Some towns I had been through might have felt like ghost towns, but Jeffrey City was the real thing. Most of it was boarded up or bulldozed down. A dirt service road running beside the highway provided access to a row of commercial outlets, mostly still standing and a couple still trading, though barely. Behind the front line, rows of abandoned apartment blocks awaited the ball and chain. A tarmac grid flocked with weeds and lined with unstrung telegraph poles extended a quarter of a mile into the desert. Beside it, only foundations and sagebrush remained. Tumbleweed rolled past residual occupancies and, behind the saloon, one man was doggedly mowing the desert. I wondered how many lost souls inhabited this sorry excuse for a town.
“I’d say about 200,” the redhead behind the bar estimated, “if you include all the dogs and cats, and there are a lot of dogs and cats. It used to be a rip-roaring place. About 2,000 folks lived here when it was a mining town, before the tree-huggers stepped in. East of the Green Mountains there are big uranium deposits and humungus quarries. The apartments were for the miners. There are a few of them left doing restoration work but since the big downer on nuclear energy, nobody mines any more. All we’ve got out here is a little ranching.”
Red was born and raised in Jeffrey City. She wished she was still living in what remained, but there was no work. She had moved to Lander, sixty miles away, and now was employed on the Wind River Indian Reservation as a social worker.
“Every weekend I come home to play,” she said “Help my boyfriend run the bar.” (He was the one on the mower.)
If I had to do the detour through Lander, I planned to pedal up to the reservation and poke around.
“Don’t go there, man.” She was emphatic. “You’ll hate Americans.”
“Actually, I rather like Americans.”
“Not after visiting Wind River. Sure, I see the worst side in my job, but all this garbage about the Indian’s cultural revival — man, those people are well and truly broken. There’s drug abuse, alcoholism, abuse in the families — hell, you ain’t seen low self-esteem until you’ve been to the Wind River. Y’know, the Shoshoni reservation used to be the size of Wyoming before it got took away. There’s ranches round here bigger’n it now, and they’ve gotta share it with the Arapaho, f’Christ’s sakes. Hell, they’re traditional enemies. They ain’t exactly killing each other, but one lot are Jesuits and the others are Episcopalians. They sure don’t mix too good.”
Red explained how reservation Indians had been snared by the myth of the noble native living in harmony with nature. While convenient for white liberals and their right-on ideas about conservation and the environment, “it’s a tragic distortion of tribal history and sets the bar too fucking high for the average Joe.” The so-called ‘cultural revival’ was something those with craft skills could earn a dime from, but when an American invests in a blanket or pot, he’s “buying into all that ‘Ecological Indian’ crap,” perpetuating a myth which keeps those without craft skills knocking back the booze. “What they really want is to be ordinary Americans,” Red said. “They want RVs and hi-fis and microwaves and power boats, just like every white American.”
The overlanders called the Shoshoni ‘Digger Indians’, a disparaging term applied to any Amerindian who didn’t fit their stereotype of a near naked savage galloping through a dust storm of stampeding bison. Two hundred years earlier, the Shoshoni were Plains Indians and buffalo hunters, before they were driven into the mountains by their enemies. Forced to roam the Great Basin’s harsh monotony of sagebrush and sand, they became superb ‘resource generalists’, scavenging plants and hunting small game to fill larders, medicine chests, tool kits and wardrobes. Annual gatherings of the tribe were an occasion for communal drives to catch antelope and jack rabbit, but their methods and superstitions were anything but benign. In the belief that an antelope stalked with respect would return to be killed several times over before finally giving up its soul, they set brush fires to corner herds and slaughtered well beyond their needs. Death and regeneration were a common theme in Shoshoni rights, and each hunting binge was preceded by a religious homage to the animal spirits. They appeased plant spirits before anything was uprooted, and a stone was sometimes left in the hole to re-seed. Heavily into immortality, they also practiced suttee, frequently demanding the wife commit suicide on the death of her husband. As Red observed, it wasn’t the soundest footing on which to build the myth of the noble native.
The mass migration which began in 1849 quickly threatened the very survival of the desert tribes. More than the killing of antelopes or rabbits, it was the huge numbers of hungry oxen, cattle and mules which had the most startling impact. To survive the vicious winters, the Shoshoni relied on seeds laboriously collected during the summer months by the women and children. Not only did the overlanders’ harvest or their livestock consume the vegetation before it went to seed, but the continuous stream of wagons shadowing the banks of the Sweetwater made the most fruitful margins of the desert a no-go area for the natives. If they occassionally stole a steer for dinner, it was to be expected, but they were stolen by stealth not by ambush. That was to come later, beside what was then called ‘Mary’s River’.
Somewhere between Jeffrey City and the hamlet of Sweetwater I twiddled through the radio dial and picked up a hurricane warning. Central Wyoming was in for a pasting. There had to be something more substantial than a tent at Sweetwater, if only a sand drowned trailer. I pulled out the stops to reach the hamlet before the hurricane struck, and hit a top speed of a brisk walk. Ice began forming on my beard and my extremities numbed up in the freezing wind.
I crossed Ice Slough, a desolate depression which emphasised the severity of the environment. Half a mile wide by maybe two long, the hollow looked similar to a peat bog except, beneath the surface, Ice Slough was permafrost. In their efforts to find water, the overlanders drove their spades in and hit solid matter beneath the surface. Out of curiosity, I took a chrome vanadium spanner to the slough and managed a seven centimetre dent. In the midst of this desert landscape, it was a remarkable natural feature and the only feature of any interest in over four hours of cycling.
Predictably, the Panther was adamant I wasn’t going to make it to Sweetwater. Equally certain I wasn’t going to suffer another night with the bastard sitting on my face, I gave up at a storm drain under the road. Slinging my sleeping gear into the corrugated tunnel, I prepared for a maelstrom which never came. Instead, sleep was interrupted by the patter of rodents scurrying either side of me through the night.
The severity of the Wild West had taken me by surprise. From the matinee stalls of my youth, I watched the butte and desert backdrops of cowboy films in awe. They were majestic, exciting, warm and spacious, but they never struck me as wild. Wild was jungle and ocean. Wild was what people got up to in the Wild West. Only two days into the sagebrush desert, I now understood how the unrelenting barrage of nature’s forces drove the whiteman to do crazy things. The wind, the heat, the sand, the intimidating space — maddening sensations I never considered in a cinema in drizzly England. Europeans simply weren’t built to withstand the maliciousness of this wicked environment day in day out. It undermined sanity and brought out the savage. I certainly was going bonkers and had psychotic fantasies of ramming my whole kit and caboodle down the black cat’s throat.
I needed extra provisions if I was about to disappear into the desert up a dubious track. A packet of pretzels could prove a life saver, but Sweetwater turned out to be a bridge, a bungalow, a house within an empty RV park and a ramshackle gas station, which was closed. I dozed an hour away against a pump waiting for somebody to appear. At half eight, a ranger pulled up in a pick-up with the crest of the Bureau of Land Management on its door and black smoke billowing from of its tailpipe. “If’n he ain’t here b’now, guess it’ll be t’morrow,” he said, crashing into gear.
Through binoculars, I surveyed the featureless desert for my dirt line. A jeep towing an Airstream caravan bobbed along the western horizon, apparently crossing open range. It turned onto the tarmac dripping great gloops of mud. I flagged it down. Yes, they’d just turned off BLM 2302 and the conditions were “muddy but passable, if’n y’got four-wheel drive.” I had one-wheel drive but two feet I could take to if things got sticky. Atlantic City was about forty-five miles away, the fat vested driver said. By tarmac road, I estimated it to be half as far again. For better or worse, I turned onto the track. The old adage about a short-cut being the longest way round was about to come true.
Wilderness areas of America which aren’t sites of special scientific interest or extraordinary beauty come under the control of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Those which are special tend to be State or National Parks, like Ohiopyle or Yosemite. The BLM manage bog standard wilderness, and millions of square miles of the stuff. The Antelope Hills were nothing exceptional to look at, unless you were trying to cross them with only muscle and sinew. Then they became daunting.
Initially the track was fine, its surface gritted. Most of the width was impossibly washboarded, but the margins were eminently ridable. I wound my way up to Beaver Rim and perused a bleak and barren cyclorama. Up the side of the slope, linear indentations marked the line taken by the wagons and handcarts, feet and hooves of the overlanders. They were the most unadulterated evidence of the passage of the Forty-Niners I would see, and they revealed that in high land like this there were many routes through.
At the very top of Beaver Rim, the Rockies finally revealed themselves on the north-western sky line. They were snow-capped and glowing but a hell of a long way off. I couldn’t believe the sight of them was any more heartening for the wagon trains than it was for me. Before either of us would get an idea of their true proportions, there was mile upon mile of buckled desolation to negotiate. The prospect was depressing and I knew worse was to come. Weariness like I had never experienced before was beginning to blunt my brain and body. I could only believe blood continued to pump because my legs continued to pump, but I hadn’t a clue what kept them going. I wasn’t simply tired of the day. I was tired to the core of my being. No different from the overlanders at this point, every inch of my fibre was wrecked with fatigue. We all plodded wearily forwards on automatic pilot, and I knew what kept them going had nothing to do with promised lands or the lure of gold. Such dreams had fallen to the bottom of a wish list dominated by cravings for warmth, rest and silence, not for a day or a night, but for ever more. We blundered forwards because there was nothing else to do in this merciless place.
A day and a half after leaving Sweetwater I somehow hauled myself into Beer Garden Gulch. I could think of better names for this cleavage of barren sandstone at the tail end of the Wind River Mountains. The hills around the gulch were stripped naked and artificially shaped like coconut pyramids. Up the sunny side from Rock Creek, a small grid of dirt roads strung together a couple of dozen wooden shacks thrusting out of the steep slope. A few were modern A-frames, but most were as old as the hills, which were barely a hundred years old, having been sanded, scoured, blasted and generally hacked about by gold diggers from the 1860s onwards. The village was called Atlantic City, an even more unlikely name.
The population of Atlantic City had fluctuated between several hundreds and a grand total of three during its boom and bust lifetime. The first gold strike was made by panhandlers returning broke after a decade in the Sierra Nevadas. The thriving community which grew up around the mines included an opera house, brewery and a dance hall with a saloon and gambling tables. There was a school, church and fire station, but the tenor of the place is best illustrated by the local legend that Calamity Jane was employed as an escort at the dance hall. Until the cavalry chased them back to the shrinking reservation, the town was also subjected to periodic raids from the aggrieved Shoshoni. Since those rough and tough days, commercial and individual efforts to extract gold from the area had gone in fits and starts, all of it impacting badly on the landscape. At the peak of extraction, Atlantic City must have been a desperately ugly place to live in, except in winter under metres of snow, when it was just desperately cut off.
Gold mining was still carried out by individual die-hards and a recent find of a nugget worth $4,500 had raised hopes once again. The assured wealth was now in tourism, particularly fly fishing, hunting and cross-country skiing. Strolling around the hillside, it was interesting to see how the old stores, blacksmiths’ shops and miner’s homes had barely been modernised. Outside of one, a notice read, ‘Welcome to Atlantic City. We really don’t give a rotund rectum how you did it back home’. Whether this was a warning to incomers to curb their city ways or to tourists wasn’t clear, but the residents were definitely a tight knit. At the Sagebrush Saloon, I picked up a copy of The Mountain News, ‘Published by Women of Wyoming (Atlantic City and South Pass)’. The upcoming birthdays and anniversaries of local residents received prominent display, and Chris-Contracting offered to do maintenance on your log cabin ‘at Christian prices’. Answering the question, “What do you do in winter?” the editor had written, ‘Required reading — The Shining’.
The ascent out of Atlantic City was the steepest I had encountered in America. Slipping and sliding on the grit, I had to heave the bike forwards then jam on the brakes while my feet and breathing caught up. Either side of its high convex back, deep snowdrifts were grey and mucky with the splatterings from car tyres. The village had been hit by a blizzard on the night of the storm at Cherry Tree Creek. Protruding from a coconut pyramid topped in icing sugar, the shaky corrugated structure of a small working mine shuddered with something dangerous going on inside. A buckled shack propped on stilts was imperceptibly sliding down the hillside under the vibrations.
Less than a mile from Atlantic City, South Pass City was a fraction the size of its sister. I dropped down to the cross tracks in Hermit Gulch. Up the valley was a short cul-de-sac of cottages and the South Pass Trading Company, purveyors of period clothing. Down the valley was a small heritage park. I paid a dollar and went for a walk along historic South Pass Avenue, wandering in and out of the twenty-seven renovated log cabins, clapboard houses and stone buildings which made up a large percentage of the original gold town. It was a cold, comfortless place. In the two storey hotel, only one of the rooms had a stove. When all that separated you from sub-zero temperatures was a blanket and a plank of timber, sharing a bed with a total stranger was undoubtedly a plus. In the Sweetwater County Jail, you just froze to death standing up, in one of three dark cells akin to upright coffins. Here Polly Bartlett, the ‘Murderess of Slaughterhouse Gulch’, was shot dead by the vengeful relations of one of her victims. Polly was one of the West’s earliest serial killers, thought to have robbed and poisoned over twenty miners who stopped by her family’s way station south of town.
The most unexpected discovery I found at the far end of the row, in a cabin where Esther Morris and family once lived and produced a newspaper. Esther was America’s first female Justice of the Peace. During the Wyoming Territorial Legislature of 1869, saloon keeper, miner and local representative William Bright steered through a groundbreaking women’s suffrage bill which opened the way for Esther’s appointment. Twenty years later, when Wyoming was negotiating entry into the union, the federal government had severe reservations based on the fear that Esther’s position would set a precedent. Bright’s reply was forthright. “We will remain out of the union a hundred years rather than come in without the women.” This rough and ready frontier town in the back end of nowhere was the last place I expected to be at the forefront of women’s rights.
In the Smith Sherlock Company Store, a modern frontier woman dressed in period clothing sat behind a counter displaying marbles, jaws’ harps and liquorice sticks. Barbara Palmer sold toys and candy on behalf of the Friends of South Pass, but mostly she spent her time shooting the breeze with visitors. She was a powerful woman, self-assured and good at extracting information. I told her my tale, recounting my night with the Mormons at Martin’s Cove.
“I bet they didn’t tell you about the cannibalism?” I raised my eye-brows. “I thought not. They keep that under wraps. When they exhumed the bodies, they found saw marks on the bones. The Mormons were no better than the Donner party.”
The story of the Donner party is the single most horrific episode in the history of the California Trail. Chancing their luck on a new route through the Sierras, George and Jacob Donner’s wagon train became stranded in snow at Truckee Lake. With provisions for six days, a group of fifteen were sent forwards to fetch help. The journey took a month, during which time those left behind resorted to cannibalism when their food ran out. On the trail out of the mountains, the forward party likewise began consuming their colleagues as they dropped dead. Two Indian guides who refused to eat human flesh were shot and themselves eaten. The Saints hadn’t gone that far but, if Barbara was right, they had gone a lot further than Sister Osage and the Hub and Spoke museum were prepared to reveal.
Peter Sherlock, the original storekeeper at the Smith Sherlock Company, was blind, but he could recognise his customers by their footsteps and knew where to lay his hands on any item in the shop. Barbara Palmer also had insight. In the middle of our conversation, she stopped, eyed me up and down, and declared, “You’re a Libran, aren’t you?”
“I am actually. October 3rd.”
“Oh, my. Three is my number.” Her car registration was 3.33, she lived at Three Forks Road and her phone number was all threes. Yep, Barbara had a thing about threes, but she also had the insight to realise I couldn’t give a damn.
“You’re exhausted, aren’t you? And I bet you could do with a bath? Why don’t you leave your bicycle here and come and spend the night at our place? We’re not very together at present, but we’ve got a spare bed.”
I didn’t need convincing, nor did I appreciate quite what I was getting into. It’s not every day one gets to wallow in a jaccuzzi in the middle of a desert watching elk watching you through the bathroom window.
I didn’t see Barbara Palmer’s house until her SUV was almost in the lounge. At the end of a rough track appearing to lead nowhere, the flat-roofed bungalow was dug into an isolated hillside and invisible on three sides. Made from Styrofoam blocks held rigid by concrete ribs, the house had been designed and built over six months by Dan, Barbara’s husband, while they lived on site in a trailer. The outer surface was brushed with asphalt sealant, and the front clad in Moss Rock. About as attractive as a Normandy bunker, the Palmer home was equally efficient.
Wind power provided their electricity, supported by an 18 HP propane generator which echoed through the house when running. Eight heavy duty batteries stored the excess and kicked in to keep the rear of the place lit. Only the kitchen, chapel and bathroom received natural light. The enormous garage where the power was controlled also stored truck loads of caterers’ tins and commercial freezers stuffed with packet food. Though last winter was mild, they expected to be cut-off for months at a time in a normal season. The skidoo and half-tracks for Dan’s 4x4 pick-up had been called into action only last week, after the unseasonal blizzard.
Dan’s confidence in the technology was based on his expertise as a military aviation engineer, but I was curious why an elderly couple would want to retire to such a remote and vulnerable location. This was not somewhere anybody would want to be in the depths of winter when the lights conked out.
“You’ve seen the chapel?” Dan asked, by way of a clue.
Barbara and Dan had fostered twenty-five children in their time. When the last child left home in 1995, Barbara got the calling and trained to become a minister for the Universal Brotherhood of God. Armed with a licence to go forth and proselytise, she had a vision of herself preaching in the wilderness.
“The following day, we received a phone call from a realty agent with an investment he thought would suit our purposes. We hadn’t actually briefed any realty agents but there he was on the phone. The property was a forty acre lot overlooking Oregon Buttes. We came to look at the site and I instantly knew it was the right place. I walked around a bit and kinda tuned in. I just knew it was the right place.”
Barbara located water, later confirmed by a professional dowser. They sank a well and raised a block house which included a simple chapel capable of holding a congregation of a dozen. She had conducted weddings there but mostly counselled disturbed souls who either sought her out or, like me, she picked up in the course of her day at the state park. I got the impression Dan was weary of sharing his home with Barbara’s waifs and strays. A short, wily, affable sort of bloke, he seemed resigned to her overbearing manner. While Barbara’s head was firmly in the clouds, Dan’s was full of nuts and bolts, volts and volumes, and a certain frisson underlined their relationship. They continually bickered and talked about each other as if they were the thankfully departed, but Barbara made no effort to beat me over the head with a Bible. She showed me the chapel and said it was there if I needed it. Over the altar were the words, ‘Serenity Within’. Over the kitchen windows and closer to my needs were the words, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’.
We dined on microwaved packets while relaxing in the windowless sitting room with Dan’s slightly senile mother-in-law. Filling one wall was a modest library which was huge by comparison to anything I had seen in any other American home. Barbara showed me the work of William Henry Jackson, Dan’s great uncle and a photographer whose early images are credited with enabling President Roosevelt to convince Congress to make Yellowstone the first National Park in the world. Jackson had taken pictures of Atlantic and South Pass Cities at the turn of the twentieth century. Then on a boom, the hills were either obliterated by the outfill from gantry mines or raw from the impact of hydraulic mining, a high pressure water process which ravages the landscape. The old towns were as grim and unromantic as I imagined.
Dan laid out the BLM map of the area to show me our location, a chart as detailed as anything the Ordnance Survey produces of our wilderness regions. Regardless of the lie of the land and the invisible lines of longitude and latitude, the whole of the Wyoming map was overlaid with a grid of perfect squares, each delineating 160 acres of BLM land. Every four miles there was a blue square representing land set aside for the state to locate a school house, administration buildings or whatever might be needed for future generations of desert settlers. Every other white square was up for grabs, and the Palmers were the first settlers of the rectangle abutting Spring Gulch. It was an astonishing testimony to the efficiency and invasiveness of the way the West was and continues to be won.
“A large percentage of the current population of the Sweetwater Mining District are artists, writers and musicians,” Dan explained as he drove me back to South Pass City the following morning.
This threw new light on my reading of the sister villages, and probably explained how they had managed to fend off developers. I could see the isolated setting conspired with a romance for the Wild West, a fascination for industrial heritage and cheap property prices to lure Bohemians into the area. Gold has always held a strong fascination for creative people, particularly in the visual arts. It is an elusive colour, difficult to mix and challenging to use. It can be totally tacky or stunningly regal, and the myth that it was the matter of the bough which opened the Underworld to Aeneas only adds to its appeal. Less appealing is the harsh reality that wealth is as elusive for the majority of artists, including me, as it is for the majority of gold-diggers.
Wondering why I didn’t stick to just trying to make it as a cartoonist, I hauled my weary bones out of the relative serenity of Hermit Gulch and back into the desolation of the Great Basin. The track curled out of the rocks and plonked me in the front stalls of the Saturday matinee. On screen, a sumptuous Technicolor desertscape of towering buttes lapped by soft swells just needed Ward Bond moseying over a sand hill to remind me why I was flogging my guts out on the trail to gold and not chained to a drawing board. My romance for the Wild West was flickering back to life, having been thoroughly beaten out of me over the past week. I had weathered the deep doldrums which every adventure suffers from somewhere down the line, and struck out for the Continental Divide with a discernible spring in my crank.
It wasn’t to last.