Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"When there’s no sheep to herd....."}]

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

<title>Daily Smile: Sunday, April 26, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

When there’s no sheep to herd.....

Daily Smile: Sunday, April 26, 2026

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Bessemer Bend, a true Wyoming ghost town, has been claimed back by nature and alfalfa fields. 

Before its demise, Bessemer was where Wyoming’s oldest cabin was built by desperate fur traders with the Pacific Fur Co. 

Decades later, Bessemer became part of the Oregon, California, Mormon, Pony Express, and Overland trails that all crossed at Red Buttes/Bessemer Bend.

Later, the famous Goose Egg was built on the spot. This extravagant stone mansion is said by some say to have inspired scenes in Owen Wister’s “The Virginian.” 

Today, Bessemer Bend is a broad loop of the North Platte River southwest of Casper that shows no signs of the failed city. 

The landscape is dominated by irrigated fields, ranchland, cottonwoods along the river, and the red hills and buttes that explorers and Oregon Trail emigrants knew as Red Buttes. 

The town of Bessemer, now long gone, had gained a reputation as the “Queen City of the Plains.” Her founders believed that their city would one day be the grandest in Wyoming. 

Their hopes were dashed by a rigged election and the railroad. 

Ultimately, Casper “stole” the honor from them when it became the seat of Natrona County instead and, one by one, the residents of Bessemer hauled their homes over to Casper.  

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Fur Traders "}]

Bessemer first appeared in written record in the 1812 diary of fur trader Robert Stuart. 

Stuart had been hired in 1810 by John Jacob Astor to work for the Pacific Fur Co. and was on the company ship, the Tonquin, when he became marooned at Fort Astoria.  

The crew had sailed first to the Falkland Islands and then around Cape Horn and up the western coast of North America, reaching what is now Astoria, Oregon in May 1811. There, they established Fort Astoria.

When the crew sailed farther north, to Vancouver Island, an interaction with Native Americans resulted in many deaths and the destruction of the ship. 

It was left to Stuart and a small group of men to return eastward overland. The party left Astoria on June 29, 1812, bound for St. Louis. With Stuart were Ramsay Crooks, John Day, Benjamin Jones, François LeClerc, Robert McClellan, and André Vallé.

They started up the Columbia River in canoes. Before they were out many days,  John Day became “demented" and was sent back to Astoria in the care of some friendly Indians. 

In a few days, they came across some men who had been separated from another party and gave them provisions. 

A man named Miller joined Stuart in Day's place according to Molker. 

The group headed east, through what is now Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming, traveling on what would later become the Oregon Trail. 

Highlights of their journey that Stuart detailed in his diary included paddling down the Snake River, crossing Teton Pass and seeing Jackson Hole, and discovering the South Pass.

By the time they reached Bessemer, the seven men were starving and weak, desperate to rest. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Refuge"}]

Described as “footsore, hungry, and utterly weary,” fur trader Robert Stuart wrote in his diary that he and his six companions had been following a river (the North Platte) for two days but had to find a place to stop and recuperate. 

The cabin they were soon to build would become the oldest recorded cabin in Wyoming. 

It was November 1812 when Stuart described how they had found a low point of land on a bend in the river and had selected it for their winter camp. 

There were cottonwoods and willows there for building materials and firewood and the area had plenty of wildlife to sustain them. 

The men had already seen the Grand Canyon and discovered the passage through South Pass. They had their horses stolen by the Crow and were on foot. 

Weakened by their trek, they had started missing shots and were starving when they had finally succeeded on killing an injured bull buffalo. 

Though tempted to eat the meat raw, Stuart had fed the men broth to regain their strength. 

Stuart describes their cabin at Bessemer as eight feet wide and 18 feet long. The walls were six feet high and the whole was covered with buffalo skins. 

The fireplace was in the center and the smoke found its way out through a hole in the roof.

“As the slaughter of so many buffaloes had provided the party with beef for the winter, in case they met with no further supply, they now set to work, heart and hand, to build a comfortable wigwam,” Stuart wrote. “In a little while, the woody promontory rang with the unwonted sound of the axe.”

He said that by the second evening, the cabin was complete. 

They rested and recuperated from the exertion and hunger they had suffered. They had been in their little cabin for five weeks when a small band of Arapahoe Indians visited them for a few days. Although the Arapahos did not harm them, Stuart was concerned that they might return in “another mood.” 

He packed up his men and some provisions and moved on toward the east, leaving behind their home on Bessemer Bend. When Stuart’s party arrived at Saint Louis they had shortened the route of Lewis and Clark, had discovered the Sweetwater and North Platte rivers and had discovered the most important gateway through the Rockies, South Pass.

Mary Lou Pence and Lola Homsher in their book, “The Ghost Towns of Wyoming,” said that some pioneers claimed the cabin stood for many years while others said the Indians immediately swooped down and burned it. 

Whichever the case, the cabin has long been gone when the Oregon Trail followed part of the same route first made by the small party of fur traders. 

The Goose Egg, or the Searight House, was built on Bessemer Bend and by 1888, a town had been planned, adopting the name of Bessemer. 

The founders had high hopes of being a metropolis. A sawmill and brick plant were brought in and homes and businesses sprung up quickly. 

When a brewery and liquor house were brought in by Max Jaensch, the residents of Bessemer saw a bright future.

“For as one citizen put it,” Pence and Homsher wrote. “Here the consumption of distilled waters was far above the average in American communities.”

In 1888 to 1889, the town promoters laid out 49 blocks and reserved land for what they hoped would become Wyoming's future capitol building. Bessemer grew quickly and attracted settlers, ranchers, and businesses. 

As Wyoming was preparing for statehood, Bessemer entered the race to become the county seat of the proposed Natrona County.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"However, it was not to be. "}]

According to Pence and Homsher, just as Bessemerites were sitting back “gloating” over the meager 304 pollings cast in Casper as compared to their 667 count, it was announced that some “skullduggery” had been perpetrated. 

The investigators ruled that Bessemer had cheated and had more votes than residents. Their count was thrown out and Casper became the county seat in 1890. 

Residents of Bessemer were still angry when they spoke to historians Pence and Homsher in the 1950s. 

“They say we cheated and voted every man, woman and kid,” one old-timer told Pence and Homsher. “Well, I know one of their men who voted three times. But they don’t tell about that!” 

The following year, the printing press for the Bessemer Journal was seized and moved to Casper to become the Natrona Tribune. 

The railroad selected Casper as the regional rail terminal and the end of Bessemer was official.

Many of the buildings were moved to Casper until only the Goose Egg and a few others remained. Eventually, even the stone mansion was torn down and Bessemer quietly faded into the past. 

“When they said the Goose Egg was no more, you could hear that awesome hush,” Pence and Homsher wrote. “You could almost see Chalkeye and Fingers and Honey Wiggin and Baldy and Missou wipe away a tear.”

Bessemer is now returned to pasture and agricultural land. However, the memory of the ghost town and the first cabin from 1812 remain. 

“You can rip a house to pieces, ’til it ain’t no more, but you can’t tear up the things that happened there,” an old-timer told Pence and Homsher in remembrance of his beloved Bessemer and the people that once lived there.

Bessemer Bend and inset 6 7 26

<title>Wyoming History: Once A Bustling City On Oregon Trail, Bessemer Now A Ghost Town | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Bessemer Bend, now peaceful ranchland, was once a stop on the Oregon Trail and a bustling city known as the “Queen City of the Plains.” Now it’s a true Wyoming ghost town that disappeared when Casper was picked as the county seat. 

Wyoming History: Once A Bustling City On Oregon Trail, Bessemer Now A Ghost Town

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Dave Nutter looks back on a life in broadcasting with stories to tell.

The 74-year-old who spent much of his working career talking into microphones and turning dials has to stop periodically to cough as he fights idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease doctors say will eventually claim his life.

His working resume covers call letters of radio stations from Casper to eastern Nebraska, Rawlins and even short stint in Portland, Oregon, before returning home for a long stint at K2 Radio and Television. 

Along the way, he collected broadcasting equipment and memorabilia that represents Wyoming’s golden-era airwave history.

But how a 13-year-old got on the air and parlayed his teen years into gigs at Casper radio stations in the 1960s and early 1970s seems a Top 40 tale worth spinning again. 

It all began with a fifth-grade trip to the K2 TV station where he was a member of the choir singing Christmas carols. 

He noticed the guys behind the big cameras pointing the lens at him and others.

“It just really looked enticing to me,” Nutter said. “I decided I wanted to be a TV cameraman.”

From that point on he also started paying attention to radio and made it a point when he learned that a Casper radio station was doing a remote broadcast to drop in and hang around. 

He got to know the players, talked with those at the controls and behind the mic, and became a “radio pest.”

Mostly, KVOC, a country station, did the remotes and Nutter recalls being at the annual Casper summer parade downtown in 1964 when he was 13 and standing by the live broadcast guys who included Dave “Woody” Woodside, the program director, at the microphone and the new station owner’s son who was manning the broadcast board controls.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"First Gig"}]

The station owner’s son and Woodside got into an argument and the son walked off. Woodside, who had gotten to know Nutter, looked at him and asked if he could do the job.

“I said, ‘Sure,’” Nutter recalled. “So, that was my very first day probably 1964, I don’t remember exactly, but it was summertime and I ran the controls and helped pack up the equipment. 

"They didn’t give me any pay, but that that’s how I started working at KVOC at 13.”

That impromptu introduction to the board led to more opportunities on remotes that summer and the next where he would ride his bike or hitch a ride with the station crew to the remote location and help set up microphones, the board, and landlines to the station for a remote broadcast.

Because he had no broadcast license, he could not work inside the station, but at 15 that changed. He studied for the third-class FCC license, the minimum requirement, that would allow him to work inside a station with broadcast equipment and the transmitter.

He convinced his parents that he could pass the test and the nearest place to take it was Denver. His family took a vacation with a swing through Denver and at 15 he joined the 20- and 30-year-olds looking for their ticket to a broadcast career by taking the multiple-choice and more than an hour-long exam.

After finishing the test, he rejoined his family and went on the rest of their vacation.

“I came home from vacation and my license was in the mailbox,” Nutter said. “I immediately got on my bicycle and rode to the radio station with the license. It was like my graduation.”

Woodside and the owner were at the station, saw the license, and told him he could go to work the next Sunday. 

It was July 1967. He operated the two turntables, cart machines for ads, reel-to-reel recorders and the broadcast board that controlled which machine sent content on the air.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Blue-Light Specials"}]

Sundays involved playing 15-inch records from the Salvation Army and other church-related programs that were serialized. 

It also meant going to church locations and setting up remote broadcasts. The station alternated churches during the month, so it might be a Baptist congregation one week and Pentecostal the next.

Nutter said when Kmart came to town in the fall of 1965, the city’s first box store paid to have a three-hour live afternoon broadcast every Sunday from the store. 

It was the first time a store was open on Sundays and lines would form outside the doors before it opened at noon. He and the announcer would go to the store and set up for a 12:30 p.m. start. 

Nutter initially just ran the controls with the on-air personality who called himself the “Deacon Speakin’.”

But then the “deacon” got fired because Kmart did not like the job he was doing. His replacements also got fired. 

Woodside asked Nutter if he thought he could do the announcing part of the broadcast. It involved playing music on the turntable at the store and reading a stack of “blue light” and other specials over the airwaves to bring Sunday shoppers to Kmart doors.

Nutter said the store occasionally did a “99-cent special” that involved putting a small 99-cent sticker on an expensive item such as a barbecue or even a washer or dryer. The draw was no one knew where or what it was.

“People would literally tear up the store looking for those 99-cent specials,” he said.

Nutter told his boss he would try the role. And store management was pleased with the results.

Nutter said he found out that Kmart paid KVOC about $1,200 a month for the broadcasts, which represented the biggest advertising account the station had at the time.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"KATI Calls"}]

While doing the Kmart show he was noticed by a competitor at KATI in town. The station’s program director asked him to come in and talk. 

He was offered a job and took it. His first shift running the board from midnight to 6 a.m. at the Top 40-centered station was June 5, 1968.

“That was the date that Bobby Kennedy got shot in California,” Nutter said. “CBS maintained a network alert system and we got the CBS network alert signal.”

For the next few hours he played instrumental music between CBS News bulletins updating listeners on Kennedy’s fate.

It was also at KATI that the program director told him he could not use his real name and gave him three options of monikers to choose from. 

The one that kind of had a nice ring was “Don Steele.” He chose it.

And as the “Real Don Steele” soon realized, there was another one on the air.

When he went back to the school in the fall, he remembers a girl asking him if he was “this guy?” She pointed to a fan magazine that said a Don Steele was the number one rated disc jockey in the country — he worked at a station in Los Angeles.

“This guy was the real Don Steele and I learned later he came from Portland, Oregon and Omaha,” Nutter said. “So I’m assuming (his program director) gave me three names of three big disc jockeys someplace else in the world.”

Nutter’s time at KATI also involved continuing the Kmart show. When he left KVOC, he brought the account over with him.

Following high school graduation, Nutter’s career took him to Rawlins and then for a stint in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and then back to KVOC. 

He spent a few years traveling the country in a good-paying job installing kitchen equipment for McDonald’s Restaurants before returning to Casper as a McDonald’s store manager.

A K2 radio salesman convinced him to check out a Sunday radio gig opportunity and lured him back. 

“I started full time at K2 on Jan. 15, 1980 and for all intents and purposes that was the last radio stop,” he said. “That was my last place of employment.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Personality Role"}]

He spent the next 25 years until 1994 working for K2 in various roles, including as a radio personality, and program and music director. 

He later founded and operated the Wyoming News Network for five years, a radio service that offered radio stations in Wyoming and South Dakota news, special events, sports, and weather.

Nutter said his on-air shows were more a “personality broadcast” where he offered little features and sometimes did interviews of various people.

“I tried a lot of different things that seemed to work,” he said. “I remember my ratings were better than anybody else in town for that time period, even though we never really ever worked for ratings, they were there.”

In addition to on-air work, Nutter fascination with the broadcast equipment led him into a collection of broadcast gear headed for dumpsters at an early age. 

He remembers one day at KVOC when the station engineer called him and said they were taking a bunch of equipment to the dump.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Collecting Artifacts"}]

Nutter went to the station and gathered the first microphone he ever spoke in as well as the remote radio board that he used at 13 and some cart machines. 

During his K2 career, he remembers coming back from Laramie after a football game broadcast and finding a bunch of old equipment in the dumpster behind the station.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He rescued it."}]

Among  the items was the first studio camera used at K2 TV in 1957 that weighed nearly 140 pounds.

After being diagnosed with his illness, he knew his collection of things was going to end up back in a dumpster unless he could find a place that wanted it. 

He contacted the Texas Broadcast and Communications Museum and ended up taking two trips down to deliver the 1,400 items he had collected over the years.

The K2 camera was something unique among the other 109 cameras in the museum’s collection. Instead of storing in a corner or closet they put it on the floor in their main lobby, Nutter said.

“I’m proud to say that it is within 15 feet of the TV camera that covered the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department,” he said.

Much of Nutter’s present day involves trips to doctors and procedures to help prolong his life. His pulmonary fibrosis continues to harden his lung tissues making breathing more difficult.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"But he keeps pressing on."}]

“They’ve got a couple of medications out there that prolong you breathing,” he said. “But the only real cure is a lung transplant.”

Dave Nutter Inset David Nutter 1967 Age 15 KVOC edit 6 7 26

<title>Attention Kmart Shoppers: Casper's Dave Nutter Reflects On 45 Years On The Radio | Cowboy State Daily</title>

For 45 years, Dave Nutter was a familiar voice on Casper radio. Now, fighting for his life, Nutter reflects on his unique experiences in radio, including broadcasting blue light specials from Kmart. He most recently donated 1,400 radio items to a museum.

Attention Kmart Shoppers: Casper's Dave Nutter Reflects On 45 Years On The Radio

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Growing up, the only mushrooms retired mycologist Jack States ever really noticed were puffballs. They were great targets for kicking down the street.

But eating them? Forget about it. That was the last thing on States’ mind.

Years later as a young graduate student, he had his heart set on being a plant ecologist.

Still, mushrooms didn’t figure in his plans at all.

Then one semester he found himself enrolled in a class with internationally acclaimed mycologist and microbial ecologist, the late Dr. Martha Christensen.

“She was one of the best instructors I think they ever had at the University of Wyoming,” States told Cowboy State Daily. “And she had me do a project on isolating molds from soil, which I thought was kind of ridiculous, but I thought I would be interested in knowing what kind of molds grew on herbivore dung.”

That led to a capstone field project collecting molds from elk, moose, deer, and rabbit droppings. 

Even though he thought at the time it was “ridiculous” to sift through rabbit dung to see what would grow, he had soon found a species of mold no one had ever documented. 

It was a discovery that would attract pharmaceutical money and pull him into a lifetime of chasing fungi from Wyoming to the far corners of the world. 

Along the way, he would identify a dozen new truffle species, reshape forest management in the Southwest United States, and change how scientists think about wildlife diseases and even the Red Desert’s shifting sands.

All of it started with the “ridiculous” student project and a legendary University of Wyoming mycologist pushing him into the strange, hidden world of fungi.

The mold he’d discovered would go on to produce not only a new moth insecticide, but also lysergic acid compounds used in LSD-related research.

Aspergillus leporis, as the mold would be named, is now famous in international mycology and pharmaceutical circles. 

At the time, what it meant for States was a research assistantship under Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company that supported his entire master’s program.

“Money was scarce in those days, and I wasn’t getting any offers from any other place,” said States, who’s now known as Lander’s Mushroom Man. “So that’s what I ended up doing. I isolated and worked on that new species of mold.”

Despite discovering an internationally famous mold, States wasn’t completely abandoning his first love — plants. Fungi just gave him a different perspective on plants.

“It turns out that the fungi are the major decomposer, we call them associates for plants,” he said. “That is, they cause most of the plant diseases, rather than bacteria, which causes the most diseases in animals. 

"Because of their strong relationship to plants, I just parlayed that into plant ecology.”

The underground world of plants — the mycorrhizal partnerships between tree roots and fungi — is still a vast and understudied universe. 

Diving into that allowed States to break lots of new ground over his career, including the discovery of 12 new species of truffles.

It’s also given him what he affectionately describes as the world’s largest collection of squirrel poop.

“All that craziness out there on the highway has paid off,” he said. “And I think (new discoveries) are what makes the career of a scientist so rewarding.”

Many of States’ discoveries have involved adventures to other countries with his wife, who studies both plants and birds. 

One of the most humorous adventures, though, didn’t happen in a remote jungle. It started in an ordinary university mailroom.

“Mushrooms were so popular then — even more so than today,” States said. “And in the Southwest, people automatically assumed I knew everything there was to know about mushrooms, and I didn’t.”

That led to occasional packages of mushrooms mailed to him for identification, including a particularly malodorous specimen called stinkhorn.

“Stinkhorns, when they produce their mature spore mass, the odor is like a rotting cadaver,” States said.

The smell was so bad that a couple of people from the campus post office delivered the package to States in person — along with a request.

“Whatever is in this package, don’t ever have anybody send it to you again,” he was told. “We’ve had to fumigate our entire post office.”

States counted himself lucky that the police didn’t show up to ask why people were mailing him dead bodies.

“So, I decided to write a book to protect myself,” he said. “I thought I’d write a book so they will read that and not send me anything else like that again.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Lessons In Root Beer"}]

Stinkhorns weren’t the only mycological misadventure in States’ career.

To feed his students’ huge and curious appetite — and to attract more students to his program — States looked for creative lesson plans that would draw people in.

At first, he settled on growing some psychedelic mushrooms. He was mindful that such mushrooms were only legally problematic at maturity, so he focused his lesson plans on immature mushrooms. But someone still broke into the building to clean out his entire growth chamber.

He needed a new lesson plan after that, so he switched to fermenting root beer in class using a special, French yeast. It was a big hit, but the students loved the root beer a little too much. They drank it down to the last drop — including the yeast sediment.

“It created almost instant diarrhea,” States recalled. “We had to put warning labels on the bottles after that. Just don’t drink the whole thing. Leave the sediment in the bottom.”

States himself had to learn the hard way that mushrooms are a strange world, with dangers that are not always completely predictable.

“There’s a mushroom that grows in Ponderosa pine forests in Arizona and New Mexico associated with Aspen trees,” he said. “And it produces a mushroom with very strong garlic flavor, which sheep herders in those areas have used for decades to flavor their dishes.”

One year, that was about the only mushroom he could find, so he decided to try it for himself and see if it really did taste like garlic.

“I had heard that some people have an allergic reaction to it, sort of like poisoning,” he said. “But since it just causes gastric upset, and obeying my rules — if you eat a mushroom for the first time, don’t eat more than a teaspoonful — I tried it.”

An hour later, States was doubled over in pain and violently vomiting, forcing him to go to the emergency room — even though his wife, who had also eaten some of the mushroom, had no reaction at all.

He was given painkillers to deaden muscle contractions and kept overnight for observation.

“I was laying there and had one last vomit,” he said. “Out came just a little, tiny piece of that mushroom. Once that came out, there were no more symptoms and I felt really great.”

States realized he must have had an allergic reaction to the mushroom, since his wife was not affected.

“Then the night nurse came in and asked me how I was feeling,” States said. “I said I was feeling great, because I’d gotten rid of that last piece of that mushroom.”

The nurse asked if it was one of those “wild” mushrooms and States admitted it was.

“Then she said, ‘You know, maybe you should leave the mushroom eating to the experts,’” States said with a chuckle.

She had no idea States had literally written the book on mushrooms.

States’ research hasn’t just expanded the catalog of weird fungi. It’s also changed how forests in the American Southwest are managed, and changed the understanding of certain wildlife diseases in Wyoming.

The work he’s proudest of is identifying a three-way symbiosis between truffle-producing fungi, squirrels, and ponderosa pine forests.

The truffle-producing fungi help roots absorb nutrients, while squirrels use the truffles as food, and help spread more fungal spores with their droppings.

Cut too many trees, States found, and that disrupts squirrel populations, chokes off truffle dispersal, and even knocks down northern goshawk numbers, since the raptors overwinter in pine forests and depend on squirrels for food. 

Ultimately, that becomes a negative feedback loop for the health of the forest itself.

As a result of States’ research, the U.S. Forest Service changed its timber harvest practices in Southwestern forests.

His work with molds in soil, meanwhile, was part of a breakthrough discovery about the connections between soil microbes, heavy metals and fighting off wildlife diseases in Wyoming.

A project digging through rabbit poop led mycologist Jack States — aka Lander's Mushroom Man — to discover a famous mold and 12 new species of truffles. His research has changed how scientists view wildlife diseases and has reshaped forest management.

Daily Smile: Sunday, April 26, 2026

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