SAVERY — Snow still tops Baker Mountain looking down on Little Snake River Museum in this hamlet near the Wyoming-Colorado border east of Baggs, Wyoming.
The air is still crisp, like children’s laughter, but the steely sky threatens a mix of rain and hail to come.
That didn’t deter any actual laughter from the 100 or so kids gathered at the museum Thursday to dig — sometimes literally — into their pioneer roots by repopulating a frontier town of old.
Many of those students came dressed for the part, whether it was pioneer dresses, cowboy garb or Native American regalia.
Pioneer Day has been happening far longer than Lela Emmons has been the museum director, but Emmons has made the event her own.
Her vision is an interactive adventure where the kids get their hands dirty and take-home treasures from the day. It now attracts students from as far away as Wamsutter in Wyoming and Clark in Colorado.
No two Pioneer Days are the same. Some years, the children pan for gold, other years, they do more mundane tasks, like rake the garden.
This year, they tried their hand at blacksmithing, branding flat pieces of wood and watching how a portable forge works.
They also helped build birdhouses that will be used at the museum and learned to make pancakes before then helping serve the pancakes to fellow students just as they might if at an old-time restaurant.
Joe Jessica serves sarsaparilla and water to children during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Sage Connor lathers up her little sister, Grace Connor's face during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Students try their hand at printing newspaper advertisements during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
A number of newspaper advertisements on metal plates were available for students to try out during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Info A student addresses an envelope to herself during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. The letter will be mailed to her later as a memento of Pioneer Day. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Abbigail Elizabeth Dauwen with her teacher Tabitha Tomeo address an envelope during Pioneer Day at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Lela Emmons talks to students about how pioneer towns printed newspapers during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily)
9 Pennies A Day
Each student was paid a wage of nine pennies for their work that day, money they could use to later shop in the museum’s stores.
Shopping in the stores is the one activity that happens every year, Emmons said. That’s in part because it’s such a popular part of the whole experience.
The children line up with glee for their chance to buy candy or toys like balsa wood airplanes or modeling clay for mere pennies at the Harris Mercantile — a novelty in today’s world.
They also quickly figure out that they won’t have enough pennies for everything. They have to save their pennies if they want to try a refreshing sip of the sarsaparilla at John Irons’ Dixon Saloon, where Seamus the Magician was performing a magic card trick.
Their shopping adventures also included a shaving demonstration at Fred Johnson’s Barber Shop, where the kids slathered each other up with shaving cream, then used a tongue depressor as a mock razor to “shave” the cream away.
“Johnson was an undertaker and a barber,” Emmons told Cowboy State Daily. “And that’s why it says on the building, a complete and understanding mortuary. Because he did both.”
It was common in pioneer towns for barbers to do this kind of double duty. They could fix teeth, set bones, stitch cuts.
Some even provided higher level medical care, such as bleeding someone with leeches, which was at that time thought to remove toxins from the body.
Many barbershops today still sport the red and white poles that then indicated a shop provided some emergency care, facts which are explained in a little booklet Emmons printed for each child with lots of historical tidbits about the Little Snake River Valley and its pioneers of old.
Perfect Venue For A Pioneer Town
While the activities may be different every year, one thing remains the same. That’s the museum itself, which is the perfect venue for students to experience being pioneers for a day.
The museum includes a collection of more than 15 historical buildings, arranged around the outer perimeter of the museum grounds, as if part of a village of old.
Each of the historical buildings has a story to tell, one that’s tied to the history of the Little Snake River Valley. That makes it a rich venue for recreating the times of old, and a venue that can change every year to highlight something new.
There’s the Stonewall Cabin, for example, built in 1871 by Bill Slater and Bibleback Brown. It’s now sitting at the museum just 2 miles from its former home.
The cabin is an important piece of Valley history. It was given to the Reader family, who was down on their luck at the time — counting out their last change with a couple of children in tow.
The cabin turned the whole family’s fortunes around. Noah and Rossanna Reader decided to stay in the Valley, becoming one of its biggest ranching families.
Rossanna was a trained herbalist and healer, befriending many American Indians living in the valley at the time. She’s also on the historical record as the first white woman to call the Valley home.
Mountain man Jim Baker’s cabin is also here. Baker was one of the last mountain men of the Rocky Mountain West.
He’s sometimes called the forgotten man. No movies have been made about him, but his life was every bit as legendary as the other mountain men of his day, like Hugh Glass, immortalized in the movie, “The Revenant,” for surviving an encounter with a bear.
Baker, too, survived a bear encounter. More than one in fact. And he also beat impossible, Thermopylae-like odds at Battle Mountain, defeating hundreds of Native Americans with a dozen or so scouts.
The location of Jim Baker’s cabin at the Little Snake River Museum is just a mile from the homestead’s original location.
Students run across the grounds at Little Snake River Valley Museum during Pioneer Day. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Seamus the Magician demonstrates a card trick to Sage and Grace Connor while another student looks on during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The Barber Shop, John Iron's Dixon Salloon and the Harris Mercantile are replicas of historical buildings from the Little Snake River Valley and are part of the area's museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Students took turns "shining" each others shoes during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Children line up to buy sarsaparilla during during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. Water was also available for free. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The children were all paid pennies for their "work" as pioneers during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Wade Golden fires up a portable forge so the students can try their hand at branding a block of wood during Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Hazel Reardon pounds a nail on a birdhouse Pioneer Day at at Little Snake River Valley Museum, while Rodney Croyle holds the box steady for her. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily)
Becoming A Newspaper Publisher
With so many historical buildings like this at the museum in Savery, it’s easy to see why the venue’s Pioneer Day has become such a draw for schools, even beyond Carbon County.
Wamsutter, for example, is in Sweetwater County, while Clark is in Colorado, and both of these towns are more than an hour from the museum.
“Some of the kids who come to this are almost on the bus longer than they’re here,” Emmons said. “But they have a lot of fun. And we try not to repeat things more than every three or four years, so that they’re not just doing the same thing over and over.”
Emmons has enough material by now she could make her event “turnkey” from year to year, but somehow, she just can’t bring herself to do that.
The thing is, she wants history to become a living thing for the students. To not just be the stuff of dry and dusty textbooks or museums where artifacts gather literal dust because no one is allowed to touch them.
So she has created interactive exhibits at the museum, including an entire cabin where children are encouraged to play pioneer when they visit. They can dress up in the clothing of old and play in a pioneer house that’s outfitted with artifacts of the time.
Given that, it is no surprise that Emmons refuses to make this event cookie cutter from one year to the next.
“I have so much fun planning this that I always end up doing something new,” she said. “It’s just more fun to sort of mix it up. Like the restaurant was a new idea this year, and I think that was a lot of fun for them.”
The Last Pioneer Lesson — Rain And Hail
So, too, was the printing press activity, which Emmons led herself. She started by asking the children a fun question: How in the world did they print newspapers in a world with no computers?
She gestured at a wall with yellowed newspapers full of tiny type on display, pointing out that there are hundreds upon hundreds of words on each of the pages.
When she showed them how those pages were printed, with little metal letters that were hand-set backwards, one by one by one, eyes started growing wider and rounder.
Now that she had their attention, Emmons asked, “Do you think you could do that with all of those letters and not make any mistakes?”
Most of the children were immediately shaking their heads no way.
With that little bit of history in set in their minds, Emmons showed the children how to use an old-fashioned press to create a few newspaper ads, and each child got to try their hand at it.
Their creations were all placed into individual envelopes that each child decorated and embossed with other stamps, before addressing it to themselves.
Emmons plans to mail all of the envelopes as both souvenir and reminder of each student’s time as budding pioneers in a Wyoming town of old.
After every child had tried their hand at all the different pioneer jobs, the children gathered under a steely sky, threatening to rain and hail for one last event — a pioneer game of old called tug of war.
But there was time for only one game.
The grey clouds split open, spitting down rain and hail on the world below. Children ran as fast as they could for buses, laughter peeling out under a swiftly darkening sky, no doubt looking like scurrying ants to any angels that were watching in the heavens above.
It was one last lesson about being a pioneer, one that Emmons couldn’t have planned if she’d tried.
But it was nonetheless a perfect ending for Pioneer Day at Little Snake River Museum, where pioneer spirit is not only celebrated each and every day, but kept alive for new generations.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
