Drinking Wyoming: The SOB Who Showed Up Four Days Late To The Boulder Bar

The crowd at the Boulder Bar on a Sunday in September offers a representative sample of rural Sublette County: rancher, fishing guide, washed-up rodeo rider and retired rig mechanic.

Then there's Donna Steele, who belongs in a category all her own. 

"I'll be damned!” she says. "You’re the son of a bitch from the newspaper, aren't ya?”

Steele throws her voice across the room like a lariat, snagging the attention of every man at the bar.

Patrons look your way. Suddenly, this small crowd feels very large.

"You're the son of a bitch we've been waiting for for four days!"

You’ve got a defense, but your instinct tells you to save your breath. Besides, coming from Steele, son of a bitch sounds more like a welcome than a reprimand.

"Don't worry," she says. "I wouldn't say anything behind your back that I wouldn't say to your face."

The bartender smirks.

For more than half a century, Steele has been taking the measure of men passing through the Boulder Bar. She and her husband, Pete, took over this family business in 1972.

Smack in ranch country, it’s the kind of place that’s seen deer nose right through the door.

And amid western Wyoming's natural gas-rich Jonah Field, it also doubled as a second home for hard-drinking rig hands, whose fistfights sometimes sent them caroming around the bar like pool balls.

Toolpushers used to recruit roughnecks at the bar based on who appeared the least drunk. Steele had to periodically summon the company men to remind them whose roof their crews were drinking under.

Such stories have been accumulating here for generations, but you’ll have to wait to hear them. Donna is already gone.

Her son, Burke, recently took over the family business, and the transition represents more than a change in ownership. 

It comes at a moment when Boulder, population 115, finds itself caught between old Wyoming and whatever comes next. 

In a place that prides itself on staying the same, what happens when the world around it does not?

‘Always Some Kind Of Nonsense’

Outside, a thumbnail moon hangs low on the horizon, and Burke Steele is smoking a cigar beside a rusted 1965 Ford Galaxie. 

"This takes about 30 minutes," he said, lifting the cigar. "My children are small, and at night when I light this I get to say, 'You guys leave me alone until this cigar's gone.'"

Thirty minutes is enough time for old memories to surface.

Burke didn't hear stories about the Boulder Bar secondhand. He grew up in the house attached to it.

"I'd be asleep next door, and the bar would wake me up," he recalled. "You could hear that change in noise, and it was a problem when it went from laughing to yelling."

One night, a fencing crew drank the place past its tipping point. 

When 10-year-old Burke wandered in to investigate, liquor slicked the floor and a barstool sat buried in the shattered glass of the jukebox.

"They'd pitched the stool right through it," he said. "I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. My dad did not agree."

He shakes his head at the memory. His own son is that age now.

The odds of his son wandering into the aftermath of a bar fight are considerably lower, but for Burke, growing up beside the Boulder Store in the 1980s, that sort of thing was not uncommon.

He recalled a drunk who came after hours threatening to barge through the door of the Steele family home, only to discover Pete Steele waiting behind a shotgun barrel. 

He remembered the winter a pickup plowed through the side of the bar and stopped feet short of an old cowboy nursing whiskey.

"There was always some kind of nonsense like that going on," Burke said.

Although lately, his mind is mostly on the future. 

As the third-generation steward of the family business, he’s got to consider how the oil field has faded, how ranching employs fewer people than it once did, and how the area has become increasingly reliant on tourism.

"I used to be the type to resist change," he said. "But it’s coming … and best that you try to adapt." 

If much has changed around Boulder, the instinct to size up a newcomer is not one of them. 

The bartender has real suspicions about a son of a bitch from the newspaper.

‘I DON’T TRUST YOU’

Back inside, the crowd has dwindled to a single patron. 

The last customer is a fly-fishing guide from Utah who’s glued to the New York Giants game. His second cousin, Jaxson Dart, is the starting quarterback.

"I talked to him all the time," he said, pausing. “Before he got famous.”

Behind the bar, Clayton is less interested in football than the clock.

His mind is already on tomorrow. He closes the store each night. His wife, Connie, opens it every morning.

“I’ll be sitting right there drinking vodka-cranberry at 6:30 tomorrow morning,” he said, pointing to the end stool. “That's the only time I have to spend with my wife."

At 57, Clayton looks like a man who's paid a price for the life he's lived. His eyes are filled with fatigue, and he’s missing most of his teeth.

One explanation hangs on the wall.

"That's me right there," he said, pointing to an iconic rodeo photograph in a frame over the door.

Around here, rodeo isn't treated as something exotic. You could spend an evening at the Boulder Bar beside multiple former rodeo competitors and never know it.

Clayton grew up on a ranch outside La Barge. He slept in a converted barn loft with his parents and siblings. Nobody had a private bedroom. Hay chutes lay beneath the closet floorboards.

Rodeo was just another extension of rural life for Clayton, who spent every spare moment riding, roping and looking for things to chase.

"You get an hour break, you run a pen," he said, adding that because it came out of a lifestyle, rather than just being a sport, “Rodeo meant something different back then.”

But that lifestyle collects a payment.

For Clayton, the bill came due in an arena in Vernal, Utah, in 1988.

“I hit the ground hard, I’m dazed,” he said,  “I got up and ran, but I ran in the wrong direction.” 

“We were face to face. I ran right into the bull,” he said.

He hooks a finger beneath his upper lip and pulls it back to reveal the damage: a single, cracked front tooth dangling down like a bat in a barn loft.

If he’ll tell you about the inside of his mouth, there’s a lot about his past he won't tell you.

Like why Ronald Reagan's Interior Department once sent a letter to his parents effectively stating, “Get your kid under control, or we will.”

But now he’s said too much. When you press for details, the conversation ends abruptly.

“No, because I don’t know you,” he said.

“SO I DON’T TRUST YOU!”

He marched over to the jukebox, queued up a Charley Pride song and cranked the volume so loud the whiskey bottles practically rattled on the shelf.

Point taken: This interview is over.

‘Somebody Dies, They Don’t Come’

The next morning, sure enough, there’s Clayton, drinking vodka-cranberry at the bar.

He’s not in the mood to field more questions, but there’s someone who will.

“Follow me,” he said. 

He leads the way through the back of the store, down a hallway, past an office and into a tidy kitchen.

Waiting at the island counter is the same woman who called you a son of a bitch last night.

“I’m old school. You tell someone you’re going to be here, you are,” said Donna Steele.

 “But that was yesterday,” she adds. "Water under the bridge.”

Her green eyes twinkle when she smiles.

“Coffee?” she asks.

Spread across the countertop are photographs, newspaper clippings and fragments of local history. 

They reference an era when people cut ice blocks from the river for food preservation and when bad winters would leave families isolated for months at a time. 

She’s more interested in the town's people themselves. Ask enough questions, and nearly every story she tells eventually circles back to the idea of trust.

She told the story of Chris Bunning, a banker from Rock Springs who spent time at the bar between travels to his cabin near Boulder Lake. 

Bunning was there the morning in 1990 when a television crew checked out of the motel. They explained on the way out they’d have to stay elsewhere next time because Boulder didn't have a restaurant.

"How much do you think it would cost to start a restaurant?" Bunning asked her when they left.

She had no idea. He opened his wallet right there and handed her $10,000 in cash.

“I just took out an envelope and I wrote on it: ‘I, Donna Steele, owe old Chris Bunning $10,000,’” she said.

Each time Bunning drove up from Rock Springs, she'd make another payment. 

Years later, after he died, Donna showed the envelope to his daughter, who had no idea, but wasn’t surprised.

"That's my dad," the woman told her.

Slow Bleed

Stories like that, Donna says, used to be common here.

Outside the kitchen window, a pickup pulls up to the gas pumps towing a trailer full of pack horses. Donna watches it for a moment.

"When I first came here, there were five [local] outfitters," she said. "Now there's one."

Another change is that nearby ranches have been bought by people with more money than time, she said, but what bothers her isn’t their money.

“They’re coming in and buying up these prime ranches with all the river on them, but they’re not part of the community,” she said.

“You have a potluck supper, they don’t come. Somebody’s sick and we have a fundraiser, they don’t come. Somebody dies, they don’t come,” she said. “They just want to fish and go back to wherever they came from.”

For Donna Steele, belonging has never been measured in acreage, money or how long somebody owns a place.

It comes down to something simpler: showing up — even if you're a son of a bitch who shows up late.

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.