Breaking Through-- stories of forty women who found success in Wyoming

Stories of forty women who found success in Wyoming THE CASPER STAR-TRIBUNE’S CELEBRATION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE Sponsored exclusively

by Wyoming Financial Insurance

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FOREWORD BY SUPERINTENDENT

INSIDE Esther Hobart Morris Lilian Heath Nellie Tayloe Ross Mary Strand Susie McMurry Beth Williams Patricia MacLachlan Jackson Town Council Randi Martinsen Cathy Connolly Shelby Descamps Margaret Murie Dell Burke June Downey Affie Ellis/Andi Clifford Marilyn Kite Edness Kimball Wilkins Margie McDonald Mary Bellamy Seadar Rose Davis Lindsay Linton Buk Grace Raymond Hebard Liz Byrd Patty Reilly Helen Bardo Clarene Law Elsa Byron Monica Leininger Margaret Craighead Nancy Freudenthal Judy Shepard Louisa Swain Kathleen Rochelle Joan Barron Mandy Fabel Rep Lynn Dickey Megan Degenfelder Elinore Pruitt Stewart Rory Tendore Lynn Cheney

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JILLIAN BALOW T

here’s a reason why Wyoming is called the Equality State - and that’s because on December 10, 1869, Wyoming women were granted the

right to vote. Then, some nine months later, Louisa Ann Swain was the first woman to vote in a general election, in Laramie, on September 6, 1870.

From then until now, Wyoming’s rich history has, in many ways, been written by women - including Esther Hobart Morris, Nellie Tayloe Ross, Liz Byrd, and Affie Ellis to name just a few. These are the stories - the lives - we celebrate with the Breaking Through Collection.

This collection of Wyoming stories illustrates the heart and soul of Wyoming women through time in such a beautiful way. Defining success on their own terms, these women pioneered grit, tenacity, and passion. One common thread is that they all impacted our state, and sometimes the nation, in ways that can still be felt today.

One of my particular favorites is the story of Estelle Reel, Wyoming’s first female statewide elected official, and my predecessor as State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Her story inspires me daily, and reminds me to strive to ensure that our children receive an education that will prepare them for an exceptional life of opportunity. I hope that among these pages, you’ll find your inspiration, as you look to write your own success story.

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CHRISTINE PETERSON

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For the Star-Tribune

n the heart of the unruly West, in a bustling mining town where most people were men and most business was conducted over whiskey and beer in saloons, ruled the country’s first female justice of the peace.

She was an abolitionist and suffragist, a mother and a wife. She was strong, opinionated and, according to one newspaper, “the terror of all rogues.”

She was just what the state’s acting governor was looking for to test Wyoming’s groundbreaking law giving women the right to vote and participate in politics.

And for her service, Esther Hobart Morris has assumed her place in history as a leader of women’s rights not just in Wyoming, but across the country. Her likeness is displayed in Cheyenne and Washington D.C. Her name is associated with other trailblazing women like Nellie Tayloe Ross, the nation’s first female governor, Estelle Reel, the first woman elected to statewide office in Wyoming, and Sandra Day O’Connor, the nation’s first female supreme court justice.

While debate remains over her role in Wyoming’s women’s suffrage movement, historians say her documented accomplishments stand on their own.

“She showed that women could do this,” said Renee Laegreid, professor of the American West at the University of Wyoming. “The world wouldn’t go to hell in a handbasket if women became involved in politics.”    Born in 1814 in New York, Morris was orphaned at 11, but later apprenticed to a seamstress and became a successful women’s hat maker and purveyor of women’s clothes.

She married a civil engineer in her late 20s, and shortly after they had a child, she was widowed. When Morris moved to Illinois to settle her late husband’s estate, she realized she could not assume the property he left her. Women, she was told, were not allowed to own or inherit property.

In 1850, she married again, this time to John Morris, a local merchant. They had twin boys, and in 1869, she followed her husband to South Pass City in the brand new Wyoming Territory, where he planned to run a saloon.

Esther Hobart Morris’ family had ties to the abolition movement in the East and women’s suffrage, said Laegreid, and she maintained those connections through letters shipped back home by rail.

Groundbreaking

JUSTICE Esther Hobart Morris, the country’s first female justice of the peace, paved the way for women in politics

COURTESY OF THE WESTERN HISTORY CENTER AT CASPER COLLEGE

Esther Hobart Morris of South Pass City became the country’s first female justice of the peace in 1870. Her first case was to prosecute her predecessor, who refused to relinquish his docket and records in protest of a woman filling the position.

“When she moved, she was an important person in the town,” Laegreid said.

“She and her husband were well established, and she wasn’t shy about her opinions. She never had been.”

From there, versions of history seem to differ. Some accounts written long after Morris’ death say that Morris had a hand in securing the votes needed to pass women’s suffrage. The most likely story is that the movement to allow women to vote in Wyoming was already well underway for reasons noble and otherwise, said Tom Rea, historian and editor of wyohistory.org, a project of the Wyoming State Historical Society.

Regardless, about a week after women

were granted the right to vote, also giving them the right to serve on juries, run for public office and become judges, Morris heard her call.    South Pass City, with its dozen saloons, two breweries, handful of brothels and thousands of desperate men scouring every crevasse and ravine for gold, doesn’t sound like a progressive haven waiting for the country’s first female justice of the peace.

But Morris was the right person at the right time. In early 1870, a district court judge encouraged Morris to fulfill the final eight and a half months left vacant when the previous justice of the peace resigned.

The appointment was contested and ultimately approved by Edward Lee, the territory’s acting governor.

“Lee wanted to put her in a place that said, ‘Yes, you have political rights and we will enforce them right now,’” Laegreid said. “The two of them knew each other, and he probably knew she had the personality and the ability to take on that role and stand up to the predominantly male mining camp. He wasn’t going to put anyone in there that wouldn’t succeed.”

And by all accounts, she did succeed.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper wrote several months into Morris’ tenure that she gave “infinite delight to all lovers of peace and virtue.” The paper’s first assessment of her, however, was a detailed account of her wardrobe — “a calico gown, worsted breakfast-shawl, green ribbons in her hair, and a green neck-tie,” — which Laegreid says may well have been embellished to ease concerns that a professional woman might no longer be domestic.

Morris sent thieves to jail, delivered severe punishment for drunkenness and brought domestic abusers to justice.

She wrote in a letter that she “labored more in faith and hope,” but that she also deemed her work had “been satisfactory.”

Most knew her as fair and honest.

And when the time came to run for public office again, Morris declined.

“To put yourself back in the 19th century, she made a point, and then it was time to go back home and fulfill her domestic responsibilities,” Laegreid said. “It was one thing in that age for a male judge to throw people in jail, it’s another thing for a woman to do it, and there were some men who did not want to see her back in that role.”

One of those men was her husband, who forcefully disapproved of her appointment. At one point, he disrupted her courtroom — so much she had him thrown in jail.

Of the nearly 30 cases she presided over, none were overturned by higher courts.

Morris left the bench, and later South Pass City and her husband. She went on to support women’s suffrage movements across the country.

She spent much of the end of her life in Cheyenne, honored two decades later at Wyoming’s statehood celebration.

Morris died at 87. But her legacy, the truth of a mother, wife and businessowner who moved to a tough mining town and pioneered the path to law and politics for all woman, remains today carved on statues, taught in lessons and scrawled in history books across the nation.

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MORGAN HUGHES

Wyoming’s first female

PHYSICIAN

DEFIED NORMS Lillian Heath stood out as a professional when few existed in Wyoming

COURTESY CARBON COUNTY MUSEUM

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307-266-0505, Morgan.Hughes@trib.com

n the late 1800s, Lillian Heath helped a railroad doctor rebuild a man’s face.

The man had tried to kill himself. He survived the bullet wound but was left horribly disfigured. Heath was among the small team that put the man back together.

It took months and more than 30 surgeries, but by the end, the man looked relatively normal, Carbon County Museum Registrar Ashlee James said, and Heath gets a lot of credit for the role that operation played in the history of plastic surgery.

“They were 25 years before World War I, (plastic surgery) was still quite new, if not nonexistent,” James said. “They do somewhat consider her a pioneer in the field.”

Heath began studying under a railroad doctor when she was a teenager. She was Wyoming’s first woman physician. She was a clothing model, and her story has been preserved as one that upholds the toughness of Wyoming women. But it’s strange that we know anything about Lillian Heath at all.

James, who builds out museum exhibits and so knows the challenges of puzzling together a historical narrative, said less was known about women in the 1800s. In photos, women were typically identified by their husbands.

They tended not to have newsworthy professions, so few newspaper articles were written about their lives. Heath was different.

“She was a professional in a part of the world where there weren’t very many of them, and being a female on top of it,” James said. “That makes her stick out in many cases.”

Heath was born in a small marshland town in Central Wisconsin in 1865. The Civil War had just ended. The railroad boom was about to begin. Heath’s father, William, painted locomotives. The work took the family west to Rawlins, where William would become close friends with a railroad physician named Thomas Maghee. This is how Heath would meet medicine.

Heath began assisting Maghee as a teenager. When the notorious outlaw Big Nose George Parrott was lynched in Rawlins in 1881, Maghee performed the autopsy, with Heath at his side. Maghee apparently thought looking at Parrott’s brain might elucidate some understanding of the man’s lawlessness. He sawed off Parrott’s skull for the experiment and gave a piece of it to Heath.

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Some say Heath kept the skull as a flower jar, others say a doorstop. Either way, when Parrott’s coffin was excavated 70 years later, Heath’s husband brought in a piece of skull that matched perfectly with the remains in the coffin.

These early exposures to medicine enticed Heath, and eventually she decided to attend medical school. She attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Keokuk, Iowa, where she was one of three women in her graduating class.

When she returned to Wyoming, she did so as a 27-year-old woman and the state’s first female physician.

Being a doctor in Wyoming was different than practicing elsewhere in the country at the time, James explained.

“Wyoming was still very much the Wild West,” she said. “(Heath) is a nice example to use as an example to say people didn’t live out here like they lived in the East.”

Indeed, when Heath went on latenight housecalls, she did so in men’s clothing, with a pistol tucked snuggly into her jacket pocket. Heath’s practice was wide-ranging. She provided everything from obstetrics to amputations and often had to ride 40 miles on horseback in any direction to provide these services.

Heath’s career isn’t the only way she eschewed the norms of her day. She never had children and wasn’t married until her early 30s. That marriage — to Louis J. Nelson, a decorator and former member of William McKinley’s honor guard — lasted more than 60 years.

A little over a decade after getting married, Heath retired from her medical practice and began modelling clothes for the Denver department store Daniels and Fischer’s.

Heath died in 1962. She was 96 years old, had lived through both World Wars and the start of tensions in Vietnam.

She’d endured the Great Depression and watched technology advance in medicine, transportation and everything else. She saw women earn the right to vote and 18 presidents take office. And through all of it, she secured her own place in history.

Heath’s story is part of two separate exhibits currently on display at the Carbon County Museum — one honoring the medical practice in Rawlins and one honoring historical women of the area.

“She defied a lot of conventions of her time,” James said.

Follow health and education reporter Morgan Hughes on Twitter @m0rgan_hughes

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Milestone executive How Nellie Tayloe Ross became the nation’s first female governor

Wyoming elected Nellie Tayloe Ross as governor in 1920 — the first woman ever elected to a governor’s office in the U.S. She served for two years before losing her re-election bid. She later served as vicechairwoman of the Democratic National Committee and director of the U.S. Mint.

COURTESY OF THE WESTERN HISTORY CENTER AT CASPER COLLEGE

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MANDY LASKY

Nellie T. Ross served as governor of Wyoming from 1925 to 1927.

For the Star-Tribune‌

n October 1924, Nellie Tayloe Ross was a widow at a crossroads.

Her beloved husband, Wyoming Gov. William B. Ross, had just succumbed to appendicitis.

He had been preparing to run for re-election the following month.

And now, as if her life wasn’t tumultuous enough, the state Democratic Party was wondering if Nellie would run in his place.

The decision took some reflection.

Ambitious women were not part of Ross’ worldview, said Renee Laegreid, a history of the American West professor at the University of Wyoming. Ross was also recently widowed and raising three boys. It was not an easy time to take on a new challenge.

On the other hand, thanks to her husband’s career and her role as his trusted adviser, Ross knew what the political process looked like up close. She wanted to shepherd his Progressive policies. And secretly, she was eager to serve.

“You have a woman who was intelligent, who hadn’t been involved (in politics) personally but had been around it for years,” Laegreid said. “She was well positioned, yet she always had to couch her ambition not as something she wanted to do but as a way of advancing her husband’s goals.”

Ultimately, her ambition and the opportunity to carry on her husband’s agenda won out, said Tom Rea, historian and editor of wyohistory.org, a project of the Wyoming State Historical Society.

Ross decided to run, declaring her intention to become the nation’s first female governor.

It was a momentous choice — one that would radically reshape her own future and lead to watershed moments in women’s history. ··· The values behind that decision— hard work and the importance of service — had been instilled in Ross as a child, said Alexis Pratt, superintendent of the Historic Governor’s Mansion in Cheyenne.

After the Civil War, “Nellie’s family fell on some tough times, bouncing around from state to state,” Pratt said. Her family was hardworking and supportive, and Ross grew up knowing that those traits mattered.

She became a schoolteacher in Omaha, where she learned about navigating a big organization like the school district, Rea said. Then, her marriage to William Ross opened up a new world for her — the

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

world of politics.

The value Ross placed on public service was “part of her family values instilled during her upbringing,” Laegreid wrote.

“It seems to me they were reinforced by working alongside her husband so closely when he was governor.” ··· As a grieving widow, Ross had the advantage of voter sympathy. That might be one reason she cruised to victory in 1924.

No matter what factors swirled around her win, though, it was an important victory at an important moment. Wyoming had seen advancements in women’s status as far back as the 1869, when the Wyoming Territorial Legislature voted to give women the unrestricted right to vote and hold office — the first territory or state to do so. Next year, Esther Hobart Morris became the nation’s first female justice of the peace. Not long after that, women gained the right to serve on juries. Momentum seemed to be building.

As time went on, though, the movement’s sails grew slack. Support for women serving on juries ended, and women did not serve as jurors in Wyoming again until 1950, according to an article on wyohistory.org.

So when Wyoming elected its first female governor in 1924, it was a milestone for women across the nation — and an important event for the Cowboy State itself. Texas also elected its first female governor that day, but Miriam A. “Ma”

Ferguson did not take office until after Ross had been inaugurated.

Ross’ election “was huge for Wyoming.

It kept on that idea of the Equality State,” Laegreid said. “It wasn’t just about the right to vote, but also the right to political participation and civic equality with men.” ··· Once in office, Ross held true to her promise, staying close to her husband’s platform. Like William, she supported Prohibition. She also advocated for tougher mine safety rules, stricter child labor regulations and stronger state laws regulating banks.

“For the most part, she was showing people that women could actually do this job,” Laegreid said.

Then came 1926, when she ran for re-election and lost. During the campaign, Ross came under criticism for not appointing more women to government positions.

“She really didn’t have a women’s agenda,” Laegreid said. “That was held against her by women voters, who didn’t see her as someone who advanced that cause.”

Rea says her main focus was elsewhere.

“Women’s suffrage was not Nellie Ross’ main concern,” he wrote on wyohistory. org. She “cared deeply about getting things done in the public sphere.”

Her passion for politics, combined with her intelligence, meant that Ross’

defeat simply set the stage for her next act. But the loss, according to a 1995 essay by Virginia Scharff, had given her a new perspective.

If she had amassed a group of active women supporters, the essay says Ross wrote later, “that would have been entirely proper, and I believe, effective enough to have changed the result of the election.” ··· After the defeat, thanks to her time in the governor’s mansion and on the campaign trail, Ross had gained national fame. It helped that she was a great orator, Rea said, a skill that she had honed in Cheyenne women’s clubs.

As a renowned speaker and barrier-breaking figure, Ross “was a real novelty, and that would have made her in demand,” Rea said.

She was chosen to manage the women’s campaign of the National Democratic Committee — a role that would test her ability to build the same networks of politically engaged, active women that she had not constructed during her time in office.

In 1932, she was responsible for whipping votes among women for the Democratic nominee, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And when he won, he demonstrated his gratitude for her hard work by appointing Ross the first female director of the U.S. Mint — a role she held for 20 years. ··· Ross, whose choice to enter politics came only after a deep personal loss, built a political career that lasted for decades.

Her husband’s death created an opportunity for her to show her state and country what she could do — and in taking that opportunity, she changed the role of women in American politics forever.

“In a national light, [Ross] inspired women to become politically active across the country,” Laegreid said.

But any signs of the impact she would eventually make weren’t outwardly visible in the fall of 1924. To many, she appeared to be simply a grieving widow who hoped to fulfill her husband’s promises.

Her true sentiments — a quiet confidence in her own ability to lead — came to light only later. Laegreid points to Scharff’s 1995 essay, which cites Ross’ writings.

“Naturally, it may be asked whether felt within myself the ability to fill this position,” America’s first female governor wrote. “I hope it does not suggest egotism when I reply that not for one moment did I doubt it.”

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A life of peace

and solitude Mary Strand has run a successful ranch for three decades

Mary Strand gives a tour of her barn where she keeps horse and cattle in Evansville Wednesday October 16.

CAYLA NIMMO, STAR-TRIBUNE

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CAMILLE ERICKSON

‌W

307-266-0592, camille.erickson@trib.com ‌

hen the Cole Creek Fire consumed the parched grasslands of Natrona County in 2015, Mary Strand did not evacuate her property.

“We would have lost everything if we didn’t fight it,” said the longtime Evansville ranch owner.

When the fire began to encroach on her property, Strand jumped in her pickup to drive up the road. She had to save her cattle. The further she drove, the closer the fire lapped the edges of her truck. The smoke thickened.

“You couldn’t see anything,” she said.

As she neared the pasture, she remembers noticing a deputy sheriff and a firefighter blocking her way.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she recalled the sheriff telling her.

“I don’t want to be here,” she blurted out with indignation. “Get out of my way, I’m going down that hill try to find my cattle!”

“You can’t go down there,” he replied.

“Well, I’m going down there, so get out of my way.”

The sheriff eventually acquiesced, demanding she at least put on the truck’s emergency lights.

As she descended the hill toward the gate of the pasture, all she could see was “a solid ball of flames.”

Unable to locate her animals, she turned around and returned to the top of the hill, measuring her loss. That’s when she noticed movement on the crest of a nearby canyon. Her cattle, all 40 of them, were lined up single-file, marching to safer land.

“They were fine,” she said. “I don’t know where they went, or how they came to be there. The fire burnt that whole pasture and jumped the river. It was unbelievable.”

Though her cattle saved themselves, about 90 percent of her land ended up destroyed by the devastating fire, she said. It took months to recover her property — an “astronomical” task she accomplished largely on her own.

“I worked harder that next year than I ever had in my entire life,” Strand said.

She went on, “I hate to ask anyone for anything. I am very, very independent. I am pretty much a loner, and it’s by choice.”

Today, a blanket of golden grass once again cloaks her property, topped with a prodigious, clear sky. She continues to care for cattle and horses every day.

CAYLA NIMMO PHOTOS, STAR-TRIBUNE‌

A small group of cattle lay in a pen as clouds roll over the lands of Mary Strand’s ranch in rural Evansville. RIGHT: Mary Strand poses for a portrait at her home in rural Evansville. Strand wakes at 5 a.m. on summer days and closer to 6 a.m. in colder months to care for her ranch.

A stained glass tile with Mary Strand’s brand hangs in a window of her home in rural Evansville. Stand has worked on a ranch most of her life and her sister made her the decorative tile of her brand as a gift.

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With short, white-tipped hair cut neatly to frame her sun-kissed skin, Strand described how she circuitously wound up back where her life began.

Born in 1944, Strand was raised on a ranch in Natrona County. Every waking moment she tried to spend outdoors.

“I absolutely love outside labor,” she explained. “I did everything and anything outside. I absolutely hated any-

thing in the house.”

She described herself as a tomboy.

“I was raised as my dad’s boy,” she said. “The biggest factor in my life was my dad. I have a great deal of respect for country people. And the majority of them are very giving, helpful people.”

Despite her love for Wyoming’s sprawling land and open air, Strand would face formidable hurdles before finding her way back. She married one

year into college and moved to Denver, where her husband at the time worked in the oil industry.

“It was a miserable existence,” she recalled with tears collecting in her eyes. “My marriage wasn’t the happiest in the world, and I had two daughters so I was pretty much stuck to it.”

But in 1978, she had enough. Her former husband pulled a pistol on her. She packed up her bags, gathered her 13and 14-year-old daughters and moved back to Wyoming. Having worked in the airline industry in Colorado, she landed a job with the same company.

But when the company folded, she became a part-time travel agent, a job she despised.

Strand simply longed to go outside and be on her own.

She acquired over 100 empty acres of her parent’s ranch land and started an over threedecades-long business from scratch that continues to this day.

She never looked back.

“It’s just nice to have this peace and solitude,” she said with a glowing smile. “And animals are your best friends.”

Industrious and proud, Strand has raised, trained, boarded and hauled horses, picking up myriad awards along the way.

“I worked in a man’s world an awful lot of my life,” she said. “There’s very few women on ranches that you find do what I do. The majority of them, they work with their husbands but don’t do the physical labor. But, like I said, I like it.”

She rises at 5 a.m. in the summer, and closer to 6 a.m. when the days become shorter.

“I wake up and look out at what God really created and I thank him for it,” she said. “That’s my church out there on that hill. I don’t need to go to a manmade building.”

As the sun rises, Strand places a bale of hay on the bed of her pickup and drives out to feed her animals. The property is thoroughly cleaned twice a day. The 75-year-old spry rancher maintains scrupulously tidy barns, too.

“I got a lot on my plate,” she admitted. But she doesn’t complain. “(I’ve done) everything related to the horse business and it was kind to me.”

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Susie McMurry sits for a portrait Monday, Oct. 21, 2019 at her home in Casper.

FILE, STAR-TRIBUNE

A life of

gıvıng Former teacher Susie McMurry became dedicated volunteer, leading philanthropist

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SALLY ANN SHURMUR

‌S

307-266-0520, sallyann.shurmur@trib.com‌

usie Warburton wouldn’t go to the door to meet her blind date, set up by her aunt and uncle.

She left that to her roommate.

“She looked at him, came to get me and said, ‘Honey, if you don’t go, I am,’” Susie recalled in a recent interview.

Eighteen months later, Crest Hill first-grade teacher Susie Warburton and Mickey McMurry were married on Dec. 21, 1973.

Susie McMurry has been many things in her nearly 73 years — daughter, teacher, mother of two, faithful foster parent, nana, tireless volunteer, philanthropist and visionary when it comes to the needs of a community.

She has known tragedy — deep and soul-sucking. She is a widow, having lost her beloved partner Mickey to suicide in March 2015. She is the mother of two daughters, the youngest of whom she describes as a “lost person,” after multiple times in residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

“I honestly don’t know how I did it,” she says of the time immediately following Mickey’s death. “Giving up for me was never an option. That came from my parents. Such kindness was shown to me, and I will never forget it. I tell you it does take strength and courage. I could never have made it without my family.”

She credits her late parents, Tillie and Robert Warburton, with giving her and her three sisters, two older, one younger, “a wonderful childhood.”

“We lived very, very modestly. We all lived in a one-bathroom house and didn’t know any differently,” she said. “We had everything we needed but we really didn’t have much looking back.”

She was raised in Elk Mountain and Hanna, graduating in a class of 24 from Hanna High School. Two years at Casper College followed, only because her parents wouldn’t let her stay home.

“I didn’t want to leave my mom and dad,” she said, “but my parents said I was going to college.”

After Casper College, she attended the University of Wyoming, graduating with a degree in elementary education and a minor in vocal music. Then began a brief teaching career in Casper, until that blind date with Mickey moved her toward building a family and a life of giving.

After working for his father in Wyoming highway road construction, Mickey and business partners developed the natural gas field, Jonah Field, in southwest Wyoming. That quickly elevated the family

to among the wealthiest in Wyoming.

Twenty-one years ago, Mickey and Susie established the McMurry Foundation, which grants money to numerous organizations, especially those working with children and on health care issues.

The legacy that the McMurry Foundation has left on Wyoming in incalculable.

Kids with nowhere to go after school, piccolo players in a marching band, grieving families needing food after a funeral, all and thousands more have benefited from Susie McMurry’s volunteerism in addition to her checkbook.

She started volunteering by joining the Casper Service League when her girls were small, and the volunteering that became the hallmark of her life just blossomed from there.

Her parents showed her that stepping forward to help others is always the right thing to do, if not financially then with love and support in whatever way they could help.

She counts those who she has helped as among her biggest role models, and suggests that young people find great role models in their own lives and concentrate on being kind to one another.

“There are great children who have wisdom beyond their years and they honestly become mentors for their peers,” she said.

She was asked to join the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Wyoming board nearly two decades ago and met executive director Ashley Bright.

“He is a hero in my life,” she said. “I would never tell Ashley no. He has such a big heart and such great ideas.”

Susie steered the multi-million dollar campaign to build a new club in 2003-04, brought the Cowboy Ethics program into the clubs and high schools throughout the state and most recently has made a huge donation for an upgraded technology center at the club so members can have the finest in technology after school to do their homework.

“Susie McMurry means everything to our state. She inspires every child to understand that dreams do come true,” Bright said. “While Mick’s legacy continues to build a better Wyoming, Susie energizes us through prayer and action to build a beloved community.”

At the University of Wyoming, the McMurrys’ giving can be seen on the actual playing surface, Jonah Field, where the Cowboys play in the fall, as well as in the High Altitude Performance Center in the north end zone and in the gorgeous Marion Rochelle Gateway Center just southeast of the stadium.

But it can also be seen whenever the Western Thunder Marching Band per-

forms anywhere, whether in a downtown bar or at halftime.

“I don’t care at all about athletics,” Susie said. “I go to every game and hardly ever watch the game. But the times I did watch, it always involved the band and I thought these are unrecognized young people. We need to support the band. They work as hard as athletes do. They were over-thetop excited because no one was supporting the band.”

In addition to much other band support over the years, in September Susie bought the band new dark brown Resistol cowboy hats.

Ben Blalock is the president of the University of Wyoming Foundation. He says Susie McMurry changed his life because of her generous spirit.

“She has forever changed the impact of philanthropy in our state,” Blalock said.

“She sees our world through a different lens. Her philanthropy gave me the privilege of knowing her, yet it was the true person she is that has given me one of my most important friendships. Her strength is a defining statement that a single life can change our world.”

Susie and Mickey adopted oldest daughter, Trudi McMurry Holthouse, from Catholic Social Services when she was 4 days old. They left a highway construction job outside of Worland and drove the length of the state to claim their first daughter, who remains Susie’s shining light.

They continued a long legacy of foster parenting and eventually adopted a second daughter. That daughter now lives in Florida, and retired Casper deputy police chief and current McMurry companies employee Mark Stuhlmiller is her legal guardian. Susie attempts to keep in touch with her and worries like any mother does.

“He saved my life doing that,” Susie said of Stuhlmiller, “but I worry about her continuously. She is just a lost person. I panic like every mom does that I won’t be able to find her, or will one day get that phone call.”

The last foster child Mickey and Susie welcomed into their home was Lou Davis.

“It became clear to us that we were going to be too old to see her through to adulthood, so Trudi and her first husband adopted her. She is my oldest grandchild and we remain very, very close.” Trudi has three other daughters, making Susie a very busy nana in addition to her other daily responsibilities running a multi-company legacy, the foundation and volunteering.

Lou is also the mother of Susie’s only great-grandchild, Neil, who turns 4 next month.

Children and health care have been the

primary focus of the McMurry Foundation’s generosity through the years.

She is a founding member of CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) in Natrona County because of her first-hand dissatisfaction with how foster children were treated and how they stayed in the system way too long.

She and the late Ellie Ellbogen and Gail Kennah founded Gentle Hands at Wyoming Medical Center, which Susie describes as a ministry rather than a program. Knowing that medical professionals do a great job but don’t often have time just to sit with patients, that was the sole goal of it.

“I would walk into these people’s rooms and say, ‘Dear God, please bless these words that come from my mouth,’” Susie said.

People still approach her on the street and say they remember when she came to the hospital and just sat there and held a hand or listened.

She is a longtime, active member of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, where the Rev. Gary Ruzicka is pastor. She credits her belief in God and her faith with getting her through the roughest times.

“She is one of the most energetic, vibrant people that I know,” said Ruzicka, who has known her since moving to Casper in 1990. “She is not a pretentious individual, she is just as common and ordinary as anybody. Her humility and ordinariness is only surpassed by her generosity.”

She was on the steering committee to transform the ancient St. Anthony’s School downtown into the city’s St. Anthony’s Tri-Parish School on the campus of Our Lady of Fatima parish.

“She is a woman of vision and in that vision she is always willing to step up and support that vision to make it a reality,” Ruzicka said. “Her talent is that once she has a vision, she can sell it. She has the energy and that vivacious sparkle about her. She is a woman who lives her faith.”

Nearing 73, Susie McMurry is not about to slow down. The morning of this interview, she had two committee meetings back-to-back and maintains an office at the McMurry companies’ headquarters.

She may have been timid when Mickey McMurry first knocked at the door five decades ago, but Susie McMurry’s willingness to act since has indeed left its mark on Wyoming.

Follow Sally Ann Shurmur on Twitter @wyosas.

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A scientific

PIONEER

Beth Williams’ work on chronic wasting disease was just one part of her legacy

Williams was a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Wyoming for more than two decades, where she published more than 100 papers, mentored hundreds of students, served on committees with the United Nations and U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and contributed frequently to places like NPR’s Science Friday. She studied diseases in creatures as charismatic as bison and elk and as overlooked as the Wyoming toad or even seagulls at the local landfill. She and her husband, Tom Thorne, were largely responsible for preventing black-footed ferrets from going extinct.

But as much as she achieved in wildlife disease research, she also made time for every student question, every rancher or hunter with a sick animal and every puzzling wildlife issue.

“There’s a saying that nobody is indispensable, but when it comes to Beth, I’m not sure that was true,” said Walter Cook, a wildlife health professor at Texas A&M University who completed his PhD under Williams. “There really was no one else like her.”

Williams and Thorne died in a car wreck on icy roads in northern Colorado just before Christmas in 2004. She was 53. Thorne was 61.

Even 15 years later, Edwards, can’t talk about her loss without feeling a lump in his throat.

“We lost one of the finest human beings I’ve ever known,” Edwards said.

“And we also lost a fantastic scientist and wildlife pathologist.”

•••

PHOTO BY TOM THORNE

Scientist Beth Williams is photographed by her husband, Tom Thorne, while surveying for bighorn sheep in 1982 on Whiskey Mountain. Williams discovered chronic wasting disease and helped save the black-footed ferret.

CHRISTINE PETERSON

B

For the Star-Tribune

eth Williams began her graduate work with a box full of slides of diseased deer brain.

The samples came from animals that arrived healthy at a Colorado captive wildlife research facility and later became emaciated and died. No one knew why.

Professors figured Williams could take

a look. She likely wouldn’t find anything either.

But she did.

Williams recognized the tissue looked like a prion disease in sheep known as scrapie. The brain samples hadn’t rotted like many assumed. They were infected with what she recognized as a different version of that same prion disease.

Chronic wasting disease, or CWD, as it’s called, is now one of the most seri-

ous wildlife diseases facing deer, elk and moose in North America.

As remarkable as her discovery was, what became even more notable was her humility. At no point after her discovery did the distinguished faculty members who missed seeing the disease feel inadequate. That was Williams, said Hank Edwards, a former student and colleague. She was brilliant and also one of the kindest people he’d ever met.

Williams didn’t have to be in Wyoming.

She worked in her father’s research lab at the University of Maryland and studied veterinary medicine at Purdue University. After discovering CWD, she could have written her own ticket to any prestigious university or lab in the country, said Donal O’Toole, a veterinary pathologist at UW who completed his PhD at CSU a year behind Williams.

But while finishing her PhD at Colorado State University, she met Thorne, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s wildlife veterinarian, and they married in 1979.

His life was in Wyoming. And so were opportunities to study some of the most interesting and perplexing wildlife diseases in the country.

So she took a job with UW, which had little history at the time of doing wildlife Please see WILLIAMS, Page 15

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

ELYSIA CONNER

P

For the Star-Tribune

atricia MacLachlan was about 5 years old when she gathered dirt from the prairie into a small plastic bag before her family moved from Cheyenne. The Wyoming native and author of many award-winning books keeps that bag of dirt on her desk where she writes.

“Wherever I go, I’ll have this,” she remembers thinking.

Her family loved to drive through the prairie, and she’d asked her father to stop so she could pick up some dirt.

“Somehow I knew then that it was important in some way,” she said.

Wyoming has inspired many of her numerous books loved by generations of children, including the Newbery Medal-winning “Sarah, Plain and Tall.”

“Prairie Days,” set for release in May, is all about memories of her first home in Wyoming.

Wyoming has remained a major part of her life and work.

“Well, I think it’s because it was my first home,” MacLachlan said. “But it’s totally beautiful in a dramatic and yet barren kind of way. And I love the stretches of the land, and in a sense, they give me comfort when I go back there and see those stretches of land, and I think it kind of symbolizes the prairie.”

Author remains

INSPIRED

by native Wyoming Patricia MacLachlan continues to write stories for children

Wyoming inspiration

Kids from all over write to MacLachlan, and many ask her where she was born and what it means to her, she said.

“Sarah, Plain and Tall” is based on her great-great-grandfather and stepgreat-grandmother, who joined his family on the prairie.

“So most of my writing is quite personal,” she said.

In her 1998 book, “What You Know First,” a young girl leaving the prairie takes some dirt like MacLachlan did when her family moved to Minnesota.

“I think you always remember what you know first,” she said.

MacLachlan sometimes shows her bag of dirt from the prairie to students she speaks to.

“Kids are really interested about where you’re born and how you feel about leaving and how you go back in other ways, like writing about it. They really understand that.”

A Wyoming group of children she visited mailed her a bag of dirt, a gift she treasures, she said. She’s kept other

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO BY JOHN MACLACHLAN

Cheyenne native Patricia MacLachlan is known for award-winning children’s books, including “Sarah, Plain and Tall.” The Newbery Medal-winning book is among many of her books inspired by Wyoming. bags that children have sent over the years as well.

Her upcoming “Prairie Days” describes her memories like horses, prairie animals, drives in her family’s old gray car and towns with names those in Wyoming know, like Spotted Horse and Sunrise. She misses Wyoming every day, but she lives near the ocean,

which offers a view that almost looks like the prairie.

“It stretches out,” she said.

Wyoming even comes into how MacLachlan writes.

“I think my writing is pretty bareboned when I write about the prairie.

It’s my tribute to the prairie, because it’s a bare-boned place.”

13

She was a teacher before she began in her thirties to write books on a typewriter.

“And now it’s like a piece of my past coming back, that’s kind of interesting,” she said.

She thinks she learned to write first about the Western landscape settings and kept her spare way of writing.

“I think it is style, because I have a bit of a simple way of writing,” she said. “I think, as I look at other writers, mine is kind of simple and almost young — younger than I am. Or maybe it’s my age, and I just am looking back.

I’ve never figured that out. But I think it does affect my writing. And when I write about the prairie, it’s certainly the prairie, because I know it.”

Constant ideas

MacLachlan hasn’t let becoming legally blind stop her from writing. In fact, she thinks she’s even writing more now.

“So I kind of bring the world in, since I can’t get out and drive.”

The 81-year-old never runs out of ideas for books, and retirement is nowhere in her plans.

“I have eight books coming out in the next couple of years. What do you think about that for an old blind woman?”

At her mountain home in Massachusetts, she still chases bears from the bird feeder.

“I’m very brave,” she laughed. “It’s probably because I’m blind.”

MacLachlan’s 2017 picture book “Someone Like Me” tells about the way she was as a child and experiences that later helped her become a writer. She’d sit under the table during dinners and listen to the grownups’ secret conversations, for instance.

“And children like that, because they see themselves there somewhere, you know, they know secrets.”

The book shares MacLachlan’s lifelong love for reading. Her mother would walk her home from the library with a hand on her shoulder to safely cross streets as she read the books, she recalled.

“And so my parents had a lot to do with me actually being able to read everything I wanted to. And nothing was something I couldn’t read. I could read anything; but we could talk about it, if it was a difficult subject. Oh my God, those are funny times, too.”

MacLachlan finds endless inspiration for her novels and picture books for Please see MACLACHLAN, Page 15

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JACKSON HOLE HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND MUSEUM‌

Jackson was served by an all-female town council from 1920-23. From left: Mae Deloney, Rose Crabtree, Mayor Grace Miller, Faustina Haight and Genevieve Van Vleck.

A NEED FOR TOWN LEADERS In Jackson’s early days, women transformed their town, made history

MANDY LASKY

‌A

For the Star-Tribune‌

s the 1920s began, life in the young frontier town of Jackson was changing fast.

For one thing, it had recently been designated a county seat. The small town, which had been incorporated only a few years earlier, was intended to become the heart of this new community in the West.

That meant people were starting to sell their homesteads and ranches and move into town — the early days of a shift toward a more commercial economy.

Still, though, Jackson was isolated. It had no railroad, so supplies were hard to come by. In this rough-and-tumble time of transition, self-reliance could be the difference between success and failure.

“1920s Jackson was a hard place to survive in,” said Morgan Jaouen, executive director of the Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum.

Civic leadership was not yet a priority for the settlers, but as more and more people began to call Jackson home, the town experienced the growing pains that often plague fledgling settlements.

Livability, including infrastructure, had

become a priority, Jaouen said.

As the town grew, so did its need for leaders who would guide it along its new path. But the men of Jackson were still occupied mostly with simple survival, Jaouen said. That meant the new leadership would have to come from someone else, someone who wanted to see change and had the time and ambition to make it happen.

It would have to come from women.

••• The right crop of women to lead Jackson wasn’t hard to find. Everyone in town knew everyone else, Jaouen said.

“These were outspoken, respected women who were seen as partners with their husbands,” she explained.

Most important, they ran on a platform people identified with — one that centered on transforming the frontier town into a livable community. They wanted to collect overdue taxes; focus on water, sewer and electricity services; and improve roads. They hoped to create a place where they and future families would want to live.

“They had clear ideas of things they wanted to do to improve everyday life for people here,” said Natalia Macker, chairwoman of the Teton County Board

of County Commissioners and currently its only female member. “They had practical experience, and they saw problems that had solutions.”

The platform was popular, and the women faced little resistance. One candidate, Grace Miller, beat her male opponent with 56 votes to 28, Jaouen said.

Another woman defeated her own husband, according to a news article from 1922 provided by the Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum. The article was published in The Delineator, an American women’s magazine.

This made Jackson one of the first towns in the U.S. to be governed entirely by women.

“We simply tried to work together,” the article quotes Miller, who served as mayor, saying. “We put into practise the same thrifty principles we exercise in our own homes. We wanted a clean, wellkept progressive town in which to raise our families. What is good government but a breathing-place for good citizenship?”

Once the women were in office, they followed through on their promises, addressing garbage disposal, culverts, overdue taxes and the need for a town cemetery, according to the article.

They also appointed other Jackson women to leadership positions. One of these was Pearl Williams, the town marshal. Williams, who was in her early 20s when she was appointed, became one of the first female town marshals in the nation.

These women set Jackson on an important and lasting path.

“They certainly created this sense of civic duty and community engagement that’s been strong in Jackson,” Jaouen said. “People here are really involved and take pride in being part of decisions.”

But in another sense, this milestone town council didn’t start a trend at all.

“This happened in 1920, but it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that Jackson once again elected female leaders in town council or the county commission, and we did not see another female mayor until Jeanne Jackson from 2001 to 2002,” Jaouen said. “We were not immune from national trends. But we are starting to see that trend change in Jackson and in Wyoming.”

She noted that the town had seen several strong female leaders over the last decade. Still, she said, “there’s still Please see JACKSON, Page 15

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 | 15

Williams From 12

disease research, O’Toole said. And she built a program.

The university agreed to allow her to do any wildlife workups for Game and Fish that she wanted and the department wouldn’t be charged. What that meant was that she worked nonstop, but she also had a front-row seat to anything strange in the wildlife world.

“There was a constant stream of ‘This looks kind of weird. Beth, will you look at it?’” O’Toole said. “One time I said, ‘Beth, don’t you get sick and tired of dealing with all this rotten wildlife stuff?’ And she said ‘No, it’s like Christmas.”

She performed full necropsies on bison by herself. She opened grizzly bears that had been poached and buried and examined them for clues. She was as comfortable staring at slides in a microscope for hours as she was examining animals in the field or speaking in front of international politicians.

The team she made with her husband only increased their influence on the wildlife disease world, said Edwards, a wildlife disease specialist with Game and Fish.

It was Thorne who made the decision to round up the last of the black-footed ferrets and bring them in for captive breeding. And it was Williams who identified the best canine distemper vaccine to use to ensure they could survive in the wild.

The couple was also largely responsible for keeping game farms out of Wyoming. They worried that allowing captive breeding of wildlife and bringing in wildlife from other places would only increase the spread of disease.

She worked extensively on brucellosis – a disease that causes elk, bison and cattle to abort their fetuses, and chytrid, a deadly fungus found on the endangered Wyoming toad.

“As an academic you find one disease and find one aspect and you mine it. You don’t become a generalist, and that was unusual about Beth,” O’Toole said. “She would look into anything.”

•••

To those who knew Williams best – or really knew her at all – it wasn’t her brilliance that struck them so much as her brilliance coupled with patience, a willingness to mentor and a desire to collaborate with anyone who could help solve wildlife diseases.

When she arrived at UW, she created

an externship program that brought graduate students from around the country to Wyoming for a short time to study, participate in field work and gain experience.

Cook, the Texas wildlife health professor, started in one of Williams’ externships and later returned to do his PhD under her.

“It set the stage for my entire life,” said Cook, who recently testified before Congress about wildlife diseases. “I can’t imagine where I would have been if I hadn’t gotten to know her and gotten to work with her.”

That is Williams’ legacy, said Shelli Dubay, a wildlife professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Results from her work like discovering CWD and helping save the blackfooted ferret will live on. But even more than that are the multitude of students Williams sent out into the world who are making their own discoveries and advancing wildlife disease research. Even the international Wildlife Disease Association named its lifetime achievement award after Williams and Thorne.

Dubay still thinks of Williams when she teaches her students. She remembers to approach everyone with friendliness and civility, and always put science first.

“You would walk into her office, and she had a characteristic way of spinning around in her chair and look at you with a big smile on her face. She always had her face in a microscope. She was always looking at slides,” Dubay said. “But she would never say no. She would always have time. She was so welcoming.”

It’s not lost on Dubay that Williams operated gracefully in a male-dominated space. Williams was beautiful, she said, with long, brown hair and a playfulness that showed when she felt relaxed and at ease. She didn’t demand professional respect, she earned it.

Recently, as Dubay talked to her science-minded, 10-year old daughter about the upcoming Wildlife Disease Association’s annual conference in Spain, she told her about Williams, about the advances she made in science, the way she brought people together and the power of having a female mentor and role model. Her daughter was in awe.

That’s how one of the best wildlife disease researchers in the state will live on, through students like Dubay, Cook, Edwards and dozens if not hundreds of others. Williams exemplified how science should be accomplished, and now those lessons are being passed on to their students and their children, continuing to progress wildlife disease research around the globe.

Maclachlan From 13

young readers in her childhood memories, three children, six grandchildren, children she’s taught and met — and even dogs. She writes some of her picture books with her daughter, Emily.

Her many awards include a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the American Library Association’s Notable Children’s Book award, according to the NEH website.

Her screenwriting credits include the “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” TV movie and sequels starring Glenn Close and Christopher Walken.

Her books feature many admirable girls and women among her lead characters.

“I know, they’re all pretty strong aren’t they? And they make decisions and they’re not afraid. There’s no fear there. I hadn’t realized that, but thank

Jackson From 14

a lot of work to be done toward equal representation.”

Macker agreed. This town council’s success was inspirational, she said, “but I think we still have things to learn” about diversity in representation.

••• The numbers support their assessment. Only 16 percent of the seats in the Wyoming Legislature and only 20 percent of all positions on the county commissions of the state’s five most populous counties are held by women.

The Wyoming County Commissioners’ Association recently honored Macker as county commissioner of the year.

She was the first woman to receive the recognition.

“It’s not a place women have always seen themselves,” Macker said.

She noted that for some women, the barriers to holding political office may be economic. In many cases, women are the primary caregiver for their families, which makes it difficult for them to be in Cheyenne for two months for the legislative session. She also mentioned the state’s gender wage gap and the economic inequality it creates as obstacles in achieving more diverse representation.

you for saying that, because I would hate to go out of this life without having done that in some way or other.”

Many of her characters experience difficulties like loss of parent and other loved ones or changes like a first love — like the main characters in “Dream Within a Dream,” which was released in May and named by Publishers Weekly one of the 10 best books of 2019 for middle-grade readers.

Last week, the author and baseball fan finished a novel in which a little girl learns to pitch the knuckleball, to her father’s surprise.

“So I think children can do anything, if they’re given the opportunities, that’s what I’d like to say,” MacLachlan said.

She hopes children find something in common with her characters, and finds they often do.

“I think what I’m trying to do is reflect interesting and strong children, like the children that I’m writing for.”

“It doesn’t have simple solutions, but it’s worth trying to address,” Macker said.

From her perspective, a more diverse group of voices means we have access to a greater understanding of the issues and the full impact of policies. Without diverse representation of all kinds, she said, “we’re missing out on more voices lending solutions to the challenges we face.”

Finding solutions to everyday challenges is also at the heart of the 1922 news article.

“What the women have done to the town is worth telling, because it proves that women can bring into practical politics common sense and business ability,” Genevieve Parkhurst wrote.

Enthusiasm for women in leadership roles is growing again in the state, according to Macker. She mentioned that several organizations are working in the state to increase representation and inclusion, such as the Wyoming Women’s Foundation, which focuses on topics like economic parity, as well as the Wyoming Women’s Legislative Caucus, which aims to prepare women to run for office.

“Wyoming has been a leader with women’s representation in government, and I think we can be again because of the scope and scale of our state,” Macker said. “It has created opportunities for women to lead.”

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CAMILLE ERICKSON

T

camille.erickson@trib.com, 307-266-0592

he Casper Petroleum Club used to bar women from entering.

Even Randi Martinsen was stopped at the doors of the club in the 1970s, just moments after she made history as the first female expert sworn in before the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She also held notable credentials in the field of petroleum geology. But even that wasn’t enough to earn entry into the Petroleum Club.

Her boss, Vernon Hill, stood beside her at the entrance, fuming.

“He got very upset,” she said. “I didn’t say anything. He was more upset than I was.”

As Martinsen remembers it, her boss tore up his membership card and the pair left.

The Casper Petroleum Club, which closed in 2016, changed its bylaws in 1976 to allow woman members.

Over 40 years later, Martinsen remains as nonplussed by the incident as she was when it occurred. Her measured, matter-of-fact recounting reflects the approach she has taken throughout her trailblazing career: The accomplished geologist met gender discrimination in the male-dominated field head on and remained largely unfazed.

“I don’t get offended by much,” she said.

“I just moved on.”

While her mentors often stood flabbergasted at the rampant sexism thrown at the bright and promising woman, Martinsen would dig in her heels and forge ahead. She simply walked into every room as if women had been allowed in since day one, using humor to ease any discomfort.

After all, she had work to do.

••• Born and raised in New York City, a young and curious Martinsen spent many summers in her youth exploring the Ramapo Mountains of New Jersey. She says her time in the wilderness as a little girl instilled in her a burning adoration and awe of the natural world.

Her ravenous appetite for learning quickly earned her a degree in earth and space science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1971. Soon after, she relocated west, where she has stayed to this day. She wrapped up a master’s degree in geology at Northern Arizona University in 1975, the only woman in her class.

Martinsen launched her career in the oil industry during a boom. Drilling around the Powder River Basin chugged steadily along.

Cities Services Company, a firm based in Denver, eagerly scooped up Martinsen, and she applied what she learned in school to oil and gas exploration.

After transitioning into a role as a de-

DRILLING PAST

OBSTACLES

Randi Martinsen didn’t let sexism keep her from a career in the oil and gas industry COURTESY

Randi Martinsen went to work in Wyoming’s oil fields in the mid1970s after earning her master’s degree in geology. She quickly found success and recognition in an industry that was almost entirely dominated by men. Martinsen joined the University of Wyoming faculty in 1981 and has also worked as a consultant and served as president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. velopment geologist, Martinsen moved to Wyoming to sit wells in the bustling Powder River Basin. At the end of the work day, she would curl up to sleep in her car or drive into town to find a room.

One morning after waking in her car, she hit the road toward her next rig. She would spot a bathroom along the way, she thought. But locating a bathroom in the remote stretches of the basin often presented a challenge at dawn. None appeared.

Out of options, she pulled over to the side of the road to relieve herself. At just the moment she squatted down along the gravel roadside, the rig crew, and her soon-to-be colleagues, cruised on by and spotted her.

Soon after, her boss called. Through a smirk, Martinsen said she met the people she would be working with in the field already.

“Really? How did that go?” Hill said.

Martinsen filled him in on the nature of the encounter.

“So, what did you do?” he asked.

“Well, what could I do?” she said. “I waved.”

Martinsen wasn’t always alone on the job, though.

At first, the company sent “chaperones,” or male geologists along with her, one even introducing her to others in the field as simply the “girl geologist.”

After shedding the chaperones, she picked up a stint as a well-site geologist in a remote “all-man camp” in the Cook Inlet of Alaska.

The isolation made accommodations limited. She had to share a room with a male tool pusher, a foreman on a drilling rig. But as in most situations that cropped up in her life, she adapted.

The geologist became accustomed to be-

ing the only woman in a sea of men.

“I’ll use the Norwegian term ‘guttejente,’ which basically translates into ‘tomboy,’” she said. “I was a tomboy. I grew up playing with boys.”

Back in the Cities Service Company’s office, she also worked alongside engineers, many of whom adorned their offices with calendars of naked women. A bit perturbed, Martinsen decided to do her part in contributing to the decor.

She tore out and posted pictures of naked men from an adult magazine around her desk.

She never said a word about her male colleague’s calendars, but they quickly came down.

••• Her growing geological expertise of the Powder River Basin came in handy early on in Martinsen’s career.

In 1979, Martinsen submitted an abstract to the Rocky Mountain Section American Association of Petroleum Geologists about the Hartzog Draw, a top-notch oil field in the basin that was a “hot topic” at the time.

When the association rejected her proposal, Martinsen turned around and sent her idea to the national association chapter, only to have it accepted.

Soon after, her phone rang.

A member of the regional technical committee explained the reason the program chair had denied her proposal on the Hartzog Draw.

“It was too important for a female to present,” he said.

Martinsen sat back and reflected on the situation, and then picked the phone back up.

She dialed about a dozen colleagues at various oil companies also studying the Hartzog Draw. Explaining the rationale behind the rejection she received from the Rocky Mountain conference, she asked her colleagues to keep their research from the man whom the chair had selected to present.

“And no one, nobody, said a word,” she said.

That left the chair with no choice but to reverse his decision and ask Martinsen to present instead.

“That was so rewarding,” Martinsen said, each word punctuated with glee. “It took away all the negativity out of the rejection.”

“The icing on the cake was that I won best presentation,” she added.

Please see MARTINSEN, Page 19

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

Longtime lawmaker doesn’t believe ‘Wyoming woman’ archetype is an honest portrayal — but hopes one day it will be SETH KLAMANN

W

For the Star-Tribune

hat is the value of myth?

The myth of Cathy Connolly considers this. She’s sitting in her small office in Ross Hall, on the University of Wyoming’s campus. To her back are windows that look upon Prexy’s Pasture. The brick walls are covered in photos and bumper stickers and posters, her bookshelves stuffed with works on sexuality and gender.

A black-and-white photo on one cabinet shows an old woman, her hair hidden by a scarf knotted around her neck.

The woman is holding an AK-47. “Social security” is written beneath the image.

By that photo is a bumper sticker stuck to the same cabinet. It bears a slogan that reverses an old grumble: “I don’t mind straight people as long as they act gay in public.” A red, feathery boa hangs from a cabinet, slightly ajar, by the door.

On this September afternoon, midway through the first day of classes at UW, professor Connolly is weighing the myth of the Wyoming Woman: the outfitter, the pink hard-hat wearing construction worker, the female rancher or oil worker.

“I love those images,” she says. “But the reality is that is not the typical Wyoming woman. And it’s a myth that it’s the Wyoming woman. I’m going to love each one of them as well, and I’m thrilled. But that’s not the typical Wyoming woman.

So I’m very cautious about embracing myths as if they’re realities because they cover up way too much.”

What is the reality? The reality is 14 female state lawmakers out of 90 legislators. The reality is the 32 cent pay gap between men and women here.

The reality is that nearly seven out of 10 minimum wage workers in Wyoming are women. The reality is that the female oil worker is the reality we want, and the disparities are the reality we have. “‘She’s the rancher, she’s the oil worker’ — part of the myth is this is the Wyoming woman, so all the other Wyoming women who work in service and retail say, ‘Ah, we’re not the real woman,’” Connolly says. “Or the more prevalent myth is that any woman could

Cathy Connolly’s quest to make

MYTH INTO

REALITY

CAYLA NIMMO, STAR-TRIBUNE

Cathy Connolly talks about her life during an interview Sept. 4 at her office on the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie. Connolly is a tenured professor at the university where she teaches in the gender and women’s studies department. be that person. And that just isn’t the case.”

By this line of thinking, Connolly herself is a myth, perhaps more so than the others she lists. She’s a university professor with a Ph.D. and a law degree.

She’s a female Democratic lawmaker in a Legislature that has as many men from Natrona County as Democrats from anywhere. She’s the first openly gay legislator to legislate in a state that, as recently as 2018, had residents who weren’t aware gay marriage was legal.

She lives in one of two counties here that had less than 50 percent support for Donald Trump in 2016.

She knows this, that she is not the norm. It’s part of the paradox of who she is: the myth who wants to make her status so mundane and commonplace for others that it’s no longer a myth at all, a Legislature that is truly reflective of

the Wyoming populace. But to do that, she has to be the myth — the equal-pay champion, the minority floor leader, the openly gay public official — to provide an example of what could be.

“I want to be able to counter the notion that sex, gender and racism is irrelevant,” she says. “I think it is relevant. I think representation matters. Until we have a more accurate and adequate representation of a variety of people, we’re not doing as well by the state as we could or should be.”

••• Like any myth, Connolly has an origin story.

The only daughter of a working class family of five, Connolly attended 12 years of Catholic school in the small town of Troy, which is a few miles north of Albany in northern New York. She worked through much of school — babysitting,

17

cleaning houses, manning a toll booth (“I could classify vehicles with the best of ‘em”). Even now, decades later, her New York accent still slips in — the middle of “daughter” stretches like she’s talking around the vowels.

Her high school — Catholic Central, whose Latin motto translates to “For God and country” — was large, she says.

Her father had gone to — and been expelled from — the same school. When she took the entrance exam, she’d done well, scoring high enough that the nuns wanted to place her in a more rigorous track, with an eye toward college.

Sitting in her office in September, roughly half a century later, she remembers her father’s response. Being a lifelong Catholic, all he typically said to the nuns was, “Yes, sister.” But he managed two sentences of protest.

“I just thought she should be a secretary,” he told the nuns. Connolly smiles as she remembers. “She should learn to type.”

The nuns assured him that his only daughter would indeed learn to type but that Connolly needed to be in a special program.

“Yes, sister,” her father acquiesced.

Her town and her state and the country were still grappling with the civil rights movement. She remembers briefly dating a black high schooler before starting at Catholic Central and the looks and threats directed at her as she walked down the hallways. She didn’t use a bathroom above the second floor until she was a senior. She was afraid she’d be thrown out of a window.

She remembers one of her teachers — who wasn’t a priest — “having an affair” with two of her high school classmates.

Connolly had been raised to believe that “boys were better than girls because boys could be priests and priests are God on earth.” She quickly dismissed the notion of the “infallibility of men.”

Still, she didn’t dismiss the political undercurrent. The priests and nuns at her school had a Marxist streak, and many were politically active. She read Marx and Friedrich Engels, the behaviorist B.F. Skinner, the anti-war sci-fi of Kurt Vonnegut and the dystopian warnings of George Orwell. She remembers reading the autobiography of Malcolm X on a city bus. She would ride those buses until the end of the line, until the city lights came on and she would go home.

The formation of her political beliefs, then, was less a moment of breakthrough and more an accumulation of formative experiences.

Please see CONNOLLY, Page 19

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Women’s fire crew

emerges in male-dominated field

BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT

The BLM/Montana Conservation Corps All-Women’s Fire Crew was deployed to Alaska this summer to battle the Hadweenzic River Fire in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

CAMILLE ERICKSON

W

307-266-0592, camille.erickson@trib.com

hen Shelby Descamps was in high school, she set out to mow her family’s lawn. Her stepmother immediately directed her to use the non-motorized push mower. But Shelby wanted to try out the big gas mower. Her brother had been using it since he was 11 years old. Why couldn’t she?

But she was a girl, and she remem-

bers being discouraged from using the equipment.

Shelby didn’t end up mowing the lawn that day.

“I was like, ‘Well, OK, never mind,’” she recalled. “I wanted to use the actual lawnmower.”

Now, the 26-year-old has mastered the ins and outs of using heavy chainsaws. She can cut and plumb fire lines.

She can also confidently stand at the front lines, fighting wildland fires.

“Oh man, it is so empowering and

confidence boosting,” she quipped.

This year, Shelby led an all-women’s fire crew as it protected Wyoming’s wild landscapes. The training, launched by the Montana Conservation Corp, provides women with the necessary qualifications to launch a career in wildland firefighting and conservation.

This year, the All-Women’s Fire Crew training was primarily located in Wyoming, with a 19-day stint in Alaska to battle the Hadweenzic River Fire in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

The experience concluded in Wyoming, west of Rock Springs, with restoration efforts — clipping away at juniper to restore habitats for vulnerable sage grouse populations.

The training aims to address gender disparities in the male-dominated firefighting and natural resources sectors.

Women remain severely underrepresented in those fields.

Throughout all U.S. fire departments, women comprise just over 7 percent of firefighters, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Across all federal firefighting entities, the number of women working in fire is unclear. The Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming said it does not collect precise data on the number of female seasonal or permanent wildland firefighters.

“Diversity is important,” said Rance Neighbors, a fire management specialist at the Bureau of Land Management.

“Diversity — whether that is through race, gender, culture or where you are from — any time you can add diversity to your program, federal agency or entity, then we make it better. Because everyone comes to the table with different views and ideals.”

And intentionally growing an all-women’s fire crew is just one of the ways of bringing more women to the table, he explained.

With the federal government, there are certain qualifications one needs to fight wildfires. The program passes along these required fire suppression techniques to women.

It wasn’t glamorous work. In fact, the six months in the wilderness could be grueling — tough conditions, long hours, extreme weather and few amenities.

The 11 participants are now prepared to launch into the job market and are on the hunt for positions in the firefighting or natural resources sectors. About 85 percent of previous participants go on to land a job in firefighting.

A career outdoors

Shelby grew up in central California and studied animal science in college.

When looking at her career options, the adventurer wanted to be outdoors and physically active as often as she could.

“Working outside is a big, big factor in my choice of occupation,” she explained.

She first felt the itch to try out firefighting when working for the American Conservation Experience in Utah. A forest service fuel crew camped alongside Please see FIRE CREW, Page 19

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Martinsen From 16

In a 1979 photograph captured at the moment Martinsen received the Levorsen Award for best presentation, the emerging geologist appears with a soft yet defiant smile. Purpose and pride fill her expectant eyes, directed at the plaque held up with both her hands.

••• Sitting wells was Martinsen’s happy place. She described the chorus of sounds that emerged from the ground whenever the drill string soared through porous, permeable rock hungry for oil.

Five years into working at Cities, Martinsen fell in love with Jim Steidtmann, a University of Wyoming geology professor.

“He really, strongly supported me,” she said.

Following months of arduous com-

muting across state lines between Denver and Laramie to stay in one another’s lives, Martinsen relocated to Wyoming and began work as a consultant, eventually teaching at the university too.

Martinsen applied the same zeal she had for geology to her family, balancing the demands of raising children with her career.

“My proudest accomplishments are my children,” the mother of three said.

Martinsen’s sentences picked up speed as she described the sheer joy of regularly riding horses as a family through the open landscapes of Wyoming. In the winter, Martinsen and her husband would cradle the children between their legs as the family zig-zagged down snow-capped mountains on skis.

“We did a lot of things together as a family, and everything just seemed to work,” she said.

The youngest, Matt Steidtmann, 33,

entered geology just like his parents and works at a Denver-based independent oil and gas company.

“She is one of the most passionate people,” Matt said of his mother. “She genuinely and truly loves what she does and instills that in the people around her.

Definitely don’t get me wrong, I enjoy what I do, but I don’t think I’ll ever love it as much as she does.” *** Teaching at the university never lived up to the thrill of being constantly out in the oil and gas fields, Martinsen admitted.

But she harbors no regrets about making the switch to academia.

“I’m eternally grateful that I had that opportunity because it allowed me to grow and raise children, which a lot of women of my generation had to make a choice either or,” she said.

The oil industry also experienced a downturn in the 1980s, just as Martinsen

made the professional switch.

“I’ve had a fabulous career. I’ve been very, very fortunate,” she said. “I had fantastic mentors; they were all men.

But they taught me, encouraged me and promoted me. I know other women in my generation had some substantial difficulties.”

But in her mind, the field of petroleum geology has some work to do if it wants to achieve gender parity.

Companies could provide paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers, she said. And more flexibility is needed to allow working mothers to continue advancing their careers while raising families.

“I saw (being a woman) as a double-edged sword,” she said. “I was being more closely watched than the average male and I would say females in general.

So if I didn’t perform quite right, it would get more attention. And if I did perform well, it got more attention.”

Connolly

were expected to cook, clean, wash the dishes and help remodel the old building.

“We were living our politics,” says Laura Grube, who lived with Connolly in the St. John’s residence.

Grube remembers how the group at St. John’s would stay up late, sitting around the old oak kitchen table that the owners had picked up secondhand. The residents, all of whom were active in various progressive political movements, would talk politics over a box of donuts.

Bill Nowak lived in the house too, and he first met Connolly at a food co-op where they both worked. The two worked on efforts in the 1980s to place control of the public power utility in the hands of Buffalo residents.

“She was a person who took her responsibilities seriously,” Nowak says. “She was a person who was doing things for the right reasons. She was a person who was respected. Sometimes when people get respect, they get egos. Cathy never got an ego. ... She maintained a focus on why she was doing what she was doing.”

Nowak’s son was born in that house, in one of the upstairs rooms. Nowak remembers the residents crowding around the living room TV every weekend to watch “Saturday Night Live.” He remembers Connolly working in a collective vegetarian restaurant, where — like the house — all the duties were shared, and how the staff would have Breyers ice cream after shifts.

Grube and Nowak both remember Connolly leaving for Wyoming in 1992 and being a bit worried for her. By that time, Connolly had earned both a law

From 17

BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT

Hannah Zamorski performs chainsaw maintenance as Patty Derner looks on

Fire Crew From 18

her team for eight days. After seeing what their jobs entailed, she was hooked. Eventually, she started taking fire classes online and looking for job opportunities.

When it comes to Montana Conservation Corp’s training program, Shelby was drawn to its strong emphasis on leadership development. She spent three months before the launch of the program in leadership training.

Shelby anticipates continuing to fight fires for the foreseeable future and is on the hunt for jobs. But for the long term, Shelby may look beyond

fire. The reason comes down to the work culture.

“What’s interesting about Montana Conservation Corp and Bureau of Land Management partnership is that (the program) really strongly values communication and feedback,” she noted.

“There are not many employers that I’ve had that value that. I want to find a workplace that does value that and where people are open to feedback, change and growth as individuals.”

In contrast, the firefighting world can be what Shelby called, “rigid.”

“People have the mentality of, ‘Yup, that’s the way it is. Deal with it,’” she added. “That’s why I don’t think longterm that would be the most beneficial or healthy, at least for me personally.”

“You don’t think about this stuff, you don’t analyze it,” she says now. “You consciously don’t pee (to avoid a third-floor bathroom), you recognize that some of the girls that you go to class with are having an affair with a teacher, you just see things around you. It was the height of the hippie movement, to see what the future could be, a future that would be more collective and you wouldn’t need to worry about making ends meet if everybody shared more.”

“Collectivism, as opposed to individualism and money, right?” she continues.

Her voice can be quiet and deadly serious one minute, energetic and quick the next.

She frequently uses “right” as punctuation. “As a kid, I juxtaposed them. I went here rather than there.”

That desire for collectivism followed her into college, where she says she bounced around undergraduate programs for 10 years and had semesters with straight F’s.

She spent some time studying to be an environmentalist, until “I recognized that what I was being trained to do was work for the logging industry.” She worked on energy issues and studied the labor movement.

She lived a collectivist life. For years in the 1980s, she stayed in a red Victorian-style house on St. John’s Place in Buffalo, New York. More than half a dozen people lived there with her. The group shared the various duties of the home, specifically eschewing gender roles. All

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E

CHRISTINE PETERSON

For the Star-Tribune

ven after living for a century, Margaret “Mardy” Murie advocated for wild places, taking solace in nature everywhere, from Alaska’s far north to the beaver pond near her Teton County home.

The Wilderness Society calls her the “Grandmother of the Conservation Movement.” Former President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. She wrote books on nature, landscapes and raising a family in the outdoors. Her legacy lives on with her husband, Olaus Murie, in the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Murie Ranch of Teton Science Schools. She went on scientific expeditions around the world.

Those are some of the obvious accomplishments, the ones that make for good soundbites. For Kristen Girard, who manages the Murie Education Program at Murie Ranch, some of Murie’s “greatest legacies are her profound belief in people and the impact that one individual can have if they put their mind to it and if they have curiosity.”

Murie advocated for youth education. Even in her later years, she would invite community members and students from local schools to her ranch to listen to their stories and hear what inspired them.

“She liked to encourage that spark because she believed that young people were, and continue to be, the people who will take up the reins of conservation,” Girard said. “It’s in them that the hope of the future lies.”

••• Murie was born in Seattle in 1902.

At 9, she and her mother moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, where they spent a decade living in a four-room log cabin on the edge of town. There, fresh water arrived each morning from a horsedrawn cart and mail came once a week, Murie wrote in her book “Two in the Far North.”

She went to college in Oregon, Boston and then Fairbanks, eventually becoming the first women to graduate from the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, now the University of Alaska.

In 1921, after two years of college in Portland, she came home and met a tall, blue-eyed, “unassuming” biologist named Olaus Murie, who was studying caribou in the Brooks Range for the U.S. Biological Survey (what would become

An enduring

conservation

legacy Margaret Murie spent her life working to protect wild spaces

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Margaret “Mardy” Murie sits on her porch in Grand Teton National Park as the sun sets June 29, 2002, shortly before her 100th birthday. Murie is considered by many to be the mother of the wilderness movement. the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

For years they corresponded back and forth by letter, meeting when possible in Olaus Murie’s remote outposts. Then at 3 a.m. Aug. 19, 1924, after Mardy, her mother and maid of honor traveled 800 miles downriver, the couple married.

Minutes later, they walked outside to see the sunrise: “Out across the wide gray river, over the low willows, there was a bright splash of rose and molten gold. Mother and Olaus and I stood in the bow and watched a sunrise of promise. A beautiful world was waking to light here on the Yukon,” she wrote.

In 1927, Olaus was sent by the Biological Services to Jackson to study elk. There they would make their home base for conservation for decades as they raised their three children. They

eventually purchased a dude ranch near Moose with their siblings, Adolph (Olaus’ brother) and Louise (Mardy’s sister) Murie, and the couples began to leave an indelible mark on the preservation of the country’s wilderness.

••• It would be nearly impossible to adequately summarize Mardy and Olaus’ lives spent in conservation. Their writings include his book “The Elk of North America,” which is still considered the Bible of North American elk management; her book “Island Between”; his sketches and writing that filled field ecology books including Peterson Field Guide’s “A Field Guide to Animal Tracks”; and their shared book “Wapiti Wilderness” about their early lives in Wyoming.

Olaus worked for the Biological Survey until he left to “enter the struggle to preserve our remaining wilderness,” at the helm of The Wilderness Society, Mardy wrote.

There, the couple championed for the creation of The Wilderness Act. Olaus died in 1963, the year before The Wilderness Act was signed into law. Mardy traveled to Washington D.C. for the signing, then spent the next 40 years continuing the couple’s mission.

Murie died in 2003, a few months after celebrating her 101st birthday.

“She’s clearly, when you think of the icons of conservation — Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, Wallace Stegner — she is in that league of icons when it comes to conservation and protection of public lands,” said Dan Smitherman, Wyoming state manager for The Wilderness Society.

As she traveled to Alaska in 1975 for a humanities forum, she articulated her thoughts on the state and wilderness: “… perhaps Man is going to be overwhelmed by his own cleverness; that he may even destroy himself by this same cleverness; and I firmly believe that one of the very few hopes left for Man is the preservation of the wilderness we now have left...”

It was not only her curiosity and intelligence that made her so successful, Smitherman said, but also the couple’s ability to bring people together on their ranch in Moose to work on the future of the country’s wild lands.

She appreciated, to her very core, what wilderness and open spaces offered people and wildlife.

In their book “Wapiti Wilderness,” Mardy wrote about the tendency for travelers on the Union Pacific to travel through western Wyoming, “their eyes glazed with boredom.”

“At last, the wide sky, the wide land, broke and bare but stretching far to the limitless blue sky of Wyoming,” she wrote. “Room to breathe, to stretch one’s soul’s wings again. Here the big country still is. Always a joy to come back, to find it still big, still stretching away, meeting and passing starling buttes which rise here and there, and dry watercourses, drift fences, once in a while a ranch house and corrals nestling under cottonwoods and willows in one of those watercourses; once in a while a few cattle, a band of antelope in the sage, some horses galloping with the wind.

After the cities, a wave of thankfulness rises in my heart that the great United States still has some room, some great spaces.”

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

ELYSIA CONNER

D

For the Star-Tribune

ell Burke would stand on the porch of her Yellow Hotel across the street from Lusk’s downtown train depot at 5 p.m. She’d ring a little brass bell to let everyone know her business was open.

Traveling women off the train often mistook the business for a hotel, Burke’s hairdresser Mary Engebretsen said, relaying the story she’d always heard around Lusk in the 2018 documentary “Dell Burke & Her Yellow Hotel.”

“And she would just very pleasantly tell them that they’d be happier if they went up and stayed at one of the other places that was there,” she said in the film.

Burke successfully ran her brothel on Lusk’s main street for six decades. What she’s remembered for most is her business savvy and philanthropy.

Burke loaned money to the town of Lusk during the Great Depression, footed college tuition for locals and gave to charities and churches, according to a 2018 Star-Tribune story about Dennis Rollins‘ 2018 documentary.

“Bordellos existed across the frontier throughout the rough and tumble days of settling the Old West,” the narrator says.

“But one of the most famous of them all, the Yellow Hotel in Lusk, operated openly on the main street until 1978.”

Burke was a woman far ahead of her time, Rollins told the Star-Tribune on Wednesday.

“She was a very astute and very tough business person,” he said. “But the thing is, she also had that other side where she was always helping people.”

Booming business

In 1919, Burke arrived in Lusk with a business partner after stints in Alaska and Casper, according to the documentary.

“They pitched a tent across from the railroad station and announced that they were open for business,” the narrator says. “With the nearby Lance Creek oil boom in full swing, business was good indeed.”

On the same spot, Burke soon opened her Yellow Hotel, according to the documentary.

“She did scholarships, she was very charitable, she gave to all different kinds of organizations, belonged to the farm bureau and the chamber of commerce,” Engebretsen said in the film. “She made sure that there was donations given to all of the churches. She made sure there was no activity at her place on Sunday.

It was closed, so that nobody could ever

Brothel owner remembered for

philanthropy Dell Burke ran Yellow Hotel for six decades in downtown Lusk

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

say she kept anybody from going to church. She was a very smart businesswoman. We all know that she was over a millionaire when she left. And it wasn’t because of Dell’s hotel. It was her smart business sense and the way she invested her money.”

Author June Read wrote “Frontier Madam: The Life of Dell Burke, Lady of Lusk“ and was interviewed for the film.

Word was that Burke, during the Great Depression, helped the town with crucial repairs for the water and power plant, Read said in the film. She’d recently met a witness of a meeting where Burke helped pay for the town’s power and light.

His account backs up a comment Burke made in answer to talk of her brothel needing to be run out: “Well, you shut me down, I’ll shut down the lights.”

“And now I know,” Read said, “she really could have.”

Glenna Madden in the documentary

her employees and whether they should come in the back door of her shop. Engebretsen told her to come in like any other customer, and Burke treated her better than some clients who would cross the street if the Yellow Hotel owner happened to be out there, Engebretsen said in the film.

Despite keeping a low profile, Burke had subtle ways of advertising. She’d send new employees out to shop for a small item at a store while carrying her dog, Read said in the film.

“And the men all knew that this meant there was a new girl over at Dell’s hotel.”

‘A living legend’

Dell Burke moved to Lusk in 1919 and ran her Yellow Hotel brothel in downtown for six decades. She’s remembered most for her business savvy and philanthropy.

recalled Burke didn’t initiate conversations around town; others had to speak to her first. Hugo Lenz in the film recalled Burke “was quite a lady” and would simply smile and wink as she passed on a street.

She required the same discretion — as well as class in dress and conduct — from all “her girls,” people from Lusk recalled in the film.

In the film Read told a story of one employee who greeted a local by name: “And the wife was standing next to him and looked at Dell and looked at her, and the young lady in question was on the bus very, very soon.”

When two employees returned after a night out of drinking and had tried to seduce young men, Burke met them with their suitcases and took them to the bus station.

Burke asked hairdresser Engebretsen if she was comfortable with serving her or

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Burke traveled often, including with a friend turned into a fiancé, Engebretsen said in the film. Right before they planned to be married, Jerry Dull died suddenly.

“And I thought, how sad, that she finally had found someone and they couldn’t have spent more time together and continued their life,” she said. “Because at that time, Dell didn’t need to run the hotel. She had enough money.

She just could have retired and traveled.

But without Jerry to travel with, then she just stayed there in Lusk and lived out the rest of her life.”

Rollins has continued to come across people with more stories about Burke since releasing his documentary. One told him of a relative who was a foreman at the Lance Creek oilfield and would bring his crew into town for a nice dinner and drinks. He wasn’t welcome in Lusk’s restaurants because he was Native American, Rollins said. The man went to the Yellow Hotel instead, though not for its famous pleasures.

“But Dell would invite him in, and he would just sit in the parlor and smoke a cigar, drink some coffee, maybe have a bowl of soup and visit with Dell or whoever was in there,” Rollins said. “… And his wife actually went to Dell Burke and personally thanked her for being kind to her husband when other people in town wouldn’t.”

Denver Post reporter Red Fenwick wrote a column about Burke shortly after her death in 1981, describing his friend of more than 25 years as one of the wealthiest women in Wyoming and “certainly one of the most charitable,” Engebretsen relayed in the film. His column included his inscription to Burke in her copy of his book: “To a lovely little lady in red velvet, who perhaps more eloquently than any other woman can testify to the masculinity of a true masculine state, Wyoming.”

In Fenwick’s eulogy column, she said, he hailed Dell Burke as “a living legend.”

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MANDY LASKY

L

For the Star-Tribune

ast summer, the University of Wyoming held an event to honor an important figure in its history. Stephen Downey, a prominent 19th century Laramie lawyer and legislator, was officially being named the father of UW, and the Downey family had gathered with members of the university community to celebrate his legacy.

As part of the event, attendees were asked to wear a name badge listing the Downey ancestor they had descended from. Dr. Narina Nunez, a psychology professor who attended the event, sported her own badge. It said “June Downey.”

Technically, this was impossible. June, one of Stephen’s daughters, never had children. But during her 57 years of life, she led significant national advances in personality testing, made a historic rise to the top of the University of Wyoming’s psychology department and cultivated a lifelong love of writing and other creative pursuits. “(June) chose psychology,” Nunez said, remembering the warm reception her name badge garnered from the family that day. “So we’re her children.”

LEGACY

IN LARAMIE Groundbreaking educator June Downey left mark on psychology, university

•••

June Downey was born in Laramie in 1875. Her father, Stephen Downey, practiced law in Laramie, served in the Wyoming Legislature and as Wyoming’s territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress and was on the university’s board of trustees.

He was also devoted to his family, said Rebecca Hein, assistant editor of WyoHistory.org, a project of the Wyoming State Historical Society. June Downey’s parents encouraged their children to pursue knowledge and learning at an early age in a variety of disciplines, including academia and the arts, Hein said.

June Downey graduated from UW with a bachelor’s degree in 1895. The timing was crucial, as this was right as women were beginning to be hired for teaching positions at state universities, Hein said.

It was just the time for June Downey to launch a prolific career that would ultimately shape the fledgling field of psychology and lift her to become the first woman to chair a department of psychology at a state university.

•••

Downey began her career in personality testing. She was interested in what handwriting and other muscle movements might indicate about someone’s

COURTESY PHOTOS, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

University of Wyoming professor June Downey made important contributions to the field of psychology. She was the first woman to chair a department of psychology at a state university. personality.

“Psychology was just really getting started then,” Nunez said. “She was really in the right place at the right time, and she was very smart and very tenacious.”

Downey had a particular interest in experimental psychology, especially after attending a summer session in 1901 at Cornell University, where she studied under experts and brought the tools and knowledge back to Wyoming for further use, Nunez said. That is also where she began to meet other experts in the field, making the academic connections across the nation that would strengthen her work and raise her profile in the world of psychology.

Early in her career, Downey created one of the first personality tests in the U.S., Nunez said. It was an assessment

that included three main personality types, which Downey described as the quick, hair-trigger type; the decisive, willful type; and the cautious, accurate type.

The assessment, called the Downey Individual Will-Temperament Test, is no longer in use, but Nunez said it’s remarkable how well Downey’s tool aligns with what modern personality tests assess.

Downey was also interested in experimental methods and “good solid research,” Nunez said. That meant that while her personality assessment may not have entirely withstood the test of time, her methodology does.

“It was June Downey who got us started” in research psychology, she said.

Downey, a universally beloved educator, eventually went on to become the head of the UW department, making

her the first woman to chair a psychology department at a state university. She held the position for the rest of her life.

The esteemed psychologist also left another mark on UW. The university is a founding member of Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology. That’s largely due to June Downey’s influence, Nunez said. Downey believed strongly in the need for a student organization that celebrated success.

•••

Downey’s research also had some legal implications, according to Hein’s article on WyoHistory.org. According to that article, in 1916, a Carbon County Jail inmate attacked a guard in an attempt to flee. The victim ultimately died, and the inmate was accused of murder. His lawyer entered a plea of insanity.

That’s where Downey came in, using an IQ assessment on the inmate. She — and the jury — concluded that the inmate had a mental age of under 10 years old.

Ultimately, he was sent to the Wyoming State Hospital for treatment.

This type of legal defense was codified into law around this time as well, Nunez said. But that wasn’t the only noteworthy element of Downey’s work in the case.

“To her, it was really important for the public to understand,” Nunez said. “It was a very rich way of thinking about it.”

After the case, Downey wrote, More and more we realize that there are criminal acts but no criminals, and that society, if properly alive to the problem, could protect itself and the unfortunate man who may become a so-called criminal, by discovering him before he commits a crime.

•••

Over her lifetime, the renowned research psychologist published seven books and more than 70 articles. But her interests and abilities stretched far beyond academia as well: The eminent scholar with deep Laramie roots also penned poems, plays and even the UW alma mater. One of the books she wrote focused on the creative process.

“She was so diverse in her creative pursuits,” said Hein. “Her involvement in the arts really enriched her life as a scientist.”

Nunez agreed. In 57 years of life, she said, June Downey accomplished an incredible amount of work. “I’m not even sure I understand how she did it,” Nunez said. But whatever forces surrounded Downey’s success, Nunez is sure of one thing.

“Her passion made it possible,” she said.

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 | 23

Ellis and Clifford both serve on state’s tribal relations committee CHRIS AADLAND

‌T

For the Star-Tribune

wo Indigenous Wyoming women are bringing their experiences to the state Legislature, especially when it comes to issues affecting Indian Country.

Sen. Affie Ellis, R-Cheyenne, a citizen of the Navajo Nation has served since 2017.

She is the first Native American to have been elected to the state Senate and third overall to have been elected to the Legislature.

Rep. Andi Clifford, D-Fort Washakie, was the first Northern Arapaho woman to be elected to the state Legislature when she won in 2018. Clifford recently announced that she intends to seek re-election.

While the two women have different backgrounds, approaches and parties, the two also share some common goals, like addressing the high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous people.

Both women serve on the Legislature’s Select Committee on Tribal Relations, which Ellis co-chairs. Both have worked on legislation addressing missing and murdered Indigenous people that will be debated during this year’s session. They’ve also combined to work on a resolution they hope the Legislature will sign off on to send to the U.S. Congress, encouraging it to more aggressively tackle the problem.

Ellis’ and Clifford’s elections come as other Indigenous women are winning elections. In 2018, Minnesota voters elected an Ojibwe woman as the state’s lieutenant governor, making her the second Native American woman to ever be elected to statewide executive office in the U.S. That same year, the first two Native American women in history won seats in U.S. Congress.

And despite the 100th anniversary of U.S. women winning the right to vote, Clifford said the anniversary means something different to many Indigenous women because that didn’t mean they could then vote — and they are still fighting to be treated equally.

She’d like to see women, despite race or background, hold more leadership roles.

“We still have a ways to go on the national, state and even my tribal level for women to be equal,” she said. “My hope would be to inspire women and men, girls and boys to support each other, to encourage each other to get past the stigma of a woman being in leadership positions. I

CAYLA NIMMO PHOTOS, STAR-TRIBUNE‌

LEFT: Sen. Affie Ellis poses for a portrait Jan. 13 at the Capitol building in Cheyenne.

RIGHT: Rep. Andi Clifford poses for a portrait Jan. 18 in Lander.

INDIGENOUS

WOMEN

bring expertise to capitol hope that’s my legacy. ... Women are sacred. We give life.”

Unapologetically Indigenous‌

Clifford previously served as a Fremont County commissioner and currently works as a human resources and employment consultant in addition to her work as a lawmaker.

Clifford and her husband have eight children between them and 19 grandchildren, who she said she enjoys spending time with — whether that’s visiting them in South Dakota, California or taking them to Disneyland.

When her uncle, Patrick Goggles, said he was retiring his legislative seat, she ran to fill in for him in 2014. She lost that first bid but narrowly won in 2018.

Growing up and listening to passionate family members advocate for issues on the reservation, like allowing women to enroll their children in their tribe or to establish a reservation school, helped instill a drive to one day serve her people, a goal hardened by other experiences like serving as president of University of Wyoming student group Keepers of the Fire.

“It was those two who really inspired me to speak out and fight for what I believe in, sometimes standing alone,” she said.

She said she’s spent much of her first term observing, forming relationships and learning how to be an effective legislator — advice given to her by Goggles.

Still, she acknowledged that she’s “ruffled some feathers” when speaking out about issues around using tribal IDs to vote or a police shooting of a Northern Arapaho.

Despite that, she said she doesn’t mind being seen as frank or outspoken, adding that she hopes she’s seen someday as “an unapologetic Indigenous women” who always spoke up for her people.

Now that she’s feeling more comfortable with the process, she said she’s looking forward to tackling more issues. One she hopes to take on is passing legislation requiring all Wyoming school districts to allow Indigenous students to wear regalia during their graduation if those students want to.

And in the end, she hopes people view her as someone who fought for Indigenous voices to be included in discussions and to have helped educate Wyomingites about their Indigenous neighbors.

“I’m going to go sit at that table. I’m not going to wait to be invited because sometimes we’ll never be invited to the table,” she said. “There’s a lot of tables that we still are not at consistently at.”

‘Do they let girls in the Senate?’‌

For Ellis, a Wyoming native, it took a question from her daughter to decide to seek office.

“I think I’ve always been interested and involved with government politics in some way, shape or form,” she said. “... But it

wasn’t until ... I took her to the Wyoming Legislature to just watch some of the debate and she heartbreakingly asked me if they let girls in the Senate, because she looked in the chamber and didn’t see any.

And so after just a lot of soul-searching and reflection, I decided to kind of transition from being a more behind-the-scenes observer into a candidate and decided to run.”

Ellis works as an attorney for law firm Holland & Hart has deep experience in tribal affairs and law. She also participated in a group that studied the high rates of Indian crime and helped author a report a few years ago about the problem and recommendations to fix it. That’s expertise she’s taken to the Legislature.

“There are some areas in federal Indian law where I don’t have as great a depth of knowledge, but certainly in other areas I do,” she said. “So, being one of the few people that practice in this area in Wyoming, being a Native person and then serving in the Legislature, is a wonderful combination of skills that, I think, really have started advancing some conversations that I think are long overdue or have been long overdue in Wyoming.”

She also serves on the education committee, where she says she’s proud of legislation she helped pass around computer science education. She added she’s thought a lot about the state’s Indian Education for All act and the history that Wyoming students get about the country and state’s Indigenous people.

Ellis grew up in Jackson. Her parents, who grew up in the Navajo Nation, moved to the state about 60 years ago.

She and her husband have three kids, and although she said she’s missed some events, she hopes her children recognized what that means. Working, being a parent and legislator means being busy, something Ellis said she doesn’t mind.

“I have a really hard time just kind of relaxing,” she said. “That’s actually something I want to work on, that ... I probably have too many hobbies.”

Although she said she’ll be recognized a state lawmaker, ultimately, she hopes her friends and family view her more as a loving mother who loved seeing her children laugh, a voracious reader, passionate sewer, for her frybread or her renovation of a vintage camper.

“It’d be fine at my funeral to say, ‘Well, she cared about computer science legislation,’” she said. “I would hope that at my funeral, people don’t mention or get hung up on the fact that I served in the state Senate. ... So I kind of have that duality of like, that’s what I want on a personal level to be remembered by, versus knowing that my public service will always be larger than anything.”

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| BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020

CHRISTINE PETERSON

For the Star-Tribune

M

arilyn Kite was living in Jackson, working as an attorney and raising her son when she got the call.

Justice Richard Macy was retiring.

The Wyoming Supreme Court would have an opening. Would she consider it?

It felt impractical. Her family had just moved to Jackson and settled into a new home and jobs. Her 6-year-old son was in school. She couldn’t move everyone back to Cheyenne.

But a woman had never sat on the Wyoming Supreme Court. It was time.

So she applied, went through a series of interviews, explained that she would commute the 450 miles from Jackson to Cheyenne once a month to hear cases.

Then in 2000, Kite became Wyoming’s first female supreme court justice.

For her, requiring or pressuring justices to move to Cheyenne embodies what has kept women from rising into senior positions in so many fields.

“I have told governors and commission members since then that it discourages women,” she said. “It’s usually harder for women to get the rest of the family to move than it is for men.”

But it was her presence, her willingness to apply, and her doggedness in her career that helped pave the way for countless other women in Wyoming’s judicial system. Ultimately, she said, that matters most because it allows those appearing before the court to see more of themselves in the people making decisions on their lives.

“No one starts out (on a court) thinking they’re going to save the day for women, and you better not start out that way, but as you wrestle with difficult questions and societal issues, it’s important you have different perspectives,” she said.

••• In 2020, Kite’s path may seem pre-ordained. The court was ready for a woman to serve, and she was the logical choice.

But when she started law school at the University of Wyoming in 1971, a woman lawyer was anything but normal.

“Our law school class was extra big for that time,” Kite said. “They ended up with 125 freshman and only about six of us were women. You stuck out.”

In fact, of all the attorneys in the Wyoming State Bar, she counted only five or six who were women.

Kite was born in Laramie in 1947, the daughter of a dentist and housewife. Her father’s mother came to Hanna in 1902.

Her mother’s mother homesteaded in a town outside Daniel around that same

Forging a path to the Wyoming

Supreme Court Marilyn Kite became first woman to serve on state’s high court

FILE, STAR-TRIBUNE

Wyoming Supreme Court Chief Justice Marilyn Kite addresses a joint session of the Wyoming Legislature in 2013 in Cheyenne. Kite was the first woman to serve on the state’s highest court. time.

She went to UW to study international affairs, but then realized most jobs in that field would require moving from Wyoming. Her Wyoming roots ran too deep. She couldn’t leave. So she interviewed with an oil and gas company and a landman there suggested she go to law school.

“I couldn’t visualize that,” she said, mostly because she hadn’t seen female attorneys. “But I remember going to my college political science adviser and asked if it was something I could consider, and he was furious with me. ‘Of course it was,’ he said, ‘and of course you should.’”

Her older brother applied the same

time after several years in Vietnam and the two joined the freshman class.

“I never had anything but encouragement from the faculty and the students, and I didn’t feel any discouraging feeling or unwelcome feeling,” she said. “I did feel like we were an oddity, not a lot of us in the picture.”

From there she went to the attorney general’s office and, in retrospect, got lucky. Wyoming’s Environmental Quality Act had just been passed and no one was versed in that kind of law, and Kite was assigned to the job.

“I joked it was a place I could do the least damage,” she said. “But that was a real godsend because it allowed me to become an instant expert and that led

me to a really wonderful career in something I enjoyed.”

She left the attorney general’s office then for a position with Holland and Hart, a regional law firm expanding into Wyoming. And there she stayed for more than 20 years until she got the call.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Bill Hill was one of the people who encouraged her to apply. They met in high school on their respective student councils (he from Riverton, Kite from Laramie).

They went to UW undergraduate school together and were in the same class at law school. They even commuted from Laramie to the attorney general’s office in Cheyenne together.

Their friendship didn’t mean they always agreed, but they held the same mutual respect.

“It seemed to me history was about to be made,” Hill said. “And I thought truly she was the one to make it.”

••• Kite rarely faced discrimination for being a woman. During her 26 years before joining the bench, she occasionally had people assume she was there to fetch coffee, not to sort out a complicated legal issue.

She would have to readjust meetings with clients because some lunch clubs would only allow men.

But for the most part, she was treated with respect and sometimes as a novelty.

And now most law schools are split evenly between men and women — some even have more women enrolled.

The Wyoming Supreme Court has three female justices and two male.

The same cannot be said for other branches of Wyoming’s government.

The Wyoming Legislature has very few women serving and county commissions are even worse. Even department heads in state government are largely men.

She blames some of the disparity on societal expectations of women that make it harder to rise through ranks, like difficulty with child care or even difficulty moving a family for a woman’s career.

Some of those issues may never go away. But Wyoming is making strides in creating groups to support women, organizations like CLIMB Wyoming, Leap Into Leadership or even the Wyoming Women’s Antelope Hunt, which Kite helped form.

But more women also need to sign up, she said. They need to run for office.

They need to apply for promotions or positions, and they need to advocate for themselves so that more women can see themselves in those roles, too.

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

Wilkins remembered as the ‘first lady of Democratic politics’ ELYSIA CONNER

E

For the Star-Tribune

dness Kimball Wilkins served as a Democrat in a Republican state. But her party affiliation didn’t keep her from gaining respect from politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Wilkins served more than two decades in the Wyoming Legislature. She was Wyoming’s first female Speaker of the House, an assistant to the director of the U.S. Mint, a historian and rancher.

She made such an impact on Wyoming that a state park just east of Casper now bears her name.

“My respect for Edness Kimball Wilkins crossed all party lines,” then-Wyoming House Speaker Warren A. Morton said in a July 1980 newspaper article that was published shortly after her death. “In the Legislature, she was a woman of indomitable will and amazing strength. She was certainly the First Lady of Democratic politics in Wyoming.”

Sen. Charles Scott, R-Natrona County, started his first term in the Legislature during Wilkins’ last. He recalled growing up with partisan Republican parents while she was a Democrat in the House.

While his parents wanted Wilkins defeated at the ballot box, when Scott had an opportunity to meet her, he was impressed.

“And once I got to know her,” Scott said, “she was a very good legislator.”

•••

Wilkins came from a family of early Casper settlers.

She graduated from Casper High School and attended the University of Kentucky and University of Nebraska, according to the Wyoming Blue Book Volume IV. Wilkins’ husband, Capt. Roland Wilkins, died in 1933 from an apparent blood clot while the infantry officer was stationed in Hawaii. Wilkins “was left as the sole support of the couple’s young son, Charles,” according to an editorial piece in the July 17, 1980, edition of the Star-Tribune.

After her husband’s death, Wilkins accepted Nellie Tayloe Ross’ invitation to work as her personal secretary at the U.S. Mint in Washington D.C. “Besides having a good working relationship, the two became close friends, and their friendship lasted until Ross’ death in 1977,” according to Wilkins’ bi-

Casper lawmaker earned

RESPECT across party lines

CASPER STAR-TRIBUNE COLLECTION, CASPER COLLEGE WESTERN HISTORY CENTER

ography on the Rocky Mountain Online Archive.

Wilkins in 1947 returned to her hometown to help her ill father, Wilson S. Kimball, who’d been a druggist and Casper mayor for 10 terms, according to her obituary and biographical information in Wilkins’ papers at the Wyoming State Archives.

She worked in the personnel department for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and then as manager of the city’s water and sanitation department. After her father died, she managed the Kimball ranch east of Casper.

Wilkins served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1955-1967 and 1973-80 and was a state senator from 1967-71. She was a delegate twice to the National Democratic Convention.

She became Wyoming’s first female Speaker of the House in 1966 after Speaker Walter Phelan’s death, although she was elected to the Senate the next fall and didn’t serve as speaker during a legislative session, according to wyohistory. org. Wilkins was the first woman in Wy-

oming to be chairman of the Legislature’s labor committee, and she was the third woman in the state Senate in 101 years, according to her biographical information at the Wyoming State Archives.

An August 1978 Star-Tribune story described her as a pioneer, historian and rancher whose work in the Legislature included championing for people with disabilities and the elderly.

Wilkins in one legislative session, “successfully opposed an attempt by the Ways and Means Committee to cut the salaries of women employees of the state, and raise the salaries of the men,” according to a Casper Tribune Herald story from 1958.

She told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle in 1975 that women are needed in Wyoming’s government and should be represented.

“In the past there were usually two of us and at times as high as four,” she’d said. “I remember years ago people would ask me, ‘With all the equality you women are so proud of, you haven’t taken advantage of it.’ In those days it was a vast country, and a woman couldn’t go out and campaign.

25

“Women were scarce, and as wives with children they couldn’t get out into government.”

•••

Jerre Jones worked for the Casper Journal for many years and often happened across Wilkins around the community. She remembers her passion for the Democratic Party and for telling stories about local history.

“I think she liked to kind of give them a little excitement in her stories,” Jones said.

Former Wyoming legislator Mary Hales lived with Wilkins when she arrived in Casper fresh from college to work for the Casper Girl Scouts. Wilkins served on the board.

“She was a very gracious person.”

Hales said. “She took me to the Wyoming Pioneers group one of the first weekends that I was there.”

Wilkins invited her to tea in the middle of one afternoon, and Hales arrived home to find Nellie Tayloe Ross, the nation’s first female governor, resting on a chaise lounge.

“So the three of us had high tea” at a downtown dime store, Hales recalled, laughing.

Scott, the Natrona County lawmaker, remembers Wilkins’ big issue was excluding groceries from the sales tax.

While campaigning on the issue, she would push a cart through grocery stores and talk with shoppers about the tax.

“And she didn’t need those things she put in the cart,” Scott said. “When she’d talked to everybody in the store, she pushed the cart off in a corner and just departed. And then they had to restock the shelves. And I understand the grocery stores were kind of mad at her, but they didn’t dare do anything about it.”

Scott remembers Wilkins’ skill maneuvering through the legislative process. He once watcher her kill a rightto-records bill that concerned her for its lack of privacy protections — including one important to Kimball herself, who never revealed how old she was, Scott said.

“Why, if this bill were to pass, they could print my age in the newspapers,” he recalled her saying.

“And that bill, it went down like a dead heifer,” Scott said.

Wilkins’ contributions to Wyoming led to the establishment of a state park that bears her name on what had been her ranch outside of Casper. In a bit of irony, the bill establishing that park was Scott’s second to become law.

“It was a fitting honor for Edness, for having served as many years as she did,” he said.

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| BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020

RUNNING

THE FLOOR

Women’s basketball coach Margie McDonald paved the way for Cowgirls’ success

Margie McDonald crouches on the side of the court while coaching a UW women’s basketball game. She coached the Cowgirls for nine years, posting a 122-114 record.

Margie McDonald coaches the University of Wyoming women’s basketball team in this undated photo.

McDonald served as the second coach in the program’s history.

COURTESY PHOTOS, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

SALLY ANN SHURMUR

H

307-266-0520, sallyann.shurmur@trib.com

er copper hair was cut in a Dorothy Hamill before the Olympic figure skating champion became a household name in 1976.

Her honey-smooth accent, honed in Camargo, Oklahoma, and Plainview, Texas, is unmistakable in a huddle or on the radio.

Margie McDonald is a pioneer. Her path was not a dusty trail in her native Oklahoma or adopted Wyoming, but on a gleaming hardwood, as a player before Title IX and as a coach after the landmark decision giving women equal athletic opportunity.

With three kids in school, McDonald returned to the classroom at the University of Wyoming to earn her master’s in

physical education. When Title IX was adopted as part of the Federal Education Act of 1972, one of the PE teachers at UW was charged with putting together an organized basketball team. McDonald began her successful nine-year coaching career three years later, the second coach in program history.

“I am really proud that I got to give the first female an athletic scholarship to Wyoming and that was to Dale Ann Feusner of Powell,” she said recently.

The state Legislature appropriated money to fund the women’s program and McDonald coached her first game for the Cowgirls on January 18, 1975.

There were 15 games on the schedule that season.

While playing for the nationally renowned Flying Queens at Wayland Bap-

tist University in Plainview, McDonald and her teammates flew to away games on private planes. More than a decade later, the Cowgirls began their history driving in three station wagons to away games — one driven by McDonald and two driven by student-athletes. McDonald did the team’s laundry, carried the basketballs in the back of her car and had to take a class so that she could properly tape the ankles, knees and wrists of her players.

Feusner, now Dale Ann Meeker, still refers to McDonald as “Coach,” 45 years

after enrolling at UW. “I had to give a speech at Soroptimist last week, and most of it was about Coach,” Meeker said.

“When she recruited me until now, what I loved about her was she was a tremendous example of combining a demanding career, marriage and motherhood.”

Meeker got engaged and married while playing at UW and says she never considered what Coach would say.

“She was very supportive and was super supportive of (my husband) Mike and tried to include him in any way she could,” Meeker said. “He became part of our team, he got himself a really nice camera and became the team photographer and became one of our No. 1 fans.”

Meeker said her coach was a true leader and that you could tell just by being around her that she was a “take charge” type of person.

“She made us feel like we were a big deal. She made us feel like what we were doing was just as important as anything the men were doing,” Meeker said. “I remember when she signed Cindy Bower from Worland and me, she made us go to these different functions. She paraded us around and made us dress up. ...

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 | 27

There were bankers and lots of important people there, people I suppose you would call boosters today.”

Meeker followed in her coach’s footsteps, graduating from UW with an elementary education degree in 1979.

After a year in Canada where her husband was a geologist, they returned to Powell, where she taught middle school PE for 33 years — same job, same office she laughs. She coached basketball for 21 years, 15 of those at her alma mater, Powell High.

“Even after I retired, I continued coaching middle school track,” she said.

“This is my 38th year. I’m old school and I can’t believe those kids keep coming back because I believe in accountability. Coach was certainly a blessing in my life, definitely a great example in all the things she’s done and she’s just a humble person.”

McDonald scoffed when asked if she realized that she was making history when the Cowgirls first took the court.

“Of course not, you just live one day at a time and take care of everything that comes up,” she said. “It really felt good to have all of these young women who were athletes and had a passion for the sport. Some of them had played a little bit in high school and almost all were in PE and education and it was a pleasure just to be able to coach them.”

McDonald posted a record of 122-114 in her nine years coaching the Cowgirls. The 1978-79 squad, with Meeker and three other starters from Wyoming, went 25-7, still the second-most wins ever in a single season at Wyoming.

After her coaching career, McDonald became the first executive director of the High Country Athletic Conference, which later merged with the Western Athletic Conference. She then served as deputy commissioner of the WAC and closed out her administrative career as coordinator of women’s basketball officiating for the Mountain West Conference.

“That was the hardest job I ever did,” she said. “You have to evaluate, talk to the coaches about referees, it was very difficult.”

After six years, then-Wyoming head women’s coach Joe Legerski thought McDonald should give color commentary a try on Cowgirl radio broadcasts.

She served in that capacity for 15 years, retiring Jan. 1 of this year.

The early years‌

McDonald has received honors throughout her playing, coaching and administrative days, but the one that means the most to her is the newest

homa State University.

The two married after college and after she returned from the women’s world basketball tournament in Lima, Peru. After several stops while they began their family and Lyman earned his doctorate at CSU, the family moved for the first time to Laramie, and would return again after a brief stint at Kansas State, returning “for good” when McDonald’s time as deputy commissioner of the WAC ended.

The future‌

Margie McDonald coaches the Cowgirls in this undated photo. She began her time as coach in 1975.

UW women’s basketball coach Margie McDonald calls a game with UW broadcaster Reece Monaco. McDonald was a pioneer in women’s sports in Wyoming. and oldest at the same time. She is a member of the University of Wyoming Athletics Hall of Fame, inducted individually in 2002 and with her 1978-79 team in 2008. She is also a member of the now-defunct Wyoming Sports Hall of Fame, based in Casper.

In September 2019, she and other former players representing the Wayland Baptist University women’s basketball teams of 1948-82 were inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.

“Coach (Harley J.) Redin turned 100 in August and oh, we worked on getting in there a long time for him,” she said.

McDonald, then Margie Hunt, played 3-on-3 basketball in Camargo, and Redin wasn’t so sure she’d fit with his Flying Queens program. WBU won 131 consecutive games from 1953-58 and 10 AAU national championships from

1954 to 1975. McDonald graduated from WBU in 1964.

“My mom and daddy took me in the car to Plainview for a tryout and to meet him, and he said he really couldn’t give me a scholarship because I didn’t know how to shoot, but he said he could tell I had a sense for the game. And he said if I could pay for one semester, he’d see how I might improve,” McDonald said.

Hunt’s dad had to get a bank loan to pay for her first semester, which McDonald remembers as “not cheap at a private religious school.”

But “Coach Redin really pushed me,” she recalled, and she did indeed earn a scholarship.

While working in a cafe in Vici, Oklahoma, the summer after her sophomore year at WBU, Hunt met Lyman McDonald, who was working at his uncle’s grain elevator on summer break from Okla-

Her husband left academia after decades in professorships in statistics and zoology at UW to begin Western Ecosystems Technology, which is a research firm dealing mostly with fish and wildlife and has offices all over the country.

When Lyman decided to retire from the business world in December 2019, McDonald knew that was her signal to step away from the headset.

“We have three children (all of whom are UW graduates) and nine grandchildren and I can’t tell you how proud I am of them all,” she said. “It’s time to spend time with them, travel, and stand up and cheer for the Cowgirls from the stands.

It’s been a long time, but now I can cheer again for them instead of just talk about them.”

Women’s and girls’ athletics have come a long way in Wyoming since January 1975. The Cowgirls basketball team flies to away games, sometimes even by charter (fewer long layovers, fewer missed classes). There are managers and trainers and others to make arrangements, do the laundry and the taping. Today, women at the University of Wyoming compete in volleyball, soccer, cross country, basketball, golf, swimming and diving, tennis, and track and field.

There are still struggles. It took years to get enough local school boards to approve competitive high school softball in their districts. Finally, the sport has been sanctioned by the Wyoming High School Activities Association and girls will be allowed to play for their high schools starting in spring 2021.

“I thought Wyoming really stepped up for women’s athletics back in the day,” McDonald said. “Of course, it was hard all over the country, but the Legislature appropriated the funds and we got scholarships and travel and salaries and the whole nine yards. There are not any disadvantages to being a woman in Wyoming. Only advantages.”

Follow Sally Ann Shurmur on Twitter @wyosas

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| BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020

First woman elected to state Legislature had adventurous spirit MANDY LASKY

W

For the Star-Tribune

est of Laramie, in the Snowy Range, a crystal-clear lake beckons to adventurers.

Its gleaming waters are popular for fishing, and the area is a haven for hikers and others who love the outdoors. It’s known as one of Wyoming’s loveliest lakes, and it has historical significance, too: Its name — Lake Marie — honors one of the state’s pioneers.

This pioneer — the first woman elected to the Wyoming Legislature — started her life as Marie Godat but became known as Mary Bellamy, a progressive advocate for her community and her state.

Mary, a schoolteacher, began her political career as the county superintendent of schools in Albany County, an office to which she was elected in 1902, according to wyohistory.org, a project of the Wyoming State Historical Society. She moved there as a young girl with her mother in the prairie town’s early years, eventually becoming a member of the first high school class in Laramie.

She went on to marry another pioneer: Charles Bellamy, the first person in the nation to receive a professional engineering license, said Phil Roberts, professor emeritus of history at the University of Wyoming. Charles, a surveyor, had named the Snowy Range lake after his wife, who often joined him on expeditions into the Wyoming wilderness. ··· Though Wyoming women had been granted the right to vote decades before Mary’s election to the Wyoming Legislature, her victory remains a milestone.

“The gears for women have been very slow in Wyoming, in terms of politics,” said Judy Knight, the collections manager at the Laramie Plains Museum and an active member of the League of Women Voters who has researched and written about Mary Bellamy.

She was elected in a Democratic sweep in 1910 and was part of a progressive movement that supported election reform and conservation, according to Roberts.

She worked with progressives in both parties.

“She was able to work in a nonpartisan way for progressive reform,” Roberts said.

He also noted that Mary was very dynamic and an articulate speaker — likely thanks

A pioneer in politics

and more

WYOMING STATE ARCHIVES

Mary Bellamy was elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives in 1910. She was the first of just 132 women that have served in the state Legislature. to her years in front of a classroom.

Knight agreed. “She was very plain-spoken and was a fun person to be around,” she added.

According to Knight, Mary was resistant to being labeled a single-issue candidate. In an interview with the Sheridan Press around the time she was elected, Mary explained that she had a wide variety of interests, no different from her male colleagues.

“Why, I think I am interested in every

measure the men are, and then some,” she is reported to have said.

According to Knight, issues Mary supported during her time in the Legislature included industrial education, labor reform, the University of Wyoming and penal reform, including the creation of what is now known as the Wyoming Boys’ School in Worland — the site she had preferred. ··· Mary’s political career began in an era

in which women’s status was changing quickly. Wyoming women were granted the right to vote in 1869, and Estelle Reel, the first woman to hold statewide elected office in Wyoming, was elected as superintendent of public instruction in 1894.

By 1910, when Mary was elected to the Legislature as an at-large representative from Albany County, attitudes had already begun to shift about women in politics and government.

“Wyoming had become very accustomed to women in public service at that point,” Roberts said.

Mary herself is quoted on the website “Her Hat Was In the Ring” as saying she could count on support from like-minded men in her bids for office.

“Men are usually willing to elect those [women] that run,” the website quotes her as saying. “You see, in Wyoming, when it comes to politics, the men don’t think of women as women but as citizens. They are willing to accord us equal rights with themselves, to consider what we want, and if it seems desirable, to grant it...

Between the men and the women of this state there is a sympathetic understanding and the best kind of cooperation … working together for the good of Wyoming.”

So although women’s suffrage was already part of Wyoming life by the time Mary Bellamy entered the political scene, she was still an advocate for women’s right to vote in other places. In 1917, she attended the national rally for women’s suffrage as Wyoming’s delegate, and the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920.

“My guess is that she was there to be a demonstration model of why women can serve, to show that they weren’t dangerous fanatics or anything,” Roberts said. ··· After Mary had served her term, she stepped out of the statewide political arena to focus on community improvement. She was an active member of the Cheyenne and Laramie women’s clubs and helped publish a special one-time women’s edition of the Laramie Boomerang newspaper on Jan. 1, 1900.

Knight suggests that the publication may give some insight into Mary’s adventurous spirit. Many of the articles are attributed to specific authors, but one anonymous contributor describes going on a trip down the Laramie River with her husband with the goal of measuring stream flows — likely a common activity for a surveyor like Mary’s husband, Charles. The writer’s name is not listed, but the style and humor with which it was written hints at the author’s identity.

“I can’t imagine it being anybody else but Mary Bellamy,” Knight said.

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

CAMILLE ERICKSON

‘Y

307-266-0592, camille.erickson@trib.com

ou Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.”

That’s the title of a song by Bob Dylan. And it’s the song that Wyoming artist Seadar Rose Davis chose to play on her guitar during her first open mic event as a burgeoning musician years ago.

In hindsight, Davis’ choice in tune seems fortuitous. Themes of staying put, growing roots and ceding to creativity permeate the lyrics. The selection foreshadowed Davis’ choice to stay in Wyoming for the past 16 years, making a living as a musician, organizer and creative entrepreneur.

Together, she and her husband, Aaron Davis, launched the Americana and roots-rock band Screen Door Porch in 2007. They stayed in the Equality State, settling outside Jackson in Hoback, even though they knew it wouldn’t be easy to make it playing music. It’s the longest she’s ever stayed in one place.

“We knew that the mountain was going to be a little taller to climb to become touring musicians and really make a living out of it in Wyoming,” Davis said.

“But we were really committed to living here, making music from Wyoming and trying to put Wyoming on the map.”

The demanding days of touring with Screen Door Porch required perseverance and fortitude. The band toured every corner of the state, down to “the smallest dots” on the map.

“It gave me such a bigger appreciation of where we live, and a bigger appreciation of how much grit it takes to make it in a place like Wyoming,” Davis said of her touring days.

She was raised by a Southern Democratic family in North Carolina. One of her first memories as a young girl is accompanying her mother to vote — a moment that would later prove to have been impressionable. By the time she turned 5 years old, though, she was determined to be a singer when she grew up.

“I just started singing and I just kept doing it,” she said.

Despite her 5-year-old vision to be a singer, she still carried doubts in her ability to support herself as an artist as she grew up.

“It still took me awhile to think that I was any good and could make legitimate money off of (my music). I was also aware of how difficult that life would be.”

Part of this apprehension, she noted, has to do with being a woman in a male-dominated industry.

“There certainly weren’t enough fe-

The

importance of staying put Musician grew roots in Wyoming, found a love for community

COURTESY DP TURNER AND SEADAR ROSE DAVIS

Seadar Rose Davis sings on stage during an encore at the Gryphon Theatre in Laramie during a 2016 tour with her band Screen Door Porch. INSET: Seadar Rose Davis and her husband, Aaron Davis, pose after voting in the Teton County election on Nov. 6, 2018. COURTESY SEADAR ROSE DAVIS males on the road” in the music industry, she said.

But along the way, she came into her own identity as an artist, soaking up encouragement from other women musicians, like Grace Potter and Nicki Bluhm.

She began etching into her mind her own definition of success — one where community and creativity were cornerstones.

“I think this idea of ‘making it’ is always about (winning) a Grammy and making millions of dollars. But there are so many (more) people I know who, I think, are successfully making it too.”

But after several years of touring, she yearned to stay home.

“It’s hard to stay connected and you can’t do as much in your community

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when you’re on the road,” she said.

When she made the decision to take a step back from Screen Door Porch, she knew immediately that she wanted to become more involved in the community.

That led her to a conference for women in leadership where the idea of running for public office started to percolate. Later, with Chairwoman Natalia Macker’s encouragement, Davis took a leap and decided to run for county commissioner in 2018. She built a campaign platform focused on advocating for working people.

Davis’ winding path has been defined by her community — what she called the “backbone of my existence” — and a drive toward making the state more equitable for working people.

“I’m always interested in knocking the door down so that other people after us can go through it,” she said.

That conviction can be traced to her career as a musician and also her foray into local politics. Looking back, her favorite part of campaigning came down to knocking on thousands of doors, meeting people in their element.

When her campaign ended with a loss, it didn’t take her long to find her next steps. She now serves as the executive director of Cultivate, a nonprofit helping people living with disabilities secure meaningful work.

“I feel like community is what really fuels me. This is definitely my community and my home, and I feel really grateful to be here.”

For now, Davis has channeled her energy to keeping her employees safe and cared for during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The community members that my organization serves — those are the people in my thoughts right now,” she said.

In many ways, the first song Davis played live on her guitar well over a decade ago could deliver some solace today. The entire world has buckled under the stress of the coronavirus pandemic, with millions forced to stay put in their own homes.

As Bob Dylan’s song goes: “Strap yourself to the tree with roots. You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

Follow the latest on Wyoming’s energy industry at @camillereports

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| BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020

Lindsay Linton Buk exhibiting ‘Women in Wyoming’ project CAMILLE ERICKSON

B

307-266-0592, camille.erickson@trib.com

efore taking a photograph, artist Lindsay Linton Buk searches for the “spark” or “little flame” in the eyes of the woman before her.

“I can feel it when I’m working with someone,” the 34-year-old Wyoming photographer said.

This bolt of light she identifies in her subjects can be easily dampened by the world, Lindsay said, but she hopes to capture and amplify it in her art. Since 2016, Lindsay has been working on her project “Women in Wyoming,” a series of portraits and interviews that celebrate the lives of the “brave, strong and impactful” women driving the Equality State forward.

“My hope with creating these stories is that you, as my viewer, can see a reflection of yourself and that it ignites something within you,” she said.

In her mind, women and girls need to see themselves reflected in the world around them more.

“Seeing women in positions of power and leadership, or just standing in their truth is really, really powerful,” she said.

As a young girl being raised in rural Wyoming, she vacillated over what she wanted to be when she grew up. Looking back, Lindsay wishes she had seen more of herself represented in the stories or images around her.

“I know I would have loved to see more of that growing up,” she said. “It’s not that it didn’t exist, it’s just living in smaller towns you don’t necessarily see all that.”

Raised rural

The fifth-generation Wyomingite grew up in Powell. Lindsay’s family lived on the edge of town; their backyard bled into acres upon acres of farm land.

From the age of 2, she started dancing, exploring the boundaries of movement and freedom against the backdrop of an open and mountainous landscape.

Her father owned a farm and ranch store in Powell. He also cared for a garden near the house. One of Lindsay’s earliest memories is spending summer days with her father, nibbling on crunchy snap peas.

Despite her rosy childhood filled with outdoor adventure and play, Lindsay was convinced at a young age she wouldn’t stick around Wyoming long. She couldn’t envision a life for herself as an artist in the

ARTIST

brings Wyoming women’s

story into light

CONTRIBUTED

Artist Lindsay Linton Buk is photographed on location in Bighorn. Since 2016, Buk has been working on her project “Women in Wyoming,” a series of portraits and interviews that celebrate the lives of the “brave, strong and impactful” women driving the Equality State forward.

Equality State.

She recalls flipping through stacks of National Geographic issues, hungry to travel beyond the boundaries of the tiny Wyoming enclave.

“While I had such a wonderful childhood and Powell was such an amazing place to grow up, I just never imagined that I would have a future in Wyoming as a creative person,” she said. “I always thought I would have to leave to be successful.”

After studying history and geography in college, Lindsay looked at her options and realized she wasn’t done learning. She

picked up a camera and enrolled in a twoyear photography program at the community college in Powell, challenging herself just to see what was possible.

Once she completed her photography classes, Lindsay spent a pivotal three-year stint in New York City, honing her craft as an emerging photographer. She landed a gig with the renowned artist Rodney Smith after cold-calling his studio.

While studying at Northwest College in Powell, she had seen reproductions of his work in film — “romantic, timeless, original” — decorating the studio walls.

So the ambitious artist sent her portfolio

to Smith. Soon after, she moved to New York City to work with him.

“I am a believer in just asking, just put yourself out there,” she laughed.

But a magnetic tug from her hometown struck again, and a curiosity drove her back to Wyoming in 2013.

“When I came back, I really had to question that belief and that idea that I had held that Wyoming is limiting,” she said. “There are so many amazing people doing incredible work here, but it’s not always at the surface.”

‘Women in Wyoming’

A determination to bring Wyoming women’s accomplishments to light catalyzed her multi-year project, “Women in Wyoming.” Using her camera and recorder, she documented the varied journeys of over a dozen women, bringing hidden stories to light from all four corners of the state. The culminating multimedia exhibition commemorates the 150th anniversary of Wyoming’s female citizens becoming the first women in U.S. history to gain the unrestricted right to vote.

Sen. Affie Ellis, Wyoming’s first Navajo and Native American senator, participated in the first chapter of Lindsay’s project.

Sitting at Ellis’ kitchen table, Lindsay asked the working mother of three to share all about her life.

“I was blown away by Lindsay, who at her heart is an artist,” Ellis said. “I felt really comfortable speaking with her, because she’s just a good listener and really easy to talk to.

“Her project came at a really good time for our state as we were celebrating the passage of the suffrage,” she added.

Lindsay now lives and works in Jackson.

But the artist’s deep roots in Powell often pull her back to her place of birth, she said, where the town of 6,000 will always feel like home. Her grandparents, now in their 90s, still live in Powell, roughly a city block away from her childhood home.

Now the mother of a five-month-old baby, Lindsay hopes the COVID-19 pandemic won’t keep her family apart for much longer, with introductions to the newest family member limited to video chatting.

Lindsay’s multimedia exhibit, “Women in Wyoming: Portraits and Interviews of Women Who Shape the West,” is on view at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody until Aug. 2. The exhibit will then travel to the University of Wyoming Art Museum and will open on Sept. 12. For details, visit womeninwyoming.com/ exhibit-1.

Follow the latest on Wyoming’s energy industry @camillereports

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

SALLY ANN SHURMUR

M

307-266-0520, sallyann.shurmur@trib.com

odern-day life is filled with sentiments extolling the multi-tasking prowess of women as nurturers, caregivers, professionals, meal fixers and most recently — home-school-teaching overseers.

Grace Raymond Hebard (1861-1936) was a Wyoming pioneer, especially in terms of multi-tasking.

She came to Wyoming in 1882 as a brand-new college graduate from the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she was the only woman studying engineering and a member of Pi Beta Phi Fraternity. Her engineering studies focused on surveying and mechanical drawing.

Along with her mother and siblings, the family settled in Cheyenne, where Hebard had been offered a job working for the United States Surveyor General’s office, which then was surveying and mapping the Wyoming Territory.

She worked in the office for $100 a month and took correspondence courses from her alma mater to earn a master of arts degree in 1885.

Through acquaintances with political influencers Edward C. David and Joseph M. Carey, Hebard, then 30, received an appointment to the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees in January 1891. That appointment was the beginning of a 45-year employment at UW, which lasted until her death.

Although she was not the first woman appointed to the board, she soon began to acquire power and influence, according to historians, when she was made the board’s paid secretary. With six of nine board members living outside Laramie (and before the now-normal Zoom meetings), she and the two other Laramie board members made up the executive committee and had oversight of day-to-day operations at the school.

In 1898, the trustees considered hiring Hebard as UW president, but she declined. That same year, she took and passed the Wyoming State Bar exam, and although she never practiced law, she was the first woman in Wyoming admitted to the bar.

Hebard again took correspondence courses and received a doctorate in political economy from Illinois Wesleyan University. In 1894, Hebard started the first library at the University of Wyoming with a sack of books she found in

A Wyoming

Renaissance

WOMAN Grace Hebard was engineer, teacher, lawyer and historian

COURTESY, AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

Grace Raymond Hebard was a multi-tasking pioneer Wyoming woman, taking on education administration, engineering, passing the bar, writing five history books and marking pioneer trails. a small, locked room at the university.

In 1908, she was appointed the university’s first librarian, a post she held until 1919. The cataloged collection had grown to 42,000 volumes by the end of her tenure.

She began her formal teaching career when she received an appointment in 1906 as the university’s head of the Department of Political Economy.

In addition to the administrative, library and teaching duties, Hebard would write five volumes of Western history through the years, and it was as an author that she would receive the most criticism, especially in the decades following her death.

Her five books included “The Government of Wyoming,” (1904); “The Pathbreakers from River to Ocean,” (1911); “The Bozeman Trail,” (1922), co-authored with E.A. Brinninstool; “Washakie,” (1930), and “Sacajawea,” (1933).

It is the last work that has caused the most eyebrow-raising in the seven decades since Hebard’s passing.

Historians note that Hebard was a tireless researcher, but the trouble was that the facts she uncovered often did not match her romanticized or pre-determined versions of history.

Hebard insisted in her writings that Sacajawea lived to about 100 and was

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buried on the Wind River Reservation.

Most scholars agree that there is much stronger documentation to show that the young Shoshone interpreter for Lewis and Clark died in 1812 at Fort Manuel Lisa in what is now North Dakota.

Another posthumous problem for Hebard’s credibility is of the role Esther Hobart Morris played in Wyoming’s suffrage movement. Hebard subscribed to the story that Morris and two candidates for the territorial legislature met, with Morris obtaining a promise that whichever of the men was elected to the legislature, he would introduce a bill supporting suffrage for women in Wyoming.

Hebard described Morris as “The Mother of Woman Suffrage” and found a South Pass City resident (where Morris was justice of the peace) to corroborate her story. Historians say at no time in her life did Morris ever claim to have anything to do with the introduction or passage of the suffrage bill in Wyoming.

Hebard never married, although some describe her longtime roommate and UW professor Agnes Wergeland as her partner. Hebard died in Laramie in October 1936. A campus-wide memorial service was held for her on December 7, 1936, with speakers including U.S. Senator Robert Carey, university president A.G. Crane and author Agnes Wright Spring, among others.

Her research on the history of Wyoming, the West, emigrant trails and Native Americans became the nucleus for what is known today as the American Heritage Center on the University of Wyoming campus. Officially established in 1945, the center now holds over 90,000 cubic feet of historic documents and artifacts in more than 3,500 collections — making the AHC among the largest non-governmental archives in the nation.

Hebard’s papers currently reside in the Coe Library addition, completed in 2009.

Hebard was an engineer, administrator, librarian, professor, lawyer, researcher, suffragette and historian.

While not a native, she is just one of more than a century of women whose curiosity was spurred by a deep romanticism for this wild, untamed place called Wyoming.

(This story is based on information from WyoHistory.org, Mike Mackey, University of Wyoming American Heritage Center and Wikipedia. The writer thanks them for help with this project.)

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NINA MCCONIGLEY

S

For the Star-Tribune

ierra Rhone Byrd, granddaughter of Liz Byrd, remembers visiting her grandmother every summer during Cheyenne Frontier Days.

“She would take me and all of my extended family to the parades, rodeos and carnival,” Sierra said. “But no matter what we did or where we went, one thing I will always remember is sitting with her after dinner and drinking her very, very sweet iced tea as she told me stories about her life and the people she had met and the amazing places she had gone.

“She would tell me all about how Frontier Days as girl was her favorite part of growing up in Cheyenne, and my great-grandmother Sudie Rhone would love to cook for the whole neighborhood,” Sierra continued.

“She would also tell me stories about how she met my grandfather at the Air Force base when she would volunteer there.”

It seems fitting that Harriet Elizabeth “Liz” Byrd, the first African American woman to serve in both branches of the Wyoming Legislature, was born in a town known for flight and transportation.

In the 1930s, Cheyenne became a major stopover for transcontinental aviation. In the 1930s, when Byrd was a little girl, United Airlines had a dozen arrivals and departures daily. During World War II, when flying was restricted on the West Coast, United relocated its pilot training school to Cheyenne.

And in 1947, Fort Warren became a U.S. Air Force Base.

Byrd’s own family was connected to the railroad. Byrd was born in Cheyenne on April 20, 1926; her family are fourth-generation natives of Wyoming. Her grandfather, Charles Rhone, was a cowboy and railroad worker, who came to Wyoming in 1876. Her father, Robert C. “Buck” Rhone, was a firstclass mechanic for Union Pacific Railroad.

He and her mother, Sudie Rhone, settled in Cheyenne.

Byrd graduated from Cheyenne High School in 1944, and after her application to the University of Wyoming was rejected, she attended West Virginia State College, a historically black land-grant university.

There, she received a degree in education, and she began her decades-long work as an educator and advocate for students. After receiving her degree in 1949, she came back to Wyoming to work. She applied for a job in the Laramie Country School District, but was not accepted. Instead, she began teaching at Fort F.E. Warren Air Force Base, and taught classes for the next decade as an instructor.

In 1959, reversing an earlier decision, the Laramie Country School District hired her. According to Wyohistory.org, she be-

LIZ BYRD MADE

POLITICAL

HISTORY Trailblazer became first black woman to serve in Legislature

AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

Elizabeth “Liz” Byrd was the first black woman to serve in the Wyoming Legislature. came the first fully certified full-time African-American teacher in Wyoming. She worked at Goins Elementary and reportedly received $4,400 annually her first year of teaching. In 1976, she enrolled at the University of Wyoming and earned a master’s degree in Elementary Education. She would teach in Cheyenne for 37 years, retiring in 1996.

She met her husband, James Byrd, at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in 1946. They married in 1947, while Byrd served in the army. He later would become the first African-American police chief in Wyoming in 1966.

Byrd’s role as an educator spurred her into serving in government. She ran, and according to one report, “Byrd soon became concerned about the lack of benefits for teachers and inadequate materials used in the classroom.”

Byrd’s granddaughter, Sierra, said, “I think she was called to serve because she was a natural educator. I think after teaching for many years, she realized she could use her education skills to help the community.”

She served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1981-1988, and then was the first African American to serve in the Senate from 1989-1992.

Dr. Tracey Patton, a professor at the University of Wyoming, is the former director of African American and Diaspora Studies (AADS) at UW, and oversaw what became the Harriet Elizabeth “Liz” Byrd Excellence Fund. Patton notes, “Sen. Byrd is incredibly important to the state of Wyoming, which is why AADS named a scholarship after her. Sen. Byrd is entrenched in Wyoming’s history.

“I was privileged to get to know Sen. Byrd and spent time with her as AADS took the

steps to name and endow a scholarship after her. She was able to provide me the opportunity to learn about Wyoming and Wyoming history and politics from things not necessarily covered in history books,” Patton said. “My biggest takeaway from Sen. Byrd was that she was intelligent, compassionate, believed in social justice and was tenacious.”

African American and Diaspora Studies felt it was important to recognize Byrd’s contributions to the state, as an educator and legislator at UW. “Honestly, I was surprised that no other entity at UW had anything named after her at the time,” Patton said.

“AADS wanted to name the excellence fund after Senator Byrd because she was an educator and an advocate for all people,” Patton continued. “Sen. Byrd was a recipient of a number of awards and honors during her time in public service, and was and is simply someone to aspire to be. I feel honored for having gotten to know her.”

As a legislator, Byrd spent over a decade working to endorse a paid holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. In 1991, the holiday was recognized, and it’s known in Wyoming as “Equality Day.” “Byrd also worked on passing key legislation such as providing handicap parking, creating social services for adults and enforcing the use of child safety restraints for Wyoming’s citizens,” Patton said.

Byrd died on January 27, 2015. Her legacy lives on in her legislation, as well as her children and grandchildren. The Byrds had three children, Robert, a dentist and retired colonel in the Wyoming National Guard, Linda Byrd-Hsieh who is an accountant and office manager, and former Wyoming Rep. James Byrd.

Sierra Rhone Byrd, daughter of James Byrd, recalled going to the Capitol with her grandmother.

“She would take me to the Capitol and show me around the Senate and the House and show me where they made laws and bills. She would also show me pictures on the walls from the years she served. Since my father James Byrd also served in the House, he did the same thing … it was almost a tradition to walk through the capital as family when I came to visit.”

But for her granddaughter, Liz Byrd did more than make laws and educate, “Ever since I was little, she was someone I looked up to as a role model and inspired me to be the best version of myself. She was such an amazing person and I cherish every moment I had with her.”

Nina McConigley is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming, and currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

CHRISTINE PETERSON

P

For the Star-Tribune

atty Reilly hadn’t planned on being a fishing guide. She came out west to be closer to nature. She found a job near Jackson and co-owned a successful restaurant. She was young. And she really liked to fish.

Maybe it’s because she liked to fish so much that she ended up making fish guiding her life’s work. Maybe it’s because 40 years ago her friends told her she needed to figure out how to row the boat, too, because if she was going to fish so much she would have to take turns at the oars.

Whatever it was, Reilly took her first two clients down a stretch of river through Grand Teton National Park called Deadman’s to Moose in 1979. Decades later, after hitchhiking with a friend and fishing through South America, opening one of the first floating and fishing businesses in Argentina and spending decades organizing trips for clients to fishing destinations around the world, Reilly still hosts trips.

Why fishing?

“There is so much involved with it.

You have to really be aware of your surroundings. What is happening in nature tunes you into what is going on with fish.

The barometer, insect hatches, a current where fish might hold, special spots where fish might be. Are they up in a riffle because insects are coming off? What are birds eating? Is there a hatch that you can’t see that they’re eating?” she asked.

“And the fact that you never become perfect. I like that. It’s a thinking game.”

Reilly was a 5-foot, 6-inch (her friends tell her she never quite made 5 feet, 7 inches) woman operating in an almost entirely man’s world in one of the country’s premier fishing destinations. She’s been featured in Field & Stream, ESPN and had a chapter in the book “Fifty Women Who Fish.” But get her on the phone talking about fishing, and she’s still clearly just a woman who loves to fish.

•••

Reilly, 69, moved to the West from suburban New York in 1972. She had gone to college in Boston and wanted nothing more than to be outside.

“My father was not an outdoorsman to speak of, but the two vacations we did we were fishing,” she said.

She went to Montana first, by way of Jackson. And when she reached Missoula, intending to finish college, she instead decided to backtrack to Jackson where she knew she could find work — and fish.

From there the story tracks like any early-20s traveler to Jackson now — she took odd jobs working for survivalists and

JACKSON GUIDE HAS LED WAY FOR

4 DECADES Patty Reilly, owner of Guided Connections out of Jackson, has spent more than 40 years guiding anglers in Wyoming and around the world.

managing a beer bar — and spent every free moment on the water.

They were spin fishing back then, chucking lures and pulling whatever took their bait out of the water. The same group of friends decided to buy a restaurant, and Reilly managed the front in the evenings, spending the days on the water whenever possible.

“My friends said, ‘You need to row, you can’t fish all day, you have to learn how to row,’” she said. “’So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll learn how to row.’”

She also learned to fly fish. She was tired of catching so many fish and keeping them. Fly fishing, she thought, would allow her to catch just as many but also safely release all those cutthroats, rainbows and browns back into the water.

Then one day a friend asked her to help guide. She wasn’t sure she’d like it

because it seemed macho, not something for her. But then she tried.

“I thought, ‘This is really great,’” she said. “Plus it was a way to make a living outside.”

And so began a career first guiding out of Grand Teton National Park and an Orvis Lodge in Jackson, then the Firehole Ranch on the Madison in Montana.

In 1978, she sold her stake in the restaurant and her car and she and a friend flew to Ecuador, spending six months fishing and hitchhiking around Peru, Chile and Argentina. Near the Andes in northern Patagonia she met anglers from Buenos Aires who suggested they bring back boats to float the rivers. The fishing was phenomenal. Brown trout were big, hungry and feisty. Because few anglers targeted them while floating, the fish were not as wary. So they came back, flying

33

boats in and driving into the mountains.

Other seasons she spent fishing in New Zealand, guiding anglers in Alaska and taking out steelhead fishermen in Oregon.

All of those experiences helped her start Guided Connections, a business out of Jackson connecting clients with fishing adventures around the world.

•••

Rarely does Reilly think about being that 5-foot, 6-inch woman in a man’s world.

But sometimes it’s hard to forget.

Like the time guiding in Grand Teton when she had a client come in and look her up and down, up and down and say: “This is it?”

She stared right back at him and said simply, “Yep.” “I felt l could teach someone something, and it was their loss if they couldn’t do something with it.”

For Jean Bruun, a longtime Jackson guide, Reilly is a mentor, dear friend and fishing partner. Reilly’s accomplishments like first ascents down rivers in South America often go unnoticed because of her humility, Bruun said.

“She is, in my opinion, one of these trailblazers that remained professional, hardworking and humble,” Bruun said.

“She sloughs it off like it’s not a big deal, but then you think of what she’s achieved.”

Both women want to be thought of not as women who guide but as professionals and guides in their own right. And while there aren’t nearly as many female fly fishing guides as male, Bruun is quick to point out the first registered guide in the country was a woman named Cornelia “Fly Rod” Crosby. Historical pictures in museums in Jackson show women as fly fishing and hunting guides.

“Patty is that kind of person in that she’s got the intellect, she’s got the talent, she’s got the skill and she’s got the personality that really wants people to love the outdoors and love what she does for the right reasons,” Bruun said.

While Reilly’s interest in fishing hasn’t lessened, her need to catch fish isn’t what it once was. She figures after almost half a century reeling in fish, it’s fine if she doesn’t catch the most or the biggest anymore. She’d rather help teach others how to fish or watch someone successfully set the hook.

She doesn’t use the word “passion.” For her it’s not spiritual. It’s not a calling. It’s something much more basic that has run like a current through her life.

“I just find the process very captivating,” she said. “To me it’s all an outdoor wonder.”

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A LEADER WITHOUT BARRIERS Helen Bardo made Wyoming pioneering state for accessibility

Helen Bardo worked to break down barriers for people in Wyoming with disabilities.

COURTESY ‌

RENA DELBRIDGE

‌H

For the Star-Tribune‌

elen Bardo and her friends Ruth and Sam Thomas were passing an evening at the Thomases’ Lusk home in 1966 when Bardo became inspired.

Sam had been shot in World War II. Now confined to a wheelchair, he maintained an active woodworking shop and refused to let his disability hold him back. But sometimes it did, with insurmountable stairs, steps and barriers in public places.

“A chance remark by dear friend Ruth Thomas Manring, ‘If people only knew how one step looks to a person in a wheelchair,’ galvanized our organizing support for state legislation for barrier-free public building, curbs and sidewalks in Wyoming,” Bardo wrote many years later in a foreword to a book about her life’s work, written by her husband Dale Bardo.

Contemplating that single step, Bardo took her own first step toward dismantling physical barriers in Wyoming.

Knowing this task was too great for one woman, Bardo motivated the Lusk Women’s Club members to action. Taking on the cause, they petitioned state agencies, lobbied senators and representatives, and sent letters soliciting widespread support from women’s clubs across the state. Legislation proposed in 1967 failed to pass both legislative chambers. Still, the women ground their heels, encouraging the Wyoming Federation of Women’s Clubs to adopt the cause. And in 1969, the effort marked its first serious milestone in the Equality State when Gov. Stan Hathaway signed a law banning new architectural barriers. Wyoming was one of the first states to place such rules on its books.

Spurred on by her early success, Bardo began a career serving on key state councils devoted to disability issues, and traveled extensively to raise awareness of barriers. By 1973 she’d initiated an effort to remodel the state

capitol in Cheyenne for safer access for people with disabilities. And in 1975, the Wyoming Federation of Women’s Clubs successfully lobbied for legislation making curbs along public streets accessible.

After Congress passed the federal Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, Bardo received letters from influential people, such as Sen. Alan Simpson, commending her perseverance and tireless passion.

In his book chronicling Bardo’s barrier-free work, Dale Bardo describes his wife’s efforts as “tireless, determined, devoted — even feisty at times.”

Her son, Richard Bardo, recalled his mother lying in a hospital bed in Cheyenne surrounded by piles of papers, one hand with the phone to her ear, putting change in motion even when she had to remain still.

Bardo suffered from a condition that impaired her balance, eventually making her as susceptible to the physical barriers she fought to remove as someone in a wheelchair.

Amy and Joe Andrews, close friends of the family, also recalled Bardo’s single-minded determination to see a project through, once she’d pinpointed a need to be filled.

“That was the way Helen was,” Joe said. “If she got an idea that something needed to be done, why, she just focused in on it and was able to motivate other people to her cause. She never turned loose until the objectives she could see out there were accomplished. She was a real leader.”

The driven, passionate woman did more than remove physical barriers for people with disabilities, however. She tore down an initial barrier in her ability to see past physical differences and relate to people directly, as individuals.

Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing Breaking Through series, we’ll be occasionally sharing past profiles of women who made important contributions to Wyoming’s history. This story originally published in 2007 as part of our “Made in Wyoming” project.

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JACKSON’S LODGING LEGEND From one small inn, Clarene Law built a thriving hotel business

RENA DELBRIDGE, STAR-TRIBUNE

Clarene Law is pictured on the upper balcony of her Antler Hotel in downtown Jackson in this undated photo. She built a Jackson business empire while performing community service and representing her area in the Wyoming Legislature.

RENA DELBRIDGE

I

For the Star-Tribune

f you call the Antler Inn in Jackson, the person who answers the phone may be Clarene Law. And if you want to reserve a room, Clarene Law will do it for you.

She is a hands-on innkeeper who bought the Antler when it had 12 rooms.

Her family business, Town Square Inns, now includes four Jackson motels with 400 rooms.

In addition, Law has a stunning record of community and state service and as a tireless worker for causes she cares about, like immigration reform.

Chris Boswell, vice president for governmental affairs at the University of Wyoming, served with Law in the Wyoming House of Representatives and thinks highly of her. He said he always associates Jackson with Law and the

Antler.

The image he has is of Law standing at the counter of the motel or working at a desk in a nearby room.

“Then she sees you. She remembers you. She is so warm, friendly and caring and genuinely delighted to see you in her business,” Boswell said. “And obviously this is a very, very successful businesswoman.”

Law also was a talented and persuasive legislator, yet gentle in her interaction with fellow members of the House, he added.

“She is a true civic trustee,” said Bill Schilling, executive director of the Wyoming Business Alliance.

Schilling said she is a highly respected woman whose words and actions were and are always in “sync.”

“She is a very truthful, giving person,” Schilling said.

Bruce Hinchey of Casper, a former speaker in the Wyoming House of Rep-

resentatives, said Law always did her homework and was passionate about issues she was interested in, whether as chairman of the House Travel, Recreation and Wildlife Committee or as a member of the Wyoming Business Council.

Law was the first president of the Wyoming Lodging and Restaurant Association.

“She’s the most inspirational woman I’ve ever met,” said Lynn Birleffi of Cheyenne, the former association director.

Law, she said, is a great businesswoman who has contributed much for her community and the hospitality industry.

“She also has been wonderful to her employees,” Birleffi said. “She’s always given back and helped other people coming into the industry.”

Law was “self-made,” said Jayne Mockler of Cheyenne, a former legis-

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lator who served on Law’s committee.

She said Law once told her how she and her husband, Creed, bought a hotel in Worland, put wheels under it and moved it to Jackson.

While working on the committee the two legislators didn’t always agree. But that was in an era where legislators could tangle over a bill one day and go out to dinner the next, Mockler said.

Born in Thornton, Idaho, July 22, 1933, Clarene Law attended Idaho State College for two years.

In a profile in the book “Made in Wyoming,” Law said her mother was a great influence on her. She encouraged reading and learning and also said that what people have inside of them is the most important. Her mother also was president of the local LDS church relief society.

Clarene Law said she came to realize that no one can succeed alone.

The family did not have a lot of material possessions.

Law recalled furniture made from boxes used to transport the explosives her father used building highways, according to the profile by Rena Delbridge.

In the 1950s, the family moved to Jackson.

Clarene worked as a bookkeeper for several years at the Wort Hotel. When the old Antler Inn came up for sale for $125,000, she and her first husband got $20,000 together as a down payment.

In 1973 she married Creed Law. In addition to her three children, she became stepmother to seven of Creed Law’s children.

Together they grew their hospitality business.

Clarene Law is a joiner and a builder.

She belonged to the school board, the bank board, conservation board and was an original member of the Jackson town planning commission. She helped start the Wyoming Business Council.

She served 14 years in the Legislature.

“I think you get out of life what you put in it,” Law said in the Made in Wyoming interview.

“But life’s greatest achievements aren’t these things. It’s the love and the sustaining affirmation of my children, my family, my friends, that keeps me going.”

Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing Breaking Through series, we’ll be occasionally sharing past profiles of women who made important contributions to Wyoming’s history. This story originally published in 2013.

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DOCUMENTING THE WEST Elsa Spear Byron chronicled Wyoming life in photographs

COURTESY

Elsa Spear Byron documented Wyoming life in photos in the early 20th Century.

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 | 37

ROBIN BEAVER

‌J

For the Star-Tribune‌

ust north of the Wyoming border in Montana, a craggy ridge juts out from the high reaches of Wolf Mountain.

On it, a cowboy observes the abyss below, his toes barely touching the lip of the rim. His spurs point toward a lone horse about 10 feet behind.

This scene is depicted in a photograph of Jack Dalhart entitled “The Lookout,” and taken by Wyoming historian-photographer Elsa Spear Byron in 1924.

“People wonder what she was doing practically hanging by her boots, taking pictures,” her daughter, Marilyn Bilyeu, said interview.

“She loved taking pictures of people out on the edge.”

It sums up the way Elsa lived her life.

Heading West‌

Elsa is known for chronicling Wyoming’s life events in the early 20th century. But history has always been important to the entire family, going back generations, Bilyeu remarked.

And thus the seeds of documenting a way of life were sown early for Elsa, who was born into one of Wyoming’s first ranching families in 1896.

Her parents inched their way to Wyoming on wagon trains, plodding along with passengers, horses and cattle. They settled in Big Horn, near Sheridan.

Grandpa Benton, Elsa’s grandfather, was a doctor, dentist and minister on the wagons. It wasn’t unusual for him to pull a tooth and then preach a sermon while his wife played the organ and the children sang songs.

Elsa’s mother kept a diary detailing, for instance, how the family received meals enroute in exchange for Benton’s “services,” Bilyeu said.

“Everything was sad, but they had to keep on going,” she said.

“They couldn’t stop and mourn a lot of things that would happen.”

By the time Elsa was born, the family was established and had a decent income from cattle earnings.

Elsa heard, read and lived stories of pioneer life.

All she needed was a galloping horse and a camera.

Wyoming in images‌

Elsa received her first Brownie camera as a gift at age 12. Her mother taught her the ropes of photography, printing pictures by sunlight or by kerosene lamp.

Elsa was hooked.

By the time she was 15, she was photographing the Crow Tribe, whom she came to know well because of their close proximity to her parents’ ranch.

Elsa also became a guide, taking dudes into the Big Horn Mountains on pack trips. But her life changed abruptly during the summer of 1923 when a sudden blizzard hit a group of women she had taken into the mountains.

“It was very cold, and she put gunny sacks around their feet.

She guided them to safety — they would have frozen to death if they had not kept going,” Bilyeu explained.

Nevertheless, Elsa managed to take pictures as they were coming off the mountain. That Christmas, she sent the photos to the women, who then not only wanted copies — they also wanted enlargements.

Fotokraft of the Big Horns was founded, and Elsa worked tirelessly each night in her kitchen — which became her darkroom. She had business cards and placed ads in magazines and newspapers.

“That was before women worked,” said Bilyeu.

For the next 40 years, Elsa sold custom-made place cards, lamp shades and letter baskets made of photographs.

And she wrote about history.

“She wanted to give a piece to everybody and never failed to share what she knew,” Bilyeu added. “Yet she didn’t think she was anything special — she was so humble about that...”

Elsa rode horseback into her 80s and lived to be 95.

Historian Jerry Keenan writes: “She was the last living link to those early days that have drawn us all together to share a common interest.”

Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing Breaking Through series, we’ll be occasionally sharing past profiles of women who made important contributions to Wyoming’s history. This story originally published in 2007.

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GAYLE M. IRWIN

A

For the Star-Tribune

s Monika Leininger sought to complete her master’s degree, she dreamed of combining her dual majors of social work and natural resources into a career. She found that opportunity working for the Powder River Basin Resource Council.

“I’ve always had a real deep connection and care for people,” the 2018 University of Wyoming graduate said. “All of my work and everything I do is driven out of care and concern and recognizing the humanity of people.”

She credits her parents for helping direct her path. Both work in the psychology field.

“They steered me in the direction of social work,” Leininger said. “I always wanted to find a way to incorporate some sort of environmental aspect into my work and my education. I ended up declaring a dual major in environment and natural resources after I’d taken a class in environmental justice through the political science school.”

She views that as a missing link in social work.

“Most of my educational focus … has been on environmental justice issues and, in particular, putting them under a lens of social work and how social workers can be more aware, screen and assess their clients for issues like pollution,” Leininger said.

Social workers think about “all the factors contributing to people’s lives” but pollution isn’t “ever taken account,” she added.

“It’s not really something I felt was in the main discourse of social work education, educating around environmental justice issues. I made that the horse I was riding on.”

This is a new realm in social work, according to Dr. Kirsten Havig, associate professor of social work at the University of Wyoming.

“Research tells us over the last few decades that impoverished and communities of color are more likely to be exposed to environmental pollutants of all sorts (and they) have less political power,” she said. “If our environments affect our lives … we have to make sure all people have the same access to clean water, air, etc. It all comes down to fairness and protection and uncovering vulnerability and oppression and trying to do something about that.”

A publication centered on Leininger’s thesis, Promoting Environmental Justice Research and Practice for Social Workers

Organizer finds

a way to blend

two passions

CLAIRE CELLA, COURTESY

Monika Leininger in a Rural State: Methodology and Findings of a Pilot Qualitative Study was published in Murray State’s Contemporary Rural Social Work Journal.

“That was original research with data she collected right here in Wyoming — the first of its kind,” said Havig, who served as Leininger’s thesis chair and co-authored the publication.

“Monika is kind of a trailblazer, not only in Wyoming, but nationally,” she said. “She’s one of the few social workers doing environmental justice work.

Monika is making a career of it, and that’s quite rare. She’s truly a leader in that.”

Leininger began her work as an organ-

izer with Powder River Basin Resource Council while in Laramie. Her primary focus was agricultural but then more projects were added.

“We had some Laramie members … wanting to try to work toward carbon emission reduction,” the Natrona County High School graduate said.

Working with those members, city officials and others, she helped a “carbon-neutral by 2050” resolution pass in March 2020.

On June 1, she relocated to Lander.

“There’s interest in Lander following in the footsteps of Laramie,” she said.

Her work involves meeting with com-

munity leaders and residents as well as speaking with legislators, and tackling various issues affecting communities, such as groundwater contamination near Pavillion. Much of her work ties back to her education.

“When I wrote my thesis on social workers’ awareness of environmental justice issues in Wyoming, I learned about a lot of these issues that I work on today, such as the groundwater contamination in Pavillion, air quality problems in Pinedale, issues in the center of the state … regarding releasing fracking wastewater,” Leininger said.

“She is committed, passionate and resourceful, and all within the context of being a really committed Wyomingite,” Havig said. “Monika is determined to better her home state.”

Leininger speaks to the professor’s graduate and undergraduate students at times.

“They call her a ‘rock star,’” Havig said.

Leininger said she’s “passionate” about encouraging young people, including in the realm of politics and policymaking.

“I’d like to see more young people learn and engage with their government and with the policies that trickle down and impact us all,” she said. “Being a young woman at the legislature and at these different regulatory body meetings, I look around and I don’t see young people represented. It makes me feel in those spaces that I’m not welcome there, that I don’t belong there. The only way we’ll ever see the change that I believe my generation wants to see is if we show up and we start making those rooms somewhere where we belong.”

She added, “I feel deeply attached and connected to Wyoming as my home. I appreciate my roots and being from this state and proudly want to help make this state better and help provide a sustainable future and economic and energy landscape for those to come. My ability to connect with humans and to want to serve and make the society and the world better for all of us drives my work and keeps me going.”

Many have helped her along her journey thus far, she said, including her parents, colleagues, faculty and friends.

“I’ve had really awesome support and role models throughout my life, including … a myriad of strong, (tough) women,” Leininger said. “I just feel so supported, and it’s a real privilege to have that in my life.”

“I believe she’s a rising star,” Havig said, “and I believe she will continue her commitment to Wyoming … and improve life for all of us.”

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post office while their husbands finished their time in service. After the war, she and John built a log cabin in the shadow of the Tetons. That cabin became the family’s home base for decades, even after a move to Missoula, Montana, for John to teach at the university.

“I think the whole family always considered Jackson Hole home,” said her son Derek Craighead, founder of Kelly-based wildlife research institute Craighead Beringia South. “Even if it was a place we only got to a few times a year or for holidays. It was like going back home.”

A modest

outdoor pioneer

···

Margaret Craighead avoided accolades but had a big impact

COURTESY

Margaret “Cony” Craighead poses high in the Tetons in this undated photo.

CHRISTINE PETERSON

I

For the Star-Tribune

t was the early 1930s in northwest Wyoming, and Margaret Smith was up for just about anything.

She’d spent summer after summer living in tents with her mother and father. She knew every climber in the area, most scientists in the region and even as a little girl collected specimens that populated Park Service visitor’s centers.

She and three other women became the first all-female group to summit the Grand Teton – the first “manless” trip it was called at the time. And she went on to complete a number of other first ascents in the area.

It was logical, then, that she went along with her dad, a summer ranger in Grand Teton National Park, to check on a report of two boys with birds of prey.

The boys – twin brothers named John and Frank Craighead – had falcons in the back seat of their used Chevrolet. They were falconers. And John would one day become Margaret’s husband.

She was a woman who climbed so much she earned the nickname “Cony” after a common name for the pika. But

she didn’t, according to her son, Johnny Craighead, consider herself a climber.

She was a talented artist trained by her mother, an art teacher, with some of the country’s most spectacular backgrounds as her muse. But she didn’t consider herself an artist.

She was a model for famed Grand Teton photographer Harrison Crandall and appeared in war posters that went up around the country. But she probably wouldn’t have told you much about that.

To her children, Margaret “Cony” Smith Craighead was all of those things, but also a wife to one of the nation’s preeminent wildlife biologists and a mother who allowed her children to roam, explore and raise nearly any wild thing that ended up at their house– including mountain lion littermates, whoknows-how-many owls and one sparrow hawk that had a tendency to poop down the back of her curtains.

“Margaret simply loved being out-ofdoors, living rough, admiring the flowers and loving the wildlife,” Johnny said.

“I think that is the reward she sought.”

···

Margaret was born in 1920 in Ye-

39

rrington, Nevada, the only child of a father who taught science and mother who taught art. They moved to Utah soon after, and her father took the job of summer park ranger in Yellowstone National Park then later in Grand Teton.

The family lived in canvas wall tents and she befriended some of the most famous climbers of that generation from Paul Petzoldt and Glenn Exum to Fred and Irene Ayres.

Those summers fostered a love of climbing, geology and the natural world that shaped Margaret’s life, Johnny said.

She went on to earn a degree in geology, but World War II hit as she graduated, so she joined the war effort, working at Hill Air Force base.

“She always maintained an interest in geology,” Johnny said. “In fact, cleaning up the house, she had every one of John McPhee’s books. She quietly kept all that interest. Of course she brought it to us kids by just being able to rock hound.”

She and John Craighead, that twin brother with the falcons in his backseat, kept in touch by lengthy correspondence before and during the war. They married and she, her sister-in-law and a friend lived alone running the Moose

The family traveled back to Yellowstone and Wyoming nearly every summer. Margaret became a mother of not only Johnny, Derek and Karen Haynam, but also became “Mother Margaret” to every graduate student that worked with her husband.

In their house in Missoula, their cabin in Wyoming and their research station in Yellowstone where John and Frank studied grizzly bears, she fostered a love of nature in her children.

That is perhaps Margaret’s biggest contribution to wildlife and conservation. She carried the name Craighead – one synonymous with conservation in the West. She helped her husband and brother-in-law complete a field guide to Rocky Mountain wildflowers and supported him in all of his conservation achievements. But Margaret, who died in 2016 at the age of 96, largely made a difference in her own ways.

“She encouraged us all to do artwork and get outdoors and hike and climb.

She joined us on most of those adventures that she could whether rafting down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River or climbing in the Tetons,” Derek said. “She traveled with dad on his trips to Tibet and Russia and Egypt and she was always game to get on the camel or elephant and go for a ride.”

And then there was the wildlife in the houses and yard – the mountain lions, the Andean condor, the Steller’s jay and the owls. It was 50 years ago, a time when people dropped off wounded or orphaned animals with the local biologist.

“There was one story about packing up the kids at the end of school to go to the place in Jackson, and mom packed up the three kids, two Canada geese, a red fox and a prairie falcon,” Johnny said. “They’d all go in the car, and she’d jump in with them. All that stuff was so natural, those were just the things we did.”

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First lady became Wyoming district’s first female judge GALE M. IRWIN

C

For the Star-Tribune

onfident, self-sufficient women influenced federal judge and former first lady of Wyoming Nancy Freudenthal at a young age and continue to do so today.

“My mother wasn’t an easy woman. Her mother worked and she worked. Having her as a role model and a compass point was important to me throughout my life,” Freudenthal said.

That significant influence included her choice in higher education. A philosophy major during her undergraduate years at the University of Wyoming, Freudenthal said her mother “was very worried” about how such a degree would be employable.

“She understood the importance of education, and she understood that sometimes, notwithstanding everyone’s hopes and abilities, things can happen to derail a woman’s plans,” Freudenthal said. “For her, it was always important to not discount the significance of family … but to have a safety net: either be working or have an ability to quickly gear up and go to work, in the event you found yourself in a situation where you had to support yourself.”

Her mother was a single parent of four.

Freudenthal refocused her education toward the practice of law.

“What I really liked about philosophy and the course of work there matched up well with law school and the demands of law school,” she said. “If you like reading, writing, reasoning and decision-making — it just really clicked for me. It served me well as a foundation to being able to express reasoning well and to understand the logic of argument and persuasion.”

She applied those skills as a lawyer and also now as the first female U.S. district judge for the District of Wyoming. In a career mostly run by men, especially in Wyoming, she found mentors on the bench and a welcoming attitude.

“All of the men on the bench were wonderful. They welcomed me into their chambers, into their courtrooms for observation, gave me materials … time and access, and just an open door to deal with any issues that were new,” she said.

Half of Freudenthal’s docket involves federal criminal cases, including those that happen on federal lands, such as Yellowstone National Park; the other half focuses on civil cases, such as accidents involving

Self-sufficiency, mentorship helped Freudenthal make

JUDICIAL HISTORY

COURTESY

Former Wyoming first lady Nancy Freudenthal is the first female U.S. district judge for the District of Wyoming. individuals and companies from out of state.

This role began in May 2010 after being nominated by former president Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Prior to becoming judge, Freudenthal worked as a lawyer, and during her early years, she served on the staff of former Wyoming Gov. Edgar “Ed” Herschler. She also attributed him as being a mentor and a reason for her fortitude.

“I had demanding employers. One of the toughest people who was also a mentor

was Gov. Herschler. I was the only woman in his office who wasn’t clerical,” she said.

“If you walked into his office, he often demanded why you were there. He wasn’t a coddler to anybody at all. Anyone who knew him knew you had be well-prepared, you had to be able to articulate yourself efficiently, you had to have to the courage to just walk in to his private office and interrupt him, so you had to ask yourself if this was important or not.”

She said she is grateful for the experience.

“It was a gift in that point in my life being so young to form that grit and inner fortitude, to be confident that this was an important issue, that you warranted his time and attention. That wasn’t just given, it was earned every day,” she said. “That was his method of operating … who he was, and it allowed me to quickly develop and hone skills that I’m still working on today. Those (standards) were extraordinarily helpful to me to step up and meet the demands of working in a challenging office. He was such an important figure in my world. It was a real honor to have known him.”

Freudenthal epitomizes a persistent work ethic. While serving as first lady of Wyoming during husband Dave’s two terms (2003 to 2011), she chose to continue working as an attorney, for which some people criticized her, she said. However, she stuck to her guns, remembering her mother’s model of self-sufficiency.

“It was drilled into me, again from my mother, that women work — that’s what they do. You have to have it in yourself to step up if any wrinkle comes up … no matter how hard it is,” she said.

Family issues, especially those that affect women and children, were topics she focused on as first lady, including women’s self-sufficiency, and they remain important to her today.

“Those have been important me since childhood, watching my mother as a single parent, and drilling into me the need to be self-sufficient,” she said.

Freudenthal also worked on programs to reduce childhood drinking “because it seemed like that was a public health issue affecting our children.”

Women’s self-sufficiency remains important to her, and she stresses the need for women to work hard, grow in confidence and develop courage — yet remain likable.

“I think women should pursue their dreams. They need to find their voice and be comfortable with who they are,” she said. “To some degree, women have to embrace the idea that they should work harder, harder than anybody else in the room. Make yourself invaluable. Whether it’s fair or not, they have to find a way to be assertive without losing their likability.

They have to be comfortable advocating, including advocating for themselves.”

She said she had to ask Herschler for an office and a raise.

“Being well-prepared and sufficiently confident gives you the courage to approach situations that are challenging,” she said. “That demanding, exacting, positional authority (Herschler had) is something I credit as an advantage in making me who I am today.”

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

GAYLE M. IRWIN

A

For the Star-Tribune

fter the death of her son Matt in 1998, Judy Shepard discovered traits within herself she didn’t realize she had.

“I was one (ticked) off mom. I am by nature an extreme introvert, and I learned how to overcome that,” she said.

On Oct. 7, 1998, University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was pistol-whipped, tied to a fence post outside of Laramie and left to die. Although found nearly 18 hours later and rushed to a Colorado hospital, Matt died from the beating. He was 21 years old and openly gay. The two men who killed him are serving two consecutive life sentences for kidnapping and murder.

From their personal tragic loss and amid their grief, Judy and her husband Dennis started the Matthew Shepard Foundation in December 1998. The organization’s mission is to inspire individuals, organizations and communities to embrace the dignity and equality of all people, especially the LGBTQ community. The Shepards and foundation staff helped pioneer America’s first federal hate crimes legislation through the passage of the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Additionally, they have spoken at events and conducted trainings for law enforcement officers and prosecutors, and a play called “The Laramie Project” has inspired other artistic projects, impacting many. Judy started as executive director and now serves as president of the board, stepping aside for younger people to steer the ship.

This is not a road Judy wanted to walk, but the journey has given the self-proclaimed introvert a platform for an important issue: the battle against hatred and violence, something still relevant more than two decades later.

“Matt’s story resonated with a lot of people, inside the gay community and outside the gay community,” Judy said.

“They were interested in that story, and so we just kept telling it.”

More than 20 years later, people are still listening because the story is still relevant.

“Matt’s story continues to be shared through the generations,” she said. “It’s not just about Matt the person; it’s the story of hatred and differences. If you take out Matt’s sexuality and replace it with race or religion — it’s the same story.”

Battling grief with a

fighting spirit Fortitude key to Judy Shepard’s efforts to advance LGBTQ rights

FILE, STAR-TRIBUNE

Judy and Dennis Shepard of Casper, pictured Saturday, Sept. 29, 2018, are Matthew Shepard’s parents. The foundation they formed in his honor has become a leading advocate for LGBTQ rights.

However, pushback, especially immediately after Matt’s death, was strong. During the funeral, members of the Westboro Baptist Church held signs with homophobic slurs and shouted at those who gathered.

She credits tenacity and another important aspect to her life for that fortitude.

“I had advocates who became friends, who helped me realize my own strengths and my own weaknesses,” she

said. “They helped me grow.”

Judy is a Wyoming native. Her grandparents homesteaded in the Glenrock area, and she grew up and graduated high school there. She met Dennis while both attended the University of Wyoming; they have been married nearly 47 years. They were in Saudi Arabia when Matt was attacked. Dennis returned there to work, and Judy set upon her new endeavor: keeping her son’s memory alive and looking to

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change life for the LGBTQ community.

“I had no reason to be home. I could spend all the time I needed on the road, which is exactly what I did,” she said.

“I met people who could help me move forward. As a family, we decided we owed it to Matt to help his peers and friends progress in the gay community, legally and in acceptance, equality and equity, in the country and the world.”

She met helpful people along the way, people she said she respects, including the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and the late Sen. John Lewis.

“I had the great privilege of working with Sen. Ted Kennedy on the hate crime legislation — he was wonderful,” she said. “John Lewis is a person I look up to from the civil rights era. As I was growing up, he was making his mark.”

Being “a product of the ‘60s,” as she termed her life, she looked up to people like the Kennedys and Lewis. However, she also carried stigmas from previous decades, barriers she had to hurdle after forming the foundation.

“As a woman of a certain generation, little girls are taught to be seen and not heard. You have to overcome that, so I learned how to do that,” she said. “I learned how to trust my instinct and that my opinion mattered — well, it mattered to me, and I’d share it whether somebody liked it or not. I wouldn’t have done that before.”

No matter the era or issue, whether 1920s women’s suffrage, 1960s Black civil rights or 1990s LGBTQ equality, advocates can right a wrong, but they need specific attributes, Judy said.

“People wonder how they can make a difference. You don’t have to be part of a big organization — you just have to share your story,” she said. “You do have to believe in yourself. You need to have self-confidence and self-respect.

You have to like yourself before you can step out into the world and have a voice that people will listen to.”

Kindness and respect are two elements society appears to be liquidating but are traits which are needed for a better world, she added.

“We could accomplish so much if we were just kind. Take some time to listen — your voice is never the most important one in the room,” she said. “Treat others as you want to be treated. It never takes extra effort to be kind. You can’t tell just by looking at someone what they’re going through in their private life. They might be suffering from something you have no idea about. Even if they’re not (kind), it doesn’t hurt you to try. We’d be in a much better world if we just tried.”

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GAYLE M. IRWIN

W

For the Star-Tribune

yoming is known for many firsts, including America’s first national monument (Devil’s Tower, 1906) and the world’s first national park (Yellowstone in 1872). The 1870s also saw many firsts in women’s suffrage: first female in the United States to serve as justice of the peace (Esther Hobart Morris, February 1870 in South Pass City), first women to serve on a jury (in Laramie, March 1870) and the first woman to cast a ballot in a general election (again in Laramie, September 1870).

That woman was Louisa Swain. The Quaker woman was about 69 years old when she made history.

“Two stories exist about the day Louisa Swain voted,” said Weldon Tuck, executive director of the Louisa Swain Foundation. “One is that she was going to the store with a pail for yeast and as she came upon the polling place, she decided to go in and cast her vote. The other is that a group of women in Laramie got together and decided she should be the trailblazer and cast the first ballot.

I think that has some merit, for there are pictures of a bonnet that Laramie ladies gave her to commemorate the occasion.”

An article published in a Maryland newspaper about 50 years ago also suggests the plausibility of the second story.

Composed by Katherine Scarborough, who interviewed Louisa’s great-granddaughter, the article states, in part: “As the oldest woman in (Laramie) … she was accorded the honor of being the first to cast her ballot by agreement of the others….”

The Wyoming territory recognized women’s right to vote, to hold office and to own property in 1869. That right continued into statehood, with Wyoming’s constitution allowing for universal suffrage. According to Tuck, that right almost kept Wyoming from receiving statehood.

“When Wyoming applied for statehood, which had to be ratified by Congress, they were told they would not be accepted unless they rescinded women’s suffrage,” he said. “Wyoming legislators didn’t relent and said they would remain a territory instead.”

Wyoming received statehood in 1890 by a slim margin (139 to 127), according to Wyohistory.org.

Louisa Swain was born Louisa Ann Gardener in 1800 in Norfolk, Virginia.

Her father, a sea captain, didn’t return from a voyage when Louisa was 7 years old. She and her mother moved to

FIRST WOMAN

VOTER

RECOGNIZED Louisa Swain made history in Laramie 150 years ago

CASPER COLLEGE HISTORY CENTER

Louisa Swain was the first woman in the United States to vote in a general election. That historic vote happened 150 years ago in Laramie.

Charleston, South Carolina, for an unknown reason, Tuck said, where Louisa’s mother died. An uncle and family living in Baltimore, Maryland, finished raising her, and it was in that city that Louisa met and married Stephen Swain. The couple and their children later moved to Ohio.

A few years later, their son Alfred Gardner Swain and his family relocated to Laramie, and historians believe Louisa and her husband followed to help the young family. Here began Louisa’s slow

ascension to Wyoming celebrity.

The older woman likely didn’t think much about casting that historic vote.

She is described in a Laramie Daily Sentinel article as “a gentle white-haired housewife, Quakerish in appearance.”

That description seems appropriate, Tuck said. He visited Louisa’s grave in Maryland and spoke with someone familiar with the Quaker faith.

“I’ve always wondered what was going through her mind that historic day,” Tuck said. “The man I spoke with said,

‘Remember that Quaker women were involved with the Underground Railroad. They were also equal (with men) during meetings. She wouldn’t have been intimidated.’”

Wyoming was still a territory in 1870 and the area considered “the Wild West,” Tuck said. However, no one seemed to stand in Louisa’s way of casting that ballot. An article in the Laramie Daily Sentinel at the time read, “There was too much good sense in our community for any jeers or sneers to be seen on such an occasion.”

A dispute between Laramie and Cheyenne ensued for the title of first woman to cast a ballot. However, according to Cora Beach’s book, “Women of Wyoming” published in 1927, Judge M.C. Brown, Laramie’s first mayor, witnessed the voting in that community and corroborated the story that Louisa cast the first vote – a mere 30 minutes before a woman in Cheyenne cast her ballot.

Not long after that historic day, Louisa and her husband returned east to live near a daughter. According to several online sources, Stephen died in 1872; his wife died eight years later.

Sunday marks the 150th anniversary of Louisa’s vote; the date is designated as Louisa Swain Day. The foundation which bears her name planned a major celebration, starting in August in Washington D.C. at the Library of Congress.

A semi-tractor-trailer driven by women and with a photograph of Louisa on the side traveled across the country, arriving Friday in Cheyenne with plans to continue to Laramie, Tuck said. A woman will re-enact the role of Louisa and her historic vote in the community.

“She was an unassuming Quaker woman, walking down the street on that historic day. She epitomized courage, character and community,” Tuck said.

The foundation operates Laramie’s Wyoming Women’s History House (which did not open this summer due to COVID-19). Visitors can find displays about many Wyoming women who have impacted the state and nation, including Nellie Taylor Ross, Lynn Cheney, Barbara Cubin and Louisa Swain. Additionally, the foundation has bestowed awards to five women who showcase Louisa’s qualities and who have made significant impacts upon the state and nation: Lynn Cheney, Jane Sullivan, Diana Enzi, Bobbi Barrasso and Margaret Parry.

An “unassuming Quaker woman” who made history nearly 150 years ago and continues to impact the state in many ways, stands memorialized in statue form in Laramie, the community where her historic action took place.

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A WOMAN OF MANY FIRSTS IN WYOMING

Rochelle known for breaking ground in politics, teaching

GAYLE M. IRWIN

K

For the Star-Tribune

athleen Mae Ogden Rochelle was known as a woman of perseverance and conviction, which led her to become a woman of many “firsts” in Wyo-

ming.

She arrived in Wyoming in 1906 from Iowa to serve as the first teacher at the Lusk Primary School. Twenty years later, she became the first woman from Niobrara County elected to serve in the Wyoming Legislature.

Kathleen decided to run for the legislature for several reasons. First, she saw an opportunity to continue supporting women’s suffrage and education issues, and second, by serving in the Legislature, she could help support her family.

She and her husband, Albert, whom she married in 1907, ran a sheep operation.

During World War I, the Rochelles had a contract for their animals, but when the war ended, the contract was canceled.

Kathleen received criticism from some people for running for and serving in the Legislature because she had a family. However, her tenacity and strong belief that women added value to society, not just as a wife and mother, led her to represent Niobrara County and later, Natrona County.

When she stepped into the role of representing Lusk and Niobrara County in January 1927, Kathleen was the only woman in the Wyoming Legislature.

She not only was the first woman to represent Niobrara County, but that year, she was also the first woman to sit on the Wyoming Legislature in 12 years. Her perseverance and courage, her values and convictions about family, women’s rights and community allowed her to work to improve Wyoming’s future.

Kathleen also led many community groups and experienced many other firsts. For example, she served as the first president of the Lusk Civic Club and the first president of the Lusk Parent Teacher Association. She was also the first woman on the Lusk Community Board of Education. Literacy and education were important to her, so she helped establish a Carnegie Library in the community.

Her values and commitment extended to the country. During World War I, Kathleen served as vice county chair of the American Red Cross, as a member of the Niobrara County Council of National Defense and on the American Food Commission.

Kathleen, her husband and their six

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children moved to a large sheep ranch near Arminto in Natrona County during the early 1930s. Even though finances were better for the family, Kathleen wasn’t finished with politics. She represented Natrona County for two legislative session plus one special session.

Education continued to be an important issue for this former school teacher. So were veterans and women’s issues. She chaired the committee on education and helped establish Wyoming’s junior college system. She worked for veterans’ benefits and lobbied for women to serve on juries. Her values and beliefs paved the way for many positive changes for the state and its citizens.

The daughter of Irish immigrants, Kathleen was known as a headstrong woman who wasn’t afraid to voice her opinion. She was also considered a woman ahead of her time.

Kathleen partnered with her husband in the sheep business, and she became the first president of the Wyoming Woolgrowers Auxiliary. She was the first state PTA president and served as president of the Casper PTA Council. She also served as president of the Casper Women’s Club.

This adventurous woman took on many roles with zeal – rancher, wife, mother, legislator, civic leader, poet and fashionista.

Standing 5 feet, 10 inches tall, Kathleen was known to dress stylishly and wear elegant hats. She enjoyed parties, social activities, reading books and writing poetry.

She composed poems about her children, friendship, fashion, the Wyoming landscape and the loneliness a woman experienced on the prairie. She also wrote a poem about Wyoming Day, a bill she sponsored while in the Legislature. Dec. 10 is considered Wyoming Day in honor of the anniversary of the then-Wyoming territorial legislature passing the women’s suffrage law in 1869.

When Kathleen Rochelle died at the age of 80 in 1958 in Casper, she left a trail of Wyoming firsts. Through her perseverance and convictions about family, women’s rights and community, she left an indelible mark on Wyoming.

Writer’s note: We thank Kay Jessen and other relatives of Kathleen and Albert Rochelle for helping us learn and understand more about Kathleen through their recollections and the numerous newspaper clippings and other historical documents they provided.

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BARRON BROKE GROUND IN LENGTHY CAREER No other reporter has been inducted into WPA’s Hall of Fame

FILE, STAR-TRIBUNE

Longtime Casper-Star Tribune capital bureau reporter Joan Barron is pictured outside the Wyoming Capitol on Feb. 26, 2014, in Cheyenne. Barron, who retired that March, began writing for the Star-Tribune in 1966 and covering the Wyoming Legislature in 1971.

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‌W GAYLE M. IRWIN

For the Star-Tribune‌

orking for the Casper Star-Tribune for nearly 50 years earned Joan Barron a place in Wyoming journalism history. In January, she became the first reporter, and just the third woman, inducted into the Wyoming Press Association’s Hall of Fame.

“It’s extra-special that a pure reporter was inducted,” said Bruce McCormack, former editor and publisher of the Cody Enterprise. “There’s no one else like that … and that it was her is completely appropriate. There’s nobody who has stood the test of time like she has, nobody that has been on the state government capital beat like her.”

McCormack worked with Barron in Cheyenne in 1977.

“I was just a cub reporter, and she was already a veteran,” he said. “She’s thoughtful, methodical and especially careful, accurate and clever — that and a lot more. She’s really an interesting study in how influential, how well-read and how respected you can become when you stay on a beat for that long and do the kind of great work she’s done, so consistently for so long.”

That longevity created a bevy of stories.

“She has been present, and she observed and reported on the history of this state for so long — I think she’s probably been read by three generations of most families in Wyoming,” said Rob Hurless, former publisher of the Star-Tribune. “She produced an incredible amount and body of work, and it was time she was recognized. I don’t think it’s going to be easily duplicated.”

“If you’d pull together a dozen publishers and editors from around Wyoming who’d talk about all the top reporters they’ve known for the last 50 years, there would be no one who could refer to somebody that was better than Joan,” McCormack added.

Hurless and former editor Dan Neal informed her of the induction, Barron said.

“I was absolutely stunned — I had no idea it was going to happen,” she said.

Born in Iowa and trained in health care, Barron’s reporting career began in 1966 while she and her family lived in Rock Springs.

FILE, STAR-TRIBUNE‌

Longtime Casper-Star Tribune capital bureau reporter Joan Barron works at her desk inside the Wyoming Capitol on Feb. 26, 2014 in Cheyenne.

“I started when the paper first went statewide,” she recalled. “I was a correspondent. At that time, they had people all over the state.”

For three years she covered the Rock Springs area, and then she and her family moved to Cheyenne. Her then-husband worked for the highway department and was transferred.

That move opened a new opportunity for her.

“The day we were leaving, the editor called me and said there was going to be an opening in the state house and was I interested,” Barron said. “I said, ‘Well, I guess so.’”

For the next 45 years, she covered politics, federal and state court cases, and other assignments she was given.

“It was a big job, (but) I found it fascinating,” she said.

One major court case she covered gained substantial notoriety. Ed Cantrell, former Rock Springs director of public safety, was accused of murdering undercover police officer Michael Angel Rosa in July 1978. Rosa was scheduled to testify before a grand jury regarding vice and corruption in Rock Springs two days after he was shot. Cantrell, who alleged Rosa was reaching for a weapon, was acquitted

of the crime.

Even though she covered similar cases, Barron said, “I enjoyed covering all the legislative sessions. When I started, it was the cusp of the boom.

They were passing very important pieces of legislation, like the Mineral Trust Fund. They did an awful lot in a short period of time.”

She admitted following and reporting on the legislature could be “boring” at times, especially following the status of bills.

“It was a long, tedious process, but I found it fascinating,” she said.

During her tenure as the newspaper’s capital reporter, Barron took courses and received her bachelor’s degree in journalism. Her interviewing style became famous among those who knew and worked with her.

“She’d asked the question and then she would wait,” Hurless said. “They’d answer the question, and instead of responding, she would stay quiet. In that dead air, they would start talking again and usually divulge more than they wanted to. She was able to get stories that were well-guarded, stories that other reporters couldn’t get.”

McCormack agreed.

“Joan would ask the question in such a short, succinct way — like 10 words — and then she’d just clamp her jaw shut,” he said. “It’s almost a law enforcement technique … you let that silence draw them out, and they want to fill that empty space. Joan is the master at that. She would ask this very simple question in this very unassuming way … and then just sit back and not say a word, just let the words come tumbling out of whoever she was interviewing.”

Barron has won several awards for her reporting, including one from the Wyoming League of Women Voters.

She attributes her journalism growth and success to Phil McAuley, a former managing editor of the Star-Tribune who hired her to cover the state house.

She said he gave her two pieces of advice.

“Write tight and read books,” she said.

She offered similar advice to people exploring career options.

“Read a lot, try different things and go to college,” she said. “If you find a job you love, you’ll be happy.”

She retired as a reporter in 2014, but at more than 90 years of age, she still writes a weekly Sunday column for the newspaper.

“I’m so grateful I found something I really liked,” she said.

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A life of

outdoor

adventure COURTESY

Mandy Fabel demonstrates her riding skill as an ambassador for Polaris snow machines.

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adventure, while another takes a snowmobile guide out rock climbing for the first time.

Mandy made herself the subject of a conversion in the episode “Girl Meets Gun,” subtitled “Anti-Gun to Full Immersion.” When she drew an antelope tag from the Wyoming Game and Fish, she realized it required training and, yes, guns. After recording the learning process, she proudly displayed the frozen meat from her successful hunt.

Mandy Fabel shows passion and tenacity in whatever she does SUSAN ANDERSON

H

For the Star-Tribune

ow does Mandy Fabel react when she arrives in the parking lot for a snowmobile adventure and overhears the guys comment, “Oh, there’s a

girl coming?”

She smiles to herself, knowing that she’s probably not the kind of girl they may be imagining. As an ambassador for the power sports company Polaris she reflects, “I tend to be a more experienced and aggressive rider than most of the guys are expecting.”

Mandy wants respect for her accomplishments, whether or not they’re considered typical for a rather slight and fit young woman because, “I want to earn it.” Then she adds, “A lot of it probably comes back to growing up with five older brothers.” She was the youngest and only girl in a highly outdoors sports-oriented family in Sterling, Colorado; plunging in to try new things has been a way of life.

One thing Mandy has earned is respect in her fairly short professional life, progressing from National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) wilderness instructor and office worker, through fundraiser for the Wyoming Community Foundation to her current post as executive director of Leadership Wyoming. The highly regarded leadership program has graduated 850 people in its 20 years, including many current Wyoming leaders. Their ranks include everyone from national and state politicians to an award-winning teacher.

The top job is arguably one of the best leadership and communitybuilding jobs in Wyoming. Mandy earned it when she worked tirelessly to have a chance at a job many would have considered out of her league at the time.

“I decided to go all in, connecting with everyone on the hiring team and asking everyone in my network to reach out on my behalf,” she said. “If they had any doubt of my passion and tenacity at the start of the hiring process, there was little doubt by the end.”

Then she jumped into the program mid-term and “spent that year con-

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Marriage – a peak experience

COURTESY

Mandy Fabel is the executive director of Leadership Wyoming and a committed rock climber. vincing 45 people that they could learn from a youngster. That group helped me through.”

Leadership Wyoming uses Mandy’s strengths and plays to what she calls her life’s work of “using respect and shared experiences to bring people together.” The program gives 40 to 45 people who apply and are selected each year a kind of educational tour of Wyoming and creates lasting bonds among the varied participants.

‘Granola & Gasoline’

The intentional building of bridges underlies another project dear to Mandy’s heart, the YouTube channel she created with her husband Brian, “Gra-

nola & Gasoline.” The granola in the title stands for their experiences as rock climbers, backpackers and backcountry skiers, and the gasoline for their love of snowmobiling and dirt biking.

After diving into snowmobiling several seasons ago, it wasn’t long before Mandy heard her riding partners ask, “Why don’t skiers like us?” She saw an opportunity. “Granola & Gasoline” is about sharing adventures between groups that might have more in common than they think. They claim the tagline of “crushing stereotypes with humor and humanity.”

The videos combine sports you don’t expect to match up. For example, one episode takes a vegan on a motorbike

Mandy married her sweetheart of six years, Brian, in a perfectly appropriate way for them. They embarked on marriage with a 45-hour adventure involving mountain biking 14 miles up Sinks Canyon near Lander, a 26-mile rugged mountain hike to the Cirque of the Towers and finally, a serious 10-pitch rock climb to the top of Pingora Peak, elevation 11,889 feet. There, she surprised him by pulling an $8 wedding dress from a thrift shop out of her backpack and changing behind a rock. The minister and climbing partner Jamie performed the ceremony and caught the bouquet of wildflowers; then they did the trip in reverse.

Asked before the adventure wedding what worried her, Mandy said, “I don’t worry about things. If we have a problem, we’ll just fix it.”

She took a job at NOLS in Lander after graduating from Azusa Pacific University near Los Angeles as a “kind of last hurrah before becoming a grownup.” But 12 years later she’s firmly based in Wyoming, which she describes as “a unique culture of people invested in this place and in each other.” Wyoming is a place of opportunity for everyone, she believes, adding that “anyone who wants to carve out a place for themselves can do it with hard work and trust.”

And that’s especially true for a woman like Mandy, who is always committed to earning it.

Contact Susan Anderson at susananderson45@yahoo.com

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Lynn Dickey served four terms in the Wyoming Legislature. Former Gov. Mike Sullivan said of her, “She had a special talent; she could work on a bipartisan basis. I think she was loved and respected by everyone she knew.”

COURTESY ELLEN DILLON

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SUSAN ANDERSON

‌W For the Star-Tribune‌

hen a young woman from Sheridan decided to run for the Wyoming Legislature after years of lobbying legislators, she faced obstacles. For one, she chose to run as a Democrat in a community known for its Republican ranching attitudes.

But Lynn Dickey had already put in time listening to rancher concerns about mining and water use in the Powder River Basin. She was outstanding at hearing all sides of an issue and then forging alliances. She did that as tribal liaison for Gov. Mike Sullivan, a member of the Environmental Quality Council and as staff director of the Powder River Basin Resource Council.

So, when she won a House seat in 1981, she was prepared to bring issues to a potentially unsympathetic Legislature and plug away at her goals. Her main objective, she said later, was to serve her neighbors in Sheridan County, and she counted her ability to help them deal with government bureaucracy as one of her best achievements.

Life-altering car crash didn’t stop

Lynn Dickey Former lawmaker ‘owned the capitol’

‘She owned the capitol’‌

Lynn faced another challenge. She entered the Wyoming State Capitol in a wheelchair, paralyzed from a car accident when she was 17. But the disability was the least of her worries, according to former Gov. Mike Sullivan.

“In her wheelchair, she owned the capitol. She was able to get around. If she couldn’t, she’d improvise,” he said.

It amazed fellow legislators how well Lynn could navigate the four-story capitol building and climb unaided in and out of the car that she drove herself. At 17, Lynn had been temporarily blinded by sun in her eyes as a new driver and crashed a car, leaving both her and her mother with spinal cord injuries. It was how she handled the aftermath of the accident that defines Lynn’s spirit. Her sister Ellen Dillon describes their parents raising them to think, “Don’t ever say, ‘I can’t do this,’ until you’ve tried everything you can.” Ellen said, “That mindset helped her a lot. She just ignored disability; she didn’t mourn the loss of legs.”

From a hospital bed, she finished junior year at Buffalo High School; her teachers recorded their lectures for her. When she returned from rehab to her senior year five months after the accident, “The football players had assigned times to haul her up and down steps,” said her sis-

Dickey was paralyzed in a car crash as a teenager. She went on to become an important figure in Wyoming politics. ter Ellen. She graduated from high school with her class and earned a scholarship to the University of Illinois at Urbana, which was the first university that had made itself handicapped accessible after World War II to accommodate disabled veterans.

And Lynn didn’t only overcome her body’s limitations; she went on adventures that might intimidate anyone.

Riding in a hot-air balloon? Check.

Camping? Check. Longtime friend Margie Rea describes canoeing with

Lynn, where Lynn’s friend Sumner carried her through a barbed wire fence to get to Goose Creek north of Sheridan. A special seat held Lynn upright while the boaters went over a diversion dam and Margie wondered what they would do if the canoe capsized. It didn’t.

One sport Lynn could excel in was archery, where her upper body strength was an asset. She won a bronze medal in archery at the Paralympics in Israel in 1968, where she also helped coach basketball. Her business partner in The

Book Shop in Sheridan, Dainis Hazners worked closely with Lynn for years and concluded, “She was the least paralyzed person I knew.”

Bringing people together‌

Lynn Dickey had a kind of superpower to bring people with differing viewpoints together to get things done. One partner in many joint endeavors, Mary Ellen McWilliams, wrote of a proposed land exchange between Texaco and the state of Wyoming in the Fort Phil Kearny area. “Negotiations on this depended on the getting together of the state attorney general, the regional head of Texaco, the director of the Archives Museums and Historic Sites Department and someone from the State Land Office. Time went by and this did not happen.

“Finally, Lynn called them each and told them to be at a meeting at the Barrett Building; they all came, and an agreement was signed. I was amazed. I asked Lynn, ‘But who gave you the authority to order those persons to be there?’ Lynn said ‘Nobody. I just told them to be there and they came.’”

She pulled off similar successes in negotiations over the CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) program in Sheridan to resolve conflicts. McWilliams describes it this way: “The work she did was monumental. It was pure ‘conflict resolution.’” Her sister Ellen said, “She was a complicated person, calm externally, driven by a great need to do the right thing. Had a desire to listen to every single perspective on every single issue to come to a well-informed decision.”

Sullivan, the former governor, said “She had a special talent; she could work on a bipartisan basis. I think she was loved and respected by everyone she knew.”

Lynn served four terms in the Wyoming House before deciding not to run again. She had become focused on bringing about peace in the world as part of her conversion to Catholicism. She participated in demonstrations against the death penalty and bringing MX missiles to Cheyenne. In the last year of her life, she was studying for a master’s degree in conflict resolution at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia when she had a heart attack while driving and died of her injuries. She was 51.

Longtime friends Ken and Sue Heuermann sum up her character in two needlepoint pillows she gave them, one funny and one profound. Lynn teased Ken with a pillow reading “Behold the hunter.” But their favorite is the pillow with the words, “Life is fragile. Handle with prayer.”

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GAYLE M. IRWIN

M

For the Star-Tribune

egan Degenfelder embraces challenge.

Whether tackling a work-related issue, overcoming an obstacle in her life or climbing a mountain for recreation, she pursues each with perseverance, a positive attitude and a desire to improve the lives of others. Much of this was instilled early in her life.

“From a very young age, my father made it very clear that I could do anything my brothers could do,” she said.

“He taught me to always find ‘the equalizers’ – in hunting or golf or in preparation for a board meeting. He taught me to persevere and that knowledge is power.

But you have to have integrity above all else.”

Degenfelder serves as manager for government and regulatory affairs for MorningStar Partners/Southland Royalty Company, an oil and gas production company based in Texas, a role she’s held for nearly two years. Stationed in Cheyenne, she works with the company’s Wyoming and New Mexico projects. She has also worked in the coal industry and with the Wyoming Department of Education.

Degenfelder learned another important lesson from her father that applies not only to work situations, but to life in general.

“He taught me to know my worth and to always negotiate my salary.”

Although there are challenges for women in the energy field, Degenfelder believes there are many positive aspects to working in this predominantly male industry.

“I’ve had so many male mentors in the energy industry, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the men that have been willing to take me under their wing,” she said. “They are excited about women entering this industry; we are so underrepresented. I have to say that outweighs the challenges.

“For every woman, even in 2020, there are challenges,” she added. “The energy industry is such a great option for women because of the high-paying jobs and opportunities there. I’ve always been really proud to work for an industry that provides high-paying jobs and tax revenue to the state that really supports our entire state.”

Degenfelder has faced and pushed through challenges in life. At age 21, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

However, she did not let that hold her back. This former Casperite and University of Wyoming graduate moved to

FIND PURPOSE

THROUGH RISK Degenfelder succeeds in male-dominated energy industry

Megan Degenfelder says she believes women need to embrace challenges and take risks, something she demonstrates often.

COURTESY

China to obtain her master’s degree in economics. She traveled through Asia and parts of Africa, where she said she discovered her life’s purpose.

“I developed a passion for energy.

What really keeps me up at night is that almost one billion people in this world are without access to electricity; that’s nearly one billion people without the most basic standard of living,” she said.

“As I traveled through rural Asia to the most remote tribal regions of Ethiopia, I witnessed first-hand the impacts of that unreliable access to electricity. Returning to Wyoming to promote production of this affordable, reliable energy resource

kind of became my life passion. Despite being an extremely male-dominated industry, I never questioned this passion.”

She applies another passion – encouraging and empowering women – in other areas of her life. She coaches a women’s rugby team during the summer, and she offers shooting clinics to women through her involvement with Cheyenne’s Trap and Skeet Club. She also chairs the Wyoming Women’s Foundation and serves on the Wyoming Women’s Antelope Hunt committee, an adventure for women and a fundraiser for the organization, whose mission is to “I’m also very passionate about get-

ting women involved in those activities we have to enjoy in the state,” she said.

Through the organization’s grant program, a summer computer science program for girls was funded this year. Similarly, while working as policy officer with the state’s Department of Education, she oversaw adding computer science to the list of educational offerings for students in public schools around the state.

“Now every student in the state of Wyoming must have access to computer science education in their school,” Degenfelder said.

“It’s really exciting to see those build and give more access for girls and women to be introduced to those equalizers. My dad always taught me ‘knowledge is power.’ How do you achieve that knowledge when you’re extremely limited on resources? There’s so many great programs that I’m so proud that we (the Women’s Foundation) fund.”

For Degenfelder, equalizers are areas “where you can clearly be on a level playing field with men,” whether that’s the company board room, through education, or enjoying Wyoming’s outdoors.

In August, Degenfelder climbed Grand Teton for the first time. She went with a group of friends, one who had been a guide in previous years.

“We did it in one day. That was a little ambitious, (but) it was very cool.”

She believes women need to embrace challenges and take risks.

“I think that’s what young women and girls should know – if it seems risky and might be scary, but you have more allies than you may realize,” Degenfelder said.

“It’s so important that we just jump in head-first. For me, that’s been key: to take advantage of every single opportunity out there. Some might be fruitful and some might not, but at least you’ve explored that opportunity. You might be pleasantly surprised what you find.”

Scaling mountains for fun and in life, taking risks and embracing opportunities – that’s a large part of who Degenfelder is.

“I’ve taken advantage of every risky, exciting opportunity and have built a career around improving the livelihoods of people across the globe,” she said. “But I also recognize that not everyone is fortunate enough to grow up with such opportunities or mentorship, and so it’s very important to me to work to provide those opportunities to future generations. I’m really passionate about providing more opportunities for women to find those equalizers.”

“I’m so proud to be a Wyoming woman,” she added. “We’ve come so very far, but we still have a lot of work to do.”

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A HARDY FRONTIERSWOMAN Homesteader Elinore Pruitt Stewart wrote of Wyoming’s beauty

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women homesteaders. The oldest of nine children, she was born into poverty in 1876 and didn’t have the luxury of formal education.

She made a bold move when the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 gave her the incentive to learn how to homestead, and she answered Clyde Stewart’s ad for a “young or middle-aged lady as companion and to assist with housework on Wyoming ranch.”

Thus she homesteaded on 160 acres adjacent to Clyde’s in Burntfork, and eight weeks later they were married.

No one knows if she had planned on marrying Clyde, said Bloomfield. “Personally, I think that she had planned on doing that. But she saw the probable marriage to (him) as a vehicle to get there. She was willing to think outside the box at the eventual idea of marrying him if they got along okay.

“They both needed a partner, and it turned out that it was a great arrangement — a great marriage,” added Bloomfield.

Becoming a writer

CONTRIBUTED

Elinore Pruitt Stewart homesteaded in Wyoming after moving from Oklahoma. She later wrote of the state’s beauty.

ROBIN BEAVER

A

For the Star-Tribune

pron-clad Elinore Pruitt Stewart stood in the doorway of her log cabin, waving her calloused hands in the air. Her smile beckoned the man at the fence as if to say, “Come on in. Finally, you’re here!”

This is how Mike Wire, Stewart’s grandson, imagined his late grandmother when he visited her Wyoming homestead in 2004.

Wire made the trip from Pennsylvania with the idea of helping initiate a restoration project for the cabin, now on the verge of collapse in the Burntfork Valley of Sweetwater County. Time has looted the home of its once sturdy

frame, allowing local livestock easy access.

Coaxed by a storm to take refuge, Wire found an unexpected warmth inside the structure, which was erected in various stages starting in 1898, he said.

Stewart, a prolific writer who published “Letters of a Woman Homesteader” in 1914, once described the “tang of sage and of pine in the air.”

Wire let the words fill his senses as he peered out toward the Uintah Mountains. At the dilapidated gateway to the homestead, he found his grandmother’s yellow rosebush “still growing and blooming.”

Look at the positive

Reading Stewart’s “Letters” inspired

Susanne K. George (Bloomfield) so much that in 1992, she published “The Adventures of The Woman Homesteader: the Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart.”

“Elinore’s letters showed me that whatever you decide to do — if you’re not afraid of hard work — you can do it.

You need to look at the positive things in your life and not dwell on the negative,” said Bloomfield.

It’s the core of Stewart’s message.

“Each one of us has a frontier,” added Bloomfield. For her, it was being a single parent, working and commuting across Nebraska to earn a Ph.D. — all on a limited income.

Stewart’s westward journey from Oklahoma was not unlike that of many

It was one of Stewart’s goals from an early age. Indeed, her writing skills were advanced for her limited education.

“It goes to show how reading voraciously — reading as a writer — can help you become a writer yourself,” said Bloomfield.

Though in reality Stewart’s life was fraught with hardships, her writings illustrate the way she saw her life.

“So even though it was tough, she chose to focus on the positive aspects and not let the negatives draw her down,” said Bloomfield.

This point is illustrated in the last chapter of Bloomfield’s book when she summarizes Stewart’s philosophy through a letter she wrote in 1920: “But I can tell you my dear, that it is a relief when things get to their worst.

You know what the worst is then and can begin to plan for better things.

That’s what I have done. I have planted flowers (every) where.”

Of his grandmother’s yellow rosebush on the old homestead, Wire reflected, “It must grow like the sagebrush — durable and deep-rooted.”

Much like Stewart, whose published letters continue to offer strength and inspiration to modern-day readers.

Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing Breaking Through series, we’ll be occasionally sharing past profiles of women who made important contributions to Wyoming’s history. This story originally published in 2006.

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ALEJANDRA SILVA, CONTRIBUTED

Rory Tendore and her children attend the 2018 FBI Rocky Mountain Region Community Leadership Award Ceremony. At the event, she received the FBI Director’s leadership award for work with young tribal members.

BREAKING THROUGH SERIES 2020 |

SUSAN ANDERSON

R

For the Star-Tribune

ory Tendore is thrilled to open the door to her office at Central Wyoming College’s Inter-tribal Education Community Center.

The office and her title, she’s the school’s first tribal student coordinator, demonstrate how far she’s come. But the distance traveled isn’t in miles.

Tendore works close to where she grew up as a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe on the Wind River Reservation. She took a winding path to becoming the successful professional that she is now. But she never gave up. And she uses what she learned along the way to help tribal students find their own success.

She describes, for example, helping a couple decide how they should invest in the husband completing a technical training program while his wife worked to support them. Tendore gave “a seed of encouragement” for their plan and was thrilled to hear the husband say that after the technical training, he may get an academic degree so he can start his own business.

Planting seeds of hope is a big part of her job, which once included putting her printer on her home’s entryway during the coronavirus lockdown so a student could print a needed document for funding. With classes resuming in person, she starts each day leaving her house at 7 a.m. to pick up a handful of students. And a major effort of hers is to provide educational opportunities and improve internet access on the Wind River Reservation.

They may seem like simple ways to help, but they add up to keeping students in school.

‘Seed of encouragement’ Rory Tendore helps Native American students find success

Overcoming obstacles

Tendore encountered plenty of obstacles on the road to earning a college degree when she was 36. The path was marked by changes, postponed starts and always, a lack of resources.

Because the community of Fort Washakie didn’t have the population for a public high school at the time, Tendore attended the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota for her freshman year. She returned home her senior year to graduate from Wyoming Indian High School. For college, she chose United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota to study office technology, which she thought would give her the best chance to get a job then she went back home. But after one year she concluded that “maybe school was not for me” and went back to the Wind River Reservation.

For the next 12 years, she worked in var-

LORI RIDGEWAY

Rory Tendore became Coordinator of American Indian Student Service at Central Wyoming College in 2020. ious jobs at Fort Washakie School, first as a tutor and then planning grant-supported programs for students.

Teachers and community members encouraged her to apply for funding through her tribe to attend Idaho State in Pocatello.

There she found a “positive environment” and was inspired by meeting other native students born from a “generation of people who have invested in education.” A roommate’s mother had worked hard to finish college, and Tendore was able to see how her hard work transitioned into a profession, not only a job. Another roommate

from Africa introduced her to a community on campus where students supported each other by celebrating their regional cultures so many miles from home.

But after two years, she felt she had gaps in her education, particularly with math, and didn’t know how to adapt her learning. Plus, money remained an issue. She couldn’t keep her apartment and made the hard choice to leave college and return home. After working a summer internship, she was hired by the Shoshone Business Council and learned first hand about tribal government and business

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procedure, which has become a major interest for her future.

At this point, Tendore had attended two different colleges and earned local credits through BOCES and online classes, but she felt no closer to receiving a degree.

Then Wind River Tribal College stepped in with a program to help non-traditional college students finish their education for teaching certification. An Indian Education grant covered tuition, fees and books to help Tendore finally finish a degree from home at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

The university sent professors to work on the reservation. Two advisers helped Tendore put together all the credits she had already earned with a program she could finish from Wyoming, and in 2015 she earned a college degree.

“I realized I had invested about 20 years of my life getting an education, bits and pieces when I could afford it.” Finally at the age of 36, she became the first in her family of seven children to graduate from a four-year college. Her youngest brother would follow a year later with a degree in Native American Studies from the University of Wyoming.

The degree opened up opportunities, and Tendore was asked to consider applying for a tribal juvenile probation position, for which she was chosen. She took probation to a level of awareness for young offenders, helping them realize that “they could make proactive adjustments in their actions and build relationships in the community and the tribe.” Tendore became the first Wyoming resident in 30 years to be honored with the FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award for work with young tribal members.

When the position of American Indian student services coordinator at Central Wyoming College was created in 2020, Tendore was hired. She says it’s an exciting time to be in education for American Indian people, “knowing that we have a place on campus built with us in mind.”

She describes the pride students in the dental hygiene program felt when they got their first set of scrubs. A pre-engineering student, also the first in his family to attend college, told her how excited he was to meet other students who appreciate science and math as much as he does.

Her long journey to becoming the person who offers resources and encouragement to tribal students has become a “dream come true.” And Tendore isn’t finished improving herself. She wants to earn a master’s degree in public administration, with a focus on tribal governments. For now, she is helping ensure that other tribal students have a smoother path than her own.

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SUSAN ANDERSON

Blue skies meant

NO LIMITS for Lynne Cheney

Lynn Cheney speaking to the Casper republican Women at the Holiday Inn 3.28.99.

CASPER STAR-TRIBUNE COLLECTION, CASPER COLLEGE WESTERN HISTORY CENTER

ynne Cheney may not have imagined that she would become one of Wyoming’s most successful writers back in high school in Casper. But the encouragement she got from teacher Margaret Shilder was so important to her that she still remembered lines in a story the teacher praised 60 years later, while promoting her latest nationally successful book, “The Virginia Dynasty.” Bestselling historian Walter Isaacson may have called her 2020 book “wonderfully readable,” but the encouragement Cheney still treasures came from a teacher at Natrona County High School in the 1950s.

The value of history and education mattered to Cheney throughout her life as she published six bestsellers about American history for children and six respected nonfiction history books, including “James Madison: A Life Reconsidered” and “Kings of the Hill” about speakers of the U.S. House with her husband, Dick Cheney.

Three books written while Dick Cheney was Vice President and she was “Second Lady” are still popular with young people. “A is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women” and “Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America” were written with Robin Preiss Glasser; “We the People: The Story of Our Constitution” became a New York Times bestselling illustrated history of how the Constitution was created.

In her memoir of a Wyoming childhood, “Blue Skies, No Fences,” Cheney describes how the Wyoming setting gave her a sense of “no fences” on what can be accomplished. “You’re not feeling limitations. There was the prairie you could run over and the world you could run into,” she said recently.

One world she plunged into was national baton twirling competition. In her youth, sports weren’t an option for ambitious young girls, so performing as a baton twirler was one way to excel in physical skill.

Cheney describes her approach to baton twirling competition as “intense,” including tossing milk bottles in her home that collided and exploded all over the living room.

But by 1953 she was accomplished enough to become Junior State

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Champion and go on to compete in the national competition in St. Paul, Minn.

“I had no idea that I couldn’t be as successful as girls from Minnesota.

I was an outsider,” she says. But “growing up in Wyoming without a limit on expectations that if you’re a girl, certain things you can’t do” was an amazing gift she says.

She relied on plenty of hard work and a positive thinking technique.

“Whenever a twirling contest was coming up,” she wrote in “Blue Skies,” I would “imagine myself winning it, see myself standing at the microphone, graciously accepting the first-place trophy—and then it would happen.”

After high school, education became her new field of accomplishment, and she earned a master’s degree from University of Wyoming and a PhD from University of Wisconsin. One of the first times she encountered a barrier because of her gender was when she was looking for a job after graduate school and a potential employer said, “Dr. Cheney, are you really interested in teaching or are you married?”

But Lynne Cheney was not one to give up. She succeeded in publishing articles centered on history. “It all Began in Wyoming” about women’s suffrage was an early publication of hers in American Heritage Magazine in 1973.

“It was slow going,’ she says about starting her writing career, but she decided, “Sure, I can do this.” More national magazine articles followed and then books and professional accomplishments such as chairing the National Endowment for the Humanities for seven years and co-hosting the Sunday edition of CNN’s Crossfire.

With success in writing and media came a desire to encourage others. In 2003 Cheney established the James Madison Book Award, which has given a $10,000 award each year to the author of a book bringing American history to young readers.

With her husband Dick, she established the Richard B. and Lynne V. Cheney Study-Abroad Scholar-

WHITE HOUSE PHOTO‌

In this undated photo, Reenactors Sarah Clayson (r) and Cathy Becker read a emigrant’s diary entry for Lynne Cheney at the National Historic Trails Center in Casper. Vice President Dick Cheney looks on.

Lynne Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, sits at her table after giving a speech during the opening ceremony of the Dick & Lynne Cheney Cowboy Ethics Club on Tuesday morning at the Boys & Girls Club of Central Wyoming in Casper.

DAN CEPEDA FILE, STAR-TRIBUNE

ship Fund at University of Wyoming to help students see the world.

It’s the largest land-grant university study abroad scholarship endowment in the U.S., a project that fits with her advice for young people, “If you can, get out and see the world.” Cheney recalls students who have used the scholarships to study in a wide variety of areas, including midwifery in Guatemala or the Enlightenment in Scotland.

“We have tried to encourage and make it possible” to reach their goals, she says, just as her early teachers in Casper did for her.

Lynne Cheney authored the recent biography “James Madison, A Life Reconsidered.”

COURTESY‌

Books by Lynne Cheney Young Reader’s Books by Lynne Cheney “Our 50 States: A Family Adventure” “We the People: The Story of Our Constitution” “America: A Patriotic Primer” “When Washington Crossed the Delaware” “A is for Abigail: An Almanac of Amazing American Women” “A Time for Freedom: What Happened When in America Nonfiction Books by Lynne Cheney “The Virginia Dynasty” “James Madison: A Life Reconsidered” “Blue Skies, No Fences” “Telling the Truth” “Kings of the Hill” “The Body Politic”

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