Category: History

For nearly a decade, I’ve usually hiked these hills alone. In only the past year, I’m pleased to report, I’ve found many women to join me in exploring the delights of the Wind River Valley.

More accurately, they’ve invited me to join them. Today I headed for the hills on snowshoes with six other women, most of whom moved to Dubois within the past few years–from Oklahoma and Louisiana, Massachusetts and California by way of Arizona, and in one case back living in Dubois again, after leaving town for a decade to explore the country by RV and considering many other locations in which to settle permanently. Here they are

Members of the ladies’ trekking club propose to call ourselves Mabel’s Girls, after the local name for the large hill that looms over our homes. Perhaps my favorite hike is the steep climb up the public land on the northeast side of Mabel’s Hill, which rewards you with a spectacular view of the Dunoir Valley when you reach the long high plateau at the top.

In 1932, one of Dubois’ early entrepeneurs, Mabel McFarland, opened the Long Creek Ranch and Tavern along the highway just off the highway at the western end of the hill. For many years, the tavern was popular with local cowboys and loggers as a place to stop for a drink and entertainment after a hard week’s work on the range or in the mountains.

One friend told us that when he was working on a ranch nearby many years ago, he and his buddy would occasionally ride over to Mabel’s at the end of the day, penniless and thirsty. She would stake them to one beer each and then boot them out.

Mabel features as “one of the most memorable characters” in Mary Allison’s iconic Dubois Area Local History. A photo shows Mabel standing in front of her establishment wearing trousers and a blazer, smiling, her windblown hair framing her face.

“There were many who remember those fun days,” Mary wrote, “particularly when the Dubois Roping Club ended up at Mabel’s for drinks and dinner. She was a great hostess and lots of fun.”

I have not taken time to track her history further, but I have heard that Mabel opened her new tavern 15 miles to the west of Dubois after locals who objected to her business forced her out of town. There are reports of cat-fights on the bridge in the middle of town between women who supported Mabel’s business and others who opposed it. But this is all merely hearsay.

Dubois Area History reports that Mabel’s tavern was badly damaged in a dynamite explosion in 1957, and burned to the ground in 1958 or 1959. There are those who say that a stone fireplace visible from the highway at the base of the hill stands as a reminder of the tavern, but our ex-cowboy friend disputes that this was the exact location.

Mabel’s Girls has no formal standing as an organization and no bylaws. But we have discussed the terms under which we might allow men to join our treks. Some members of the club joke that we should charge them for the privilege, or at least require them to break the trail.

We also note the charming exhibit currently on display at the Dubois Museum, which features dolls made from vintage clothespins depicting noteworthy women in Wyoming history. Members of Dubois’ Top of the World Homemakers Club hand-crafted the dolls in 1989, in honor of Women’s History Month.

You see Sacajawea at lower left in the image below. The first female judge in Wyoming is included, as well as the first woman to vote in Wyoming and a female doctor who dressed as a man to avoid attracting attention and unwanted comments.

Mabel McFarland is not among them.

Perhaps the women who inspired the dolls are better role models for the little girls most likely to enjoy seeing them. But as one member of Mabel’s Girls commented during our winter trek today, it just wasn’t so easy for a woman to start her own business back in the day.

And without a doubt, women like Mabel were also part of the history of the West.

© Lois Wingerson 2016

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New to this valley, I quickly became captivated with its first residents: Those people with the musical name, the Mountain Shoshone.

Elusive and misunderstood when they existed as a tribe, they’re now largely lost to oral history. (Some residents of the nearby Wind River Reservation may carry their blood, but their culture has vanished.)

Many people here treasure that heritage, because those nearly traceless migrant people who left no written records clearly loved this valley and knew how to use its scarce resources to live well.

The archaeologists have offered up a few relics that survive them: Bowls made of soft soapstone, flakes and points used to hunt, scant signs of their villages at treeline (of which I will tell much more later), and these: Their sheep traps, some of which are still remarkably intact.

They were sometimes known as “Sheepeaters,” because they hunted the bighorn sheep that still travel these hills. The first picture shows State of Wyoming archaeologist Dan Eakin walking along a drive line, one of the pincers of timber that the Shoshone laid over many of the high slopes to herd the sheep, passively, toward a high ridge.

Cresting the ridge, the sheep would find themselves wedged between lines of timber and driven with no escape route toward a pen. There by some means (I believe we still don’t know how), the hunters dispatched the sheep.

Today, with a dozen other hardy folks, I hiked a very steep slope toward a ridge to see the remains of some Shoshone sheep trap systems. “I don’t want to get personal,” Eakins called out as we were huffing our way up the slope this morning, “but I’m 57. Is anyone here younger than me?”

We called out our ages. Nobody was. The woman who organized the hike is 73.

The wood in the sheep traps has been dated to the 1760s–before the Revolutionary War, Eakins said, and well before Lewis and Clark explored this general territory in 1804-1805. He called them some of the oldest human structures in the American West. High and generally dry, they remain remarkably intact.

The second picture shows some of my friends at the end of another drive line, admiring a catch pen. The next picture shows the catch pen itself. A tree has grown up inside it, long after the last sheep was bludgeoned inside.

It’s sort of fallen in, but can you see the ramp that the animal had no choice but to climb?

Below you see the trap from the side. From a distance, it may look like a pile of rubble. But close up, it’s clear that this was built intentionally. But built by non-white people, long ago, almost certainly: There are no signs of ax marks, and certainly no nails. All of it was dead wood, put to very good use.

For years the purpose of these structures (and in fact the identity of the builders) was mere conjecture, because nobody ever found arrowheads, or bones, or any signs of butchery nearby. But a few years ago Eakin and others found a sheep processing center near Greybull, to the north, filled with artifacts identified with the Shoshone.

Why locate the processing center remote from the sheep trap? Makes sense, Eakin said. It was probably smelly. Might have spooked the sheep away from the drive lines somehow.

Anyhow, it probably wasn’t so far back in the day. Now it’s about a 4-hour drive around to Greybull, but the Mountain Shoshone didn’t drive around. They walked the ridgelines, which are much more direct.

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© Lois Wingerson 2015

Near the bottom of a long series of switchbacks, hiking down from the top of a large overlook, we approached a stream running through the base of a canyon.

My hiking companion looked down from the last switchback. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to this structure.

I was relieved to find it still intact — not fallen down and washed away or, God forbid, pilfered. Few people know about this last remnant of a flume. There aren’t many of these relics left from the watercourses constructed more than a century ago by the tie hacks, whose highly dangerous work not only helped to build the railroads that made the West but also, in a sense, created the town of Dubois.

In the early days of the last century, the tie hacks cut lumber from these mountains and fed the logs via these flumes to the Wind River, where they were floated down to Riverton to be stacked and sent on by rail. All of the tie-hack work was demanding, and much of it was potentially deadly. (Read much more in Knights of the Broadax.)

The tie hacks lived in camps in the mountains above Dubois, using the long cold winters to fell the trees and the warmth of spring to direct the logs into the flumes and down toward the river. Their stories are the kind that make you marvel at those who built these communities. The tie hack villages and their stores and post office disappeared long ago, the community essentially relocated to Dubois.

One of the tie hacks, Fritz Stevens, was still alive to tell the story when I moved to Dubois. Their achievements and exploits still survive in exhibits at the Dubois Museum, in the annual Swedish Smorgasbord (celebrating dinners in the tie camps, many of whose residents were Scandinavian), and in the surnames of many descendants who still live in town. In this picture you can see the late Fritz Stevens, sitting down with his cane and somewhat obscured by the shade, demonstrating knot-tying at a recent Museum Day.

I once heard Fritz tell of enduring a logging accident that sent a pole into his mouth, knocking out several teeth and letting loose lots of blood. There would be no talk of a trip to a medical clinic, of course: There was no medical clinic. He stopped the blood, took a rest, and got back to work.

The tie hacks are gone, but the lumbering goes on. Here’s the house my neighbor is building slowly, all by himself (with help from friends) with logs left over from his long life in the industry. His wife is Fritz Stevens’ neice. Although the couple grew up in this area, they spent several years in Alaska working for the timber industry, and they have some hair-raising stories to tell about the danger of that work. As I gaze at the huge logs that make up my own house, I think now of the perils that must have been involved in providing them.

It’s been many decades since the lumber mill, once the basis for Dubois’ economy, closed up shop. But logging trucks still rumble down the highway every day, and things are looking up: The US Forest Service recently reopened logging in the Shoshone National Forest, so that some of the many trees killed by pine bark beetles can be removed.

It’s been sad to see that forest graying and dying in patches, and good to know that the damaged lumber will come to some use (thereby reducing the risk of fire). Said a man hauling a load of wood I met at the end of a hike the other day: “It’s easy pickins.” They can’t take it away fast enough now.

Want to read more about living in Dubois WY? You can read weekly updates via email using the link at the top of the right column.

© Lois Wingerson 2015