Main Street, Wyoming; 1002; Sweetwater: The Middle of Nowhere

To. The airline passenger far above looking down it's the empty corridor to tourists driving through. It's a brutal one. And they ask each other how in the world could anybody ever ever survive here but the people who know it say every place is somebody to have. Even in the middle of nowhere. Take your troubles with the. Gun maybe. Just on the eastern side of the continental divide where the Sweetwater river snakes across the high prairie toward the North Platte River. Few travelers

stop today they may be driving on to Yellowstone. One hundred and fifty years ago they were on the trail to Oregon and centuries earlier Native Americans were hunting bison and collecting wild plants with an eye on the changeable weather ready to move on. Wyoming was always known for the harshness of this climate and the difficulty of establishing a settlement here compared to an awful lot of the rest of the country. To a lot of people Wyoming was a place you pass through but the people who traveled through and some who held on awhile left a lot of history behind. Layer upon layer like the geology that underlies this rugged surface and so from Independence Rock West along the Sweetwater river through devil's gate. We peel back a few of those layers. The Mormon pioneers the Oregon pioneers the California pioneers the Pony Express the

fraters the military presence that the mail stations the mountaineers and even back to the Native Americans because it's such a dramatic story and such a multi-layered story. Really there's so much history here so many different versions competing with each other. Some of them often quite. A few matter who gets to tell the story. It takes a special eye to see what's imbedded in this landscape and one place to look for it stories is atop that pioneer landmark Independence Rock. I love being up here because so many times and people seem simultaneous so much history is visible from a single spot. The interesting thing about this particular piece of land out here is that it holds so many stories that when you look at the Country Around here it's so easy to imagine them because the country is so physically unchanged.

The Oregon Trail. It's become an epic myth of the American West. Three major Western trails the Oregon the Calif. The Mormon braided together here along the Sweetwater river and the immigrants trekked bravely into more weather more altitude more risks and fewer options. Virtually every pioneer that headed west in the nineteenth century came right through that gap right there. That number is somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred fifty two to five hundred thousand emigrants came right through that gap. That's exactly what was going on 1850 they were passing through. We passed through it in an hour and a half. And they passed through it. And anywhere from a week to three weeks. So it's a little different passage. When you leave the river the Missouri River the Mississippi River and go cross country.

And when you get to Independence Rock and start up the sweet water why everything changes. I mean it's a whole different story. One of the things that I always run into is how bad the mosquitoes was on the Sweetwater. I mean you had them mosquitoes all the way all the way up to Sweetwater when we retraced the Oregon Trail in 93 we had tornadoes. We had two hail storms. We had a hail storm in Nebraska that tore up Kansas on wagons. So it's what we experienced back here. But maybe they might have went through or you know we didn't bury the you carved your message and you took aim at the landmarks ahead devil's gate split rock Independence Rock and on that rock Independence Rock can still come about as close to history as it's possible to come because here you'll find the messages of the travelers still alive in the stone.

All right. Here you look. Look at this it says H. P Bemis. July 4th. 1850. The generally accepted wisdom was that if you are an emigrant with your party and you were at Independence Rock by the Fourth of July then that you had plenty of time to get over the cascade raging to the limit valley of Oregon or over the Sierras into the central valleys of California or before those mountains filled up with snow. So that's a good thing the sky was right on time and they came through a very harsh really terrible part of the trail with very poor water very poor livestock forage and now they've arrived here in the Sweetwater Valley. They've got a wonderful water source. They've got excellent sources of livestock forage. This is where they sort of recruited or replenished their reserve replenish the strength of their livestock and were able then to continue successfully west toward Oregon or California or wherever it was they were

going. But not every trip through this gap was successful. In 1856 a group of impoverished Mormons from England. Made the trek to Salt Lake the hard way. The problem was that many of the Congress didn't have the money to come to America and. Buy a wagon and buy a team and come to Salt Lake City. Brigham Young had the idea and the green. Cards. Would. Cut the price. One seven. So. They wanted so badly the good of the companies. One of which was the Martin company left late in the year. Everything went wrong. They. Went to Iowa City by rail road.

From New York to L.A.. And. Carts. They had to pool. They had to make the handguard. They didn't have the number for them. So they had to make a lot of them. You can imagine what happened when they got up on groceries. To drive ferries with that number of. Cars. So it just everything went well. Murphy's Law. Went Wrong. Even in today's more comfortable world. This has been a difficult area to travel. It's been hard to find motel beds descriptive markers or museums. But that began to change when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints decided to take on a bigger role in protecting and explaining the sites important to Mormons including the one right next to Devil's gate. Martin's cove the first blizzard hit them as they crossed the North Platte.

It was cold water was freezing ice in the water and they took them all day to cross with those cars. I think you're talking about almost six people. When we got on the other side. They were last frozen. They got just about a half mile up from the river. That's as far as they could go. Their tents were frozen. Most of them just crawled under the canvas for the night to get out of the storm in the Morning. Thirteen people were dead from exhaustion. For years there was a silence that surrounded the hand-cart experience and people didn't talk about it it was very hush. It was one of those sad things that they wanted to forget. It was a thing I think that they worried if they talked about they would be seen as condemning the experience and so it just was not talked about at the time.

You know this story for a long time had had not received a lot of attention outside of certain circles you know Latter day Saints Western historians part of that I think involves the idea that you know sometimes we need heroes and we need good stories. And there are some great elements in this story. I. First visited Martin's school when I was six years old and I had always been interested in hand-cart people because my great grandfather Nelspruit rips a pioneer. I was asked in 1992. To negotiate an easement across some land into Martin's cove by the church and perhaps buying the ranch because you think of the different symbols of the LDS church you think of. The Salt Lake Temple spires. And another symbol is a hand-cart. Because it's the only group that ever used hand-cart and a transcontinental migration. Through the Marten's Cove site can be reached through the LDS visitor's center. It's on public

land and there has been some tension between the church and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management about interpreting the history on site. Historians express concern about romanticizing the hand-cart story and even the location is open to debate among some president of the Mormon Church and another man George Albert Smith who later became the president of the Mormon Church and in 1931 Smith went after visiting devil's gate and visiting Independence Rock went back to Salt Lake City and told the Deseret News he had found Martin's Co. He had found the spot where the where the suffering hand-cart pioneers had pulled up out of the weather and died a lot. And so ever since then that sort of became the official spot largely really because George Albert Smith said you know a lot of people view that there is maybe a conflict between the sacred and the historically accurate.

I have discovered that latter day saints have little to worry about their history to be concerned about. And that these fit very nicely together. We believe that this is the Restored Church on the earth. And as a result we believe that God is involved that there really is not a controversy. Other kinds of travelers were also deepening the ruts running west. The kind you wrote stories drew maps and took pictures exploring the new territories and sending reports back to the rest of the world. And once again they often came through this same patch of land by Independence Rock. In the Sweetwater Valley. People have been coming by here and writing about it for almost 200 years. Explorers like John C. Fremont kept journals and wrote books about it came

enormously popular and also a lot of writers who came by here people like Richard Burton the English travel writer and it's for East Africa. He was dashing through here in by stage stagecoach on his way to Salt Lake City to interview Brigham Young in. What he called the Mecca of the Mormons. Other people came through here where the artist with Jacob Miller who was traveling with the English sportswomen gentleman Scottish sportsmen and gentlemen when Jon Stewart in the 1830s scientists came by like Ferdinand V Hayden with the Hayden survey after the Civil War. A remarkable landscape photographer named William Henry Jackson took pictures here. So all these things all these people stopped here wrote about it wrote down what they were thinking about. So we have this remarkable record of what was going on in right over here next to the Sweetwater river just on the far side of it is the little meadow where the Haden's survey camped in 1870. We can see the meanders of the river itself here

going on down towards the east and Pathfinder reservoir in the North Platte River. And here in Jackson's picture look how Sandy the river is as it winds past these bars and how much grass here the banks are. Now these rivers change a lot over time just like everything else around here. There were government scientists. They were they weren't surveyors in the way we think of a land surveyor now but there were a variety of kind of scientists and they were really Congress and I'm out here because they wanted them to to to investigate the land and to map the land but also to find out what was exploitable to find the minerals and to find the crop possibilities of the West. And one place in the valley which never failed to catch the eye of artists removed the pen of writers was devil's gate. This is such a dramatic spot that a woman named Sarah who came through here in 1854 would use the words sublime and talk about how these rocky mountains really were rocky especially compared to the hills of Ohio where she was from. Artist.

Painted the spot now for Jacob Miller painted great pictures of Devil's gate here in the 30s. William Henry Jackson also was very taken with but was a splendid and romantic sight at the time when he was a whole vocabulary of the dramatic the sublime and the picturesque to talk about landscapes and how he looked at it. This place right here was one of the centers of that feeling because it showed God in nature. But while the writers and artists found beauty the surveyors found value and soon the nomadic Indians and emigrants and traders would be replaced by people ready to stake a claim in the middle of nowhere. It's commonly said and largely true that the Sweetwater Valley is a

place people pass through without putting down roots then and now reason that's true is nobody wanted it. Somebody wanted it. They would have. Homesteaded it. And so it's still 9 5 percent the. Built in the 1870s. Somebody did want it because what they saw was quite different from what the emigrants saw trudging by after the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. Travel on the old Oregon Trail route up the North Platte and then up to Sweetwater to the Continental Divide pretty much ceased altogether. So that what had been really heavily traveled route with lots of stock and people going by year after year. Eating up all the grass and driving away all the game. By the mid 1870s the valley was again lush with grass and full of game. And there were not very many white people there. An exception was Tom's son my great grandfather Tom son.

He had run away when he was 11 years old. Somehow you know I'd been in the Civil War and went with trappers and stuff and found his way where they were hunters for the yuppie railroad at Fort Steele after the railroad went over. I mean one boom left in another and calm and it kind of looked at the gold and then you know. What else could you do with land in those days and so livestock was the reason for probably stay it. And he went into the cattle business. Well the ranching era began here in the Sweetwater Valley when. The original Tom son settled here in 1872 and that basically was a sort of official if you will beginning of the ranching era at that time the government was practically giving away land in the West beginning with the Homestead Act. Variety of other ways too there was a desert land Act under which you could get a whole section that's how Tom son first got his second in the devil's gate.

But it was still harsh country that didn't give up a living easily. Well if you look back Thompson seniors. What we call today diversified. You know there's livestock. He was in the gold mining or gold claims. And and also as we would look at it a modern day outfitter you know people would come in from Europe or Persia and around to the railroad to Rollinson they would pick them up and take them on these hunting trips from all over central Wyoming. Gradually the valley was filling in with settlers. The ranchers work community you know you could see the upper sweet water was kind of a community and then you take say between sweet water station to split rock. It was kind of a community and then from Split Rock on down the path Pathfinder was another community but in essence the whole sweet water was one large community. You stood up for one another. You know you helped

one another with grindings or whatever the bits that you had coming on for entertainment. They were close helped me mean you got to realize. That anytime even today you're a long ways away from any communities you know. So it's in the communities now it got bigger. But in the old days you know the communities had to be pretty close just to accomplish what you wanted to do. Not everyone in the valley was considered part of that community. Not Jim. Avril and Ella Watson. Who would later be immortalized as cattle. They were new comers in the 1880s when old timers had been there. Not much more than a decade.

The open range cattle business. There were no fences between the different holdings the ranches could control. Thompson owned one section one square mile of land at Devil's gate and yet his cattle range rover and many tens of thousands of acres and jamai veral was a was a storekeeper. He was with middle class aspirations landing in the middle of and along the borders of these large ranches. Avril had been public about his opinions about the whole land use System. By the spring of 1886 April had been joined at his store and by a woman named Ella Watson from Kansas. The woman seems to have been a strong minded person and a strong looking person in the one picture you have a voice that really shows your stature. So it's a fairly tall broad shouldered woman of some size and heft. And so she wasn't a small airy flower. There were many issues between the open range ranchers and the small homesteaders. There were also suspicious questions about how Ella Watson had acquired some of

her cattle. One day after spring roundup the big ranchers came and collected the rule and Watson at gunpoint right up here the head of this gulch right up here is where Ella Watson and jamai veral were. And in the summer of 1889. They're under a long limb of a pitch pine tree you can still find this tree standing on a big rock. There they are. There's Watson and Avril already has a lariat around his neck. The woman is not cooperating they're still arguing and yelling she won't keep her head still for them to get the rope around her neck. A friend of EHLO Watson's witnessed all this and tried to intervene. That was chased off by the rancher right for those who saw the lynching through to the end. Never talked and no charges were brought. It was never discussed within the family. A lot of people have written about it in books or this or that and I'm not sure anybody is following the real story the truth. But you have to realize the people that were allegedly involved were business people

they just didn't wake up one morning and says. Let's go hang a couple of people. Nobody has ever said or come up with the answer to me. Why did it happen. I mean what brought these people to do it. They are all law abiding by the people who know what caused them to do that. I don't want to make light on the situation because it was. If he did do it it was a terrible act but the moral overreaching of power is is what's really important about that story. There's lots of conflicts in the West and lots of conflicts in the world but most of them don't end in lynchings. Eventually the Son family would make another business decision. They had been settled in the sweet water Valley for an incredibly long time by non standards since 1872.

The song family was here at Devil's gate and until 1997 when they sold their core properties here to the LDS church. When you get so many members in a family you get to that difference in business philosophies those differences were accentuated when one branch of the family sold its share the old hub and spoke ranch to the Mormon Church. It was a very very difficult decision for all of this. So the ranch they this was their heritage. They've been here a long time and it was very difficult for them to do. But you know it could have went to the belt. Could. Have Went To. Walt Disney. You know it could have went to a lot of other places. So to your in their boots How can you say. And so another of the stories that are layered in this landscape begins to fade. The story of ranching and the son family's long presence here.

Where so much happened and so little is evident. Certain stories overshadow the more complex. Today. It's the Mormon Church at Martin's cove but they're not the first to put their stamp on the past. In the 1930s it was the boy scouts and the Oregon Trail aficionados holding a gala gathering at Independence Hall. There was a didactic streak in the organization of that event. I think it's pretty clear that the organizers the organizers. Wanted those Boy Scouts to learn. An inspirational version of American history. I do think though that there is such a wonderful mix of. History here. That it that it would be nice if there were some kind of preservation going on here that know really felt loyal to that mix more than to any one story whether it's a lynching story or that or the one coach story.

Or any of. 10 or 50 other stories. Some way to tell them simultaneously and how and what they all have to do with each other. Would be good. We have a hundred thousand people a summer and they're coming here to experience that history that's in this valley. Western history is of worldwide interest. Western culture is a world wide. There's a fly fishing a Wyoming fly fishing shop in Paris. What really happened is important. And the reason it's important is so we can learn from it if we have it wrong then we're learning the wrong things. If we have it right then we can think clearly and honestly about the decisions people made in difficult times and to see if maybe. We could have made better ones. If I could have my way the whole sweet water Valley in fact the whole Oregon California Mormon trail would be a national park so that we could love and understand the entire history.

Of the airline passenger far above looking down it's the empty quarter

tourists driving through. It's a brutal environment. And they ask each other how in the world could anybody ever ever survive. But the people who know it say every place is just somebody they haven't. Even in the middle of no way.