One More For The Road

[{"type":"text","text":"\"I'm going to make you a smoothie....\""}]

One more for 12 3 24

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

<title>One More For The Road: Tuesday, December 3, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

"I'm going to make you a smoothie...."

One More For The Road: Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Wyoming Life

The name of Ephraim Ashburn has not come down through history like that of another Battle of Platte Bridge Station casualty — Lt. Caspar Collins.

Collins has a fort, city, and museum named after him. But now both men have their names honored at Fort Caspar Museum in a commemorative cemetery.

The final resting place of 61 soldiers who gave their lives while serving at Platte Bridge Station, which became Fort Caspar from 1862 to 1867, remain mostly unknown.

But a four-year project by Casper historian Johanna Wickman to determine a complete list of those killed in action or from disease while serving in what is now central Wyoming and providing each a commemorative marble headstone at Fort Caspar is nearing the finish line.

Wickman’s “Lest We Forget” volunteer effort began in July 2022 after being spurred on by the 11 headstones placed on the grounds in 1970 by former museum director Bill Judge. 

Those tombstones recognized 11 fallen soldiers from the 11th Ohio Cavalry as well as Collins, who died in the Battle of Platte Bridge and for whom the military post and later the present-day city was named.

“We kind of think what (Judge) was doing was 11 soldiers from the 11th Ohio as kind of symbolic sort of thing,” Wickman said.

A member of the Fort Caspar Museum Association board in 2022, Wickman said she knew the casualty list exceeded those 11 graves. 

Her research showed that the first headstone installed in 1970 was for David Umphlet, who served in the 11th Ohio Cavalry and died on March 22, 1866. It was installed because his family obtained a headstone from the Veterans Administration and wanted it placed at Fort Caspar.

Wickman found Judge had applications to the VA for more headstones that were never approved.

“It could be he was trying to get more and just stopped at 11,” she said.

Her initial research dug into all the various state and national military units sent to the region while Platte Bridge Station troops operated to protect telegraph lines connecting the coasts as well as settlers heading west on the Oregon, California and Mormon trails. 

In addition to the 11th Ohio Cavalry, Wickman found soldiers representing the 11th Kansas Cavalry, Sixth West Virginia Cavalry, Sixth Michigan Cavalry, Seventh Iowa Cavalry and U.S. Army infantry soldiers from the Sixth and 18th U.S. Infantry all had boots on the ground in the five-year period on which she was focusing.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Headstones"}]

Wickman said she approached former Fort Caspar Museum Director Rick Young about getting more headstones for the other soldiers. He gave her the green light to raise funds for the headstones.

“I thought I was looking at maybe another 15 or 20 headstones,” she said.

Instead, four years and thousands of hours later she has the total number needed at 61, 50 more than the original 11 set in place by Judge. When Wickman started the project there was no casualty list for those who served in the region during that era.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"She has now created one."}]

Among them was Ashburn, a member of the Sixth West Virginia Cavalry and who as a Union soldier was captured April 8, 1964, in Winchester, Virginia, and sent to the infamous Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia. Records show Ashburn was released in a prisoner swap in December 1864.

In a letter home written on July 1, 1865, as his unit arrived in Leavenworth, Kansas, he spoke of a riverboat trip where the ship got caught on a snag and horses were tossed off. He also mentioned a train accident that killed four or five soldiers and wounded others.

“We will not stay here long, we are going out on the plans to fight the Indians this side of California,” he wrote.

Most Civil War enlistments were for three years or for the duration of the war, Wickman said. But men like Ashburn, though the war ended, still found themselves subject to the whims of the government and subject to court martial, losing a pension or worse if they tried to go home.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Scurvy Death"}]

“Why did Ephraim Ashburn die out here in December 1865?" Wickman said. “(He) should have been home … it became a situation where the government was like, ‘Well, we still need you,’ so (they’re) out here and they really didn’t have a choice about it.”

Instead of dying in battle, Ashburn, like many in the severe winter of 1865 when 66 developed scurvy, and died of the disease. Scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C in the diet and typically leads to gum disease and death from bleeding or infection.

“There were a lot of guys who were sick with scurvy, struggling to get supplied and that kind of thing,” she said.

Another name on a headstone is Sebastian Nehring, who was in the 11th Kansas Cavalry and died on July 26, 1865, at the Battle of Platte Bridge Station with Caspar Collins and others.

Wickman said Nehring was a German immigrant and in his 40s, much older than most troops. He had served in the Prussian Army and after immigrating to Kansas and struggling to provide for his family on a farm, so he joined the army.

“When Caspar Collins gave the order to retreat and they are calling ‘retreat’ from the bridge for the guys to come back … he didn’t hear it,” Wickman said. “I think because his primary language is German, it didn’t register. And so one of his dear friends, Henry Grimm, who is also 11th Kansas and also from Germany, hollered at him in German and when Henry did that he was hit in the back with three arrows.”

Somehow Grimm survived the arrows. But Grimm family members told Wickman  the story he passed down was that his friend Nehring was hung up trying to do something with his horse and because of that delay was killed.

Wickman said her research showed some of the fatalities involved former Confederate soldiers who were in prison camps in the north and given the opportunity to swear an oath of allegiance and join a U.S. Army unit being sent to the West.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Confederate Soldiers"}]

She also found a couple of former Confederate soldiers who died in the region but who gave fake names, enlisted in the U.S. Army infantry and once on site started planning mutinies.

“They were actually executed,” she said. “So those guys did not get a headstone.”

Most of the 50 additional headstones have been installed this summer by Casper Monument. The remaining will go in soon. Funds have been raised through a couple of foundations as well as individual donations at the museum.

Wickman said a ceremony is planned for June 19, 2027, to honor all 61 men and will include a full military honors service and folded flag presentations for any descendants at the ceremony.

In May, the museum association received a grant from the Natrona County Recreation Joint Powers Board to fund outdoor color signs that will be placed on the museum ground. They will provide visitor information on the various units that served the Platte Bridge Station and beyond.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Book Planned"}]

The grant is also providing funds for a book Wickman is writing that will provide a short biography on all of the soldiers on the headstones. She hopes to connect with other descendants to learn more about their story before the ceremony next year and include the information in the book.

Wickman said her efforts to uncover the names involved searches through regimental records to find out where the soldiers were, who died at what location, when they died and any other additional information.

Inconsistency with how soldiers' names were spelled and conflicting death dates meant digging deeper to uncover the truth. Names on the headstones will reflect the spelling the men had on regimental records.

The fact that many of the soldiers were immigrants made the research more difficult because they might have joined the military shortly after arriving on American shores without any family ties or previous home address or location.

Among the soldiers who are getting headstones is one who died in the Red Buttes fight July 26, 1965, the same day as the Battle of Platte Bridge.

Wickman said when commemorative headstones were placed on state land outside of Casper for those involved in the Red Buttes battle in 1920, Edwin Summers was left out. He will get a headstone at the fort.

The Red Buttes cemetery is not accessible to the public and is on state land, Wickman said. 

“They didn’t want to put the headstones where the battle happened, and so they deliberately put it out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “Which is unfortunate because it is still in the middle of nowhere.”

A list of the casualty list can be found at the Fort Casper Museum Association's website 

The headstone project also involves a walkway to the commemorative cemetery. Bricks are available to purchase and help cover costs of that project.

Wickman said her reward for the project has been making connections with a few of the soldiers’ descendants and witnessing their appreciation for the headstones and effort to remember those who served the region.

“If we don’t honor these guys from the Civil War era, what does that mean for our World War II vets 75 years from now or our Global War on Terror vets 150 years from now?” Wickman said. “Will they get neglected, or will people say the same thing? I think it’s reassuring for them, too.”

Cemetery Nehring 8 15 26

<title>Never Forgotten: Names Of 50 More Men Put On Fort Caspar Headstone | Cowboy State Daily</title>

About 160 years after they died serving at Platte Bridge Station and Fort Caspar, 50 more names have been added to a commemorative headstone at the historic fort. When the “Lest We Forget” project began, there was no casualty list. Now there is.

Never Forgotten: Names Of 50 More Men Put On Fort Caspar Headstone

Jake nichols 720

Jake Nichols

Around Wyoming

Harvard University once claimed to possess up to three books in its libraries that were bound in human skin.

Thanks to relatively new technology, two of the works in question have been debunked, but not without leaving one proven authentic and opening a rabbit hole filled with questions.

[{"type":"text","text":"First, books bound in the largest organ of humans are a thing. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"In fact, the practice was once more popular than one might think. "}]

Second, in response to binding books in human skin, Wyoming history says, “Hold my beer.”

The Cowboy State has an ashtray, a medicine bag and a pair of shoes all made from the remains of a notorious outlaw who met his demise at the end of a rope.

[{"type":"text","text":"Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover"}]

Two decades ago, the internet was abuzz with hoax-or-real tales of literary works bound in human skin, particularly a few tomes reportedly owned by an Ivy League school.

It started in 2006 after an article appeared in the university publication “The Harvard Crimson.” 

Written by Samuel Jacobs, who was named editor-in-chief of Time Magazine three years ago, “The Skinny on Harvard’s Rare Book Collection” zeroed in on three unique books in the university’s 15 million-volume collection purportedly bound in human flesh.

Jacobs fleshes out the texts, ranging in content from medieval law to Roman poetry to French philosophy. A lawbook, for one, has been discredited in its claim to be skin-wrapped. It’s bound in flesh, but not human.

“Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae” is a Spanish lawbook containing material dating back to 1605. It was bought for $42.50 from a New Orleans book dealer in 1946 and shelved in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard, according to the library’s curator, David Ferris.

Nothing about the book’s cover seems out of the ordinary, though it appears to have a hue suggestive of skin tone. It’s what is handwritten in purple ink on the book’s last page that sets one’s skin to crawling.

“[T]he bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632.”

DNA tests performed in 1992 proved inconclusive. The tanning process was partially to blame, but truthfully, technology just wasn’t up to the task until more recent scientific advancements in what is known as peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) made positive identification possible.

In-house testing performed by Harvard using the analytical technique for protein identification PMF proved conclusively that Wright’s remains do not bind the 400-year-old book, nor do any human’s. The cover is sheepskin.

Another book in question — a 1597 French translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses housed in the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine — also was proven to be sheepskin even though a small penciled annotation appearing on the inside cover reads: “Bound in human skin.”

[{"type":"text","text":"The Hide That Binds"}]

The myth busting leaves Harvard with one final volume touted as epically epidermically bound.

“Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinées de L’ame” is part of Harvard’s massive Houghton Library collection. The meditation on the soul and afterlife was gifted by the author to a friend, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, sometime in the mid-1880s.

Bouland, a noted medical doctor and prominent bibliophile, bound the book with the skin from an unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke. A note was found inserted in the book after it was donated to the university in 1954 by the widow of John B. Stetson Jr. (yes, that Stetson, son of John Sr., founder of the famed cowboy hat company).

The two-page note is handwritten in French by Dr. Bouland. It reads, in part:

“This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman.”

The same testing conducted in early 2014 that disproved Harvard’s two anthropodermic-bound books was able to confirm the binding of “Des Destinées de L’am” as most likely that of a human.

Other written works confirmed bound in human skin can be found at the John Hay Library at Brown University (four volumes) and the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (five books, including three of which came from the skin of the same woman).

Perhaps the most famous example of anthropodermic bibliopegy is a book gathering dust on a shelf at the Boston Athenaeum.

The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen Alias George Walton

,” is a memoir of Walton’s. He narrated the autobiographical story to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison while on his deathbed in 1837.

He insisted the book be bound in his own skin and given to a man, John A. Fenno Jr., who fiercely resisted Walton’s attempt to rob him. Fenno’s daughter reportedly gifted the work to Boston Athenaeum, but the library/museum has no written proof of that. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Literarily Interred"}]

OK, books bound in human skin sounds revolting. But the practice was once somewhat accepted, if not common.

Termed anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin dates back to at least the 16th century, according to a study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 2014.

In the mid-1800s, anthropodermic binding was at its height. Historians cite several reasons for the macabre practice.

Confessions of criminals were sometimes bound in the skin of the convicted by court order. Doctors and scientists also helped popularize the gruesome fashion, sometimes binding medical journals and texts in epidermic. Family members were also sometimes literarily interred as a memorialization.

Since PMF made testing more accurate, dozens of suspected books have been analyzed. A team of scientists (Anthropodermic Book Project) comprised of anthropologists, bioanalytical chemists and the like, have tested more than 50 volumes to date, of which 18 were confirmed as human, 13 not human and 31 as yet undetermined.

One rare book considered by those in the antiquarian book trade to be the “Holy Grail” of skin-covered tomes tested false for human skin.

Notre Dame University’s Hesburgh Library alleged to possess an anthropodermic bibliopegy — a 1504 philosophy book once thought to be owned by Christopher Columbus and bound in the skin of a Moorish chieftain. It turned out to be pigskin.

[{"type":"text","text":"Outlaw Becomes A Pair of Shoes"}]

Well before it officially became a state, the rugged Wyoming Territory was a haven for highwaymen, cattle rustlers and cold-blooded killers.

George “Big Nose” Parrott was one such desperado, and he met a gruesome end. His hanging was only the beginning of his punishment.

Parrott was evil personified, what literary types refer to as the antagonist.

In Wyoming, outlaws like Parrott were simply known as “bad guys” and they were strung up quick as God-fearin’ men could find rope and reason.

Parrott was born in Montbéliard, France, in 1834. He arrived in Wyoming Territory in the late 1870s and immediately began robbing stagecoaches with his gang. Eventually, Parrott eyed larger scores — trains — and with bigger reward came bigger risk.

Parrott ended up killing a Union Pacific detective and a local lawman in a robbery gone wrong near Como Lake, midway between Medicine Bow and Hanna, Wyoming. Wanted posters went up everywhere and his capture was inevitable.

One by one his gang members were picked off as a $1,000 reward for Parrott was doubled when he robbed a wealthy Montana merchant, Morris Cahn, in July 1880.

[{"type":"text","text":"By August, Parrott was arrested in Montana."}]

Sheriff Robert Rankin feared angry Wyomingites would be waiting with a necktie party back in Carbon County and, sure enough, despite precautions, a masked posse of about 20 men grabbed Big Nose and drug him to the first telegraph pole they could find.

Up Parrot went by his neck, kicking and struggling. The mob urged the bandit to confess to the killings, promising they would cut him down if he did. Parrott spilled his guts and, true to their word, the angry mob turned him back over to Sheriff Rankin.

Parrott was convicted after a two-day trial and faced hanging. But Big Nose had been plotting his escape and did so, briefly, after jumping the sheriff and his wife Rosa one evening.

He didn’t get far. Townspeople in Rawlins anticipated such a break and surrounded him. This time they weren’t sparing the rope.

Parrott was hung then and there in downtown Rawlins on March 22, 1881, in front of some 200 people who gathered to watch the outlaw swing.

[{"type":"text","text":"Big Nose Is Parted Out"}]

Dr. John E. Osborne conducted the autopsy along with Dr. Thomas Maghee. They made a plaster of Paris cast of Parrott’s face, cut a large swath of skin from his chest and removed the dead man’s skull cap to examine the brain.

Dr. Maghee gave the skull cap to his 15-year-old assistant, Lillian Heath, who incidentally would go on to become Wyoming’s first female physician. For decades, she used the skull piece as an ashtray, a doorstop and flowerpot.

Dr. Osborne, meanwhile, sent Parrott’s skin to a tannery in Denver with instructions to fashion him a pair of shoes with the dead man’s nipples on each to prove they were footwear made from a human being. He also wanted a doctor’s bag if there was any of George’s skin leftover.

When Osborne received the shoes, he reportedly was miffed that the nipples were not included in the taxidermy. Still, rumor has it, Osborne wore the shoes to his inauguration ball when he was elected governor of the Wyoming in 1893.

For a time, the shoes, the death mask, a wanted poster and the skull cap were on display at the Rawlins Bank. They are now in the permanent collection of the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins.

[{"type":"text","text":"The medicine bag made from Big Nose George’s skin has never been found."}]

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<title>Yes, Skin From Wyoming Wild West Outlaw "Big Nose George" Was Used To Make Shoes | Cowboy State Daily</title>

This is the macabre story of a once-common practice of binding books with human skin — and how Wyoming did that one better by skinning notorious Wild West outlaw "Big Nose George" and making him into a pair of shoes. His skull was made into an ashtray.

Yes, Skin From Wyoming Wild West Outlaw "Big Nose George" Was Used To Make Shoes

Welsch mug

Jeff Welsch

Sports

Their Links of Dreams unfolded in every way they imagined: The long drive past cornfields on a lonely dirt road, a massive American flag and windsock fluttering over a clubhouse perched atop a knoll on the endless undulating terrain of northeast Nebraska, and the first religious glimpse of the No. 1 tee, fairways and greens unlike any others.

For Sheridan’s Josh Gardner and Jared Stiver, a moment coveted by golfers worldwide — but rarely experienced — was, at long last, at hand.

To secure a tee time at the Landmand Golf Club outside of Homer, Nebraska, 

Some 11,000 slots are made available each New Year’s Eve for the novel 4-year-old course; they’re gone in less than an hour.

Now here Gardner and Stiver were the first week of August, two regular guys from Wyoming, somehow entered to play Landmand in the inaugural The Heartbeat tournament, a Golf Channel creation, after Gardner took a Plan B New Year's Eve stab on the course's website. 

Soon they would be pitted against pairs from all 50 states over four days, a fortuitous practice round and three days of competition.

“Everything about it was cool,” Stiver told Cowboy State Daily less than a week after their return home. “You’re on top of a hill from start to finish, and you see forever and it’s all golf around you, and it’s all awesome.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Then the golf happens."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Course Unlike Any Other"}]

Gardner and Stiver have played courses of all shapes and sizes, in all types of environments, foreign and domestic.

[{"type":"text","text":"Nothing could prepare them for Landmand."}]

“We got there and I was just excited to be there,” Gardner recalled with a chuckle. “It didn’t really matter what was in front of us. Like, this is awesome. But by the time we got to the fourth or fifth green, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this four days in a row.’

“I wasn’t prepared for how massive it all was. The scale is hard to describe.”

Landmand was carved out of the treeless Loess Hills, and at nearly 600 acres is roughly four times the size of typical 18-hole courses. Fairways are the width of football fields. Gaping bunkers swallow golfers whole.

[{"type":"text","text":"Only the tee boxes offer any semblance of flatness."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"And then ... those greens."}]

On average, they sprawl to more than double the size of typical American greens. Some are four to six times larger. At three-quarters of an acre, the 17th green ranks as one of the world’s largest, in the same league as the revered Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland.

[{"type":"text","text":"Gradients rose to 25%."}]

“You could put seven Powder Horn greens in one there,” Stiver said of their home course in Sheridan. “Monster greens.”

Echoed Gardner: “Greens the size of Walmart. If that golf course was here (Sheridan) I’d take my kids sledding on it and they’d need a helmet. They’d be like the blue runs on a ski hill. In some spots where they placed the flag you couldn’t even see it.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Howling Wyoming-esque Winds"}]

The greens sport windsocks instead of flags, a nod to visibility and a notorious local climate. 

Winds can be so ferocious and unpredictable the course has two handicaps dedicated to them on the scorecard, one for gales howling from the southwest and the other for the nor’easters.

[{"type":"text","text":"Gardner and Stiver got a gritty taste of both."}]

“You’d think Wyoming boys would be good in a wind, but us Sheridan boys … not so good,” Gardner mused.

Agreed Stiver: “Guys from Evanston and Rock Springs, and the Casper Country Club boys, would be a better fit.”

It’s this enormity of challenge, the scale of the course, and its vistas — not to mention the modest $175 greens fees — that has golfers nationwide poised like expectant parents with their fingers hovering over their keyboards every New Year’s Eve.

[{"type":"text","text":"Then reality bites for those lucky enough to score a round."}]

But, unlike all other golfers except the locals who have the luxury of pouncing last-minute on a rare cancellation, Gardner and Stiver had four full days in the belly of this manicured beast.

Entering the final round, they were in 32nd place out of 52 teams. Five birdies and 18 holes later, they walked off their final monster green in 19th.

“The final round, I did feel better about it,” Stiver said. “I kind of knew how I could go and knock it out. By then I still didn’t know exactly where to go on the greens, but it definitely helped.”

[{"type":"text","text":"“Being in the top 20 was respectable for sure,\" added Gardner."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Giving A Wyoming-Style Gift"}]

The golf was the centerpiece of the adventure, but the experience didn’t end there.

Owner Will Andersen, Golf Channel host Gary Williams and the course’s architects were on hand to explain the Landmand concept and history. Their passion and detail gave Gardner and Stiver an entirely different perspective as they plied the course on days three and four.

Stiver also was struck by Andersen’s graciousness, and that he’d remember his name each time they’d bump into each other amid the throngs of golfers, staffers, media and spectators.

Small wonder: The duo made an impression when they presented Andersen with a spur with hearts cut into it made by renowned Sheridan craftsman Tom Balding. They also gave Andersen a copper shot glass from their hometown Mint Bar.

“Fifty thousand people have played golf here and nobody’s brought me anything,” Stiver recalls a touched Andersen telling them.

[{"type":"text","text":"“We just wanted to take a piece of Wyoming,” Gardner explained."}]

When it was over and they’d walked off the Walmart parking lot that was their 18th green for the final time, filmed by The Golf Channel shaking hands with their partners for the round, Gardner and Stiver said they both felt a palpable sense of relief.

[{"type":"text","text":"Their immediate reaction: Never again."}]

A week later, they are still nursing the bruises to their golf egos from what Gardner says is the toughest course he’s ever played. But they’re also certain their links version of PTSD will subside.

“There will be a day,” Stiver said with a chuckle, “when we’re ready to get hurt again.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Gardner agreed."}]

“The event itself was exceptional,” he said of a tournament where their $7,000 team entry fee covered everything from meals and drinks to their 10 daily range balls. “It was better than what I expected. Then to spend 10 hours each way with a buddy and a truck and no distractions and just hang out — it was just a great week.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Golf Envy Back Home"}]

They’re enjoying their few minutes of golf-envy fame back home, too, though a torn rotator cuff suffered at the Powder Horn member-guest event has sidelined Gardner from the duo’s mission of playing every Wyoming course over the next few summers.

[{"type":"text","text":"Landmand Is all anybody in their Sheridan circles wants to talk about."}]

Do they have advice should any of their golfing buddies somehow win the lottery on New Year’s Eve and land a tee time on this Links of Dreams in the Loess Hills?

“Just experience it,” Gardner said with a laugh, “because you’re not going to walk away going ‘I’m a really good golfer.’”

Contact Jeff Welsch at jeff@cowboystatedaily.com

Landmand Landman landscape inset 8 15 26

<title>Sheridan Golfers Finally Get To Play Toughest Place To Book A Tee Time In The U.S. | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Two golfers from Sheridan won the lottery on New Year's Eve when they were selected to play at the toughest place to book a tee time in the U.S. All 11,000 tee times were booked in one hour and they played last week. "It's all awesome," Jared Stiver said.

Sheridan Golfers Finally Get To Play Toughest Place To Book A Tee Time In The U.S.

Jen Kocher - Headshot CSD

Jen Kocher

For the Haux sisters, the enduring mystery of their father’s fate still crystallizes around one stark image: His truck, abandoned in the Red Desert, an image taken from a newspaper article.

Clifford “Russ” Haux of Mills vanished on Nov. 26, 2003, near Wamsutter in south-central Wyoming where he worked as an oil-rig driller. The 42-year-old husband and father of three had gone out with a co-worker to free a stuck vehicle and never returned.

The last image of him is his fading headlights as he drove off into a winter night trying to find a place to cross a ditch.

One minute he was there, the next, he was gone — last seen driving his pickup into a ditch, looking for a place to cross.

For two years, extensive searches turned up nothing. Then a hunter found his purple Ford Ranger less than six miles from where he was last seen. Its front tires were stuck in a washed-out riverbed, with evidence suggesting he’d tried to free them.

His children – Lois, Justy and Chancy – grew up on memories and secondhand stories, left to wonder what had happened to their father.

The story doesn’t add up based on their recollections of their dad: A guy they describe as a “driller through and through” and seasoned “mountain man” who was also a skilled outdoorsman.

“I don’t know what happened out there or the trauma he had to go through,” Justy told Cowboy State Daily. “Anything could have happened.”

The Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office likewise can’t speculate about what might have happened to Haux after he left the vehicle. But there’s no evidence to date to suggest Haux was a victim, said Jason Mower, public information officer with the department.

“Based on the evidence available, including what was found when Haux’s vehicle was later located, the disappearance has been considered accidental rather than the result of foul play,” Mower wrote in an email to Cowboy State Daily.

Nearly 23 years after Clifford “Russ” Haux vanished in the Red Desert near Wamsutter, his daughters are still haunted. The 42-year-old husband and father of three had gone out with a co-worker to free a stuck vehicle and never returned.

One More For The Road: Tuesday, December 3, 2024

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