Border Lands

Personally, I was always offended by the ninety-degree corners and audacious borders of Wyoming and Colorado. It seemed to me almost cocky, the way four corners were placed on the map irregardless of terrain. Today, as I live there, literally straddling the border, crossing this apparently arbitrary invisible line a hundred times daily, it continues to offend. Why, when the pass sits so nearby, did the border not conform to the mountain peaks? Or at least, why didn't it follow the Little Snake along its winding course, setting down one side of the valley clearly to Colorado and the other clearly to Wyoming? The imaginary boundary line brings political ramifications in our business. The valley's social constructions continue to defy the actual boundary, and while I am ensconced firmly in "Colorado" (despite more than 150,000 acres of the ranch in Wyoming), Slater, Colorado continues to be considered firmly "Wyoming" (even insofar as a recent Bureau of Land Management press release named it as Slater, Wyoming, which it hasn't been since 1888). Even the social constructions fit the topography; why can't the border line? “Wyoming, at first glance, would appear to be an arbitrary segment of the country. Wyoming and Colorado are the only states whose borders consist of four straight lines. That could be looked upon as an affront to nature, an utterly political conception, an ignoring of the outlines of physiographic worlds, in disregard of rivers and divides. Rivers and divides, however, are in some ways unworthy as boundaries, which are meant to imply a durability that is belied by the function of rivers and divides. They move, they change, and they go away. Rivers, almost by definition, are young. The oldest river in the United States is called the New River. It has existed (in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia) for a little more than one and a half per cent of the history of the world. In epochs and eras before there ever was a Colorado River, the formations of the Grand Canyon were crossed and crisscrossed, scoured and dissolved, deposited and moved by innumerable rivers. The Colorado River, which has only recently appeared on earth, has excavated the Grand Canyon in very little time. From its beginning, human beings could have watched the Grand Canyon being made. The Green River has cut down through the Uinta Mountains in the last few million years, the Wind River through the Owl Creek Mountains, the Laramie River through the Laramie Range. The mountains themselves came up and moved. Several thousand feet of basin fill has recently disappeared. As the rock around Rawlins amply shows, the face of the country has frequently changed. Wyoming suggests with emphasis the page-one principle of reading in rock the record of the earth: Surface appearances are only that; topography grows, shrinks, compresses, spreads, disintegrates, and disappears; every scene is temporary, and is composed of fragments form other scenes. Four straight lines—like a plug cut in the side of a watermelon—should do as well as any to frame Wyoming and its former worlds.” (John McPhee, in his excellent biography of geologist David Love, "Rising From the Plains" p. 29) This makes me feel a little better about being stuck on the "wrong" side of the border.

"If summer falls on a weekend, let's have a picnic." (Wyoming homesteader saying)

INSANITY DECREASING

Insanity has been decreased 60 per cent in the United States since prohibition went into effect. The reason for this remarkable decrease in insanity is that people of the nation are leading a more quiet life and the over exertion of the nervous system which is caused by the drinking of alcoholic liquors has been done away with.
-Routt County Sentinel, October 29, 1920

"The Usual Crime"

"The Decay of Lynching
(Grand Junction Sentinel)
Lynchings fell off in 1914. There were only fifty-two cases in the United States, the smallest number in any year since the records have been kept. Aside from this general indication of a growing respect for law and order, a scrutiny of the record develops some less gratifying facts. First of all, it should be noted that if “the usual crime” were ever regarded as a blanket justification for the institution of lynching, it must now be definitely discarded. Relentless statistics declare that only seven lynchings out of the fifty-two came within the category of chivalric murders for the protection of womanhood and only five of the victims in these cases were colored."

-Steamboat Pilot, January 27, 1915, page 4

A friend told me that sometimes when I write, I speak a different language. We traced the source to the constant research I do reading old newspapers. The quaint, archaic English practiced by turn-of-the-century papers is a far cry from the tight, concise writing journalism emphasizes today. Additionally, social mores required the use of strangely-turned phrases that wouldn't offend Victorian readers' sensibilities. For example, "the usual crime." This one is elusive. I have to imagine, by the context, that they refer to rape. Even better: "chivalric murders for the protection of womanhood?" Compared to the USA Today, these men were Shakespeare!

Women on a jury? Ha ha ha, how novel!

The case of inquisition in lunacy of Mrs. Elizabeth Hutchinson was heard in the county court Thursday. The novel feature of the trial was the the fact that the jury box was filled with women. Judge Morning gave Deputy Sheriff "Billy" Leahy permission to summon women as jurors. "Billy" was delighted and soon had a sufficient number of the fair sex subpoenaed to try the case. "Billy" is happiest when he can show his gallantry to the ladies. The jury was comprised of Mesdames Kate Starr, Katie Pully, Mary Criswell, Mrs. Charles McCormick, Alice Reagen and Miss Maud Keller. Mrs. Starr was foreman. Mrs. Hutchison was committed to the state insane asylum at Pueblo.

[From the Routt County Republican, July 1, 1910.]

Anna Dudley, Pioneer

“Mrs. [Anna] Dudley was an ornery old gal, and just as tough,” Leonard Fleming said. Perhaps she had to be, for she was married to a criminal.

Carl Dudley was a miner and horseman, who supplemented his earnings by thievery. Married in 1900 to Mrs. Dunbar, of Baggs, Wyoming, he left her after a year to pursue the rumors of riches in the Battle Lake mining district. By 1903, he filed for divorce, but by 1905 he was married again, this time to the “ornery old gal” Fleming spoke of.

Anna Dudley had a grown son from a previous marriage, and was probably pregnant with Dudley's child when the two moved in together in 1905. The tone of their marriage is a sad foreshadowing of things to come: in January, Dudley is arrested for stealing provisions from a railroad tie camp in Hog Park, Wyoming. Dudley used a four-horse team and wagon, and tracks clearly led to his ranch. Some of the stolen items were found in the cabin when authorities searched. Lucky for the newlyweds, the case was dismissed due to the crime being committed over the state line.

In 1909, Mrs. Dudley's nineteen-year-old son died of unknown causes. He was apparently working at the Three Forks Ranch at the time of his death, and Mrs. Gardner (who was childless, and had recently lost her husband) buried him in the family plot with a grand granite monument, something Mrs. Dudley certainly could not have afforded. Mrs. Dudley inherited her son's homestead claim, which she proved up on in 1917. Knowing an opportunity when one is presented, Mrs. Dudley also filed on her own homestead claim, which she patented in 1910. By 1916, Carl Dudley had abandoned her and daughter, Mary, and when Mrs. Dudley tried to prove up on Carl Dudley's homestead claim, she was challenged in court. Making the best of the situation, Mrs. Dudley moved into Columbine to send Mary to school full-time. She took over as proprietress of the Columbine Hotel and Restaurant.

Rural Colorado could be a difficult place for a single mother, homesteading a ranch nine miles from town. “She would put a dog collar on her little girl's neck and chain her to the cabin,” Fleming reported. She wasn't above a little deception to make a dollar: “Mrs. Dudley asked Mr. H. R. Temple if he wanted to buy half a beef, so she sent it down by stage driver. She had a colt tied in the barn, and it jumped over the manger and broke its neck, so she butchered it out and sold it as beef!” This toughness was necessary in the wilderness: repeatedly, the stagecoach would fail to make it through, and Mrs. Dudley and her daughter would snowshoe the nine miles from Columbine to their home.

Mrs. Dudley made the acquaintance of homesteader Barney Chesterman sometime before 1917, and took a certain liking to one another. Apparently, they were not very discrete about the relationship, and in July, 1918, the pair were jailed for “maintaining improper relations” as one local newspaper delicately put it. Bluntly stated, it was adultery, and after paying their $750 bonds, Mrs. Dudley filed for divorce on grounds of desertion from Carl Dudley. In April, 1919, Chesterman and Anna Dudley married in Steamboat Springs. Whether they had more children, were happy or unhappy, or simply found life easier together than apart, is unknown.

"A Rocky Mountain Recipe"

When the wily Steamboat horseman
Wants to “do” a tourist, he
“Gets a move on” in accordance
With this simple recipe:
Take a horse of fifteen winters;
File his teeth and roach his mane;
Dose him with condition powders;
Feed him chop or boiled grain.
Give his coat an oily lustre
(This is done with linseed meal!)
Use the currycomb and brush with
Ardor that will make him squeal.
Should he then, in your opinion,
Be a little short of “slick,”
Give him air of roundness wanting
With a course of arsenic!
Follow closely these instructions—
Also, then, (if you are bold)
Underneath his tail a bur put—
And you have a four-year-old.
C. F. Davis
Steamboat Pilot,
August 18, 1897, page 4