30,000 sheep to Sonora, Mexico, to graze. It was there that he met future Mexican president Pascual Ortiz Rubio. He met Rubio’s daughter, Leonor Ortiz Mustache, there, and the couple were married. They had four children: Juan Okie Ortiz, Maria del Pilar Okie Ortiz, Justina Okie Ortiz, and Gustavo Okie Ortiz. This brought J.B. Okie’s total of offspring to a dozen.
Leonor and the children remained in Mexico while Okie traveled back to Lost Cabin for extended periods.
Ever the optimistic entrepreneur, J.B. purchased a chain of six Piggly Wiggly grocery stores in Mexico. They were incredibly successful, more than profitable enough to offset the crash in sheep and wool prices after the end of World War I.
His plans for Lost Cabin were ahead of their time. Considered eccentric in his later years, Okie brought many unique things to the tiny community on Badwater Creek.
He built a runway, really just an airstrip, but locals often referred to it as Okie International Airport.
Okie brought electricity in a diesel generator and phone service to the area in the late 1910s, a revolutionary change, found only in larger towns and cities at the time.
His dance floor was very popular and showed silent, black-and-white films when Okie could arrange their delivery. Roller skating was a fad in the 1920s, and Okie accommodated that into his holdings as well.
The electrical plant had a dual purpose, yes, it provided light to his hotel, store, and residence, and a few electric bulbs to his neighbors, but it revolutionized sheep shearing with the first electrical shears in operation at Lost Cabin.
These were all new ideas that improved the lives of rural Fremont County residents, but his most lavish design was an aviary and botanical garden where he housed macaws, birds of paradise, cockatoos, and other exotic jungle species in a lavish, semi-tropical combination greenhouse/aviary.
It was the talk of the West. It’s not clear if he ever harvested oranges, lemons, or bananas at Lost Cabin, but it wasn’t from lack of trying.
In more conventional terms, he opened a coal mine on a seam nearby, built a sawmill, a water system, and one of the first municipal sewer systems in Fremont County.
Okie’s final years were a bit scandalous. It was claimed he had other children by several different women in Mexico and that many of his land holdings had been taken with fraudulent claims. Claims made by employees, then signed over to Okie. It was common practice among ranchers and big farmers in the early 20th century, but J.B. Okie was an easy target.
On a crisp November afternoon in 1930, J.B. went hunting with his friend R.P. Pruitt on a large pond near Lost Cabin. J.B. slipped on the muddy bank and slid into the water. This was a deep pond, 40 feet deep in the middle. He was wearing a heavy canvas hunting jacket, heavy boots, and several layers of clothing. He couldn’t swim, and Pruitt watched helplessly as his boss and friend disappeared under the water, never to surface.
Okie workers had to drain the pond to recover his body.
It was the end of an era in Lost Cabin, Lysite, and Shoshoni, but Okie’s influence reached as far east as Van Tassel on the Nebraska Border, into Colorado, and internationally with his vast business connections.