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.
It was the summer of 1981. My friend Dan Anderson was the assistant wrestling coach at Niobrara County High School in Lusk.
Most of the male teachers had summer businesses of their own. Roofers, painters, ranchers, and golf pros all found ways to supplement a teacher’s salary.
Dan and I picked up jobs building decks, awnings, sheds, garages, and painting. There is a house on the east side of Main Street in Lusk, between the Carnegie Library and the former Lusk High School building, now home to the Elk’s Club. It was a tall one-story frame house badly in need of a paint job. The white paint was peeling. The blue trim was faded, aside from a few spots under the eaves, and badly in need of a few days of scraping and primer before painting.
We approached the couple who owned it one afternoon and offered them a bid to fix up their home.
“Thanks, but we’re planning to paint it ourselves this summer,” the man said.
As Sue and I walked north on Main Street last Saturday evening from the Best Western Pioneer, owned by her high school friends, Tom and Valerie Wasserburger, we passed the house. It hadn’t been touched since that afternoon when Dan and I stopped by. In the interim, a scant 45 years had transpired.
I thought to myself: It wasn’t just time that had passed, but an entire lifetime of experiences that filled the space between those two moments.
I only taught and coached in Lusk for three years, from 1980 to 1983, but I’m still inexplicably drawn back to the biggest town in Niobrara County, around 1500 people at the last census.
We were in town for a trip down memory lane, albeit one well beyond our lifespans. There was a historical event put on by the Explore Niobrara historical society scheduled for Sunday afternoon in the slightly smaller community of Van Tassell (population 22 in the 2020 census), and we were planning to attend.
Yes, I’m a history junkie. I read hundreds of history books as a kid, I majored in the Civil War and American West at the University of Wyoming, and I taught it at the high school and college level for the better part of three decades.
My latest project is centered on Lusk, and the creation of it and a dozen other towns from 1886 to 1906, when the railroad came west through central Wyoming.
If you’re old enough to remember, you can probably still hear the train whistle as it rolled through Riverton.
All that’s left is the Rails to Trails Bike Path that stretches from the Wind River to Shoshoni. If you look closely while you’re on it, you can still see railroad ties lying along the trail in spots, vestiges of the technology at the turn of the 20th century that transformed Fremont County.
My view of the history of Niobrara County and history in general has matured over the decades since I listened to Dr. Long, Dr. Iverson, and Dr. Roribaugh at the University of Wyoming. They provided a foundation, but it took me a while to reach an understanding of what they were saying behind the lecture notes.
I arrived in Lusk as a 23-year-old first-year teacher. The rigors of that first year of teaching aren’t expressed much. Suffice it to say the learning curve is nearly vertical. The university never prepares you for what’s waiting once the bell rings, the door closes, and it’s just you and 20 to 40 kids.
I was 23, single, and while I’d been on my own as a college student, I didn’t know anyone in Lusk at first. This was real life.
My world revolved around prepping for class, coaching football, then basketball and track, hunting deer, antelope, geese, turkeys, and pheasants, and dates with a few local gals. After the wide variety of girls in Laramie, the hunting for female companionship was a bit sparse in Lusk. That is, until May of 1981, when the girl of my dreams walked into my life.
In the second summer, 1982, after Sue and I were married in June, Dan found a job for us painting the office buildings at the C&H Refinery on U.S. Highway 20 just as you enter Lusk from the west.
We painted the wood and stucco building a pale orange. That was the easy part. We spent an afternoon scrubbing paint droplets off a gal’s brand new 1982 Buick after the wind caught the overspray from our air-powered paint sprayer, dusting her car. Thankfully, it came off, or the paint job on the car would have been more than we made on the refinery building.
I found the refinery interesting at the time, but just mildly.
It wasn’t until last week, when I was working on a chapter on Manville, that I found the significance of the C&H and the connection between Lusk and the 1920s oil boom in Lance Creek. It was substantial.
Now the C&H has a historical sign in front of it made by the State of Wyoming. It’s a relic. (No jokes please, I’m one as well.)
That final summer before we moved to Riverton in August 1983, Sue was my painting partner. We painted a large barn on the Harry Baars Ranch south of Lusk, a couple of picket fences near our rented house on Barrett Drive in Lusk, and our final project, a warehouse owned by my friend, Bud Owens, the head custodian at the high school.
As I walked by Bud’s warehouse early Sunday morning, it was faded, peeling, and in great disrepair with patches of shingles missing and a few broken windows. The building was fading away.
Bud passed a few years ago, but once again in my research, his name popped up in a few places. He was a World War II veteran, and he drove the school bus at Node back in the late 1930s as a young man.
We talked often, but he never mentioned the army or growing up around Node.
The past isn’t crumbling everywhere. There were still a dozen or so houses we worked on that looked nearly as new as when they’d been built in the 1920s, 30s, or 40s. A testament to the people of Niobrara County.
The gathering of like-minded people at Van Tassell, a hundred or so, was another reassurance that the past will remain alive in the smallest county seat, in the smallest county, in the smallest state.
Our friends Jim and Debbie Meng were there. I’ve known Jim since my days in Lusk. Last summer, he took me across his property at Redbird, showing me where the Cheyenne – Deadwood Trail crossed a century-and-a-half ago. I could almost hear the teamsters driving the reluctant mules up the sides of some of the draws. History is alive there.
If the hardworking people of Niobrara County can celebrate their past with such pride and dedication, it can be done anywhere.