A new chapter…

If you’re reading this you probably know I quit walking in the beginning of July, about a day’s walk west of Pocatello, ID, after walking almost 800 miles. For weeks I was losing motivation and fretting about money. Also, no matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t figure out how I would get through the western half of Wyoming without serious help. I could go pretty far without buying food, but barely more than a day without refilling water — and there were LONG stretches ahead with no water.

Amazingly, the opportunity has now come up to stay in Wyoming for a while. About a month ago, after spending some time with my family in Idaho and Washington, I came to Sheridan, Wyoming, for a couple of weeks. My good friend Chris lives there with her husband, Scott, and since they were already expecting me on my way through the state, they invited me out for a visit. We had such a good time together for those two weeks (despite Chris having to weather a family tragedy that happened the week I arrived) that they offered to let me stay longer, perhaps through the winter. I was here once nine years ago, also in the winter, and loved the snow and cold. Now I get to see if I can handle a whole Wyoming winter.

Aside from the snow, the Bighorn Mountains, and potential employment, Wyoming has something else that’s drawing me: family history. My great-grandfather, Joe Elliott (my maternal grandmother’s father), was a cowboy in Wyoming from the late 1870s to about 1888. From that time until the late 1890s he worked for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association investigating and arresting cattle rustlers, and he became known (‘infamous’ is the more correct word) for his involvement in the Johnson County Cattle War. (Link here to see a picture and to find out more about the Cattle War: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Invaders.gif>. (He’s the third from the right.) Forty years after the fact, Joe got to tell his side of the story to an interviewer, B. W. Hope. By that time, many books and articles had been written about the event, and he refers to a couple of sources in those interviews. So far, I’ve seen very little of the information that’s out there, but that will soon change.

The cattle war proved to be one of the defining events in the “taming” of the West, and afterward, he and the other “invaders” became known and widely hated. He was one of only a small handful of men from the posse who lived and worked in Wyoming (the majority of the fifty or so “invaders” were paid mercenaries from Texas), and living there after the incident must have been difficult. During my trips to Wyoming, virtually every local I’ve talked to about the Johnson County War was familiar with it, and they all said the same thing upon hearing which side my grandfather fought for: “One of the bad guys.” He ended up spending about six more years in Wyoming before leaving, according to his own account, on foot, making it about 200 miles before catching a train to Sacramento, California.