Small Town Happenstance

We left our campsite near Deadwood on Tuesday morning, saw Devil's Tower in the morning (as reported in Vicky's last post), then headed in to Wyoming to get as many miles in toward our next major destination as possible. We'd originally planned to stay at Keyhole Lake State Park, not too far west of Devil's Tower. But that would have left too long a drive to the Tetons the next day. So we changed our reservation to a KOA outside of Casper Wyoming. This reduced our drive to the Tetons on Wednesday by a few hours.

As we left the Black Hills, we headed into the ever varying Wyoming prairie, so different from South Dakota. Just as we started into this landscape, it was lunch time, so we stopped for a curbside sandwich in Moorcroft, Wyoming. By curbside, I mean we stopped the Rig at the side of a residential street a block in from one of the two main streets or town, pulled out the cooler, and made sandwiches. We sat on the curb and ate them.  

Right across the street, we noticed a building that advertised itself as the West Texas Trail Museum. What in the world? We're miles from Texas! Curiosity got the better of us and after finishing our sandwiches we moseyed over. Free admission. What the heck! The woman in the office welcomed us in and gave us a ten minute history of the cattle drives of the mid 1800s.

The West Texas Trail Museum

The story is fascinating. During the Civil War, Texas lost its ability to sell its cattle to supply the Confederacy with beef once Grant took control of the Mississippi in 1863. There was a serious glut of cattle in Texas. Texans had to drive their cattle northward, in part to be able to supply midwestern states. This continued after the war, with cattle drives going farther northward, first to sidestep organized Indian rustling in Oklahoma, then to move past restrictions on Texas cattle pasturing in Kansas and Nebraska (they brought a tick-born disease). So the drives kept moving to railroad shipping destinations that could move the cattle eastward to Chicago and beyond. And farther northward, all the way to northeastern Wyoming, to supply newly formed Indian reservations after the final pacifications of the plains tribes.

The museum is full of neat artifacts from the drives, from the railways, and from local development from the primitive settlements of the 19th century to the modern life of that part of the state of Wyoming. The woman in charge collects artifacts from all over the region, and her office is full of the clutter of new arrivals. We spend almost an hour in the place. It was not on our itinerary, and we found it completely by chance. A roadside gem!

The museum has a nice gun collection

Saddles and Stetsons

Conjoined calves