Miracles Happen: How A Lost Girl, 4, Survived Two Nights In The Wilderness

In May 1908, a 4-year-old girl got lost after following a sheepherder out of camp. Nearly 120 years later, a search and rescue expert says it was a miracle she survived two days and nights alone in the Wyoming wilderness.

DK
Dale Killingbeck

January 19, 20256 min read

In May 1908, a 4-year-old girl got lost after following a sheepherder out of camp. Nearly 120 years later, a search and rescue expert says it was a miracle she survived two days and nights alone in the Wyoming wilderness.
In May 1908, a 4-year-old girl got lost after following a sheepherder out of camp. Nearly 120 years later, a search and rescue expert says it was a miracle she survived two days and nights alone in the Wyoming wilderness. (Cowboy State Daily Illustration)

The miracle of a mother finding her lost child 112 years ago in the rugged Cottonwood Peak region of what is now Wyoming’s Hot Springs County is not lost on a modern-day search and rescue expert.

“A Child Is Lost For Two Days, Wanders In the Foothills” reads the headline in the Thermopolis Record on Saturday, May 30, 1908.

The Cheyenne Daily Leader on Sunday, June 7, 1908, added its own spin to the story: “God Takes Care of Lost Little Child, Four-Year-Old Girl Wanders Forty-Eight Hours Through Wolf-Infested District and Is Saved By Mother Instinct.”

For Hot Springs County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Casey Freund, who has performed a search and rescue in the region where the little girl was lost nearly 120 years ago, the girl’s story is noteworthy.

“I’m honestly surprised that she lived,” he said.

According to the Thermopolis Record, the 4-year-old was the daughter of a sheep-camp cook named Mrs. Powers, “who is cooking for one of John Brown’s sheep outfits in the Cottonwood country, some 40 miles northwest of Thermopolis.”

Newspaper accounts seem to show that Brown lived northwest of Thermopolis. A Thermopolis Independent story March 8, 1907, records Brown visiting the city from his “range near Meeteetse.” In Oct. 1908, he was reported to be in town from “Cottonwood” country. In 1917, he reportedly lived on Owl Creek, also northwest of Thermopolis.

During the week of May 18, 1908, Mrs. Powers young unnamed daughter followed a sheep herder out of camp one afternoon and when he discovered her after some distance from the camp, the herder ordered her back.

She lost her way.

Seeking The Lost

“(The herder) gave the matter little thought until he came in at night and found she had not reached the wagon,” the Thermopolis Record reported. “The mother in the meantime thought the child was with the herder. Everybody in the camp at once took up the search and continued it through the night, shouting continually but receiving no answer.”

Freund characterizes the Cottonwood Peak drainage area, where the incident may have occurred, as being a difficult place to locate anyone, including a missing girl. A ranch in that region now runs cattle, but the region does have a history of sheep.

A few years ago, Freund said the county search and rescue team was involved in rescuing a man in September who fell off his horse riding in the Cottonwood Peak area, now part of the Shonone National Forest. They had the coordinates where he was located and with side-by-side vehicles it still took them several hours to reach him.

A helicopter ended up being needed. After the rescue, two members of the search and rescue team ended up having to stay the night and temperatures plummeted. Freund said he can only imagine how tough it was for the little girl.

“So, you are going to have predators out there,” he said. “I don’t know back then if there were wolves in the area, but I am going to assume there were. There’s grizzly bears in that area.”

He said in May, the temperatures would have been dropping significantly at night.

The Thermopolis Record recorded that the morning after she was missing, they found her tracks leading to the mountains. That day and the following night, they continued to search.

  • A photo from the Hot Springs County Museum shows girls in bonnets with a sheep herd at an unknown location.
    A photo from the Hot Springs County Museum shows girls in bonnets with a sheep herd at an unknown location. (Courtesy Hot Springs County Museum)
  • A photo of sheep man Dub McQueen’s flock in the Hot Springs County region.
    A photo of sheep man Dub McQueen’s flock in the Hot Springs County region. (Courtesy Hot Springs County Museum)
  • The sheep camp where the girl and her mother, Mrs. Powers,  the cook, live and worked likely had a sheep wagon similar to this one. This photo from the Wyoming State Archives is of an unknown location.
    The sheep camp where the girl and her mother, Mrs. Powers, the cook, live and worked likely had a sheep wagon similar to this one. This photo from the Wyoming State Archives is of an unknown location. (Courtesy Wyoming State Archives)

Hounds Join Hunt

A local man who had hounds to rid the range of wolves was contacted. He brought them into the search, but his dogs could not pick up the trail.

During the evening heading into the third night the mother “whose grief and anxiety sustained her throughout, saw her baby trudging on, draggled (sic), barefoot, tired, hungry and so lonely.”

“That meeting, good reader, theirs and God’s,” the Thermopolis Record reported. “Signal guns sounding from hill-to-hill told the searchers that the lost was found.”

According to the newspaper, the child told searchers that she had followed a road that she “thought was right” but it led to an abandoned sawmill. She came to a stream and took off her shoes and stockings to wade through and lost “one or both of them.”

The first night, she told rescuers she slept under sage brush and pulled her feet up into her dress and put stones on her dress to keep the wind from blowing in. The second night she slept under a cottonwood tree. She ate grass and became hungrier.

“‘One night,’ she says, ‘Somebody said ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m mama’s little girl, and I want to go to mama,’” the newspaper reported, surmising the questioner was an owl. The girl reported hearing coyotes and wolves but saw no animals.

She was discovered 6 miles from camp and reportedly pointed to buttes, 15 miles distant, and said she had been there. Searchers believed her.

“Once she saw a man on a horseback and called to him, but he rode on,” the newspaper reported. “This man reported that he heard a child cry but could see nothing and concluded that it must be another sound.”

The paper concluded the child went through an experience that no “strong, self-reliant woman would want to face.”

The story of the lost girl was picked up by several newspapers in the state, most just reprinting the Thermopolis Record’s version. However, the Cheyenne Daily Leader and an apparent “special” correspondent took the story to a new level by reporting in its version on June 7 that the mother had initially stayed at the camp during the search and was told the child may have drowned or been “devoured by wolves.”

“Mrs. Powers collapsed at these tidings but later became strangely calm and sat like one in a trance until morning dawned. Then calling the others to her she instructed them to follow and set off at a hard walk for the mountains, five miles distant,” the newspaper reported. “Never deviating from a beeline and seemingly indifferent to the country and those following her, the woman pursued her course up the foothills and to the end of a safe flat, where she broke into a run.

“Ten minutes later, she fell exhausted beside the sleeping missing one.”

Freund said the incident occurred when the Cottonwood region was still part of Fremont County. Any help from the sheriff’s office would have involved having to contact the sheriff in Lander, leading to great delays. And road access to the region now would not have been in place in 1908.

“It’s rough terrain to this day,” he said. “We’ve got to practice in that area every now and then because that’s a walk-in hunting area, and people will get lost and injured back there.”

 

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.

Authors

DK

Dale Killingbeck

Writer

Killingbeck is glad to be back in journalism after working for 18 years in corporate communications with a health system in northern Michigan. He spent the previous 16 years working for newspapers in western Michigan in various roles.