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

<title>Daily Darwin: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Darwin: Tuesday, July 2, 2024

 When you've run out of money for fireworks, there are other alternatives....

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

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

Another of Wyoming’s legacy ranches is hitting the market after nearly a century of stewardship. The T Diamond Ranch comes with a front-row seat to the Black Hills, as well as history to match.

It’s tucked into Crook County just a few miles from the South Dakota border on a 433-acre spread where trout streams, 

red bluffs and Wyoming tax laws all come together for a $5 million asking price.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Deep Historic Roots"}]

Aerial photos of the property show Lower Redwater Creek meandering through, with pine-studded hills and red-rock cliffs in the background. The ranch is part of an operation that was founded by the Matthews family, who trailed into Wyoming from Texas, first settling near Gillette in 1888 then expanding outward to Sundance and Spearfish. 

In Spearfish, the family is known for the Matthews Block, which includes the Matthews Opera House, a vibrant community arts center.

T Diamond Ranch is one-fourth of a larger ranch the Matthews family owned. It includes the 1930s farmstead and dairy, along with other working ranch structures. These are not relics. They are part of what is already a working cattle ranch rated for about 50 head. 

With an existing lease in place, there’s an immediate income stream.

But it’s not just the original farmhouse and ranch structures that come with this property. There’s a 7,500-square-foot mansion as well, built In 2001.

“They spared no expense when they built it,” Hayden Outdoors listing agent Kerry Englemann told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s just a beautiful, beautiful place.” 

The home was built with entertaining in mind, so has expansive gathering spaces in addition to three bedrooms and seven full bathrooms. Large windows frame a sweeping view of the scenery, including creek bottoms below. 

The interior is finished with warm wood, high-quality appliances, and multiple fireplaces. The price competitive compared to other areas with the kind of outdoor recreation the Black Hills offer.

“This would probably be $20 million in Jackson Hole,” Englemann said. “We sold a ranch down the road there last year for $2.5 million, and it had no improvements to the property, so no residence and no working ranch headquarters.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Where The Trout Live"}]

With few neighbors nearby, and easements that protect the character of all four of the original ranches that were part of this cluster, the new owner will feel as though they’ve found a private sanctuary, he said. 

“It’s rough country, it’s Wyoming country,” Englemann said. “But when you get down to the running water, it’s just beautiful. You have those rugged red bluffs and the contrast with the green riparian area, with all the things you want to see as a country boy.”

Water is a highlight on this turnkey ranch, with substantial, long-standing water rights that support about 125 acres of riparian and irrigated hay bottom along Lower Redwater Creek. That supports one to two cuttings of grass and grass legume hay every season, he said. 

Two registered wells serve the headquarters, providing water to both residences, as well as for domestic stock use. There’s a permanent stock water pipeline easement delivering year-round stock water to the southern grazing units. 

“The highlight is the running water,” Englemann said. “The Redwater Creek — in South Dakota they call it Redwater River — is just beautiful. Those riparian areas are just lush, and there’s trout swimming.”

It’s the kind of fishing many people travel hundreds of miles to find, Englemann said. Lower Redwater Creek runs the length of the property, offering cold, clear trout water starting about 100 yards from the mansion’s backdoor. 

Hay bottoms and timbered draws create wildlife habitat too, attracting whitetail deer, mule deer, turkeys, and elk, who roam freely from the nearby Black Hills National Forest and creek corridor, as well as plenty of upland birds that work the field edges and frequent the creek, Englemann said.

The ranch is also situated to access the Black Hills in both Wyoming and South Dakota, but it comes with a much lower tax bill than its neighboring state. 

“I don’t know what the exact percentages are, but when I look at properties that are similar to my property in South Dakota, my tax bill for that property is somewhere around $7,000 to $8,000 a year,” he said. “And if you go across the border to Wyoming those taxes might be around $1,200 a year. So it’s a huge discrepancy in terms of property taxes.”

The range of outdoor recreation opportunities includes horseback riding, hiking, mountain biking and backcountry skiing. The historic mining town of Deadwood, Devils Tower, Spearfish Canyon, Black Hills National Forest — all are within a half-hour or so drive. 

Rapid City, a regional hub with medical specialists, an airport with flights to Denver and Dallas as well as seasonal routes to Chicago, Las Vegas and Orlando, is 63 miles away. 

Noncommercial recreation on the ranch is protected in perpetuity by a conservation partnership, ensuring the property’s open-space character and ranching heritage remain intact.

T Diamond Ranch 35 Aerial primary residence and grounds from above adjusted 1784821086 scaled 8 1 26

<title>T Diamond Ranch, Legacy Black Hills Spread, Hits Wyoming Market For $5 Million | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Another of Wyoming’s legacy ranches is hitting the market after nearly a century of stewardship. The T Diamond Ranch in Crook County comes with a 7,500-square-foot mansion, trout streams, scenic red bluffs, and a front-row seat to the Black Hills.

T Diamond Ranch, Legacy Black Hills Spread, Hits Wyoming Market For $5 Million

Entertainment

John Mionczynski has been part of the living history that has brought Gold Rush Days and South Pass City to life for more than 50 years.

Watching him play a flawless rendition of “The Entertainer” in the 1870s gold rush town’s saloon, one would never guess that South Pass City’s beloved piano man once couldn’t use his fingers at all.

When he was 8, Mionczynski fell from a high-backed lawn chair and shattered his elbow.

“It was in a cast for six months, I think, because the bones had really gotten mangled in the elbow,” Mionczynski recalled. “The surgeon took out the elbow, so it was a stiff arm. So they asked my parents if I wanted the arm to be like this …”  

[{"type":"text","text":"Mionczynski bent his arm horizontal. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"“Or like this,” he said, unbending the arm so it was vertical."}]

Those were his two choices, because the doctor couldn’t see any way to put back his elbow. 

Neither choice was appealing to his parents. So the surgeon tried something radical.

“He carved a joint in there,” Mionczynski said. “He said, ‘I don’t know if it’ll work, but it could allow him to move his elbow like a normal elbow.”

It wasn’t a real elbow. By carving the bone ends into a functional shape, the surgeon created a false joint in hopes that scar tissue would fill the gap, acting as a makeshift cushion that could allow for a surprising amount of mobility. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Accordion Saves The Day"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"It wasn’t an immediate success. "}]

At first, the joint wouldn’t move at all. It took weeks of concerted effort to budge the tiniest fraction. 

Mionczynski had to work at moving it a little more every day. In the meantime, his fingers had begun to atrophy.

So his mom bought him a small accordion, knowing he loved music. She hoped it would motivate him to work harder at regaining use of his arm and his fingers. 

Mionczynski’s dad had been teaching him how to play instruments like the harmonica and the violin before the accident.

“I couldn’t play any of those instruments after the accident,” he said. “But with an accordion, you have to use your left arm to pull the bellows in and out. And then there’s buttons there, too. You have to move it up and down. So it was a brilliant idea.”

It took two years to fully regain the function in his arm and fingers. But his mother had picked the right motivation.

“The problem was, at first I was not interested in exercises,” Mionczynski said. “But with accordion ballads, I was interested. It was fun. I enjoyed it.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Piano Therapy In A 150-Year-Old Saloon"}]

Decades later, that once-shattered arm is what powers the music that gives South Pass City’s saloon its heart. 

On Gold Rush Days, tourists crowd inside to hear the piano music and to buy ice-cold sarsaparilla. 

Mionczynski is in his element in these moments. To him, it’s not a performance at all. It’s more like therapy. 

He’ll spend most of his summers running pack trips, plant classes and history tours back to back for a couple of months. It’s a season of logistics and long miles in the high country of Wyoming. 

But in South Pass, all of that’s far away. He’s playing the tunes of a forgotten era in a 150-year-old saloon.

It’s a reset button tapped out in ragtime and waltzes alongside re-enactors in dusters and satin dresses. 

“I just face the wall,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t have to talk to people until I stop playing. For me, it takes my mind completely off any scheduling problems I have, or vehicle problems that have to get fixed before the next trip, or any of the other usual problems people have.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"South Pass Gets A Piano Man"}]

Mionczynski has been South Pass City’s piano man since 1974, when the state resurrected the gold-rush town. 

“The governor came down,” he recalled. “And at that time, there were some people still living here. Most of these buildings were leaning with the wind.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Poles had been used to prop up some of them, Mionczynski recalls. "}]

“They finally got the main hotel here and the Smith-Sherlock store rebuilt, resurrected,” he said. “And the interiors were done and the windows that were broken replaced. They were starting to make it look like a real town, without buildings that looked like they were about to fall over.”

For the occasion, there was a band wagon in front of what’s called The Exchange today. But at the time, it was named the Grecian Bend Saloon.

“The state’s trying to rebuild this place the way it was around 1870,” Mionczynski said. “So they’re going with what the buildings were at that time.”

Mionczynski had already made something of a name for himself playing with his band, The Buffalo Chips, at Atlantic City’s Mercantile. 

“We had more fun than we should have,” he said, his eyes filling up with the memories. “It was a great band. We all liked each other like a family. We played old-time music of different sorts, and we had people who would dress up in the 1890s Western clothing.”

[{"type":"text","text":"The band wasn’t interested in the typical venue, either."}]

“What our band liked to do was play for the smallest towns in Wyoming,” Mionczynski said. “We’d go there and we’d visit and get to know a person or two. And some of these towns only had two.”

Eventually, they’d suggest the idea of coming to play for the town for free. 

“We played for a lot of small towns,” Mionczynski said. “We just had a lot of fun playing old-time music.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"From Long Island To Wyoming"}]

Mionczynski was born in 1947, thousands of miles away from Wyoming, on the east end of Long Island, New York — closer to the Atlantic Ocean than to Atlantic City, where he makes his home.

Mionczynski had a high school pal named Dennis. The two did basically everything together, including graduate from high school in 1964. Where Mionczynski was shy, Dennis was outgoing. They complemented each other in that way. 

“We were adventurous kids,” Mionczynski recalled. “We liked to go camping while we were in high school, and we camped all over.”

The Vietnam War was going on at the time, and their teachers had been encouraging them to enlist in the Army right out of high school.

“We all took it to heart,” Mionczynski said. “I was very patriotic. I wanted to go in the Army and Dennis and I were going to go in together. But I was too young and my brother was already in the Navy, so my parents wouldn’t sign me up.”

The two young men decided they would take a year off to travel the country, and then sign up to serve.

“I could afford to have a car because I played in this band, and we made money in high school,” Mionczynski said. “So my dad found a ’58 Ford coupe that I could afford to buy for $300, and he helped me purchase it.”

Mionczynski and Dennis had no idea, however, where to go in this brand-new car.

“So what we did was, we took an atlas of the United States and I think we blindfolded Dennis first,” Mionczynski said. “After he had his blindfold on, I took the map of the United States and just spun it around on the table.”

Dennis put his finger down on the map, right smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Mionczynski took a turn next but his finger also landed somewhere ridiculous — southern Mexico.

[{"type":"text","text":"The third time was the charm. "}]

“Dennis was blindfolded, and he put his finger down on Boyd, Montana, which is right near Red Lodge,” Mionczynski said. “So that’s where we were going.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Four Flat Tires And Fate"}]

The boys loved Boyd and thought they’d found the place they wanted to live someday.

[{"type":"text","text":"But fate was about to take another turn."}]

“We didn’t want to go to Yellowstone Park because it was too big and full of people,” Mionczynski said. “So we went down what is the Chief Joseph Highway now. It was a dirt road, and we went to Cody and then we went to the Bighorn Mountains.”

The two camped in a Forest Service campground, which was a rustic affair quite unlike what’s there today. 

“There was an outhouse there, and a place to park your car, and that was about it,” Mionczynski said with a chuckle. “And the first night it rained really heavily.”

That forced the boys to sleep in the car, one boy to each of the bench seats. 

“When we woke the next day, we had three flat tires that night,” Mionczynski said. “What are the chances of having three tires go flat on the same night when you’re not driving?”

[{"type":"text","text":"The flat tires didn’t upset them though."}]

“We took it as kind of some sort of sign and didn’t bother to fix them,” Mionczynski said. “We just took off, into the mountains. We hunted with our throwing knives and found squirrels and fish. We had a wonderful time and decided we were going to live in Wyoming.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Enter The Red Desert"}]

That’s how Mionczynski fell in love with Wyoming, ultimately becoming a prospector for gold and jade.

“I was looking for a place to be alone more than prospecting,” he said. “I liked traveling alone. I liked living off the land. Both Dennis and I used to like to do that.”

Because he liked to be alone, he gravitated to the biggest “white spot” on the map — the Red Desert.

“I went there in ’67 just to see it,” Mionczynski said. “By then, I had the prospecting bug, so I was there with the intent of finding something that I could prospect for to pay off my college debts.”

Mionczynski and a college friend worked on gold claims near the Sweetwater River. It was backbreaking work with a gold pan, a sluice box, shovels and picks.

[{"type":"text","text":"Dennis was drafted that year and went into the Army. "}]

“He went to Vietnam and he was sending me postcards that said, ‘Doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it, but whatever it takes, don’t come to this place,’” Mionczynski said. “These were very serious, very ominous postcards. He was getting shot up and losing all of his friends to the battle. He was my best friend, so I believed him.”

The Red Desert became a meditation for Mionczynski as he thought about the war and the postcards.

“The question I nailed it down to was, ‘Is it OK to kill somebody when you don’t know exactly why you’re doing it?'” Mionczynski said. “That’s what Vietnam was for a lot of young people. You’re following orders, but you’re basically — if you fired the bullet — killing somebody. If you don’t know why you’re doing it, I didn’t think it was right.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Best Job Ever"}]

Eventually, the lonely desert wanderings pulled Mionczynski into wildlife biology and one of his “best jobs ever,” living with bands of bighorn sheep, migrating with them, and recording everything about their lives for Wyoming Game and Fish, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. 

[{"type":"text","text":"That’s when he became the goat outfitter."}]

“They were my pack animals,” Mionczynski said. “I was carrying a 110-pound pack with this new radio equipment I had to carry. And that was the first time anybody had tried to study bighorn sheep with radio telemetry.”

To entertain himself, Mionczynski brought his accordion along. And discovered that goats don’t just like music. They love it.

“They would gather around every time I got the accordion out,” Mionczynski said. “I would start playing and they would close their eyes, rest their heads back on their shoulders, and their eyes would be closed until I finished the song.”

The instant the music stopped, they would all wake up, eyeing Mionczynski as if waiting for the next tune.

“It had to be some kind of meditative thing for the goats,” Mionczynski said with a chuckle. 

The bighorn sheep, on the other hand, had little interest in the music. They tolerated the goats, and tolerated Mionczynski, but didn’t gather round for concerts in the wild.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Home At Last"}]

Mionczynski ended up in Atlantic City when his Jeep broke down, leaving him stuck with no transportation and no money. 

He wandered into the Atlantic City Mercantile, which, at the time, was a bar. 

“I didn’t drink in those days, so I sat at the end of the bar just because it was cooler in there than outside,” he said. “And I heard these old-timers talking about Butch Cassidy.”

Mionczynski was interested in the conversation because he’d seen the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which had just come out.

He was surprised, though, to hear the men say that Butch Cassidy had visited the area in either 1938 or 1939.

“That was the first time I interrupted them after about an hour of listening,” Mionczynski said. “I said, ‘Well, I thought he died in Bolivia. The movie showed him dying in Bolivia.’”

Mionczynski hung out for a long time at the bar, listening to the stories. Eventually, though, his eye was caught by the piano in the corner. 

At first, the owner, Lyle Moore, told him the piano was broken. But he and Mionczynski got to talking about jade and gold and struck up a friendship.

Finally, it was revealed that the piano was not broken at all. The owners of the bar just didn’t like people making noise if they couldn’t play.

“So, I went over and played the rest of the night,” Mionczynski said. “And oh the bar was crowded. It was all old-timers. And they kept coming up and asking me for songs. I knew a lot of the old songs because I had played old-time music to work my way through college.”

That’s how Mionczynski found a place in Atlantic City, becoming a partner on jade and gold claims with Moore, as well as playing piano every night at the Mercantile. It didn’t take long for other musicians to find him and start playing with him, eventually forming the Buffalo Chip band.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Keeping The Dream Alive"}]

These days Mionczynski lives just 5 miles from South Pass City in what he jokingly calls the “suburbs” of Atlantic City. 

John Mionczzynski South Pass Citys Piano Man 20260711 152435 8 1 26

<title>South Pass City Saloon's Piano Man Has Entertained Gold Rush Visitors Since 1974 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

John Mionczynski has entertained patrons of the South Pass City Saloon since 1974, when the state resurrected the gold-rush town. Watching him play a flawless rendition of “The Entertainer," one would never guess that once he couldn’t use his fingers at all.

South Pass City Saloon's Piano Man Has Entertained Gold Rush Visitors Since 1974

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

For nearly 60 years, Vern Palmer has been obsessed with Wyoming license plates.

The 90-year-old Big Piney man has spent decades roaming old ranches, forgotten dumping grounds and dusty corners of Sublette County looking for pieces of Wyoming history most people would walk right past.

[{"type":"text","text":"It all started with his oldest son, Jim."}]

Together, the two spent weekends crisscrossing ranches, hunting for rusted treasures hidden beneath the sagebrush. Along the way they uncovered old bottles, antique tools, barbed wire, weathered signs and hundreds of Wyoming license plates.

Today, Palmer's collection includes every Wyoming license plate from 1914 to the present, along with every Sublette County plate issued since county numbers were added in the early 1930s. He's also just four states shy of collecting one plate from all 50.

[{"type":"text","text":"But after six decades of searching, there's one he hasn't yet found."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The elusive 1913 Wyoming license plate."}]

"I do think that it's around Big Piney somewhere," Palmer said. "I found the 1914 plate pretty close to my home, but I have not found the 1913."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Family Tradition"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Jim likes to remind people that, technically, he started the collection."}]

As a boy in the late ‘60s, he began picking up old license plates in remote places of the Upper Green River Valley. Before long, his dad was just as hooked.

Summer weekends often meant disappearing into the middle of nowhere with no guarantee they'd find a thing. Palmer rarely bought license plates. Nearly every one in his collection came off the ground.

"He just liked going through old dump grounds looking for old treasures," Jim said. "Old glass ... old artifacts ... tools that you wouldn't find anymore. He just had a passion to find those things."

[{"type":"text","text":"That passion eventually spread to a third generation."}]

His grandson, Joel Florquist, remembers countless summer days wandering through the country with his grandfather.

"A lot of times we didn't find any," Florquist said. "But a lot of times we did."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Before Modern Conveniences"}]

Long before he became Wyoming's unofficial license plate historian, Palmer grew up on a Colorado farm where life looked different.

The family raised cattle, horses, hogs and chickens. They grew vegetables and fruit. His father worked as a carpenter.

[{"type":"text","text":"There was no television, no refrigerator and no indoor plumbing."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"His mother washed clothes in an irrigation ditch using a washboard."}]

When electricity finally reached the farm, the power company installed a single light bulb in the middle of the house and one electrical outlet.

"We didn't have anything to plug into it," Palmer recalled with a laugh. "But it was kind of nice to sit under the globe and do our schoolwork because it was a lot better than the lamp we'd been using."

Florquist said he believes those early years explain why his grandfather never looked at the world quite like everyone else.

"He grew up with not having a lot," Florquist said. "So you took care of what you had so it lasted longer."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"He Valued People"}]

Neighbors knew who to call when a pickup wouldn't start or a car broke down.

After serving in the military and transferring to Big Piney with El Paso Natural Gas in 1960, Palmer built a career as a mechanic before supervising the company's garage.

[{"type":"text","text":"Then he'd go home and fix somebody else's vehicle."}]

"He went out of his way to help people," Jim Palmer said. "He never wanted to do it for credit or recognition. He loved people, and he wanted to make sure they were taken care of."

[{"type":"text","text":"Palmer didn't just see value in old things."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"He saw value in people, too."}]

To him, almost everything deserved another chance — an old license plate, a broken-down car or a neighbor who needed a hand.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"He got joy out of life by being able to help others,\" Jim said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Every Plate Has A Story"}]

Ask Palmer about license plates and you'll quickly discover they're much more than stamped pieces of metal.

[{"type":"text","text":"They're tiny time capsules."}]

He can explain why Wyoming's 1944 plate was made from fiber instead of steel because of wartime shortages, why early Wyoming plates stretched nearly 16 inches long before they were standardized in 1958, and why every county still carries the same number it was assigned nearly a century ago.

[{"type":"text","text":"He'll also tell you why Sublette County wears the number 23."}]

When Wyoming assigned county numbers in the early 1930s, they weren't random. Counties were ranked by their assessed property valuation at the time, and Sublette landed at No. 23. The rankings stuck, and so did the numbers on the license plates.

[{"type":"text","text":"His collection includes roughly 650 license plates."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"When I hold one,\" Palmer said, \"I see the history.\""}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Curious About Everything"}]

Long before Neil Armstrong ever stepped onto the moon, a young Vern Palmer told his teacher that one day people would walk there.

[{"type":"text","text":"In 1969, Armstrong did just that."}]

"He always thought God's creation was amazing," Florquist said. "He wanted to know more."

[{"type":"text","text":"That curiosity never faded."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Jim said his father didn't become an avid reader until he was about 65."}]

Now he reads two or three nonfiction books a week simply because he still wants to learn something new.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'Throw That Telephone Away'"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"Dad hates the dot-com era,\" his daughter, Tammy, said with a laugh."}]

For Palmer, that means more than smartphones or computers. It's the gradual disappearance of face-to-face conversations, handwritten letters and the chance to simply talk to another person.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"Throw that telephone away,\" Palmer said matter-of-factly."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Then, after a beat: \"Throw that computer away.\""}]

For nearly 60 years, Vern Palmer has searched Wyoming ranches and forgotten dumps for old Wyoming license plates. At 90, the Big Piney mechanic has a Wyoming license plate from every year, except one. Palmer says he's not giving up his search.

Daily Darwin: Tuesday, July 2, 2024

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