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Michael P. Ramirez

Daily Cartoon

[{"type":"text","text":"By Michael P. Ramirez"}]

Cartoon 4 19 23

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 19, 2023 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

By Michael P. Ramirez

Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Wyoming Life

A Casper woman breeds and sells rare hairless Sphynx cats that go for thousands of dollars, drawing buyers from around the country who travel hundreds or even thousands of miles for one of the wrinkly felines. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Not everyone understands the appeal."}]

For every person willing to spend $3,000 to $7,000 on a hairless cat, there's somebody like Beverly Jean Luce of Big Piney.

The retired school bus driver has owned cats for most of her 79 years and estimates she's shared her home with about 10 hairy cats over her lifetime, but never a Sphynx. 

"I think they're ugly," she said matter-of-factly. "They look demonic." 

She also voices concerns about how a naked cat would survive Wyoming's famously brutal winters.

The breed's wrinkled skin, oversized ears and lack of fur often draw puzzled looks from people more accustomed to barn cats and calico mousers. 

[{"type":"text","text":"But not everyone feels that way."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Four-Hour Drive"}]

Billie Studanski wanted a Sphynx cat for nearly a decade before she found one.

When a friend tagged her in a social media post about one available in Rock Springs, she climbed into her vehicle and drove more than four hours just to meet the cat.

[{"type":"text","text":"The breeder couldn't believe it."}]

"You're going to drive four hours to meet her without buying her?" Studanski recalled being asked.

Today, Studanski owns two Sphynxes and laughs at the reactions they get from strangers.

"Most people think that they're scary," she said, "But after they spend a few minutes around them they're like, 'Oh my God, they're so cool. I want one'."

Studanski describes hers as something closer to a dog than a traditional house cat.

[{"type":"text","text":"They come when called. They walk on harnesses. And they demand attention."}]

"They're not lay-around, loungy cats," she said. "They're terrorists."

[{"type":"text","text":"The devotion goes both ways."}]

Her cats have heated beds, heated blankets throughout the house, and a floor-to-ceiling cat tree. They even have their own room.

[{"type":"text","text":"For people who love Sphynx cats, that's not unusual, Studanski says. "}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Dark Side Of Breeding"}]

Casper breeder Jasmine Durkey understands why the cats generate strong opinions.

[{"type":"text","text":"She had a similar reaction herself the first time she saw one."}]

Then a 6-week-old kitten crawled into her lap.

"It was love at first sight," she said, explaining her head-first dive into the world of breeding. 

Durkey spent years studying feline husbandry, genetics and bloodlines before purchasing breeding cats and later importing several from Moscow, Russia.

Today she maintains a small cattery with six adult cats and produces only a handful of litters each year.

Breeding cats requires genetic testing, veterinary care, annual heart scans and constant monitoring, Durkey says. 

[{"type":"text","text":"And sometimes, things still go wrong."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Durkey remembers one of her first litters producing three kittens."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"One died days later."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"When you lose a kitten, it's heartbreaking,\" she said."}]

It's what she calls the "dark side" of breeding — the difficult reality hidden behind photos of adorable kittens and social media posts.

"You can put every ounce of your energy into it, and they'll still fade," she said.

The losses, expenses and countless hours of work are partly why Durkey says breeding remains more of a passion project than a path to wealth.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Chorus of Meows"}]

People have traveled from Maryland, Texas and Nevada to get a kitten from Durkey's cattery. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Throughout an interview with Durkey, meowing was heard in the background."}]

One cat demanded attention. Another seemed determined to contribute its own thoughts to the conversation.

"They're very affectionate," Durkey said. "They love to be around people."

Unlike the ornery stereotype often associated with cats, the Sphynx breeder describes them as "shadows that follow people from room to room."

[{"type":"text","text":"They burrow under blankets, seek out warm laps, and demand interaction."}]

People compare Sphynx cats to aliens. They joke about them being naked. Durkey said she hears it all.

What people don't see, she said, are the personalities hiding beneath the wrinkles.

Contact Kolby Fedore at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com

Naked cats Mix Collage 25 Jul 2026 07 07 AM 6257 7 25 26

<title>Wyoming Woman Breeds Wrinkly Hairless Sphynx Cats That Sell For Thousands | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A Casper woman breeds and sells rare hairless Sphynx cats that go for thousands of dollars, drawing buyers from around the country who travel hundreds or even thousands of miles for one of the wrinkly felines. Not everyone understands the appeal.

Wyoming Woman Breeds Wrinkly Hairless Sphynx Cats That Sell For Thousands

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

He was a collector of cars, coins, guns, clocks, rocks, friends and anything else that claimed his interest.

And if there wasn’t a garage on his property, he built one.

A year after the passing of Dale Corkill his widow, Patricia, and stepdaughter, Amanda Lake, are trying to find good homes for two of his four-wheeled possessions. 

He and Patricia closed on a house in Glenrock, sent three cars to its garage, and then he died of cancer at a Riverton hospice on May 21, 2025, a week before he was to move in.

Patricia Corkill said she did not realize how many cars her husband of 26 years owned at the time he died, but she pulled out a stack of titles she had to get transferred into her name.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He had them stored in various garages."}]

“It took half a day at the clerk’s office to get everything switched over,” she said. “Then I had to go back. You should have seen the no-smiley faces.”

She just sold his 1941 Chevy Master Deluxe to a man from Denver. Now there just remains a 1925 Model T Opera car and a 1931 Model A Ford with a rumble seat.

“The Opera car has this shade in the back and it would also have a vase,” Patricia said. “The driver or whoever could put a flower in it.”

She said the front seat looks like a couch and noted the cars then were built for smaller people than are typical today.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Parade Car"}]

Lake said her stepdad would drive the Model T in parades in Dubois and Lander. His passenger had to pump a non-original water-filled squirt bottle with a hose attached to keep the little four-cylinder engine and radiator from overheating at the parade pace.

Patricia Corkill said when her husband bought the Model T, as well as the Model A, they were already restored. But he purchased other cars and equipment that would require his skills as a mechanic and electrical whiz.

Mostly, she believes her husband purchased the cars because he enjoyed history and old things.

The couple met at the Dave Johnston Power Plant, where Dale Corkill worked for more than 30 years as an instrument technician.

He was born in Lander and spent his high school years in Casper, graduating from Natrona County High School in the same class as the late Vice President Dick Cheney. 

“He liked him of course and Lynn also,” Patricia Corkill said. “We went to a class reunion and I got to shake hands with him. I didn’t wash my hand for a week.”

Afte Dale's retirement from PacificCorp, he spent three years working for Basin Electric.

Patricia said when she retired from the Dave Johnston Power Plant, he left the Wheatland job and they moved to a cabin he had owned for several years and spent the next 17 years in that region.

Dale knew all of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and Shoshone National Forest trails and sites of interest. He often acted as a guide for friends and others on snowmobile trips or four-wheeler excursions.

“I guess you could probably call him the original Airbnb person up on Union Pass taking care of people’s cabins and stuff for them,” Lake said. “Not everybody lives there year-round.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Skilled Mechanic"}]

Patricia Corkill said her husband was the type of guy who fixed nearly anything: Snowmobiles, four wheelers, older cars, tractors. She said he was raised in a one-bedroom house in Casper and his dad was a carpenter and mechanic.

After graduation from high school, Dale went to Casper College and graduated with a degree in electronics. Once at the Dave Johnston Power Plant in his later years he became a teacher for other operators and even after retirement would go back to put on classes, Patrica said.

Lake said he was always a man on the move working on equipment, fixing clocks, hunting rocks, or helping others.

Patricia said whenever they moved to a new home, if the property didn’t have a garage our outbuildings he built one.

The couple from 2017 to 2025 lived in Riverton and then planned to move back to Glenrock despite his illness.

“When we bought this place, he saw the garage and said ‘let’s buy it,’” Patricia said. “Before he even came into the house.”

Besides building garages, Dale loved to listen to older people tell their stories and was ready hand to help them with projects — helping one Douglas-area widow and friend with her estate after her husband died.

When the couple prepared to move from Riverton to Glenrock, it took two auctions to downsize from the all the collection of equipment, cars, rocks, clocks and other items.

They had a three-car garage, three sheds, and a big shop full of tools, cars, rocks and more.

“He was a man that loved history and enjoyed seeing it in the old gadgets,” Patricia said. “You have no idea how much stuff we had to get rid of because we were downsizing so much. It hurt him bad, but he knew that he was not able to take care of it anymore.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Rock Collection"}]

Patricia Corkill said her husband’s rock collection that included polished stones as well as just rocks made more money than the first auction that included equipment, tools and household items.

She retains some of the rocks they collected as well as other unique items such as lamps used in the Glenrock coal mines, a razor sharpener, and arrowheads from all over Wyoming.

Patricia said her husband loved going to auctions.

“You could show him something and he could tell you the story behind it,” Lake said.

Mother and daughter posted the last of Dale Corkill’s wheeled collection they want to sell on social media sites a couple weeks ago.

 features wooden spoked wheels, a throttle on the column, and a battery so there's no need to twist a crank to start it — though that’s available for back up. The red-bulb hood ornament/radiator cap apparently helps the driver keep his hands from getting burned when removing the cap.

Patricia Corkill said the engine on the Model T was replaced by a previous owner, so the number does not match the original title.

 features a winged bird in flight as its combination hood ornament and radiator cap, spoked rims, spare tires with Ford covers on both sides of the car, and a metal carry rack that folds out off the back behind the rumble seat. The little four-cylinder engine boasts 4,635 miles on its odometer.

The last time both cars were fired up and driven was during a parade three years ago.

“We just want to find good homes for them,” Patricia Corkill said.

Model T and mug 7 25 26

<title>Glenrock Widow Trying To Find Homes For Husband's 1925 Model T And 1931 Model A | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A Glenrock widow has stories to tell about her late husband who was a prolific collector of cars, rocks, clocks, guns, gadgets, and much more. A year after his death, she's still trying to "find good homes" for his 1925 Model T Opera car and 1931 Model A.

Glenrock Widow Trying To Find Homes For Husband's 1925 Model T And 1931 Model A

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

On a hot July afternoon at Frontier Park, two brothers sit side by side sharing a drink and decades of memories.

The Brewster brothers, John and Bill, are among Cheyenne Frontier Days longest-serving volunteers, starting in 1962 and 1959 — if you don’t count the years when they helped their dad, who was Indian Chairman at the time, 

“You remember dad on those Indian trips?” Bill asks with a chuckle.

“That doesn’t count,” John says, shaking his head. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“When was that? ’51 to?” Bill says."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“It was ’50 to ’52,” John replies."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Or maybe it was until 1953, Bill suggests."}]

They decide John has volunteered 64 years, while Bill has 70 years in all. That’s 134 years between them — longer than Cheyenne Frontier Days has been around.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"They laugh, as if at an inside joke. "}]

The math all done, time has a way of blurring together, the Brewster brothers told Cowboy State Daily with a laugh and a shrug. 

It’s been a time that’s full of story and family. 

“Do you remember when those cowboys from the ranch used to come by?” Bill asked John. “They were all World War I veterans. They’d come by and drink a little whiskey and smoke cigarettes in the living room, and some of them still rolled their own. You know just being around cow people is … I’ve been a cowboy all my life.“

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“Me, not so much,” John interjected."}]

“That’s OK,” Bill said with a chuckle. “I’ve got a picture of you on a horse. Saw it the other day.”

It’s proof, if nothing else, that John belongs the same way Bill belongs, in Cheyenne Frontier Days' unofficial pop-up city of volunteers, doing all the unsung jobs that keep this historic event rolling smoothly along.

For all the flashy cowboys, arena lights and concerts, it’s volunteers like the Brewster brothers who have become the real soul of Cheyenne Frontier Days, and not just for the work they do. It’s the stories they carry inside their heads. 

They are a living archive of ranch hands, rodeo legends, and family moments that range from World War I cowboys to Indian trips with the likes of Princess Blue Water. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Fighting Custer"}]

“I’ve got to tell the story about Dad bringing the Indians down,” John said with a chuckle.

Bill nodded his head to say, “Yes, please do,” and his eyes had a twinkle.

“Dad was Indian Sheriff, and they used to bring the Indians down in open trucks from Pine Ridge,” John said.

“They were just bobtail cattle trucks,” Bill added with a laugh.

“There were two who would ride with my father in a car,” John said. “They were Princess Blue Water, Rose Ecoffey and Joseph High Eagle. He was the last surviving combatant in the Custer massacre. He was 15 when he fought Custer.”

High Eagle would often try, in a mixture of sign language and Oglala Sioux, to tell the Brewster brothers’ dad about the fight.

“Rosie’s in the middle,” John said. “And Dad’s driving.”

“No, no,” Bill said. “I’m sitting right behind High Eagle, and she’s sitting right next to me in the back seat. And he starts in with sign language, and maybe Oglala too, talking about the Custer massacre, trying to tell my dad about it.”

Except, he claims that the Indians just had arrows, which the Brewster brothers believe to be false.

“They had rifles better than we had,” Bill said. “They had all Winchesters and we had our Henrys. We had single shots.”

The conversation at the time was making their dad uncomfortable, John recalled. 

“Dad kind of gave this look, like, ‘Really?’ ” John said with a chuckle. “And Rose said, ‘You’re safe. He likes you.’”

Ecoffey was an amazing woman, Bill added. “She was blind in one eye,” he said.

John and Bill have both personally heard her tell the story of how she came to slap the Prince of Wales. 

Blue Water was 7 years old, according to family legends, and told Queen Victoria her people would bow to no one.

“She told us they had been introduced at the court of Queen Victoria, and she said, 'I only bow to the president,’” John said. “And Edward the Eighth was standing there and he laughed.”

Ecoffey had thought he was laughing at her in that moment.

“So she slapped him, and he laughed all the harder,” John said. “And she said, ‘When we got back to the hotel, let me tell you what my father did to me!' She got into trouble for that.”

Ecoffey frequently visited the Brewster family whenever she was in town.

“She and my mother were great friends,” Bill said, wrapping one finger around another. “They were close. They’d come to the house and they’d bring a couple cartons of cigarettes and sit around the garden to smoke. They’d all be in costume.”

Bill still has a photo of Princess Blue Water sitting in the garden with other members of the tribe such as Charlie Red Cloud, Frank Afraid of Horse and Levi Sitting Hawk.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"It’s A Family Tradition"}]

Stories like that might not show up in a rodeo program, but they’re part of the living memory Cheyenne Frontier Days’ longtime volunteers have built around the event in the process of volunteering year-in, year-out.

For people like the Brewster brothers, Cheyenne Frontier Days isn’t just another event on the calendar. It’s the main event.

Pulling on a pair of cowboy boots and slapping on a cowboy hat to help run the rodeo in Cheyenne was simply what you did in the summer when you lived in Cheyenne — for generations running.

“It’s just part of life,” John said. “It’s part of summer. As far back as I remember, our mother was a member of a ranch family and our grandfather was on the Frontier Days parade in the '20s, so it’s family here, it really is.”

“Our dad rode a caisson in the arena here with the Black Horse Battery,” Bill said. “That was a wagon behind the horses and attached to that was a cannon.”

Over the years, the Brewster brothers have quietly done just about every job a volunteer can do. Bill started out driving parade wagons and later shifted to the carriage ranks, then worked around the chutes, and even recited the Cowboys’ Prayer on the last Saturday of Frontier Days.

“That’s on the final Saturday,” John said. “The rodeo stops. They read all the names of the volunteers, cowboys, anybody involved with ranching that has passed away, and then they recite the Cowboys’ Prayer, and Bill would do that.”

“I’m only the fifth guy who ever did it,” Bill added. “Well, there’ve been a couple in between. I’m not going to be doing it this year, I’ll do it again next year.”

John spent time doing the “car count” in the early 1960s, tallying up license plates by state so the announcer could tell the crowd how many people had come from which state. Then he moved into parades and contract acts, helping juggle wagons, floats, queens, VIPs and the Grand Entry. 

These days, he hammers out the entire parade lineup, and he’s the guy behind the 10-gauge blank cannon that booms to officially start the parade.

Between them, they’ve stitched together a lifetime of jobs that rarely make headlines, but are still essential to keeping the Daddy of ‘em All on track. To them, it’s just another summer in Cheyenne, but it means the world to an event that’s celebrating 130 years of rodeo. 

John and Bill Brewster 20260721 131233 7 23 26

<title>The Brewster Brothers: 134 Years Of Cheyenne Frontier Days In Two Cowboy Hats | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Cheyenne Frontier Days has 2,700 volunteers, many of them multigenerational. Among them are the Brewster brothers, who have 134 years of volunteering between them. "Our grandfather was on the Frontier Days parade in the '20s, so it’s family here.”

The Brewster Brothers: 134 Years Of Cheyenne Frontier Days In Two Cowboy Hats

Welsch mug

Jeff Welsch

Outdoors

A few hundred yards downstream, after 70 miles of twists and turns and memories and restoration of a base human spirit, a white pickup truck appeared beyond the vertical lip of a canyon wall on river right and disappeared swiftly behind another tower of rock on the left.

Almost in unison, 22 hearts — one for each first-time floater on the revered emerald gem that is central Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, including and especially mine — sank.

The truck harkened an inevitability we all understood and accepted, but still dreaded as this jarring reality loomed ever larger each day.

We were plying the last stretch of the crown jewel of America’s wild rivers and, in my case, closing the book on an elusive spiritual pursuit 40 years in the making.

An odyssey that began six days earlier with a backcountry flight into a dirt airstrip was now a few half-hearted oar strokes from takeout at busy Cache Bar, after a left turn and one more mighty rapid on the Main Salmon River.

Silence engulfed us, save for the ever-fainter roar of the last of the Middle Fork’s 100-plus rapids, the chirp of chukars pecking at bugs on a boulder-strewn shore, and the goodbye echoes of wind whispering off canyon walls that towered above us like granite cathedrals.

Our bearded and tanned trip leader Murph, no stranger to this moment and its emotional swings, swiveled his head toward the four other yellow rafts and read our collective minds like a seasoned therapist.

“Welcome,” he announced, “to the most depressing place on Earth.”

Murph himself was wrestling with those emotions, as he’d conceded he would when he first gripped his oars at the Indian Creek launch site in the heart of America’s largest contiguous wilderness area.

He pirouetted his raft 180 degrees and pointed it upstream, putting the growing vehicle traffic out of sight if not out of mind, and we all followed suit. We gazed one final time up the waters we’d covered, contemplating a landscape unmatched in the Lower 48 states.

Even the group’s six 11-to-14-year-old kids, who’d spent the morning playfully smacking the water’s surface with paddles and gleefully celebrating drenching descents through rapids with foreboding names such as Devil’s Tooth and Foreplay and House of Rocks, solemnly rested those same paddles across their knees.

No heart was at once more melancholy and yet full as the one belonging to the second-oldest member of the expedition.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Mine."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Unaltered For Millennia"}]

The Middle Fork of the Salmon is born at the confluence of gin-clear Marsh and Bear Valley creeks on the eastern edge of the Sawtooth Mountains. The river carves a serpentine chasm through the craggy Idaho Batholith and, climactically, Impassable Canyon, the third deepest gorge in North America.

Its waters plunge an average of 30 feet per mile, producing nearly continuous rapids over its 104 miles.

Its flow, unaltered for millennia, is regulated purely and solely by Mother Nature — no dams, no agricultural pumps, no diversions, no community water systems, no wastewater effluent, no rip-rap and no spans save for a handful of suspension bridges for foot and equine trail traffic.

The trout fishing is world-class, the hot springs restorative, the rapids exhilarating as well as 

 with one notable and intensely personal exception 

To safeguard the Middle Fork’s fragile integrity, a scant seven launches per day are allowed between commercial and private trips. The odds of the average citizen winning the Middle Fork lottery are about 1 in 55, with 20,000 applicants vying for roughly 350 slots each year.

President Jimmy Carter wasn’t encumbered by such long odds in August 1978 when he floated the Middle Fork, along the way instilling in his wife, Roslyn, a passion for fly-fishing. Two years later he would sign the Central Idaho Wilderness Act into law, the name soon to change to Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

“I think if I had to pick out the three or four best days of my life in politics, it was the time I spent going down the Salmon River by raft two summers ago. This was a delightful trip,” Carter said at the 1980 signing. “The River of No Return, encompassing the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, is indeed one of our nation’s treasures.”

Even the Colorado River of the Grand Canyon, for all its aura and remoteness, is bookended by dams, its flows dictated by the demands and whims of far-flung water users.

The Middle Fork is as pure as the driven snows that blanket its upper reaches and feed it, along with the dozens of creeks that sustain and nurture it.

The mere utterance of the words “Middle Fork” move riverkeepers worldwide to genuflect.

A Middle Fork descent became a vision quest for me a few years after Carter’s visit, when as a 20-something Idaho journalist and budding river enthusiast I was struck by the local reverence for it.

Grown man-card-carrying, beef-eating Idaho men admitted to weeping at the sight of those same anti-climactic trucks and boat trailers.

While awaiting my turn, I rafted and kayaked many of the West’s great whitewater rivers — Idaho’s Main Salmon, Lower Salmon, South Fork of the Payette, South Fork of the Boise, and even the impossibly elusive Selway with its single launch per day; Oregon’s Rogue, Deschutes, McKenzie and Illinois; the Alberton Gorge section on Montana’s Clark Fork; and my splashy introduction to rafting at age 22 in Lunch Counter and the Big Kahuna rapids on Wyoming’s Snake — measuring each against a vision of the Middle Fork adventure certain to come.

Yet year after year, hope gave way to futility.

The lottery sneered at my every annual application. Speed dials in hopes of a rare cancellation were fruitless. Invitations from the friends who’d occasionally struck Middle Fork gold were always ill-timed.

One of the most difficult rivers to gain access to float is the pristine Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The odds are 1 in 55, with 20,000 applicants vying for 350 slots each year. After trying for 40 years, Cowboy State Daily's Jeff Welsch won the lottery

Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Michael P. Ramirez

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