In a sense, our history goes back eons, to the time when the mountains in our backyards were being pushed up and carved out.
In another sense, it’s only 40 years old–dating to the time of the bicentennial, when a group of Dubois residents decided it to create a museum to document it all.
Forty years ago, in 1976, a group of Dubois villagers began to collect interesting artifacts, from vintage household items and old tools to remnants of Native American culture. They fretted about how to decide which items were worth keeping. They planted trees and shrubs, and made arrangements to move buildings such as an old post office and a forestry cabin to the site of the new museum on the main street.
“Possibility was discussed of acquiring some old cabins in the area and moving them to the museum,” read the very first recorded minutes of the Dubois Museum Association. Today, the Museum’s collection of historic cabins is one of its best features.
The result of these efforts is one of the best spots in Dubois. The displays reach from ancient geology to the history of a landmark guest ranch, with a long stop midway to portray the distant and recent history of Native Americans. The Museum also sponsors regular treks to the remnants of history hidden in the landscape nearby.
“My favorite part was the historical cabins that were brought in from around the area,” wrote a visitor last month on TripAdvisor. “They highlighted local historical figures and gave a great overview of the tie hack industry. Really worth seeing!”
“Great museum for a small town,” reads the most recent review on TripAdvisor. “It is small but a very nice surprise.”
I’ve never understood why everyone in town isn’t a member of the DMA, because the heritage of Dubois is so fascinating, so fragile and precious (and easily lost), and so crucial to our identity and future as a community.
There’s so much to preserve, document, and celebrate: The creators of the petroglyphs and sheep traps, the courageous Mountain Men, the hunters and trappers, indomitable homesteaders, the hardy and heroic tie hacks, the cowboys and painters and quilters.
In its cabins and its tiny main building (the prospect of a new and better one always seems to recede into the distance), the Museum somehow captures it all.
There’s often confusion about the difference between the administration of the Museum, which is owned and run by Fremont County, and the Dubois Museum Association, the volunteers who created it in the first place and still provide regular support. We pay for the purchase of important items such as cameras for documenting acquisitions and IPads for interactive displays, and we recently provided supplies and manpower to replace the rotting boardwalk that leads between those charming cabins.
We also sponsor a popular annual community event, Museum Day, in the middle of July.
Lately, we’ve also been carrying out oral histories of local residents. For instance, we videotaped an interview with centenarian Esther Wells recalling her life as a child and young wife homesteading up one of the mountain valleys, and another with Kip Macmillan as he recounted a childhood visit to the camp where German prisoners of war were serving as tie hacks during World War II. The originals are housed, of course, at the Museum.
If you haven’t seen the Museum lately, please visit. The exhibits change all the time.
If you haven’t thought much about supporting it, please consider joining the Dubois Museum Association. The dues are an affordable $10, although many people contribute more.
This Saturday, the Dubois Museum Association celebrates 40 years of serving the community, at its 2016 annual meeting at the Dennison Lodge. I am a proud member of its Board of Directors.
“You only need to sit in at meetings,” said my neighbor Dorothy when she asked me to replace her on the Board years ago. It’s been so much better than that, because we are a vital and dedicated group with a mission that we feel to be extremely important.
Our history is always there, but it isn’t permanent. It will only stay alive as long as we continue to pay attention to it.
Happy 40th anniversary, DMA! Here’s to a long and fruitful life ahead.
© Lois Wingerson, 2016
You can see new entries of Living Dubois every week if you sign up at the top of the right column at www.livingdubois.com.
We’ll need to adjust our schedule to account for the smoke that hangs in the valley in early morning, clears in late morning, and billows again in mid-afternoon.
The Joneses stayed there as well, and remained in town long enough to notice the oversized jackalope and eat at the Cowboy Cafe. “On the way,” he adds, “we found ourselves on a busy, motel-strewn street called Ramshorn — the name Nabokov modified into Ramsdale, the name of Lolita’s fictional hometown.”
In the end, I’m not sorry I scanned through Lolita. The story left me cold, or much worse, but Nabokov does write quite beautifully about my favorite haunts: “red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream.”
Back briefly in Brooklyn for a business matter, I took the chance to attend the Memorial Day service in our local park. It was a pleasant surprise.
Sure enough, on Monday there seemed to be about as many people attending Memorial Day services in little Dubois (population less than 1,000) as in our part of Brooklyn (population about 44,000).
“It is such a wonderfully powerful thing to believe in,” he added. “It was a strong enough belief for me to want to dedicate my life protecting it. Unfortunately, never did I see it until last weekend.”
For most of my life back East, this was the only thing that used to come to mind when I heard the word “boardwalk.” The hottest property on the Monopoly board. High rent district!
Presumably, this will offer an attractive new opportunity for newbies like us who would like the privilege of literally putting our brand down in downtown Dubois.
The DMA and museum staff provided the sweat equity. Funds for the pressure-treated lumber and screws came from a Wyoming Community Foundation grant.
I’m quietly amused every time I say the Lord’s prayer, which is at least once a week.
At Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn (established by order of Peter Stuyvesant in 1654, so that Brooklynites didn’t have to cross the river every Sunday just to get to church), the oldest congregation in town doesn’t talk to the Lord about trespassing. They say “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
How bizarrely appropriate that in the world capital of financial markets we worry about monetary obligations, while in Wyoming we are fretting about venturing wittingly or inadvertently onto terrain we are unauthorized to enter.
Fortunately for those of us who love to hike, there’s so much wilderness about Dubois that there’s really no need to wander out of bounds.
It’s not the right day for an ambitious hike. So you wander out into the rodeo grounds, where the dog can sniff around and discover the ghosts of bulls and broncos.
On an early spring day, it’s my chance to go where I’m otherwise forbidden. Here’s where the livestock mill around, out of my view on the far side of the caller’s booth, while I’m sitting idly on my bench across the arena.
I always wondered what it looked like for the bull or bronco riders waiting on this side of the gate. I can’t imagine what it feels like to be one of them.
“Even people who don’t know much about rodeo,” Galvin also wrote, “know that whatever happens … the cowboy has to rise from the dust into an ocean of pain and make it on his own to the rail as if nothing at all has happened.”
I needed to run some errands “down county” in Riverton, about an hour away. It was almost balmy spring, and a different experience altogether from the wintry drive over the mountain pass to Jackson a few weeks ago.
I’ve met a few of these distant neighbors, but I don’t have any friends among them. “The Rez” feels like foreign territory, which I suppose it actually is.
The most prominent landmark on the drive is Crowheart Butte. You can see it in this picture, rising from the valley floor. I have no idea how the butte came to be on that flat plain, but nearly everyone here knows how it got its name.
My mother, who grew up in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, often lamented the travesty our ancestors had done to the Native Americans. But I was a child growing up in the Midwest when she raised me. I never saw a Native American (to my knowledge), or a reservation. Her words meant almost nothing to me then. I understood them, but I did not.
On our return trip through Antelope Flats this side of Jackson a few days ago, we encountered ice and cold winds. But over the pass and back in Dubois, we found the weather milder and dry.
Maybe they travel even farther on this side of the mountains. Who knows? We’ll find out soon, thanks to the collaboration between the Nature Conservancy, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the Wyoming Migration Initiative, and numerous other partners.
“After spending the winter of ’78 and ’79 in Jackson Hole, seeing the snow and the weather, I’m not surprised to see the deer and the antelope coming this way,” Mark said. “The elk used to leave too, but we started intercepting that with fences [which they can’t jump]. So we have diverted those elk to the feed ground [in Jackson] at extremely high numbers.”
You hear about it again and again: Someone came to this remote town not far from Yellowstone and fell in love. How does this happen?
3. Fascinated by the history … and the prehistory. From the mysterious carvers of the petroglyphs to the courageous and resilient Mountain Men and homesteaders, the people of the past never fail to amaze.
7. Silenced by the snow: The noisy burdens and pressures of daily life melt away when you can get out into the soft, deep white of it, whether you’re marching on snowshoes, gliding on skis, or sailing along on your snowmobile. (It’s all good–and never too cold, as long as you stay out of the wind and wear enough layers. Don’t forget the sunglasses!)
10. Drawn to the artists: You may not be skilled at capturing what you see on canvas (or film), but so many others are. Plenty of them have not resisted the lure of living here, and you have ample opportunities to admire their work on display at art or photography shows, or in local galleries.
13. Captivated by the creativity: Knitters and quilters. Guitarists and fiddlers. Woodcarvers and antler sculptors. Jewelry designers and master caterers. (So what is lacking here in Dubois? Walmart.)