Daily Darwin

[{"type":"text","text":"He loses bonus points on distance, style, and brains….."}]

Darwin no play 6 29 26

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

<title>Daily Darwin: Monday, June 29, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

He loses bonus points on distance, style, and brains…..

Daily Darwin: Monday, June 29, 2026

 He loses bonus points on distance, style, and brains…..

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Wyoming Life

Most 18-year-olds focus on deciding what they want to do after high school.

[{"type":"text","text":"Alyssa Shade already knows."}]

The Yoder teen already is a certified EMT, a red-carded wildland firefighter and a member of the all-volunteer Yoder Fire Department.

Another 18-year-old, J.R. Ruiz, joined the department only a few months ago. He recently returned from a wildfire-severity assignment in Colorado and, this past week, was helping on the South Fork Fire near Cody.

Behind them is another generation waiting in the wings. Fire Chief Justin Burkart's 17-year-old son, Jayden, is already part of the department, while his 16-year-old daughter, Maykayla, recently joined as a junior firefighter.

In a profession where volunteer departments nationwide are struggling to recruit younger members, Yoder appears to be on a different track.

How does a town of just 134 people keep producing firefighters sought out and trusted to fight some of the nation's biggest wildfires?

[{"type":"text","text":"The answer starts with volunteers investing in one another."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"We're 100% volunteer,\" Burkart told Cowboy State Daily."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Beyond Wyoming"}]

The tiny Goshen County community sits along U.S. Highway 85 south of Torrington, surrounded by hay fields and open prairie.

The Yoder Volunteer Fire Department protects roughly 248 square miles and serves about 700 residents throughout its fire district.

Yet those volunteers routinely deploy across the West, cutting fire lines with bulldozers, staffing engines on major incidents and supporting wildfire operations from Colorado to Virginia.

"We have a reputation of really sending out some professional firefighters to these incidents," Burkart said. "It's not a game to us. It's something that we really take some pride in."

Burkart joined the department as an 18-year-old in 1999 after discovering federal wildfire assignments could help pay for college.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"I found out it was a good way for me to pay for college,\" he said."}]

Today, the department routinely sends engines, a water tender and two dozers on federal assignments, with about 22 members participating regularly in the federal fire program.

Last year, Yoder firefighters collectively spent about three months helping battle wildfires in California. Burkart said the department paid roughly $1 million to firefighters and seasonal personnel through federal assignments in 2025.

For a department staffed entirely by volunteers, those assignments have become far more than an opportunity to earn extra income.

"They'll have more contact with live fire over a two-week period than most volunteers would have in a three- or four-year period," Burkart said.

[{"type":"text","text":"The knowledge comes home."}]

Heather Trompke, who serves on a Rocky Mountain incident management team, works in the finance section tracking personnel and equipment time during major incidents.

"We get to bring all of this stuff back," Trompke said. "We can train and show how to fill out documents properly, and that translates into a smoother fire for everyone else when they go out."

"There's always something to learn in wildland firefighting," added firefighter Bailey Powell. "It doesn't matter if you've been doing it for 60 years or five."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Growing Firefighters"}]

Like volunteer departments across America, Yoder faces a challenge that has nothing to do with flames.

"If you look nationwide, the volunteer fire service is aging out," Burkart said. "The younger generation is not really involved in that."

Instead of waiting for volunteers to walk through the station doors, Yoder and neighboring Goshen County departments are trying to grow their own.

Robert Shade helps coordinate a countywide junior firefighter program that introduces teenagers to the fire service before they turn 18.

"Right now, nationally, pretty much every trade, every job there is, there's a lack of young people getting involved," Shade said.

Junior firefighters learn equipment familiarization, truck maintenance, hose deployment, pump operations and safety procedures before becoming full firefighters.

"They're the future," Shade said. "We've got to make sure that we get them involved."

Rather than keeping the program confined to Yoder, departments across Goshen County work together so young firefighters train alongside one another.

"We're reaching out and kind of working with the whole county," Shade said. "It helps everyone get to know each other."

[{"type":"text","text":"The program appears to be paying off."}]

Shade started attending meetings as a teenager after encouragement from her boyfriend, who happens to be Burkart's son.

"I kind of started coming for fun," she said. "Then I got a true understanding of everything, and it just became really interesting."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Family Tradition"}]

Volunteer firefighting isn't just passed from one generation to the next in Yoder.

[{"type":"text","text":"It's often passed around the dinner table."}]

Burkart's wife left this week for a federal wildfire assignment in Colorado.  Robert Shade serves alongside daughter Alyssa.

"There are families on the department," Shade said. "Husbands and wives, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters."

For him, volunteering alongside Alyssa is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.

"It's a lot of fun to go out with Alyssa and do what we both love," he said.

[{"type":"text","text":"The work isn't without sacrifice."}]

"When the pager goes off, you could be at a dinner with your family," Burkart said. "You could be at your kid's birthday party. You could be at a track event for your kids."

[{"type":"text","text":"And the sacrifice isn't limited to firefighters."}]

"It's not only the members that have to make that sacrifice," he said. "It's also the family."

When firefighters deploy on federal assignments, the department still has to answer calls at home.

"We do have a lot of members that deploy nationally, but we also have to protect home when they're gone," Burkart said.

That responsibility is shared with neighboring departments through mutual-aid agreements.

Last year alone, Yoder firefighters assisted neighboring agencies 26 times, while local farmers and ranchers helped firefighters cut fire lines during large grass fires.

Yoder's firefighters have built something much larger than a volunteer department.

[{"type":"text","text":"They've built a pipeline to answer the call."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"One generation trains the next."}]

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<title>In Tiny Yoder, Wyoming — Population 134 — Firefighting Is In Their Blood | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Unlike volunteer fire departments across the nation which are struggling to recruit younger members, the town of Yoder is on a different track. Not only does it have a robust and growing team, but they are routinely sent out across the country to battle blazes.

In Tiny Yoder, Wyoming — Population 134 — Firefighting Is In Their Blood

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Around Wyoming

Many relics from the age of the steam engine in Wyoming remain. Some are grandiose, like 

One of these relics is the Lusk Water Tower, a point of pride in eastern Wyoming. It’s one of the few structures of its kind remaining in the United States, still standing strong 140 years after it was built.

“It's pretty important and iconic to the community,” said Leslie Stewart, a volunteer at 

. “I think there would be a drive to save it again if we needed to.”

It's also significant as one of only six surviving redwood water towers in the United States, according to the Niobrara County Historical Society.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Built Better"}]

In 1886, the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Railway was establishing a line to connect Douglas and Chadron, South Dakota. This necessitated new depots and water towers along the route to ensure the steam engines kept running.

Lusk was chosen because it had, at the time, the only post office along the intended route.

Stewart, who’s also a commissioner for Wyoming State Parks and Cultural Resources, said the establishment of this railway was an important development for the newly incorporated town.

“The railroads were coming this way to transport livestock, grain, mining equipment, and coal, but they also provided ready access for ranchers, farmers, and homesteaders coming to settle this area,” he said.

Water towers were essential for steam engines, but the Lusk Water Tower was built to be better. That’s reflected in the specifics of its design.

“It’s mostly made of Douglas fir, but the tank is four-inch planks of redwood,” Stewart said. “It wasn’t an aesthetic choice. They wanted something that would expand with water and hold the thing together tightly when it was wet.”

According to Stewart, adjustability was essential. The circular tank is 25 feet in diameter and equally as tall, but the redwood allowed it to expand and contract as needed.

“It was built like a barrel with metal bands around the outside,” she said. “When the tank was empty, they could tighten the bands. When it was full, they could loosen them up and expand the tank while keeping a tight fit.”

A windmill was used to move water 25 feet up into the tank. At full capacity, it could hold around 44,000 gallons of water.

In a certain sense, the Lusk Water Tower was ahead of its time in design and construction.

The tower and the railway were built by the Wyoming Central Railway, a subsidiary of the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Railway. The director of the subsidiary was Frank Lusk, for whom the town is named.

The Wyoming Central Railway was established specifically to ensure that a Wyoming company would build the line and all its infrastructure.

“That was one of the requirements for the railway,” Stewart said. “They had to have a Wyoming company do the construction.”

There’s another way the Lusk Water Tower happened to be ahead of its time: It was deemed worth saving before it was too late.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Standing Strong"}]

When the original Lusk train depot was destroyed by fire, the water tower was moved from the center of town to the eastern edge, where it stands today. The tower continued to service steam locomotives until diesels took over.

The railway, which is still in service, changed hands multiple times over the next several decades. However, there were concerns that the Lusk Water Tower might be destroyed by the very railway it had been built to service.

“The Chicago and North Western Transportation Company was moving a lot of heavy coal traffic past the tower,” Stewart said. “The Niobrara County Historical Society was concerned that the vibrations from the trains would destroy the tower.”

In 1971, the Niobrara County Historical Society purchased the Lusk Water Tower. A campaign was immediately started to raise money to restore and repair it.

By 1982, enough was raised for Gillette LNT Fabrication and Construction to do a thorough restoration.

“A lot of different organizations helped fund that restoration, including the Wyoming Legislature and the Chicago and North Western Transportation Company,” Stewart said. “I don't think the railroad had any interest in saving it, although they did help in the end.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Lusk’s Own"}]

In 1991, the Lusk Water Tower was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Rheba Massey, the historian who submitted the form for its consideration, said the tower was “one small part of that great expansion” that had “a major effect on the settlement history of the area.”

“The Lusk Water Tower represents this early development of rail transportation, including steam locomotion from the period of 1886 to World War II,” she wrote. “Massive water towers and windmills were regular features of station sites during the age of steam, (and) the Lusk Water Tower is Wyoming's only surviving railroad structure of its type.”

The railway is currently owned by Union Pacific, which still sends plenty of freight past the iconic tower.

As of 2026, the only other tower of its type that’s easy to track down is the Gerlach Water Tower, built in 1909 in Gerlach, Nevada.

Stewart wasn’t sure how many redwood water towers were built or how many remain. She’s content that the Lusk Water Tower isn’t going anywhere.

“We still get people asking about the tower,” she said. “Alumni come home and say they had to swing by the tower to make sure it was still there.”

She also applauded everyone who recognized the tower’s historic significance and organized the successful effort to save it, at a time when historical preservation wasn’t as popular as it would become.

“If those historically astute people hadn’t recognized that, I’m not sure it would have been saved,” she said.

Lusk Redwood water tower 6 28 26

<title>Lusk's Redwood Water Tower, One Of 6 Left In US, Still Standing After 140 Years | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The redwood water tower in Lusk was built in 1886 to keep steam engines running between Wyoming and South Dakota. While the engines are gone, the tower endures 140 years after it was built and is one of six such relics still standing in the United States.

Lusk's Redwood Water Tower, One Of 6 Left In US, Still Standing After 140 Years

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

Renée Jean

In a modern West where history is increasingly paved over or fenced in, Wyoming’s notorious Hole in the Wall outlaw hideout stands out as one of few places that remains just as wild as it was more than a century ago. 

Here, a towering red rock wall rises 400 feet and stretches, seemingly unbroken, for 35 miles. 

There’s an ocean of blue sky above and a sea of green prairiegrass below without another human soul for endless miles. This cliff appears both seamless and impassible — a beautiful, if formidable, sight.

Hidden within that long wall, however, is a single passage where a man can slip past the rock and simply vanish. 

And that is what gave this place its name, the Hole in the Wall. 

It’s not really a hole in the wall, cowboy historian Clay Gibbons tells visitors on his tours of the remote hideout. It’s more like a notch, just wide enough for a single man on horseback to squeeze through. 

Beyond that notch lies a secluded and lush valley just right for grazing stolen cattle and horses, and impossible to see from the outside.

The narrowness of this nearly invisible notch also makes it easy to defend. A lone gunman with plenty of ammunition can hold off a much larger force. 

That helped keep lawmen at bay for decades, creating a haven for outlaws ranging from Harvey Logan — better known as Kid Curry — to Butch Cassidy. 

Though Cassidy didn’t spend as much time here as he did a place further west called 

 where three states meet, giving him three  directions to escape the law.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Finding The 'Hole'"}]

One of the first things Gibbons does on his tours is teach visitors how to find the nearly invisible passage. 

“So there’s that red wall that has no shadows on it,” Gibbons said, pointing toward the red cliffs. “And then there’s this one that has shadows. You see where it comes together? There’s a triangular shadow. 

"And at the top left of that triangle there’s a little white dot.”

It looks insignificant. In reality, it’s a flat, white rock measuring 12 feet by 15 feet. 

“We’re about 3 miles away from the hole right now, so as we get closer, that will get bigger,” Gibbons said. “But first, we’re going to stop at the Hole in the Wall Fight site, where I put up a state historical marker, and I’ll tell you how I found that location. That’s going to be some story.”

Stories are actually what Gibbons’ Hole in the Wall tours are all about. 

They begin the moment his vehicle lurches onto a rugged two-track — less road and more dry riverbed. It’s a ride that jostles the insides in more than one direction at once, even as an untamed and beautiful landscape unfolds.

Gibbons laughs about the roughness of the ride and admits some would question his speed, given the bumpy terrain. But, he adds with a grin, the pace is absolutely necessary. 

Even by vehicle, this trip to the Hole in the Wall will take every bit of an entire day, from sunup to sundown. There’s a lot to see and a lot of history to tell, so the truck careens onward without slowing down.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Growing Up With History"}]

Gibbons comes by his love of history naturally. His dad loved it, too. 

Growing up, the third-generation Worland native went everywhere with his dad, who owned an implement dealership. To help pass the time, Gibbons’ dad would tell him all kinds of interesting historical tales. 

By the time he was 16, Gibbons had heard so much about the Fetterman massacre, for example, he was timing his entire school day by it on its 100th anniversary.

“I didn’t get anything done in school that day,” Gibbons said with a chuckle. “I stared at the clock and I was thinking, ‘OK, right now Fetterman is doing this. Right now Crazy Horse is doing this.’ I mean, I was just mesmerized.”

For Gibbons, though, it’s never been enough to know what happened when. He also wants to know where it happened. Exactly where.

One day as he and his dad were driving south of Ten Sleep over Spring Creek, a 9-year-old Gibbons asked his father where 

“He kind of waved out to the side,” Gibbons recalled. “Somewhere over there.”

That answer didn’t satisfy Gibbons, and sent him on a lifetime historical search that would eventually uncover lost details of that raid and allow him to pinpoint exactly where it happened.

Gibbons applied that same mentality to the 1897 Hole in the Wall Fight. 

At first, the location of the gun battle was a mystery.

Newspapers only mentioned the battle’s location vaguely. Locals, meanwhile, would say it was by the Bob Smith Hill, “somewhere over there.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Those were fighting words to Gibbons. "}]

He started digging into old court papers and documents, trying to find something that could help him pin down an exact location. 

From that effort, he learned that county officials at the time weren’t sure whether the shooting was a Natrona County or a Johnson County crime. They sent a surveyor to the scene to find the county line and determine which county had jurisdiction.

Clay was eventually able to track down the surveyor’s century-old field notes, which mentioned a large pile of rocks marking the site of the shooting. 

Gibbons had noticed an unusual pile of rocks when he had visited before. They weren’t like the rock Indian cairns that mark the 1,500-year-old Sioux War Trail that winds through the Hole in the Wall country. And they weren’t like a grave marker either.

Using Bureau of Land Management maps and the surveyor’s legal descriptions, Gibbons was eventually able to verify that the pile of rocks he’d seen was in the same spot indicated by the surveyor’s notes.

A stone monument now stands at the site of the battle on a windswept knob just above Buffalo Creek. 

The marker retells the story of the battle. 

Stock detective Bob Divine of the CY Cattle Co. had ridden up to the Hole in the Wall with 10 cowboys to look for rustled cattle. They met three members of the local outlaw crowd, brothers-in-law Bob and Al Smith and their partner Bob Taylor.

“There was animosity between Bob Divine and Bob Smith,” Gibbons said. “Divine asked if they’d seen any CY cattle and Smith replied, ‘Not a damn one.’”

Smith, believing that Divine was about to pull his weapon, pulled his own gun first. 

“Shots were fired,” Gibbons said. “Horses were pitching and the dust flew. When the smoke cleared, Bob Smith lay on the ground with a bullet through his back and Divine’s horse had been killed, and he and his son Lee had been wounded.”

Al Smith escaped after his gun was shot from his hand, and Bob Smith was taken to the Hole in the Wall Cabin where he died the next day with his young wife at his side.

“Bob Taylor was captured and taken to the Natrona County jail and later released shortly after that,” Gibbons said. “Divine led a contingent with heavily armed men and two deputies through the Hole and drive several hundred cattle out. 

"They were watched closely by a number of armed men, but were not bothered.”

After the sad tale, Gibbons offers a spread of sandwiches and drinks for lunch, and then there are more stories.

Clay shifts seamlessly from outlaw history to the wider, grittier politics of the West at the time and the Johnson County War, when powerful cattle barons brought 32 hired guns up from Texas at $5 a day plus $50 per scalp. 

The siege of the TA Ranch comes alive as he is talking, as does the doomed defense of small ranchers like Nate Champion, who wrote his last words in his diary as gunmen ringed his cabin and finally set it ablaze.

“The cabin's on fire,” Gibbons quotes Champion. “I’m going to have to make a run for it. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.”

Champion, Gibbons said, took his boots off before charging out into the gunfire. It’s an odd piece of historical detail that has nagged at Gibbons for years. 

“I always wondered why the hell he took his boots off,” Gibbons said. “Because the people who were there, the invaders, had mentioned that he had his boots off, had a rifle in one hand and a revolver in another, and he goes out the back door shouting.”

Champion was met with a barrage of 28 bullets, Gibbons said. 

“They went up to him and they tied a little note to his vest, ‘Cattle thieves beware,’” Gibbons said. “And so that’s where Nate met his end.”

Gibbons spotted an old frontier saying he believes explains Champion’s bootless feet.

“If you died with your boots on it meant you were an outlaw,” Gibbons said. “A good guy dies in bed, right? You don’t wear your boots to bed. So it finally clicked. Nate stripped those boots off as his final statement. 

"He wanted the world to know he wasn’t an outlaw.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Cassidy’s Escape Plan"}]

No Hole in the Wall story can be complete without a Butch Cassidy mention or two. But Clay doesn’t treat Cassidy like a Hollywood myth. Cassidy was a smart, calculating professional.

“He understood one thing, and that’s a fresh horse will outrun a tired horse every day of the week,” Gibbons said. “So when he would pull his jobs, whether it’s a bank job or a train job or whatever, he always knew where he was going after he got the cash. 

"He knew where they were headed, and so what he’d do is take a horse and ride the hell out of him and about 15 miles away … to a fresh horse.”

By planting fresh horses every 15 miles or so along his escape route, Cassidy guaranteed he would stay ahead of law enforcement and ultimately get away. 

The law didn’t know where he was going and had no fresh horses to keep up. 

Fast horses could take Cassidy to a hideout like Hole in the Wall where sheriff’s deputies feared to travel. 

“For hell’s sake, how do they expect us to ever catch these outlaws once they get into the Hole in the Wall?” an exasperated sheriff wrote in a bitter letter to the Pinkertons and the Wyoming governor after the Wilcox Train Robbery. “There’s nobody will talk. Everybody protects them. It’s a den of thieves.”

Locals had their reasons for protecting the outlaws who used the Hole in the Wall.

For one, they paid well for fresh horses. 

In an anecdote Gibbons found, one ranch wife told a visiting writer she could leave a coffee can of coins on her mantle, and if outlaws passed through while the family was away, they’d cook themselves a meal, leave the house tidy and sometimes even add to the can of coins.

“Who is going to turn in the men who treat you better than some of the big outfits do?” Gibbons asked.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Unfolding Mystery"}]

Not all of Gibbons’ stories are settled history. Some are still unfolding. 

Like the one he tells at the remnants of Alex Ghent’s ranch. 

The cabin and barn look like a heap of breaking grey bones, bowing to the inexorable years and slowly sinking into the earth. 

In this place, Ghent once raised fast horses for the Hole in the Wall crowd, including the mounts that helped the Wilcox train robbers disappear into this country.

At some point, a second man named Joseph “Joe” Bowie bought into the ranch. The two bachelors ran cattle together until Bowie went back East, married a schoolteacher and brought her home to this lonely, but spectacular, place.

Cheyenne newspapers of the time gushed over the new Mrs. Bowie. She was so vibrant, charming and beloved by everyone she met, and they wished the couple “the best of luck in their new home in the Hole in the Wall.”

Not long after that, however, there’s a legal notice in the same paper. Mrs. Joseph Bowie is filing for divorce due to abandonment. She hasn’t seen her husband in over a year.

The notice had to run three times in the newspaper before a judge granted the divorce. The very next day after that, Mrs. Bowie became Mrs. Alex Ghent.

Gibbons has always wondered about that. Did Bowie really walk away from his equity in the ranch he’d worked so hard for and the wife he’d married from back East?

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Or had something else happened …"}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Tin Cup Clue"}]

One weekend while Gibbons was camping over the Fourth of July, he decided to do a little poking around with a metal detector. He found a dump near an outhouse with shards of pottery, old medicine bottles, and old tools. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He also found a tin cup in that trench."}]

In a modern West where history is increasingly paved over, Wyoming’s notorious Hole in the Wall outlaw hideout remains just as wild as it was more than a century ago. Here, a towering red rock wall rises 400 feet and stretches for 35 miles. 

Daily Darwin: Monday, June 29, 2026

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