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.
My grandfather had a third-grade education. I could have written that he “only” had a third-grade education, but that would have demeaned what he did with his life. He was born in 1907 in rural, eastern Lee County, Arkansas, and Grandpa Forrest Everett Tucker never moved far from his birthplace.
Despite quitting school in 1916, he was a successful farmer, and part-time mechanic who with my grandma Sally raised my father on just 35 acres of Arkansas bottomland. A man with a quick sense of humor. Some of my favorite memories from childhood revolve around days spent with him plowing behind a mule, picking and selling watermelons, fishing, and bird hunting on his farm.
1400 miles away, across the vastness of the Great Plains, my other grandfather, Eugene Gasser carved his way in the world as a Swiss immigrant.
Grandpa Gasser was an intelligent man, with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture when he arrived in Fremont County in 1921. Born in 1897, he was an adventurous young man, a gifted athlete, and knew horses as well as anyone I’ve ever known.
I often wondered how life must have been for 23-year-old Eugene when he left the civilized, cultured world of early 20th-century Switzerland for the wilderness that was Fremont County a century ago.
He was resourceful, dogged, and creative in a brutal landscape, among men who were devoid of culture, education, and attention beyond making a dollar or finding your next meal. That was my prejudicial thought.
I confess to a bit of arrogance when it comes to living in Fremont County. As a young man, working on farms and construction sites I noticed I had a different outlook than most of the other young guys around me. My leisure hours were spent either fishing or reading. There wasn’t much else on my agenda when I had a few free minutes.
With those pastimes, it’s easy to begin to look down on those who never cracked the cover of a book, who spent their free time chugging beer, or mindlessly watching television. I hid my opinion of these “mental midgets” as I considered them, but the arrogance was just under the surface.
It’s a very human sentiment to look down on those that you don’t understand. Appearances can be, and usually are deceiving. We’ve all been guilty of making unfounded assumptions, only to be embarrassed by those assumptions later.
In the course of researching and writing about the history of Fremont County, I’ve discovered many hidden gems. Gems in the guise of people who not only survived but made a difference in the world immediately around us.
When my grandpa Gasser arrived on the Chicago North Western train at the Riverton Depot in 1921, he had just a few clothes, a little cash, and his wits. His cousin Hans Bringolf had a job waiting for him wintering sheep on Beaver Creek, near the former settlement of Hailey, a few miles from modern-day Sweetwater Station.
Grandpa bought an 1894, octagonal barrel Winchester .44-40 rifle, a few winter clothes, and rode on horseback to his job moving 2500 sheep to water and foraging out on the windswept ridges west of Beaver Rim. His companions were a couple of sheepdogs, and a pair of horses, one to ride and one to pull the sheep wagon.
He told me he lived on beans and wild game that first year. He’d choked down the flume on the wood stove inside the wagon, put a pot of beans on, and go to work. The first couple of times they burned, sticking to the cast iron pot, but he perfected his technique as time went on.
Sheepherding in “Cow County” as we all consider Fremont County seemed strange to me as a teenager when he told me the stories of his days on the range, but upon further review (Not the kind the NFL does) his story was the same as hundreds of other young, and not so young early settlers to the region.
Sheep were king from Nowood just south of Ten Sleep to the shores of Brooks Lake to the west, Crooks Gap to the south, and near Atlantic City on the mountain.
The majority of the men doing the work were Basques, Spaniards, or Mexicans, with a sizeable group of Scots around Lost Cabin.
If your knowledge of the West comes only from Hollywood you expect shepherds to be cowardly men, preyed on by henchmen and bullies hired by rich cattlemen. In the movies, these wealthy ranchers and their hired hands were all white men, with the only minorities being “the Indians.” They were killed by the dozens with a single shot or a few passive, terrified Mexican farmers.
You couldn’t be more wrong than believing the Hollywood stereotypes.
Imagine living alone, in a subzero Wyoming winter with only the howling of the incessant wind to keep you company, in a tiny wagon with only your dogs and horses to keep you company. Wolves were a very real threat and could devastate a herd of defenseless ewes in just a few minutes. It took a brave man to face those challenges for months at a time with no relief.
At one time my youthful arrogance had me thinking I was the only construction worker, farmer or coach who had ever read Tolkien’s Trilogy, Brave New World, or the works of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and James Michener. Youth will do that to you.
I’ve just finished a book titled “Letters from Lost Cabin” that effectively skewered those youthful thoughts.
In a series of letters written by Percy Shallenberger of Lost Cabin to his business partner Thomas Cooper of Natrona County, the image of illiterate homesteaders is shattered. Between the mundane correspondence of buying, shearing, and grazing sheep, purchasing land, finding pasture, and worrying about the weather an image of two well-read, learned men appears.
They wrote of details about their business, but they also wrote about the books they were reading including classic Greek authors, poetry, and stories of times and places far removed from the arid grazing lands of Fremont and Natrona County.
They mentioned the great men of the early days of Fremont County often, referring to conversations and business deals with J.B. Okie of Lost Cabin and Lysite, Charles King of Shoshoni and John Delfelder of Riverton in much of their correspondence.
When Shallenberger retired and sold out his shares of land and livestock, he took the proceeds and fulfilled his dream of building a personal library worth $10,000. In 1910 dollars, that’s nearly $350,000 today.
Shallenberger and Cooper were contemporaries of my grandfather and a visceral connection from a century ago when Fremont County was a very different place.
Just because you’ve arrived somewhere, either physically, mentally, or emotionally, doesn’t mean you’re the first one there. The path is long and filled with those who came before us.