By John Clayton

It was January 2019. I had just bundled off to my editor the manuscript for my book Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands. I was free to investigate new projects—ideally smaller ones! For example, somewhere I’d picked up the piece of trivia that famed Abstract Impressionist painter Jackson Pollock had been born in Cody, Wyo. Was there a story there?

I will always remember leaving the library at Montana State University-Billings, and starting my walk back to the car. I’d been stymied in my quest. I looked up “Wyoming” in the index of several Pollock biographies. Most confirmed the piece of trivia: he was born in Cody on January 28, 1912. A few mentioned that his family had soon moved away. But that was it.

News this week of the pope’s visit to Canada caught us off guard. We hadn’t known he was coming. When he spoke, he offered an apology the size of a continent: “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” he said, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter. “I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.” Applause and shouts of approval from a largely Native audience greeted his remarks, the New York Times reported.

Beginning in the late 19th and running through most of the 20th century, the Canadian government subsidized Indian boarding schools. Nearly all were run by religious denominations, about 70 percent of them by Roman Catholics and the rest by Protestants. The former Ermineskin Residential Indian School, now demolished, was one of the largest and was run by Catholics on Cree land south of Edmonton, Alberta. There, last Monday in a powwow ring, the pope offered his apology.

When Martha Gellhorn married Ernest Hemingway at the Cheyenne depot in November 1940, he was only a week or two divorced from his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, while Gellhorn was only 10 or 11 months back in the States from covering the war in Finland. Finland? you might ask. There was a war in Finland?

By Rebecca Hein
​Have you ever experienced a moment when the person you’re talking to doesn’t get it? For me, such an event was connected to a long, preparatory journey of awareness. It started in the early 1980s, when I was living in Wisconsin, a farming state that depends on summer rainfall. Being from Wyoming, I didn’t think much about rain, only about what pleasant weather we were having. But I gradually understood, hearing my Wisconsin neighbors talk about the drought and understanding an economic disaster was in progress.

A few years later, when regularly visiting our cabin in the Black Hills of South Dakota, I became acutely aware of the danger of forest fire and realized we could easily lose our beloved cabin.

On moving back to Wyoming in 1992, and a decade later moving to the base of Casper Mountain, I began to notice the weather patterns more than I had while living in town.

By Rebecca Hein

Gillette, Christine Scoggan. A Story Nearly Told: Histories of a Wyoming Homestead. Self-published 2020, 322 pages. $25.00 paperback. Charles and Mary Spencer, the author’s great-grand parents, moved from their farm near Traverse City, Mich., to Wyoming by train on Memorial Day 1910. There they filed on a homestead and started a ranch about seven miles west of Upton, Wyo., in Weston County. Two of their five children, along with later generations, wrote of their experiences, providing abundant information for this family saga

By Tom Rea

Some books tell their stories in blunt chronology: First this happened, then this, this and this, and finally this. Others work differently, blending events from different periods that rhyme, resonate, advance or recircle in ways they would not do if told in order. Last fall at the approach of November, Native American Heritage Month, we heard from a writer wondering if we’d like a piece on the diarist John Hunton’s experiences of the Indian Wars. We answered that we already had several articles on major events of those times, but we had next to nothing about Hunton, and would like to learn more.

1. “Individual Towels”
Sign, posted in 1868, promoting one of the best features of a hotel in Ben­ton, Wyoming Territory, now a ghost town in Carbon County. Other less exclusive establishments did not make such claims.

2. “Since man to man has been unjust
  I scarcely know what man to trust.
  I’ve trusted so many to my sorrow—
  So pay today and I’ll trust tomorrow.”
—Poetic sign over Belander’s Butcher Shop, Carbon, 1880s

3. “All you prospector boys, drop in and get a map of your mugs.”
Newspaper ad for Ferris Photo Shop, Dillon Doublejack, 1900

By Rebecca Hein

One fine summer day in 1925, Floyd Bard was riding to his camp in the Bighorn Mountains when he saw “ten young ladies standing there on the edge of the East Fork of Big Goose Creek. All they had on was their bathing suits that Mother Nature had given them, probably eighteen or twenty years back.” These young women could have been part of a group Bard guided during his 22 years as an outfitter in the Bighorns, but they were actually staying at a nearby dude ranch.

Bard, born in 1879, spent much of his life on horseback. When he was 3 years old, his parents settled on a homestead south of Sheridan, Wyo., and at age 10 he took his first of many horse wrangler jobs. In late fall 1891, three Bard family neighbors were murdered just a few months before the invasion of Johnson County in April 1892, when Bard was 13.

For many roundup seasons, Bard herded and grazed cowboys’ horses, fencing or hobbling them and in other ways managing and looking after them. In 1900, he began breaking horses for use in the Boer War and, starting in 1915, was breaking and also purchasing more horses for World War I. In both cases, the Malcolm and William Moncreiffe ranch had contracted to supply horses to the British government.

By Phil Roberts

Christmas was celebrated in territorial Wyoming much like it is today with family dinners, parties, church services and school programs. Festive occasions were reported in the newspapers of the time and press accounts reveal some of the interesting ones.

In Cheyenne in 1877 the ladies of the African Methodist Church cooked a Christmas dinner for church members and friends. “About 250 presents hung upon the tree,” the newspaper item reported.

The Presbyterian Sabbath School in Cheyenne elected new officers for the coming year, according to the same 1877 Cheyenne newspaper. Elected secretary-treasurer was photographer-banker D. D. Dare who several years later fled to the Near East after two banks in which he had an interest failed.

The Evanston newspaper mentioned a Christmas present given to the local judge. It was a “magnificent gold cane,” the judge told the Evanston editor.

By Rebecca Hein

Early in my cello career in performance and teaching, I got a glimpse into the mind of a cellist far above me in ability and position. Two of my students, both cello performance majors at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, were also there to see.

It was the mid-1980s and we were attending the Third International Cello Congress at Indiana University in Bloomington—home to one of the best and largest schools of music in the world.

Many world-class cellists were there, plus professionals and students like our little group. The featured guest that afternoon was Ronald Leonard, principal cello of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Everyone in the auditorium knew he was the equal of any international soloist because the principal chairs of major orchestras are among the best musicians in the business.

The topic was orchestral auditions. At some point, an audience member asked Leonard to demonstrate the notoriously difficult opening of the Offertorio section of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass.