(Riverton, WY) – Randy Tucker has spent the better part of his life chasing stories across Wyoming. You might know his stories from the sidelines of the football field in Riverton, his opinion pieces on County 10 and the Ranger, or maybe you had him as your social studies teacher. Next week, Tucker will be out in Fremont County promoting his new book titled “Rails to Trails Along the Sweetwater,” which follows the old stage routes and long forgotten stations between Rawlins and Fort Washakie.
“I just wanted people to get a sense of what this place was like before we got modern highways, the internet, and electric lights,” said Tucker. “Maybe a special appreciation for how Native Americans lived here. Thirty below zero with a forty-mile-an-hour wind, nothing but a little lodge fire with teepee poles and buffalo robes to keep you warm — and they lived like kings.”
Tucker got his start in writing long before making this book came across his mind. In 1979, while a student at the University of Wyoming, he wrote a guest editorial for the alumni magazine about Wyoming’s new drinking age law.
“They were changing the drinking age from 19 to 21,” he said. “The gist of it was you could be drafted at 19 and guys have to sign up for the draft at 18, you’re old enough to drink a beer. That’s what I said anyway. They still passed it, but it was in Alum News and that was my first time I’d been published in something widespread, because the Alum News was pretty popular back then.”
His first paid gig came a few years later in Lusk, where he’d come to teach and coach.
“They needed a stringer for the Lusk Herald to cover wrestling,” said Tucker. “So, I wrote wrestling for the three years I was there at the mighty Lusk Herald.”
In 1984, he moved to Riverton, where he picked up work as a stringer at The Ranger, covering basketball at the smaller schools in Fremont County.
“Steve (Peck) had an opening for a stringer for small-school basketball, so I covered that season,” said Tucker. “It was Steve, Bob (Peck), and Dave Perry, who I’d gone to college with, and Chad Baldwin. We had a great crew.”
The Ranger saw big success around the time of Tucker’s arrival.
“They have this thing called the Deming Cup, which is the best newspaper in Wyoming,” he said. “We won it and we were going up against Jackson, Cheyenne, Sheridan, Cody. I mean, we had a really great crew.”
Back then, there was always another job in the picture. He taught social studies, coached football, basketball, and track, and later picked up a master’s degree in computer science.
“I had a BA in history and then I was going to go to law school,” he said. “I took a couple of pre-law seminars and I hated it. My dad said, you’ve always liked football and track, why don’t you coach? So, I had a history degree, turned it into a social studies education degree with coaching, and that’s how I got my start.”
He returned to school to pursue a master’s degree in Computer Science and discovered a way to apply his writing skills, publishing his first book, titled ‘Repairing the Apple 2E Computer.‘
“I sold like 75 copies,” said Tucker with a grin on his face. “That was back in the late 80’s when Apple was becoming a thing.”
But history has always pulled at him. He studied history for his undergrad degree, focusing on the Civil War and the history of the American West. “You only needed 36 credit hours, but I was so into that stuff I ended up with 55 by the time I was done,” said Tucker.
The idea for Rails to Trails Along the Sweetwater came from close to home. Growing up, he’d heard stories about his grandfather’s first job after immigrating from Switzerland after World War I.
“My grandpa used to talk about this little town called Hailey all of the time, and I thought ‘what’s he talking about?’” said Tucker. “Turns out Hailey was a town near Sweetwater Station, and that’s where he got his first job herding sheep in 1921.”
His mother saved letters his grandfather had written to relatives back in Switzerland and transcribed them from German into English.
“He was always writing about his cousin Hans,” said Tucker. “Turns out, later on, I was doing a story on John Bringolf, who’s my son’s neighbor. He mentioned his grandpa, Hans Bringolf. I said, ‘My grandpa wrote letters about his cousin Hans who lived in Hailey.’ Turns out John and I are second cousins. Our grandpas were first cousins.”
This discovery opened a previously unknown door for Tucker’s story. “Just the scope of realizing that, it’s pretty fun,” he said. “Just the kind of history you can pull out of here. It’s really cool.”
Tucker began tracing the old settlements along the Sweetwater. He found another tiny place after Hailey called Meyersville.
“I heard somebody mention Rongis, which is Signor spelled backwards,” he said. “Rongis was a stage station real close to where Jeffery City is now. It was full of outlaws and drunks. They definitely had some shootings there.”
The more Randy dug through old newspaper archives, the more the forgotten route came to life.
“In 1878 the U.S. government entertained another contract,” said Tucker. “They were tired of going from Green River all the way over South Pass. Once you got to South Pass, you had to pull up through Red Canyon and come down to Lander. It was a long route. So, they put out bids for a new one, and the original route followed what’s now the highway, going from Rawlins to Jeffrey City, but that was too long, so they cut across Crook’s Gap.”
Tucker grinned as he recalled each stage stop by memory.
“It started at Rawlins. Belle Springs, Bull Springs, Lost Soldier, those were the first stations, all about fifteen to twenty miles apart,” he said. “Then Crook’s Gap, Rongis, Myersville, Hailey, Derby, Lander, and Fort Washakie.”
He writes about small human moments to bring the story to life, covering interactions between settlers and Native Americans working together to get the stage stops working.
“Natives would drive some of the teams because they were amazing horsemen,” said Tucker. “Driving a team of horses with reins is way different than riding bareback, and they had wrecks and guys breaking legs when they started. But they were quick studies and they figured it out quickly.”
Much of Tucker’s research for the book came from the Wyoming Newspaper Project, which has digitized newspapers, like the Rawlins Times, the Rawlins Daily News, and the Copper Mountain Miner, through 1929. He also used the local archives at the Pioneer Museum in Lander and the Riverton Museum.
One firsthand account he weaved into the story was from a settler named Isabella Bird, who’d come to Colorado and Wyoming in the 1890’s. “She wrote about sitting down to eat, and no matter how many times she waved her hand around, the meat was moving from the mass of flies on the table. The rancid smell of milk was always ever present. She said there were three- or four-inch gaps in the walls and that the snow drifted under her blankets when she slept.”
Keeping up the pace, Tucker has an audiobook version of Rails to Trails Along the Sweetwater in the works, narrated by Jack Schmidt. He’s also already working with a publisher on his next book titled On the Wyoming Wind, a 400-page collection of stories, photos, and essays from his life working in Wyoming, the Wyoming outdoors, and other western themes.
This week, Tucker will be doing two book signings, beginning with a short presentation on his work, on the 18th at the Riverton Museum from 6–7 p.m. and on the 20th at Lander’s Pioneer Museum from 6:30–7:30 p.m.