Wendy Corr:
Well, hey there, folks. Welcome to The Roundup. We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast, and our focus is on interesting people in the cowboy state. Today's guest on the Roundup, I am so - we've just been sitting here chatting, and I'm just getting more and more excited about our conversation because our guest knows more about Wyoming history, even though she wasn't born here in Wyoming, than probably most of us who were raised in this state know.
And so I'm very excited to introduce you all to Shannon, but first, I want to make sure that you all know about another really great podcast. It's called the business from the basement podcast, and it's from the Wyoming Business Alliance. And so anybody who's interested in or is a Wyoming business person, this is a fantastic resource filled with just great guests and great interviews and great information. For anybody who's a business person and wants to, wants to enhance their business and their connections here in the cowboy state.
So check them out, but don't go yet, because first we have all this really great fun conversation just waiting to happen with Shannon Smith. I love Shannon's, “Smithstorian,” is Shannon's webpage, and I just think that that's fantastic, and it truly fits who she is, but she's so much more than a historian. So we're going to get started.
Hello, Shannon Smith, so glad to meet you and to be able to share your stories, your Smith stories, with the rest of the group.
Shannon Smith:
Oh, I might have to take that.
Wendy Corr:
Go for it. You can have that
Shannon Smith:
Thanks for having me. Yes, and thanks for my new product, my marketing product, right?
Wendy Corr:
Your Smith stories, Shannon, you have been, you've devoted your life to telling stories, to educating, but your background is so interesting, you did not come to history and to Wyoming history and Wyoming humanities until later. You started off your life in a whole different way.
You're actually coming to us from Gordon, Nebraska. If anybody knows Gordon, Nebraska, you know that's kind of the middle of nowhere.
Shannon Smith:
No metropolitan area, major metropolitan area.
Wendy Corr:
But you know, I graduated college from just down the road. I got my degree from Chadron State. So know right where you are, Shannon. Tell us about your journey to history. That sounds so strange, but your journey to history really started there in Gordon, Nebraska, and then brought you to Wyoming. Tell us about that.
Shannon Smith:
Yeah. Well, long, long time ago, I grew up in Gordon, and I was in junior high and high school during the American Indian Movement uprising at Wounded Knee. And we're about 18 miles south of Wounded Knee, and my dad was the county attorney and prosecuted the case that really kind of triggered that whole event.
And so I kind of grew up in this atmosphere of just knowing a lot about history happening directly in in, in my backyard. But I never thought then, I mean, I was one of those, you know, graduate in 1976 and get the heck out of dodge. So, I mean, the skid marks were real when I left and I headed to, I went to Kearney State College in Nebraska, and graduated from there.
But I studied computer science back in the days when you wrote, you know, programs using key, key cards, key punch cards, back in those days. But I graduated from Kearney State and was hired by a company called Electronic Data Systems and went to New York City. So that was a big change and a big deal in the 1980s.
So I did that, and for 20 years, I was in the software world, right as it was moving into all online, and I worked on the first ATMs that existed. Because, you know, when I moved to New York, we all went to a bank to a teller and stood in line and got our money and did our deposits and all of that. And so my organization I worked for, worked on one of the first online systems where you could actually go to a machine and see what your balance was, because otherwise you were, you know, going to a teller and finding out what your balance was.
So I did that for years, lived in New York and then Boston, and then moved to Denver, but I decided, after about almost 20 years in software, that there was, I didn't want to have my gravestone say she sold a lot of software and so I decided I would try to go back to get a graduate degree, and I applied to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and was accepted into their history program.
And the timing was just so beneficial for me. There were some amazing professors who looked at this odd business girl that had no experience in writing, oh my gosh. When I look at some of the first essays I wrote, I just cringe now, but I was just there at the right time.
And this leads me to Wyoming, because one of my classes was with Dr Gary Moulton, who wrote, he devoted his whole professional life to re editing the journals of Lewis and Clark. And so I took a class with him, and he wanted to teach us how to find something and then deeply edit it, research and edit it.
So I went into the Nebraska State Historical Society, and I found this letter from a woman named Francis Tennike. And she was trying to get somebody, anybody, please, dear God, help me save the reputation of my father, who had been in the Fetterman and Fort Phil Kearny during the Fetterman fight, and he was the captain who was sent out to find Fetterman and relieve him.
And the very first history book ever published about Wyoming came out in about 1904 and by C G Coutant, and he said in his book that Fetterman didn't need to die. It was because the captain who was sent out to relieve him was a drunk and did not have any experience, and so he blamed it all on her father, who had just died.
And she was trying to get some historians to say, hey, this isn't true. So she was writing to everybody and anybody who would listen, including the colonel of the fort, Fort Phil Kearney was still alive, and so she's writing to all this.
And so that's what opened this long door to my long life in Wyoming, because that one letter sent me on a really, almost like a lifelong mission, and I turned that into my master's thesis, and really became exposed to history of Eastern Wyoming and particularly the Fetterman fight and Fort Phil Kearny and Sheridan and Buffalo.
Shannon Smith:
It was just laying on a letter.
Wendy Corr:
It really was, who knows when our lives are going to turn and change, and it was all because of an old letter. And so tell me, then, did you exonerate her father?
Shannon Smith:
Absolutely, no, absolutely. And that's where I'm saying the professors I had at the time were just so amazing. I would bring this from one class and then go to the next. So it started out with this documentary editing and research research.
And so because I'd vaguely heard of the Fetterman incident, but I didn't know anything, so I'm researching all that. I'm reading everything and I have a class with Charlene Porsol, who was an award winning women's historian. And she said, Well, why do you think this story changed? You know, because I'm like, it doesn't make any sense that this captain was blamed for this.
And then we start looking into it. And the story narrative at the time was Fetterman was a terrible officer and arrogant, and very much like we perceive Custer, and was disobedient. And so this whole narrative described him as this just kind of buffoon of an officer.
But as I'm digging deeper and deeper, I'm finding letters and Civil War records that portray him as really a great leader, and his record in the Civil War was astounding. I mean, he reported straight up to Sherman, and had 10,000 men. He was an adjunct. It was called an Adjutant General, and very organized. And so it just didn't make any sense.
So this professor, Dr Porsol, says, Well, why do you think this narrative changed? And we knew it was because there was two books that were written by army officers' wives that basically told the history of this battle, and every historian just used those two books written by these two women, and they changed the narrative to protect their husbands.
And so it was really a fascinating angle to explore how we all thought women in the Victorian era, in the 1860s to 1900s had no authority. They had no power. But these women wrote these books, and they controlled what we knew about the Fetterman fight for over 100 years.
Wendy Corr:
That's absolutely amazing. Now, disclosure here, I grew up just outside of Buffalo, and when we moved to Wyoming, we moved to Wyoming in ‘81 and I grew up outside of Buffalo, and so Fort Phil Kearny was in my backyard. The Fetterman fight was right up the road, we went to Wagon Box. We were up in Story, that was our weekends, was exploring these history places.
So for me, the narrative and the fights and the battles and the Indian wars and things like that were a big part of my interest and piquing my interest, which is why I ended up being getting a subject endorsement in history when I went to Chadron State College right down by you - so it was very much a part of what hooked me into the history, the world of history in that way.
So I love the fact that you have taken the job of detective, history detective, and really found the truth here. But that was just the beginning of your journey into Wyoming. Yes, it hooked you here. Tell us about what then brought you here, because you lived in Laramie for a long time.
Shannon Smith:
Yes, I did. So I turned this research and this master's thesis into a book and published it in 2009 and it won the Wyoming State Historical Society non fiction book of 2009. And so I was coming to Wyoming a lot, having originally done all this research. It really, quite honestly, just falling in love with the people who worked at Fort Phil Kearny and the Buffalo area.
And so I did spend a lot of time in Wyoming, doing talks about the book and things like that. But I was, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, and worked for a nonprofit called EDUCAUSE, and that is the higher education institution that it gives out the .edu, so it oversees how universities have the their URLs, and they teach teachers how to use technology professors, and I was doing research for them.
I was a research fellow, and so I was living in Boulder when I saw this position come up, Executive Director for the Wyoming Humanities Council. And I have to confess, I really didn't know much about state humanities councils. I had received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do my research and to support my work, you know, teaching, I was teaching for a long time at Oglala Lakota College, the tribal college on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is just north of me here in Gordon.
Wendy Corr:
Oh my gosh, that's a, that's a big deal,
Shannon Smith:
Yeah. And, you know, I guess I should - Yes, it is, and also it's another one of those falls into, I was just finished in my graduate degree when 9/11 happened, and I wanted to be closer to my family, and I came up to Gordon to finish writing my research and dissertation on Fetterman.
And I get this phone call out of the blue, and it's from somebody from the Pine Ridge Reservation, and they said We heard there was a historian living in Gordon, and do you want to, you know, come up and teach classes? And I'm like, Oh, this would be kind of interesting and neat.
And so I interviewed, and I had thought it was just for an adjunct position, but it turned out it was for a full time teaching position at the Tribal College. And boy, did that capture me for a long time. It was amazing and challenging. Imagine teaching US history to Native Americans. How do you tell that story of, you know, colonization and white people coming out?
So it was really fascinating, because I learned more from my students, I feel, than they learned from me. But it was a really great, great part of my life.
Wendy Corr:
Absolutely. And I have to look then and connect that back to your father being a lawyer during the American Indian Movement, in the 70s, and how that kind of that brings almost full circle.
Shannon Smith:
It really does bring it full circle and and one of my, another one of my professors - as I said, I mean, my timing at the University of Nebraska Lincoln was amazing - was one of the leading Native American scholars on how to give American Indians voice in telling their own history. So I had that background coming into teaching at the Tribal College, and they gave me such a wide berth to how I wanted to teach the classes.
So I used no textbooks, and I used things that I had learned from my professors in Lincoln. And I mean, one of my greatest rewards was once being at a golf tournament and having a former submariner - he was a navigation specialist, he was an Oglala tribal member, and he was at a golf tournament, and he had taken my class, and he's telling everybody at the whole tournament that lady taught us that Columbus didn't discover America.
I mean, it was just really fun, it just showed that I was making an impact and having conversations about how we talk about our past. And this was, you know, of course, in the late 90s and early 2000s And it was very rewarding.
Wendy Corr:
So validating.
Shannon Smith:
Yeah, it was validating. Full circle. I became very close friends with several faculty, but also several elders. John Around Him was the historian of the tribal college and for the tribe at the time, and I became very close friends with him. And another elder, Bill Stover, took me into sweats with him, and taught me just so much.
So you can imagine, it was just such a high growth period for me, at that time, to really learn so much about Native American culture.
Wendy Corr:
And that's exactly where I was going - you were immersed culturally into this whole other world, than what you grew up in.
Shannon Smith:
Yeah, it really was, and it's still just left a huge impact on me. So back to when I was in Boulder, and I see this position for executive director for Wyoming Humanities, and I wrote, really what I consider a masterful letter of introduction.
And Dave Reetz from Powell, Wyoming, and many people know who he is, was absolutely, and he was chair of the Humanities Council at the time, and he wrote me a fabulous email back, and said, I will be presenting you, you know, as one of the candidates for this position. And we just had such a great conversation, and we really hit it off.
So I came up and interviewed, and the other person who was in that interview was Milward Simpson, and Milward was the head of the state parks and cultural resources for Wyoming at the time. And so I did the interview, and it really went well. I mean, I hit it off with them. They hit it off with me, and they brought me on.
And so in August of 2013 I took the position of executive director for the state Humanities Council.
Wendy Corr:
And what did that entail? What was your job duties? What did you? How did that take you through?
Shannon Smith:
Oh, it was really Wyoming. It was so interesting. I still have a short story to write about my first day on the job, because it was, you know, the board members saw this in one way. There was a big staff. We were on the UW campus, and so I came there, and really my first year was just finding out what was going on with the organization, what was going right, what was not going right. How is it going to work?
And Dave Reetz basically said, Look, we're going through this huge shift nationally about how Humanities Councils work, how history is told, God bless my predecessor, and I love her, Marcia, but she didn't have any computer expertise. There was no website for the Humanities Council. There was no online presence per se, they were giving out grants and doing it with paper and pencil. Practically, this was in 2013.
But we weren't the only state council that was like that, because it really, the state humanities councils were such a fabulous, fabulous thing to do and work in. And there were state executive directors that have been there since the founding, 35 years, I mean, and so they weren't moving very rapidly into the new world. All of them, not just Wyoming.
And it didn't mean we weren't making an impact at the time, because they were giving out grants and but it was, I was brought on specifically to bring us into the new world. And so I spent my first year, you know, getting us a different logo and getting, you know, just marketing kind of things and
Wendy Corr:
Really, your computer background, really came into play.
Shannon Smith:
But also, I just had a board that was also trying to figure out, you know, how can we be more impactful? What should we be doing? And when I came, and I'm not saying this wasn't valuable, but it was essentially grants that felt like you were applying for a federal grant, you know, a 10 page application for $1,500 and things like that. That just wasn't right.
And a really strong book club in libraries, and that was really the two major things, and we just had enough potential and enough money that we could do so much more, and that's what the board wanted. And so it was a very exciting time to come up with new ideas and new projects for the State Council and to shape the board and to try to figure out, What's our best strategy?
So it was a lot of fun, and where we ended up going over my tenure was to become the leader of the cultural economy of the state of Wyoming. We funded all the big museums, all the big projects. The Governor Mead at the time really wanted to come up with ways to diversify the economy for the state, and so a major aspect of his he formed a an advisory committee to come up with a plan, and a major angle that they proposed was for the state to invest much more into culture and history and heritage, because people come to Wyoming to see our beautiful landscapes and to see our amazing history.
And absolutely, really was a heady time to be part of that. And I worked very closely with the head of the Arts Council at the time, Mike Lang, and the two of us worked very closely with Mead’s committee to come up with these proposals, and it shaped my board, because we said we really wanted to focus on, we felt like that was a very practical thing.
Cultural heritage tourism is a big deal in Wyoming, and we felt like we should be leading that with our funding strategies and with our partnerships with other organizations, and so that's really the direction we headed throughout my tenure at the Humanities Council.
Wendy Corr:
That is absolutely fantastic. I love that you made such an impact and really changed the face of the Humanities Council. But history is just part of Wyoming's culture, and yet it's a very large part. Like you say, people come to Wyoming to experience that. I know, just for example, here in Cody, Old Trail town, you stand on Old Trail town, you feel like you've gone back in time, 150 years, which is just really phenomenal.
Shannon Smith:
Yes, it is.
Wendy Corr:
But so, history was just part of what you did, but it still is so much your love, and it's brought you back into the news, because you have been an advisor, is that correct, for the Kevin Costner series about the West? And there's something coming up just this next week? Yes, that. And I want you to talk about that, because it's very timely. Tell us about what's happening with that?
Shannon Smith:
Well, because I published my book about Fetterman, it's called, ‘Give Me 80 Men: Women and the Myth of the Fetterman Fight,’ that came out in 2009 and I still, you know, write other articles, and I've written book introductions and chapters about the Fetterman fight, so I have somewhat of a reputation for being one of the people that knows a lot about it.
And you might remember Michael Punk, who wrote The Revenant, which was the Academy Award winning movie, and he's from Wyoming, and he wrote a second book, or another book called Ridgeline, which is a novel about Fort Phil Kearny and the Fetterman fight.
Speaker 3
And he's from Torrington, right?
Shannon Smith: 23:08
Yes, I've, we've never met in person, but in his book, it, when he does his credits and acknowledgements, he says, If you really want to know about the Fetterman fight, there are two people, and one was me, and one was John Monet who passed away last year, but was an absolute expert in Native American narratives about the Fetterman fight, so he kind of gave us credit.
So I think that's where this all happened, is I got a call last a year ago, April, about coming to New York to tell my story, about what I know about the Fetterman fight for an eight episode series that was produced by Kevin Costner and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
And so that a year ago, April, I flew to Brooklyn, and so I'm one of the talking heads. First time I've ever worked with not a nonprofit, but an actual for-profit film development company. And so was very interesting to me to see how they, you know, ran the whole show.
And they brought me into this little industrial warehouse they rented just for the day to do this interview. And we had a lot, you know, they just had a lot of questions. And it was very funny. I tell everybody, the story is that they didn't pre advise me to plan to talk in first person, current person, and present tense.
And so I would do a whole section, you know, then Fetterman went over the hill, and he did, you know, and I just kicked it right. Just did great. And even the guy behind the camera was like, Oh, that was so good.
And then the director would say, could you just do that again? But talk about it in present tense. So I'm supposed to be saying Fetterman is going over the bridge, right? They could have prepared me better, because really, what they're doing is they're setting it up for live reenactments. So I will say this, and then there'll be a reenactment, or it'll be a reenactment over my.
So it was a very interesting experience all the way around. And so then I went and did it, and I sort of just went on with my life. And then out of the blue, early May this year, I get a message, okay, it's going to premiere over Memorial weekend, and you can talk about it, because they told me, I couldn't, you know, they didn't want any of us to be talking about it until, till it came out.
So it's been very exciting that I'm the seventh episode out of eight, and it did premiere over Memorial weekend, so that I watched the first three episodes then and now we've had up to six episodes. And so mine is next Monday, June 23 and it will feature - the entire episode is about Fort Phil Kearny and the Fetterman fight. And then the concluding episode, Wyoming should be so thrilled, because the last two episodes are based in Wyoming, and that'll be on the Johnson County wars.
And so here's the thing. I don't have a clue who the other scholars are that are in my episode or in the Johnson County wars, I gave recommendations of people they should talk to, but watching all the previous episodes, it's a who's who of historians, and so I'm real excited to see who else they bring in to do. But it's fun to watch a History Channel, way of telling history, rather than a straight up documentary, you know, because they have all the reenactments. So I'm excited to see how this goes.
Wendy Corr:
This is so cool. Again, I grew up in Buffalo, Johnson County War was a big part of my history, just kind of surrounded by all of that. And then when I went to a couple of community colleges, and one of them, I got my, you know, you have to have your Wyoming history. And there were a couple of great, great books that I was able to read and that I just I, even after I graduated, I would go back to read those stories. Nate Champion and all of these, these really important characters, that shaped Johnson County history.
So too cool. Shannon, this has been so, so fun to talk about what's coming up. I want to go back, though, before we close our conversation today, because your life has been more than just the history part of Wyoming and Wyoming humanities and computer software and all that.
I love the fact that you actually owned a golf course at one time. And so the reason that I say is because people have been noticing, I'm sure have seen the golf injury you have there - tell us about, tell us about the other really fun things that you've done in your life, because you just had such a great, colorful life.
Shannon Smith:
Well, after I came back to Gordon to teach at Oglala Lakota college and complete my writing and my history that I was working on at the time, we bought, my husband and I bought the Gordon Golf and Country Club. And it has an actual national claim to fame, because for decades, 40 years, it hosted the largest Native American golf tournament in North America, both Canada and the US.
It was called the Oglala Nation Invitational. And it was really huge, and a lot of time, you know, any native american pro would at least go up there once during the era, but it was just a really big fun, great tournament that the golf course had.
But the history of our little golf course is just so fascinating, because when my dad moved here in the 1963 it was a sand course that just locals kind of maintained up on a hill with horses around it. It was just very rural. And then in the early 1970s the community came together and got a grant from the Department of a rural what was it, a rural activities grant, or something like that, and they built this course.
And it is a beautiful nine hole course, and today it is privately owned - and it's just the nature of the world out here in rural America. I mean, when they built that course, this town was almost, you know, 2700 people. We're at 1100 now. So it's just a whole different world. And so it is private, but it's still that same beautiful course, and it's fun to golf.
Wendy Corr:
Well, if anybody's been to the Sandhills of Nebraska, it's rolling hills. So. I can imagine that it's going to be a really interesting and challenging course.
Shannon Smith:
It's a fun course because it does have hills. And, you know, it's not just like one flat but I mean, all the western Nebraska towns, Hyannis, even, you know, population, what, 400, has a really challenging, interesting, hilly golf course.
And it is fun for me, because golf is really part of Native American culture. A lot of golfers play, you know, play, and now I play Ladies Night is, you know, I have friends coming down from Pine Ridge that are great women golfers. And the same with the men's, there's just a really nice culture.
Wendy Corr:
That is something I did not expect. I've never put Native Americans with golf. And so this is educational for me. Before we go, Shannon, what's next for you? What projects are you working on next? And tell us so that we can keep track of - You're still so active. You're still so active.
Shannon Smith:
I did retire from the state Wyoming humanities at the, you know, a year or so into the pandemic, and left it in very good hands. I'm sorry to report that with the closing of the National Endowment for the Humanities at the national level, that has a great impact on all state humanities councils.
So Wyoming's Humanities Council was forced to let some staff go, but they have a very strong board. They have two employees now that are just kind of keeping the lights on and doing really strategizing on how they can still have a powerful impact on the state. And that's really great news. The Humanities Council, Wyoming humanities is probably the leading investor in cultural projects of Native American based cultural projects, and they'll continue to provide a lot of support to those projects.
I began doing consulting work in these kinds of heritage and cultural projects. And I have one that I'm so excited about that is just launching, and it's about all American Indian Days in Sheridan. And from 1952 to the late 1980s Sheridan hosted a really big event that brought tribal members from all around the nation to come to Sheridan and celebrate Native American culture.
And it had four major aspects. It had a teepee village that was kind of set up during the rodeo time. It had a major award, a national award that was given out to a Native American from around the country who had had a major impact on the United States. It also hosted Miss Indian America. And for three decades, I mean, women came from all around the country and competed for this amazing in this pageant, and then they served as Miss Indian America for a year, and toured the country and went abroad representing Native American culture.
So a group of people called the honoring project, they formed an organization, and they raised money and created a beautiful Memorial that's right downtown Sheridan. It's right across from the Sheridan Inn, and where the old steam engine is, and it's a beautiful monument.
And as they did this, they realized that a a really nice high end book needed to be written to commemorate this history and to pay honor to the non Indians of Sheridan and the both Johnson and Sheridan County, who for decades put a lot of energy and effort into healing racial injuries and building strong connections between Native Americans and non natives.
And this is an effort by those Native Americans who were impacted by this, to pay respect back to the non Indians who worked so hard during that era. So it's going to be a beautiful book, lots of pictures, and I'm excited to be working on that as the editor of the book. And so we're recruiting, you know, scholars and historians and people who are involved with this to tell this story.
Wendy Corr:
That is absolutely fantastic. Shannon, this has been a great conversation. I am so pleased to make your acquaintance and to hear your stories and to just really get educated myself and to spark that real flame of history, that those stories that you're telling can ignite in all of us.
And so thank you for what you've done over your career, and thank you for taking the time with us today. This has been just a great time. And folks do, do get on the history channel and check out the previous episodes of ‘Kevin Costner's The West,’ and tune in on the 23rd for this episode that will feature our friend Shannon Smith. And Shannon, thank you so much for your time and good luck with the projects that you're continuing to work on.
Shannon Smith:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. Wendy, it's been a real delight. Thank you.
Wendy Corr:
Well, good. It's been a delight for us too. Folks, have a fantastic week. Go back and listen to some of these other really great conversations that we've had with the unique people that make up the cowboy state and that have influenced the cowboy state over the years.
I love what we do here on The Roundup and shine a light on all of these great people. So tune into those. Tune in next week. We've got another great guest coming up next week - until then, see you soon.
