Daily Darwin

[{"type":"text","text":"Extra points were rewarded for the level of difficulty achieved....."}]

Darwin 11 13 24

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

<title>Daily Darwin: Wednesday, November 13, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Extra points were rewarded for the level of difficulty achieved.....

Daily Darwin: Wednesday, November 13, 2024

 Extra points were rewarded for the level of difficulty achieved.....

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

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

Business

Chugwater is not the place where most people would expect to find high fashion.

But that is exactly what they’ll find along the tiny town’s main drag — a new vintage Western clothing shop, run by a woman with roots in the high-powered fashion worlds of Italy and New York. 

In a town better known for its annual chili cook-off than haute couture, the BB West Vintage boutique joins a growing number of historic buildings turned destination businesses pulling tourists off Interstate 25 and keeping a rural main street alive.

Claudia Borchardt is her name, and she’s married to a Wyoming rancher just outside of Chugwater. But her fashion story starts a world away.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Beginning Of A Dream"}]

At first, Claudia didn’t dare dream of starting a clothing store about as far off the beaten path as a person can get — in a town of less than 200 people in the least-populated state in the U.S. 

She’d owned a boutique in Brooklyn, New York, and knew just how difficult retail could be, even in a more populous community. 

“When I moved here, my career obviously didn’t exist,” she said. 

That had her asking herself what kind of work she could do from home to keep the creative muscles working and feel more a part of the community. 

She tried a few things. First, she leaned into her marketing experience, working with The Historic Plains Hotel in Cheyenne to sell tourist packages and such. 

But there’s just something about the fashion industry that refuses to be quiet in her head.

“So, about eight years ago I started an Etsy business,” she said. “And I was selling vintage Western wear — kids and adults — and it really took off. I found that there’s a market for what we take for granted, for what everyone probably already has in their closet from grandma.”

Turns out, people in big cities and even other countries just love Western fashion, especially now with popular television shows like Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone”. 

“So I started online and I’ve been working out of my house for eight years, growing and growing,” she said.

Before long, dozens of orders were shipping to customers across the country and even overseas, all from a basement in rural Platte County. 

One day the growing towers of totes in the basement could no longer escape the notice of her husband. 

“Whoa,” he said. “You have so much stuff, you could open a store.”

And so, that’s just what she decided to do, right there in tiny Chugwater, population 175.

“I was just getting tired of having to go to the basement every time I had a sale,” Borchardt admitted. “And I was wishing I could just hang it all up and work with it a little more.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Following The Lead"}]

For Chugwater, BB West means one more cute shop on a slowly but surely growing main drag. It’s something else to help draw tourists off Interstate 25, too, bringing new dollars into a town that would otherwise go the way of so many other small communities.

Borchardt found good role models in Chugwater’s 

 owner Josh Hopkins, Soda Fountain owner Jill Winger, and Stampede owners Lily and Lance Nilson.

All have bought distressed properties and/or businesses to revive them and found ways to succeed in spite of the lack of population. Their efforts have injected new vitality into the community, to keep the town from dying out altogether, while also helping preserve pieces of Wyoming history. 

The Soda Fountain, for example, is the state’s oldest operating soda fountain. It opened in 1914, and still serves old-fashioned malts.

Winger initially thought her path to viability was to keep things simple, so she leaned into a burger and malt concept. That was popular, and drew people from all over the state for ranch-raised burgers and a huge selection of flavored malts.

But real success didn’t come until she leaned further into her true vision for the place — fancy dinners.

Now she has a supper club experience every month or so she calls 

, which has been selling out regularly and drawing people from Cheyenne and beyond.

“We all just want the town to have more,” Borchardt said. “We want to kind of collaborate together and make it so when you come to town, there’s more things to do than just grab a milkshake.” 

So Borchardt will be working in tandem with Winger for the next Supper at the Fountain, set for July 17 and 18. 

“She has two seatings, and sometimes people are trickling out the door or waiting on the sidewalk, because that’s a small space,” Borchardt said. “So I said, ‘What if I open and we collaborate and you send people over as they’re waiting for their table?’”

It was the perfect solution to support both businesses in creating an experience that can draw people into Chugwater not just once, but over and over.

“There’s also a rodeo on Saturday,” Borchardt added. “So obviously, I’m going to be open then, too, because there are going to be people, and I just don’t like driving through a town and seeing everything closed or run down.”

Borchardt, in talking with Hopkins about the Tri-County Mercantile and how he’s made that work, learned that he and his partners, Jesse and Arden Miller, had long wanted to do something productive with the Standard Station.

“It’s very expensive to make it a gas station,” Borchardt said. “To really make that a gas station the right way would probably be, I mean, a million dollars.”

The Standard Station has served as event headquarters for the car show held in conjunction with the Chugwater Chili Cook-off each year, playing off its vintage Standard Station vibe.

It’s a tiny space, Borchardt said, but the more she thought about it the more she realized it was perfect.

“I just needed more of an office/showroom space to work out of,” she said. “And, as my daughter is getting older, I’m also the high school volleyball coach, so I’m constantly going into town.”

Moving her towering totes into town made a lot of sense, she decided. It would let her display her items better for photography, as well as create a storefront for the “high season” — her way of describing summer, when tourism foot traffic starts pattering through Wyoming.

Hopkins and his partners agreed that if Borchardt and her husband would fix up the Standard Station, they would pro-rate the rent. Borchardt had to keep the station historic, which was fine for her, considering her business is a vintage Western clothing boutique.

“I made the gas pumps into a garden and kept the aesthetic, the color scheme,” she said. “I had to match the perfect Standard Station red, and things like that.”

She also hand-made her signs, fitting them into an aesthetic she’s seen at other businesses in town, which also have hand-painted signs.

Her opening day was Chugwater Chili Cook-off day — just barely. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Vintage Value"}]

 now. The reason, Borchardt believes, is due to something her father always talked about when she was growing up in a fashion-forward family.

“My dad always taught me quality over quantity,” she said. “You can have a suit hand-stitched in Italy that your grandpa can pass down, even after it’s been dry-cleaned 300 times.”

That’s ultimately a better value than buying a suit needing replacement within a year or two. While the better-made, classic suit will cost more, the cost per wearing is much less than for a cheaply made garment that won’t survive many washings.

“I got made fun of as a kid, because people would joke, ‘Oh, your dad sells silk socks for $100',” Borchardt recalled. “But there’s always someone who will pay for quality, if they understand its value.”

That makes the hand-me-down side of her vintage clothing business particularly special. 

“As a kid, I wanted to just look like everybody else,” she said. “But now I appreciate what he was trying to teach me. You don’t have to buy a lot, but you buy classic staples. You can have a leather jacket for your whole life if you buy the right one.”

Inside her Standard Station store, the classics range from worn-in, pearl-snap shirts and tooled leather belts to fringed jackets and well-made wool suits. All are one-of-a-kind pieces sourced from ranch closets, estate sales, and small-town thrift shops across the region.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Here’s Your Sign"}]

Borchardt’s first day, with the Chugwater Chili Cook-off in town, went well.

People from Wheatland, Cheyenne, Denver, Texas, and other places who had come for the cook-off were finding items they just could not live without. 

The real test, she realized, is now that the cook-off has left town and all the 

“I didn’t open Sunday because it was Father’s Day,” she said. “But Monday morning I said, ‘You know what, I’ve put my hours up and I’ve got to stick to it. So I went in at 11, because right now my hours are saying 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day.”

And something pretty cool happened that has her confident this idea is actually going to work.

“I was sitting there thinking no one from Chugwater Town is going to be my bread and butter,” she said. “They’ll love that I’m here, and they’ll come to visit, but I don’t know if they’re going to be buying stuff they maybe already have or that’s not unique to them.”

But right about then, an 80-year-old local man from Third Street came rolling up on his bicycle and stopped to look around.

“He bought a fringe leather moto jacket and a belt buckle,” Borchardt said. “And he’s like, ‘I had that jacket in the 1980s, and I always wanted another. I don’t have a motorcycle anymore, but I’ve got my bike.”

And now he has a high-quality, 1980s leather jacket that’s channeling all the nostalgia he was seeking. 

“That was my first big local customer,” Borchardt said. 

In that moment, all the pieces felt like they were coming together. She might be a city girl who married a rancher from Chugwater, but she’s finding the way to keep her creative sparks alive and bloom right where she’s been planted.

With her vintage Western boutique in an old Standard Station, she’s part of a new wave of pioneers betting that history and hospitality will keep Chugwater’s main street from going dark. 

And she’s proud to be in the midst of this revival of a tiny American town whose residents refuse to let it dwindle away and die.

Chugwater shop 20260620 122438 6.28.26

<title>Italian-Trained Fashion Stylist Opens Vintage Western Boutique In Chugwater | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A woman who grew up in the high-powered fashion industry in Italy and New York has decided to open a vintage Western boutique out of a former Standard gas station in Chugwater. She’d owned a boutique in Brooklyn so she knows how difficult retail can be.

Italian-Trained Fashion Stylist Opens Vintage Western Boutique In Chugwater

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

In a modern West where history is increasingly paved over or fenced in, Wyoming’s notorious Hole in the Wall outlaw hideout stands out as one of few places that remains just as wild as it was more than a century ago. 

Here, a towering red rock wall rises 400 feet and stretches, seemingly unbroken, for 35 miles. 

There’s an ocean of blue sky above and a sea of green prairiegrass below without another human soul for endless miles. This cliff appears both seamless and impassible — a beautiful, if formidable, sight.

Hidden within that long wall, however, is a single passage where a man can slip past the rock and simply vanish. 

And that is what gave this place its name, the Hole in the Wall. 

It’s not really a hole in the wall, cowboy historian Clay Gibbons tells visitors on his tours of the remote hideout. It’s more like a notch, just wide enough for a single man on horseback to squeeze through. 

Beyond that notch lies a secluded and lush valley just right for grazing stolen cattle and horses, and impossible to see from the outside.

The narrowness of this nearly invisible notch also makes it easy to defend. A lone gunman with plenty of ammunition can hold off a much larger force. 

That helped keep lawmen at bay for decades, creating a haven for outlaws ranging from Harvey Logan — better known as Kid Curry — to Butch Cassidy. 

Though Cassidy didn’t spend as much time here as he did a place further west called 

 where three states meet, giving him three  directions to escape the law.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Finding The 'Hole'"}]

One of the first things Gibbons does on his tours is teach visitors how to find the nearly invisible passage. 

“So there’s that red wall that has no shadows on it,” Gibbons said, pointing toward the red cliffs. “And then there’s this one that has shadows. You see where it comes together? There’s a triangular shadow. 

"And at the top left of that triangle there’s a little white dot.”

It looks insignificant. In reality, it’s a flat, white rock measuring 12 feet by 15 feet. 

“We’re about 3 miles away from the hole right now, so as we get closer, that will get bigger,” Gibbons said. “But first, we’re going to stop at the Hole in the Wall Fight site, where I put up a state historical marker, and I’ll tell you how I found that location. That’s going to be some story.”

Stories are actually what Gibbons’ Hole in the Wall tours are all about. 

They begin the moment his vehicle lurches onto a rugged two-track — less road and more dry riverbed. It’s a ride that jostles the insides in more than one direction at once, even as an untamed and beautiful landscape unfolds.

Gibbons laughs about the roughness of the ride and admits some would question his speed, given the bumpy terrain. But, he adds with a grin, the pace is absolutely necessary. 

Even by vehicle, this trip to the Hole in the Wall will take every bit of an entire day, from sunup to sundown. There’s a lot to see and a lot of history to tell, so the truck careens onward without slowing down.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Growing Up With History"}]

Gibbons comes by his love of history naturally. His dad loved it, too. 

Growing up, the third-generation Worland native went everywhere with his dad, who owned an implement dealership. To help pass the time, Gibbons’ dad would tell him all kinds of interesting historical tales. 

By the time he was 16, Gibbons had heard so much about the Fetterman massacre, for example, he was timing his entire school day by it on its 100th anniversary.

“I didn’t get anything done in school that day,” Gibbons said with a chuckle. “I stared at the clock and I was thinking, ‘OK, right now Fetterman is doing this. Right now Crazy Horse is doing this.’ I mean, I was just mesmerized.”

For Gibbons, though, it’s never been enough to know what happened when. He also wants to know where it happened. Exactly where.

One day as he and his dad were driving south of Ten Sleep over Spring Creek, a 9-year-old Gibbons asked his father where 

“He kind of waved out to the side,” Gibbons recalled. “Somewhere over there.”

That answer didn’t satisfy Gibbons, and sent him on a lifetime historical search that would eventually uncover lost details of that raid and allow him to pinpoint exactly where it happened.

Gibbons applied that same mentality to the 1897 Hole in the Wall Fight. 

At first, the location of the gun battle was a mystery.

Newspapers only mentioned the battle’s location vaguely. Locals, meanwhile, would say it was by the Bob Smith Hill, “somewhere over there.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Those were fighting words to Gibbons. "}]

He started digging into old court papers and documents, trying to find something that could help him pin down an exact location. 

From that effort, he learned that county officials at the time weren’t sure whether the shooting was a Natrona County or a Johnson County crime. They sent a surveyor to the scene to find the county line and determine which county had jurisdiction.

Clay was eventually able to track down the surveyor’s century-old field notes, which mentioned a large pile of rocks marking the site of the shooting. 

Gibbons had noticed an unusual pile of rocks when he had visited before. They weren’t like the rock Indian cairns that mark the 1,500-year-old Sioux War Trail that winds through the Hole in the Wall country. And they weren’t like a grave marker either.

Using Bureau of Land Management maps and the surveyor’s legal descriptions, Gibbons was eventually able to verify that the pile of rocks he’d seen was in the same spot indicated by the surveyor’s notes.

A stone monument now stands at the site of the battle on a windswept knob just above Buffalo Creek. 

The marker retells the story of the battle. 

Stock detective Bob Divine of the CY Cattle Co. had ridden up to the Hole in the Wall with 10 cowboys to look for rustled cattle. They met three members of the local outlaw crowd, brothers-in-law Bob and Al Smith and their partner Bob Taylor.

“There was animosity between Bob Divine and Bob Smith,” Gibbons said. “Divine asked if they’d seen any CY cattle and Smith replied, ‘Not a damn one.’”

Smith, believing that Divine was about to pull his weapon, pulled his own gun first. 

“Shots were fired,” Gibbons said. “Horses were pitching and the dust flew. When the smoke cleared, Bob Smith lay on the ground with a bullet through his back and Divine’s horse had been killed, and he and his son Lee had been wounded.”

Al Smith escaped after his gun was shot from his hand, and Bob Smith was taken to the Hole in the Wall Cabin where he died the next day with his young wife at his side.

“Bob Taylor was captured and taken to the Natrona County jail and later released shortly after that,” Gibbons said. “Divine led a contingent with heavily armed men and two deputies through the Hole and drive several hundred cattle out. 

"They were watched closely by a number of armed men, but were not bothered.”

After the sad tale, Gibbons offers a spread of sandwiches and drinks for lunch, and then there are more stories.

Clay shifts seamlessly from outlaw history to the wider, grittier politics of the West at the time and the Johnson County War, when powerful cattle barons brought 32 hired guns up from Texas at $5 a day plus $50 per scalp. 

The siege of the TA Ranch comes alive as he is talking, as does the doomed defense of small ranchers like Nate Champion, who wrote his last words in his diary as gunmen ringed his cabin and finally set it ablaze.

“The cabin's on fire,” Gibbons quotes Champion. “I’m going to have to make a run for it. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.”

Champion, Gibbons said, took his boots off before charging out into the gunfire. It’s an odd piece of historical detail that has nagged at Gibbons for years. 

“I always wondered why the hell he took his boots off,” Gibbons said. “Because the people who were there, the invaders, had mentioned that he had his boots off, had a rifle in one hand and a revolver in another, and he goes out the back door shouting.”

Champion was met with a barrage of 28 bullets, Gibbons said. 

“They went up to him and they tied a little note to his vest, ‘Cattle thieves beware,’” Gibbons said. “And so that’s where Nate met his end.”

Gibbons spotted an old frontier saying he believes explains Champion’s bootless feet.

“If you died with your boots on it meant you were an outlaw,” Gibbons said. “A good guy dies in bed, right? You don’t wear your boots to bed. So it finally clicked. Nate stripped those boots off as his final statement. 

"He wanted the world to know he wasn’t an outlaw.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Cassidy’s Escape Plan"}]

No Hole in the Wall story can be complete without a Butch Cassidy mention or two. But Clay doesn’t treat Cassidy like a Hollywood myth. Cassidy was a smart, calculating professional.

“He understood one thing, and that’s a fresh horse will outrun a tired horse every day of the week,” Gibbons said. “So when he would pull his jobs, whether it’s a bank job or a train job or whatever, he always knew where he was going after he got the cash. 

"He knew where they were headed, and so what he’d do is take a horse and ride the hell out of him and about 15 miles away … to a fresh horse.”

By planting fresh horses every 15 miles or so along his escape route, Cassidy guaranteed he would stay ahead of law enforcement and ultimately get away. 

The law didn’t know where he was going and had no fresh horses to keep up. 

Fast horses could take Cassidy to a hideout like Hole in the Wall where sheriff’s deputies feared to travel. 

“For hell’s sake, how do they expect us to ever catch these outlaws once they get into the Hole in the Wall?” an exasperated sheriff wrote in a bitter letter to the Pinkertons and the Wyoming governor after the Wilcox Train Robbery. “There’s nobody will talk. Everybody protects them. It’s a den of thieves.”

Locals had their reasons for protecting the outlaws who used the Hole in the Wall.

For one, they paid well for fresh horses. 

In an anecdote Gibbons found, one ranch wife told a visiting writer she could leave a coffee can of coins on her mantle, and if outlaws passed through while the family was away, they’d cook themselves a meal, leave the house tidy and sometimes even add to the can of coins.

“Who is going to turn in the men who treat you better than some of the big outfits do?” Gibbons asked.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Unfolding Mystery"}]

Not all of Gibbons’ stories are settled history. Some are still unfolding. 

Like the one he tells at the remnants of Alex Ghent’s ranch. 

The cabin and barn look like a heap of breaking grey bones, bowing to the inexorable years and slowly sinking into the earth. 

In this place, Ghent once raised fast horses for the Hole in the Wall crowd, including the mounts that helped the Wilcox train robbers disappear into this country.

At some point, a second man named Joseph “Joe” Bowie bought into the ranch. The two bachelors ran cattle together until Bowie went back East, married a schoolteacher and brought her home to this lonely, but spectacular, place.

Cheyenne newspapers of the time gushed over the new Mrs. Bowie. She was so vibrant, charming and beloved by everyone she met, and they wished the couple “the best of luck in their new home in the Hole in the Wall.”

Not long after that, however, there’s a legal notice in the same paper. Mrs. Joseph Bowie is filing for divorce due to abandonment. She hasn’t seen her husband in over a year.

The notice had to run three times in the newspaper before a judge granted the divorce. The very next day after that, Mrs. Bowie became Mrs. Alex Ghent.

Gibbons has always wondered about that. Did Bowie really walk away from his equity in the ranch he’d worked so hard for and the wife he’d married from back East?

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Or had something else happened …"}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Tin Cup Clue"}]

One weekend while Gibbons was camping over the Fourth of July, he decided to do a little poking around with a metal detector. He found a dump near an outhouse with shards of pottery, old medicine bottles, and old tools. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He also found a tin cup in that trench."}]

It was nearly intact, save for one single neat bullet hole punched through the bottom and existing just above the rim.

It was exactly the trajectory one might expect if someone were holding that cup to his lips and taking a drink.

“If you’re this far from town, you don’t use a perfectly good cup for target practice,” Gibbons said. “If you’re going to use it for target practice, you’re gonna shoot the living hell out of it right? Not just one hole and throw it away.”

Gibbons realizes he can’t prove anything based on that. But he’s learned of suggestive anecdotes that make him believe Bowie didn’t abandon his wife at all.

“There was word that Ghent left the ranch one day and he came back and threw his gun on the bed and said, ‘I never want to see that gun again,’” Gibbons said. “And then one of the hired men caught him down at the crick crying.”

What Gibbons wants to do next is a little more digging in the privy area to see if he can find a revolver that matches the bullet in that tin cup.

“If we do, then I think we’ve solved a murder mystery,” Gibbons said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Letting The Past Live"}]

Hole in the Wall 20240612 154811 6 28 26

<title>A Day At Wyoming’s Notorious Hole In The Wall Outlaw Hideout | Cowboy State Daily</title>

In a modern West where history is increasingly paved over, Wyoming’s notorious Hole in the Wall outlaw hideout remains just as wild as it was more than a century ago. Here, a towering red rock wall rises 400 feet and stretches for 35 miles. 

A Day At Wyoming’s Notorious Hole In The Wall Outlaw Hideout

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's managing editor, Greg Johnson.

Greg Johnson

Crime & Courts

Public Safety

Erin Mills was driving from Casper to Riverton on Friday afternoon when she found herself just behind a devastating multivehicle crash involving a semitruck that killed two people.

She stopped, “thinking I was waiting on the pilot car since they were doing construction,” she wrote in response to a Facebook post about the crash by the 

Wyoming Department of Transportation District 5

. “People started turning around (and) I was about 7 cars behind the wreck.”

Mills said that it appeared that “a huge tanker plowed into what I thought was about 6 cars,” she wrote. “I have never seen such a terrible accident. I am praying so hard for all involved and their families.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“I was sick to my stomach all night.”"}]

Krista Nethercott, an owner with Grand Teton Funeral Home in Jackson, responded to Mills saying she was even closer to the crash when it happened.

She wrote that she got out of her vehicle and “helped assess people with another guy who was with the construction crew.”

“I am a funeral director, so I’m used to seeing stuff like this, but it was one of the worst accidents I’ve witnessed in person,” Nethercott wrote. “There was a man who ran up who was a pediatric doctor who helped.”

She described a scene where a number of people sprang into action in the aftermath of the crash.

“It was amazing seeing so many people trying to help in a crisis, and we stayed with the survivors until the ambulances finally arrived,” Nethercott wrote. “It took a very long time because the accident was in the middle of nowhere.”

The Wyoming Highway Patrol or WYDOT hasn't yet reported any other details about the crash other than confirming the two fatalities, "numerous injuries" and that the "crash involved a semitruck and a handful of vehicles."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Highway Closed"}]

“A huge tanker plowed into what I thought was about 6 cars,” is how one witness described the scene of a devastating double-fatal crash Friday on Highway 20/26 in Natrona County. “It was one of the worst accidents I’ve witnessed in person,” said another.

Daily Darwin: Wednesday, November 13, 2024

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