Main Street, Wyoming Classics; 114; Jeffrey City

For over 15 years the program mainstreet Wyoming has been bringing you the pictures the voices the music the art the history and the stories of the Cowboy State. Now in our series of Main Street classics we're bringing those stories back and bringing them up to date. Jeffrey City Wyoming is a classic boom and bust town once a thriving uranium mining and milling center. Now it's largely the home of bare house foundations rabbit brush and sage grouse. But there's life here below Green Mountain. And in this main street classic we visited the folks who have stayed on wind blown lonely and a peculiar kind of paradise. It takes.

Time to develop an appreciation for this country and probably the time I. Appreciate most is like all around. Before the boom only or there was just. A blur in. Post Office Home On The Range. But when the town was built it had 26 houses a permanent houses and over 60 trailers. By 1959 it had over 100 craters by 65 to have another expansion. The Federal for not doing too about for about another hundred fifty traitors. I don't remember how many trailer spaces they had in 68 but I remember that the bars were three deep with people. It was very depressing to see your friends and churches close and businesses close and your kids friends. Move away. Now I was really tough. People they're always in a hurry. This isn't the country you can hurry up. This.

Week. Driving the. Route I would. Think that we saw singing a song about our oil misses the little old man. Takes a dreamy look. Down the road. Means to me the same thing as chance road begging for. News more truth. Well you got your feet down in the. Main Street. The ranchers out here by the Sweetwater river used to drive into this little homestead to get their mail. But there wasn't really a town here until the big uranium boom followed by the bust and that's what our story is about. Up until a few years ago you could stop here at below Peterson Walker's place with a postcard and get a cancellation stamp that read You guessed it home on the range.

Beulah lived to see her little town grow into a wild boom town Jeffry city and then collapse. But the story of this place won't fit on a postcard because it's not just a story of a bucolic homestead. It's the story of a homestead that became an energy boom town Jeffry city. And then in the blink of an eye a boom town gone bust. And now it would like to be home on the range again. We don't know what's going to happen. They could be home honoring and we don't know what it's going to be. If the new people are interested though. There's a lot of history back before the boom here on the range. Well my great great uncle John Myers came from Ohio in 1974 to this area. And at first he worked on the 71 I think it was called the 71 quarter circle ranch that John Clay owned down by Jeffrey City which is now the J.

And he worked there for several years and then he hosted his own place up here by Sweetwater station and I think that at first they lived on my great great uncle's homestead by water station and then in 1917 they've bought this ranch I think probably somewhere along the line the winters and probably dry conditions. Persuaded him to be in cattle ranching in history. People said that it hardly ever rained here. And so I think that we're seeing that now. Musta had better times. It was pioneering but it's at its best. But if you think about the people that came here they came from the east where a section of land was huge and productive. And they came here with that same expectation. And when they got here they tried

to do the same things from where they came. And over a period of time and. You know the climate now altitude kind of proved them wrong. And they either had to get bigger. Or sell out and move on. And that was I think that's why you see so many little cabins little dug outs as you hunt this ferry right across a lot of little cabins places where people lived where you had to be tough and you had to be hearty to stay here. Right here was the stage station between 1919 20 people turning to ranching town or inching. During the Depression the prices of cattle were so low and there was such an overabundance of them that the government came in and paid people 50 cents a head. We dug a pit shot their cattle pushed them in and covered them up.

Oh he wept when he would talk about the government shooting the cattle. Yeah that and it stayed with him all of his life he never forgot it. It was like being in that he never forgot being a foxhole in Germany either and those were two things that he never forgot. But they stayed on an equal living despite the howling winters in distant towns and few neighbors. Generation after generation bringing in some new blood now and then. I remember the first time we came out here my dad who lived in Washington that time came down and and we were going to Washington and so I wanted to drive out and see Cindy before we went out there. We drove out across the same raw Road that. Voice lived a long way from town and I did. I learned right away that you be quiet and you listen. And we've had people come in that think they know everything and start telling people have

been your hundred years how to do it and then set real well. I knew enough when I came here to watch how people do it. If I could improve it I would do that but I would make a big deal out of it. Yeah. Listen these guys have been around a while because they are here for a hundred years for no reason. But there was something more out here than just sagebrush an antelope and cattle. There was energy in the form of crude oil and uranium. The stuff that runs nuclear power plants prospectors founded near Douglas and in the gas hills and finally a fellow named Bob Adams started staking claims around Kirk's gap with the federal government guaranteeing a market for yellowcake. Adams decided to build a mill and make a little home on the range into a real town called Jeffrey City. Oh he was a nice guy he was in fact the first truck that we did for Bob he. We didn't have a contract they just have a handshake. And when I first met him down and then run at him through Mike Slater who's our corporate counsel and he had represented western at

their law. And I know his story you know I knew that he had formed a company called The Last Great call in uranium he was in crocks kept fly over and I knew that he had run a restaurant down in Rawlins Wyoming a successful restaurant and I knew that he was one of the first entrepreneurs to come into the crack staff area and I knew that he'd built the first uranium also. That was to me it was a pleasure to meet him and look at how many jobs he provided in Wyoming you know. Look at it he actually put Jeffrey City together Dr. Jeffries was the guy that helped finance and understand what was going on so he named the town after him of course the town's name prior to that was their home on the range of Wyoming. And I think it should be changed back to that now because I think it's a wonderful life. One of the things you know in a small isolated town you're have to depend a lot on your own

resources. You can't. Just go out. And hire somebody to do your work for instance. Something breaks you can't fix it. My father was offered a job in. Western the chiller in. 1957 he was working on what was called The pilot plant Grand Junction where they processed uranium ore. And he'd been. Sent to a number of different start up Iranian operations to help them get going and was so successful at that that. He was noticed by other. Companies. And so he was offered a leadership position with Western nucular Corporation and he took the one in. Jeffrey City because they were interested in his education because he didn't have a high school diploma. Or that was the only game in town. Course we enjoyed each other we did a lot of things together

very simple things from hiking in the prairie or hiking Sweetwater rocks or along the river. Cutting. Our neighbor was a mining engineer. And he was also a very skilled piano player. And he would load is spin a piano. In the back of the pickup haul it down to the bar and play bodied beer drinking songs and. People hanging on the piano and singing all night long until the bar would close and load the piano back up in the pickup and then drive in and out the rows of the trailer homes or around the houses and serenade their friends who they thought should have been there. Three o'clock in the morning with these songs and this piano play. That was the first small boom. Then the 1070 came the big boom

as other mills and mines opened. Jeffrey City got busier and wilder. When the boom started they. Had just a few to start with bosses and they built the mill and then they started mining. So they kept adding more people every year and there it was they had to work really hard to try to keep the school. Built so they'd have enough places to put the kids. I had. To free sitting Marcantonio. And then they added on had a packaged liquor store and I had. Then they added a coast to coast store and then they had a bigger grocery store and they had a three two three bar cafe units. I had some really good friends down here and we started we were in several clubs and we had. They had Boy Scouts they had little league they had 4 to for each club.

Homemakers club. Sweetwater cowbell group. So we kept busy. People were resistant or rancher's were to interacting with folks at Jeffrey City but as I mean it became apparent they were going to be there a long time and so. Ranchers got involved in things that Jeffrey City people were doing in their community activities and involved with the school the school has always been the central point of the community and so that's where ranchers got acquainted with your A new. Miners and their families and things like. That. This was the prairie market in 65 he bought this building from Colt and added on that part. So best Redden could have her restaurant she ran and they ran a barn restaurant up at the Charlie Mitchell place. And. Their motto was nobody ever went away hungry. The little boom that first made Jeffrey City a town was followed by a big boom in the

1970s when suddenly Jeffrey City was a town of 5000 with mines and mills whose owners said they'd be open 50 years. Even a bank a lot of activity a lot of people and upwards to 5000 people actually lived in the area and we were part of that and had trouble finding a place to stay had trouble finding a place to eat. With. I took an old trailer and put it together and lived in it we called it the Tilton Hilton because there was no place else to live and people slept on the floor on couches it was it was a boom. This place was really divided where people can people Pathfinder didn't buy from Pathfinder the ranchers they were kind of left out in the cold they you know so as you think you know I mean they were here all of a sudden their worlds been turned upside down. The mill was really stable. A lot more stable in the mines the mines had a lot of what we call the contracts coming through there. They work here in the summer and go down south in the winter and they already go log in in the summer and work here in the winter or whatever they whatever they did that is a strange bunch of people and they they were from all over the country.

I was thinking two of the women who come as spouses. That is not a good thing I had one of them. And he was good for her. Again this is this is just like any other town you go to you see the same thing. You read your divorce things in that in the paper you see he had to say and a lot of the biggest problem that I heard down here was it was the wind. That's what the men would say the women say no are they the wind it's the bars. Because well we have I think one television station back in your news maybe two or three that won an awful lot of a lot of entertainment daily entertainment for women that came in during the boom there was very little for them to do. There were no jobs available for them a few women actually worked in the mines in that I know got slammed and I was paralyzed from the waist down. But in general there wasn't anything for them to do. And I'm sure the you know the isolation kids were in school and the husband was working and I'm sure they had a lot of time on their hands that was hard to fill so I'm sure there was an adjustment there and then though

the winters were harsh. Sometimes in this The streets were totally snowed over and you have to park like three blocks away and walk to your house because the snow drifts were 10 feet tall between you and your car and there was several really severe winters in the 70s. That. Was really pretty depressing to all of us I think we all wound up with cabin fever before spring. Because we couldn't get in to get our grocery shopping and it was really hard. By severe winters but new wealth easy money public works one instant. I remember we were going into the our large building program and that's when the new gym that the big huge pizza hut was built. We were sitting at the table. The school board and the company officials. And I made the comment that because we were looking at a considerable

indebtedness for the community and I said What happens if uranium goes down. And the managers of the company look to me like I had rocks in my head for even asking that question they told us about plans because we wanted to put that gymnasium. Close to the rest of the school and they said we have plans to fill all this with houses from the current school clear up to the houses on the Hill. It's a pretty nice modern gymnasium. It was built to hold fifteen hundred spectators because when Jeffrey City was booming there were 600 kids in the school. Two things happened in 1979. First the Jefferson School District passed

a two million dollar bond issue and second back East a nuclear power plant called Three Mile Island suffered a near catastrophic accident. Cheap yellowcake was flooding the international markets from Kevin in Australia. And so in what seemed like an instant the boom in Jeffrey City was over. Now it's gone like a pack race that if they did they just picked up and they were gone. Most of a lot of my calc on about a. Lot of them went back to Arizona. A lot of them went to Montana. Our mine manager wanted people here and he wanted to see Jefferson a goal and he wanted this to be like a regular big town. You know this guy we want and he wanted people to stay here and try to make it attractive as it could. And if you didn't live here than here I want you here. To Let's go. Gotcha. The package could be your hair stay over and then of course it falls apart in two years and pretty much everybody lives here so a

lot of made a joke out of it but it yet hurt because some of them that moved here had quite a bit of debt. Young families they bought their mobile homes and they are owed quite a bit when they wound up without jobs well they just had to. So off with they couldn't leave. And while many left some did not. They hung on to their land their trailers their school their town. I would say just the decline of Jeffrey City was very depressing it was very depressing to see your friends move and churches close and businesses close and your kids friends move away. Now it was really tough because there was my daughter and one little girl left and in a class she moved and it was really tough. So that that is that's hard and it's hard now because there are there's no center for the community anymore because the school was the center of the

community. They were we let a lot of good people go and we we made a real concerted effort to find jobs for them some of them are still in Riverton a lander. To see that they were placed. And I think that was hardest for me because when you build something you hate tear it down within a few years. They didn't want to let go of their beloved school they even fielded a coed basketball team so they'd have enough players to compete. But businesses closed one by one. Except for those who could scrape by. One. Late 70s we were busy. Real mini course he worked in the show. And we had twenty eight. Twenty eight units. Then I think we sold off down here. They went to Dubois. And we kept things here.

You know they could be doing her jihad to people. You know and it's a people we kill the authentic country view that anything that you live in the country anybody. Back before there was a Jeffery said the renters pay the schoolteacher $60 a month to come and live in a one room cabin and teach the kids how to read and do their sums. Profile. In the 1960s and 1970s that all changed. But now it's back

to the one room schoolhouse and a handful of kids again. They've hauled away a lot of prefab homes and trailers and shut down all the shops. But as long as there is still a school you could say that a heart still beats in the skeleton of Jeffrey City. Some still hope for another boom. But not long ago the last energy company auctioned off what was left of the company town. Yeah. We just decided to come out for the auction and get a little bit of oilfield equipment. We have her well-filled Gruntal service and. We just had a good time here and we just kind of went crazy and decided to buy some wine while it was.

Raining as part of the solution and of course nationally 20 percent of our electricity is generated by your own even nuclear power plants and I think that needs to be part of the mix. Listen to what Vice President Cheney saying he talks about nuclear power. And so I think there is a future for it and maybe down the road that whole area may be more active once again. Well maybe 20 years after the book this is reality for about 120000 you could have bought this little town on the wide open plains where there is a windy nowhere place where a few ranchers and eccentrics going out for the beautiful loneliness of it all and going home. For me now it's this is like heaven to me. We don't have the problems towns do. You can still people out here trust everybody. Your word is good you don't have to have everything triplicated by a high dollar lawyer before you know just to go say hi. I mean that's the way it is out here.

I feel more isolated in a crowd then I do when I'm in a small town. Again I think it relates to the type of friendships of people for me. And. That's I enjoy living in a community where people know each other or. Look out for each other. There's a different mentality amongst the people that are moving in. And these people are using this as their hideaway place. The people that left everyone probably to a person. Said they would come back and live in Jeffrey City if they could make a living. So I think they would also need. Some security of continuation because that's pretty hard when you see there's a lot of people that put everything they had in their lives and their families and then when the layoffs came it was quite a blow. And it takes time for people to. Trust. To move back and commit themselves to change.

Mm.

Hmm.