Wright At 50: A Half-Century For The Wyoming Town That Coal Built

It’s not unusual to see antelope hanging around watching the humans in Wright, Wyoming, which turned 50 years old this year.

“They act like they own the town,” Mayor Ralph Kingan told Cowboy State Daily, shaking his head in mock frustration.

“When you go out and golf, they’ll just lay there under the shade tree, watching people,” the mayor’swife, Jean Kingan added. “They won’t bother to move or anything.”

Deer aren’t any better, she added. They, too, will often refuse to move, even as she tries to shoo them away from her tulips in the morning. 

Wildlife, Jean Kingan said, is one of Wright’s biggest claims to fame. Even if everyone else in thestate only thinks of bison.

The Durham Ranch, which is near Wright, claims to have one of the oldest and largest single-operation bison ranches in America.

“But we have so much wildlife here that it is like, no big deal,” Jean Kingan said. “The antelope wander around town, and you have to honk your horn for them to move, so you can keep going. We just have all sorts of wildlife here.”

Another of Wright’s big claims to fame, as one of the state’s youngest towns celebrates a significantmilestone, is coal. This is a town that was built on coal, but many people may not realize just how much coal underlies the foundation of this town of just over 1,600 people.

“In Gillette, they have tours of the coal mines,” Jean Kingan said. “But we’ve got the two biggest coal mines in the United States right here.”

Wright also has an unusual array of amenities for such a small town, she added. Twelve miles of walking trails, as well as the Panther Pond, which is part of a larger overall complex that doubles as a state rest area and includes a visitor’s center.

“We have a nine-hole golf course, a rec center, a library, two excellent schools,” she said. 

There are bike paths, an Agriculture complex, senior center, and a museum, as well as many other amenities that have made this small town a hidden gem.

How A New Town Gets Built

The Kingans met and married in Wright when the town first began, and they’re part of an old guard that helped build this brand-new town in Wyoming.

“I came from Ohio — Cincinnati — in 1979,” Ralph Kingan said. “Unemployment was 30%. That’s when the steel industry was going down, and cars were having a hard time.”

He and his friends heard that the oil field was hiring in Wyoming from a friend who’d become homesick and returned to Ohio. That friend shared phone numbers with his friends, so they could try to find jobs in Casper, Wyoming.

“We were single and didn’t have jobs,” Ralph Kingan recalled. “So, the three of us came out, but the guy who had hired us got fired.”

That left the three men stranded in Wyoming with no job. They found construction work to tide them over, at least until winter.

“I kept hearing how bad the winters are here,” Ralph Kingan said. “And we were basically sleeping on the job site.”

One night, he overheard some people at a bar talking about this new town that had been built in Wyoming. At first, he didn’t believe what he was hearing.

“How could they build a new town?” he wondered. “It’s 1979.”

He and his friends took a drive to the new town, to see it for themselves. They were amazed when they saw it was true. Here was a new town. It wasn’t just some tall tale, told over beers.

The trip turned out better for the three men than they could have expected. Not only did they get good-paying jobs from Harley Hall Construction, but their new jobs also came with a free place to live as well. 

They were all going to be warm for the fast-approaching Wyoming winter after all.

Free Rent? Sign Me Up!

Jean Kingan, meanwhile, was studying at University of Wyoming when a couple of principals from the area came to recruit students who were ready for their student teaching. 

“They said they would pay for the housing, except for $100,” Jean recalled. “And I said, ‘Pick me!’ Because that was a major expense.”

Over the Christmas break, Wright threw a dance party and Jean decided that was as good a time as any to check out the scene of this new community that she was planning to join. 

“I saw this really cute guy,” she said, smiling at her husband. “He was wearing the fedora type hat. He had the black leather jacket on with the padded shoulders, so his silhouette was like this, and I’m going, ‘He’s cute!’”

At first, she thought her future husband had a girlfriend, though, because he was dancing with this pretty little redhead, who barely came up to his chest.

But the redhead wasn’t his girlfriend after all, Jean would later realize.

“So, I set my cap for him,” she said. “And I joke and say that there were two men who were eligible bachelors here in town, and I picked the one who was the right age.” 

Growing Up Wright

Not everyone was new to town. There were those whose families had lived for generations in the area, among them Nolene Wright.

She was 9 years old when the town of Wright began. She remembers the influx of new people, coming from all over America, to live and work in one of America’s newest towns.

“I loved it,” she said. “I was an only child, so the only time I got to play with kids or see other kids was if there was a function going on. So, I would go down there, and I’d get to go to some of their Halloween parties and dress up and play with those kids.”

Sometimes in the winter, two or three families would throw ice skating parties, and then, in the summertime, there were birthday parties and Fourth of July picnics.

All those new people in town needed new friends. It was a bonanza of new friends for all the ranch kids who’d grown up in a rural area with few neighbors.

“I was the little kid on the bus,” Wright recalled. “But the older kids that I knew would, I won’t say protect me, but they watched out for me and took care of me and that was nice. I appreciated those people, those kids. They’re not all here anymore, they’ve moved away, obviously. But it was a good childhood. A very good childhood.” 

A Tragedy Helped Build Wright

The town of Wright takes its name from Wright’s ancestors, which include a trio of brothers who came to Wyoming under rather tragic circumstances.

“Their father was a doctor who was shot coming back home,” Wright said. “He got off his buggy to close a gate, and somebody shot him. He lived a couple of days and then he died.”

The boys’ mother couldn’t take care of all her children, Wright said. 

“So, she kept the oldest — kept the girl who was the oldest — and the youngest boy,” she said. “And she put the other three in an orphanage in New York. She moved back to New York from Missouri, because she had a brother who was a bell ringer at the Episcopalian Church.”

But the three boys didn’t enjoy the orphanage at all. 

“One of them, Jim, got beaten by the nuns so bad that she put him in the hospital,” Wright said. “So, he swore that when he got out, he wasn’t going to stay.”

Jim was returned to school on a Monday or Tuesday, and, by Friday of that same week, he had mustered up a nickel, which he used to pay for his escape. He gave that lonely nickel to a boy at the end of his desk’s row, who agreed to get on his hands and knees on his desk, so that Jim could run down the desk, hit the back of that kid, and fly out the window, never to be seen at that orphanage ever again.

“He was only 12 at the time,” Wright said. “And he ended up making his way via Chicago into Nebraska to the Broken Bow area, which was where a lot of the feed lots were.”

But first, he had to survive Chicago. Which he did, thanks to bakeries. 

“At night, he would crawl in — because their bricks would come out — so he could crawl under the bricks of their ovens to stay warm,” Wright said. “And sometimes the baker would feel sorry for him and give him day-old bread.”

Wright doesn’t know if Jim found work in Chicago, or if his mom sent him some money to help him get to Nebraska.

“I just know that when the other two boys left the orphanage, they joined him in Broken Bow, Nebraska to work in the stockyards,” she said. 

It didn’t take long for the boys to notice where all the fattest calves were coming from.

“They were coming from this area, the Powder River Basin, in Wyoming,” she said. “So, they worked their way up here in the 1890s. And I know that a couple of them were working on ranches in Buffalo during the time of the Johnson County War. but I don’t know who they worked for because they always ran the kids out of the house when they were talking about whatever was going on.”

William Wright homesteaded the present-day Durham Ranch, filing the official paperwork for his homestead in 1911. Nolene’s great-grandfather, Richard, homesteaded on Hay Creek, but whereWilliam ran Hereford cattle, he ran sheep instead. Richard also started a post office in 1906, west of the present-day town of Wright, which he operated until 1914.

Uncle Jim, meanwhile, ran a barbershop in Buffalo, along the creek, until it was flooded out in the early 1900s. 

“He opted not to rebuild and go back, and he moved to Gillette,” she said. “He had rentals and things like that in Gillette, but he never did have a ranch.”

Tornado Couldn’t Kill Them

Wright has had its ups and downs, just as any town whose primary occupations are related to energy. Through booms and through busts it has continued to roll forward.

Ralph Kingan keeps tabs on how his town is doing by driving past the RV park where many oil and gas workers stay when they’re in town for work. If the park is full, he knows the town’s economy is humming along and doing OK. 

Downturns haven’t killed the town so far. Though a tornado almost did in 2005. Kingan was on vacation in Utah when the storm hit.

“My son called me and said that a tornado had hit us,” the mayor said. “And I asked, ‘How bad?’ He says, ‘It’s real bad. You better get back.’”

As he and his wife crested the hill approaching Wright, Ralph Kingan couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“I thought we probably had tons of people dead,” he said. “That’s how bad it looked. It just looked like the total town was destroyed.”

But Wright was full of oil and gas workers, and they weren’t going to sit on their hands. They knew how to operate heavy equipment, and they knew how to get things done. 

Everyone in the town rallied to the cause of cleaning up the town and helping each other, Jean Kingan said.

She herself was involved in a mental health program after the tornado that involved visiting people whose homes had been destroyed and putting on activities to bring the community together.

“That really helped solidify the fact that we care,” she said. “This community cares about its residents, our neighbors.”

“The FEMA guy told me, if you didn’t have the mental health, your town would probably die,” Ralph Kingan added. 

The tornado tested the community’s mettle, and it pulled through, Wright said. That’s something that still makes her emotional to this day, even though it happened 20 years ago.

“I hate to say this, but man, if a tornado was going to happen anywhere, then this was the place to have it happen,” she said. “The oil and gas and mining people were already trained in safety and hazmat stuff, and they kicked in. They knew just what to do.”

There were people with Red Cross experience in town, too, and even those who had no special training still found ways to do their part.

“This is a really good place,” Wright said. “A place where people take care of each other.”

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.