Wyoming is a one-class state, and if you think you’re better than someone else, they will tell you to your face that you’re wrong. My mother, Miriam Jenkins Barlow, would have argued this point with you because, to the extent that there is aristocracy in that part of the world, she was kind of like Wyoming royalty.
Her great-uncle was a cattle baron named Amos Smith, who was the first human being to spend a winter in the high reaches of the upper Green River basin. Not even the Indians had ever tried to do that, but Amos had taken a bunch of cattle in there to graze because the grass was unbelievable. It started to snow early, and he got trapped.
I imagine it was a lot like what Hugh Glass, who was my hero when I was about seven years old, went through in The Revenant, with deep snow and lots of wind, but somehow he managed get through it. Having done that, Uncle Amos decided that the upper Green River basin, which was as fair as the garden of the lord and full of tall green grass for two or three months a year, would be wonderful for his cattle, because he could grow hay there and keep cattle year-round.
These were pioneering ideas, and so he hired a bunch of people to homestead for him on 160 acres of sagebrush with barely any water and nothing that you could raise because the entire growing season was about eighteen minutes long. I have actually seen it snow there on the Fourth of July. There’s a joke in Pinedale about a stranger who comes to town shivering and asks one of the locals, “What do you people do around here in the summer?” And the local guy says, “Well, if it falls on a Sunday, we usually have a picnic.”
Uncle Amos never had any children, but he did have three nieces, who were from Burlington Junction, Missouri, and one of them, Eva, married my grandfather Perry Wilson Jenkins, who was an astronomer and a mathematician and an incredible human being if not also terribly likable. Known to one and all as P.W., he had been born in Mount Carmel, Indiana, in 1867. His grandfather had served as an army officer during the American Revolution, and his father had fought in the Civil War. P.W. grew up on the family farm in Butler County, Ohio, and then attended Miami University in Oxford, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and played quarterback on the football team.
P.W. went on to acquire multiple master’s degrees in mathematics and geodesic engineering. By the time he was twenty-nine years old, P.W. became the youngest college president in the United States at Amity College in Iowa. While serving as a fellow at the University of Chicago in 1905, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the kidney, known back then as consumption. The doctor who removed one of P.W.’s kidneys didn’t even bother to send him the bill because he figured the other kidney would kill P.W. before he could ever pay it.
P.W. was about thirty-eight years old when he came out west with Eva because he thought the mountain air might be good for him. He came with the expectation of dying quickly. But he didn’t. Instead, he became quite a big deal.
First he went to a sanatorium in Colorado Springs and then to Wyoming, where he spent a couple of years working for Uncle Amos on his Mule Shoe Ranch, which turned out to be extremely salutary for him. When it looked like P.W. was going to live after all, Uncle Amos said, “Why don’t you get a place of your own?” He grubstaked him a bit, and then P.W. bought a little homestead called the Westphall Place that was north of Cora.
It was soon called the Bar Cross Ranch; as a mathematician, P.W. had come up with a one-iron brand that was also a mathematical symbol and easy to apply. He then bought the Wright place, the Johnson place, and the Merschon place and started to accumulate a lot of adjacent land in the county.
When Uncle Amos died, he left all of his property to P.W.’s wife, Eva, and her two sisters. Her sisters were both farm girls back in Missouri and they immediately sold their shares to P.W. Pretty soon, he had bought himself a drugstore and a grocery as well as a stake in the State Bank of Big Piney, Wyoming. He also became a thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason and founded the Franklin Lodge in Pinedale.
In 1919, P.W. was elected to the first of his five terms in the Wyoming State House of Representatives, where he became Speaker pro-tem before going on to serve two terms in the state senate and as president. Because he didn’t like to ride all the way over to Lander, the Fremont County seat, and because the line between it and Lincoln County ran right through the middle of his house, P.W. introduced the bill in the Wyoming State House of Representatives that led to the creation of Sublette County in 1923.
To the best of my knowledge, Sublette County, which comprises about five thousand square miles of land, is the only political jurisdiction that is based almost entirely on its watershed. P.W. did put the tiny town of Bondurant in it, but that was only so he could get enough votes from there to make Pinedale the county seat in a hotly contested election that was decided by just six votes.
P.W. named the county after William Sublette, a well-known mountain man who, along with his four brothers, trapped for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In the early nineteenth century people would come into Wyoming through South Pass, the only wagon route through the Rocky Mountains. In 1826, William Sublette blazed a shortcut between South Pass and the Bear River that became known as Sublette’s Cutoff.
P.W. also tried running for governor twice, but that never worked out for him. The fact that he was quite unlikable had a lot to do with it. He was already in his mideighties when I was a kid, but my mother always felt that it was really important for me to learn whatever I could from him. So I would go out with him on long drives that let me see huge swathes of Sublette County. From the passenger seat I watched that old man take his 1954 Chevy Bel Air into places that I subsequently could not get to in a four-wheel drive.
I wouldn’t say P.W. was ever loving to me in the conventional sense of the word, but I liked going out with him because he would address me as an adult and I would get to see things I would never have seen otherwise. And so getting to spend time with him as a kid gave me the opportunity to learn a lot of useful stuff about the adult world. My mother definitely felt that it was worth the risk of having us go out to some far distant place where P.W. might suddenly die behind the wheel, leaving me stuck there until someone else came along. Before we left the ranch, she would always say, “If Grandpa falls asleep for a very long time, that means he’s gone. You don’t go anywhere on your own. You just stay by the car.” Fortunately for both of us, that never happened.
My mother herself always had a mixed relationship with her father. A big part of the problem was that while P.W.’s wife, Eva—my grandmother—was still alive, P.W. had already taken up with Girly Neal, who was like the scarlet woman of Big Piney, Wyoming. She was his secretary and traveling companion and about my mother’s age, and my mother didn’t care for this arrangement at all. Girly herself didn’t help the situation much. Whenever she came down to Salt Lake City, Girly would stay with my mother at her sorority house at the University of Utah rather than at the house P.W. had there.
Around Pinedale, they called P.W. “the Little Red Bull.” A bunch of different ranches ran a large cattle allotment in common, with the idea being that everyone would put out pure Hereford cattle that more or less matched. P.W. was a full-fledged member of the bull-buying committee, but he had his own goddamned ideas about this particular subject. He believed there was some significant virtue to crossing Hereford cows with Red Angus bulls, and so he bought a Red Angus and turned it out on the allotment. It was a rip-snorting little thing that tore up the turf and fucked everything in sight. That bull didn’t look or think like any of the others, and in some respects it resembled P.W., who at five foot six was kind of diminutive physically.
Getting the little red bull kind of represented the way P.W. dealt with everything. Had someone else tried this, they would have gotten some shit for it, but with P.W. people were willing to say, “Well, he may know something about this,” and so they let him do it. But I don’t think anyone ever came up with a solid answer to the question of how they felt about either one of them, the bull or P.W. They all had mixed feelings.
Even though P.W. did amazing stuff for the area, including selflessly laying in a lot of the ditch line and road line and creating the shape of the county, he wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with. He knew he was a hell of a lot smarter than anyone around him in terms of raw intellectual horsepower, and so he was snappish. It was a character trait that became even more pronounced in my mother.
On June 19, 1955, when I was nine years old, P.W. wasn’t feeling all that well and so he drove himself to the hospital, where he then died at the age of eighty-eight. He had outlived his doctor’s diagnosis by fifty years.