This is the second in a two-part miniseries. If you missed the first one, which told the story of the Last Cowboy and his story of barbed wire, you can read it here. We’ll pick up where we left off — mid-interview, a smoky wildfire summer day, talking about the early days of Sheridan, Wyoming.
The Second Sons of England
Around the turn of the century, the Cowboy says, they started building ranches up here. It was after barbed wire and the Indian Wars, and the grassy land east of the Bighorns was ripe for the taking.
Many of these new ranchers came from England. They were rich and royal and had names you still see everywhere in Sheridan: Gallatin, Moncrieff, Wallop, Bradford, Brinton. They were called remittance men, the Cowboy says, second sons of England who didn’t inherit the title, castle, or money. They had a pittance [poor chaps], so they came west because there was a vast area of seven, eight states totally open. In fact, people used to call the Big Horn area Little England.
In fact, in the Boer War in 1900 (a nasty, nasty war), the Moncrieffs sold 20,000 horses to the British cavalry, owing to their connections to the Crown. They put the horses on trains from Sheridan to Houston, then on a ship all the way to South Africa.
Absaroka… or, The People of the Long-Beaked Bird
In 1939, in an interesting bit of history, there was a movement to create a new, 49th state out of sections of Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota, with Sheridan as its capital. It was to be called Absaroka, which was the name of the Crow in their own language and meant “people of the long-beaked bird.”
Ranchers and small town citizens, ravaged by repeated years of droughts and grasshopper plagues, were frustrated with the lack of federal aid from the New Deal sweeping the nation. Several South Dakotans met with like-minded residents of northern Wyoming to contemplate secession. Rock-ribbed Republicans with a libertarian bent populated both regions.1
People believed that this region was special enough, the land unique enough, for a separate state to be carved out. License plates were made, and there was even a beauty pageant, but statehood went unrealized.
Coal was King
This used to be a cow town, the Cowboy says. When I came here, agriculture ruled. Then what happened? Coal. Coal is king for thirty, forty years in the West – late ‘60s to 2015 or so. Wyoming led the world in energy production: coal, natural gas, oil. Now it’s all fossil fuels. We could feed the world with natural gas.
Lot of mines bankrupt, around Obama, really hurt Wyoming. Half a million people. When coal was king, every high school got a new campus. Wyoming was hauling coal to Japan, China, through the docks in Washington, but now they don’t want it.2 Everyone wants us to change, but China’s not gonna.
That’s why Trump get seventy percent of the vote in Wyoming. Wyoming, energy; energy, jobs; jobs, money; money, vote.
The Cowboy recalls working summers at the ranch, back in the 60s. The Vietnam war was going on, and people would show up at the ranch with holes in their Levis. But the cowboys on the ranch didn’t want to see liberal people protesting the war. That’s what they think about. The next year the hair was a little longer. The next year the hair was long. They said stuff it under your cowboy hat. Then marijuana came (we didn’t know what that was). The cowboys didn’t like that, not at first.
Why not?
They were very conservative, cowboys and ranchers. It took money to buy a ranch. To work there you had to think alike and if you didn’t, maybe you didn’t have a job long.
Nowadays, the Cowboy says, Wyoming’s all hobby ranches, tourists, and money. Of all the states, Wyoming has the highest number of guns per capita. They’ve got no permit for concealed weapons. The founding fathers would do cartwheels, the Cowboy says, if they knew what was going on. The public’s allowed to have semi-automatic, banana clip, military assault weapons when the founding fathers had muskets that took a minute to load. And they couldn’t hit anything w ‘em anyway! But if the gun laws change, he says, this state’s ready to fight the next Civil War.
There isn’t any combination of two or three
Is he proud to be an American?
He’d rather be an American than anything else, but there’s a little too much flag waving from the conservatives.
The state of the nation’s terrible. He’s read a lot about the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American war, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. This nation building crap doesn’t work in this day and age, we can’t help everyone. Look at our infrastructure, it’s shot, and look at our cities and streets, and we’re giving money to Ethiopia and Sudan. We can’t help those countries. We got to take care of America.
He watches five minutes of Fox to find out what they’re doing, then the rest of the time it’s network television and CNN. He reads a lot, goes on the internet a lot, but still can’t believe he’s getting a good cross-section. There isn’t even any combination of two or three news sources, he says, to get you what’s really going on. Everyone puts their spin on it. Look how many newscasters, talking heads, have jobs today.
He’s got friends he can’t even talk to about what an asshole Trump is. They’re like Fox News just coming out at you. They think Trump drained the swamp. But he was a jerk, he told like 4,000 lies! How can you vote for someone who lies like that?
What is it about liberalism, nowadays, that people don’t like?
They don’t understand it. They turn on the TV and see Black Lives Matter. They don’t understand minorities in cities. They’ve been told by Fox News that all cities have immigrants who aren’t American, that they’re hiding out and voting two or three times an election. They listen to news about shootings from Chicago, New York, Philly, all Black neighborhoods, but don’t understand why they’re shooting.
What about the reservations, don’t Wyomingites understand that?
He gives a sad, dismissive wave. Ah, they don’t care about the Indians.
We need to find a way to represent both sides, to make this country like it used to be, but it’s never going to be that way, we’re going to have to adapt somehow, we’re going to have to get together.
It looks just like a human when you’re done
But for all its problems, this land of the people of the long-beaked bird is beautiful. The wildlife is tremendous, he says, it’s their greatest asset: open space and wildlife. And that gives it the draw of big game hunting, the big five: elk, sheep, deer, antelope, bear.
What makes a good hunter?
He talks about how to walk and move through the country, how you need to whisper, put your hand over your face when going over a hill, watch your wind, know the terrain, know where animals hang out… Every time you step in the timber, he says, the whole thing changes. One step, look, squat, and you get a different angle.
One time he killed a bear over in Dubois. Black bear, brown bear — no grizzlies in Dubois then. And I tell you what, he says, skinning a bear out in the moonlight with a flashlight… thing looks just like a human standing there when you’re done. It’s spooky.
Frankly though, he says, got tired of killing things. He gave away his rifle. He’d killed a lot of animals. Even though it was legal and enjoyable, out in the wilderness…
Somehow he got in a situation where he killed horses. Old horses, crippled horses. And people found out about it: Can you come shoot my horse? Right? Cause it’s like shooting your kid. So he did it for a while, wouldn’t take money. But he can’t do it anymore.
There were 20 million buffalo from Texas to Montana. Some say 40. They killed them all, then they picked up the bones and sold the bones. It’s a real find today to find a buffalo skull.
He finally quit guiding hunters, too, because he figured his number was up. He had guns go off in the pickup, guns go off behind him when he was glassing. You see every kind of shot in a wild animal – legs blown off, guts spilled out, dragging. Horrible stuff like that. Some guys get buck fever: can’t shoot, too nervous, neophytes, real nervous, goofy, can’t calm down.
Now hunting’s turned into an elitist sport ‘cause of the cost: the gun, thousands; optics, thousands; gear, thousands; GPS; drones… They’re making shots from a thousand to eight hundred yards; in my day it was 300, max. Game doesn’t stand a chance, they don’t even see ‘em, it’s crazy. And they’re wounding too.
These Safari Club guys are the elite of the elite – they hunt all over the world, they got live videos of bears charging ‘em, with backup guides behind, of course. You can’t tell those guys anything. They’ve hunted all over the world. He couldn’t afford the plane ticket to where they go, let alone the taxidermy bills.
But the worst hunters he’s ever guided were FBI agents. To think they walked around every day with a gun on ‘em was terrifying. They had no safety at all with guns.
No, he liked taking those Milwaukee brewery guys that saved up for ten years. They just appreciate it so much more.
That’s a real cowboy for you.
* * *
I have been to the end of the earth.
I have been to the end of the waters.
I have been to the end of the sky.
I have been to the end of the mountains.
I have found none that are not my friends.
— Navajo proverb
https://www.southdakotamagazine.com/absaroka
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/supreme-court-denies-wyoming-montana-lawsuit-against-longview-coal-terminal/