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Zakary Sonntag

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Business

Typically, the people who bleed in the emergency room are patients. This past week at Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County in Rock Springs, it was a nurse.

Around 9 p.m. July 20, emergency department nurse Christian R. stepped into a patient's room for a routine medication check. Seconds later, he fled with a broken nose.

“I asked the patient if he’d take his nighttime medication, then he stood up and walked towards me and with a closed fist punched me straight in the face,” Christian told Cowboy State Daily.

He heard a pop when the punch landed. Blood started pouring from his nose as he stumbled out of the room. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"But there was no time to process the pain."}]

The patient chased Christian through the emergency department, catching him more than once and resuming the attack.

“He ended up catching up to me and throwing more punches and then using his knees to try and knee me in the head,” he said. “He did knee me a couple times, so I have lacerations to my lips.”

Christian ran around corners, down two hallways and eventually into the department lobby, where a security worker intervened by tripping the patient.

The patient tumbled to the floor, giving Christian enough time to sprint back into the emergency department, where a colleague pulled him into a locked supply room.

There, surrounded by shelves stocked with gauze, wound-care supplies and medical equipment, the shock finally began to set in.

“I was shocked that he attacked me, but he continued chasing me — that’s what shocked me the most,” Christian said. “The patient had run past countless other nurses and staff, but was just fully focused on me and trying to get me.”

Christian's experience was dramatic. Health care leaders say it’s not unique.

Health care workers are five times more likely to experience workplace violence injuries than workers overall, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While they make up less than 10% of the overall workforce, nurses and other health care workers experience 48% of all nonfatal injuries due to workplace violence, according to analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"In Wyoming, the problem takes many forms."}]

“First of all, you get a lot of verbal violence as a nurse. People call you all kinds of nasty names and four-letter words and curse and swear at you,” said Tracy Garcia, chief of nursing operations at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, who’s seen the gamut after working in the health care sector for 37 years. 

Garcia believes emergency department workers shoulder an outsized share of the problem.

“In the emergency department, I've had people slap me, kick at me, throw things at me,” said Garcia, adding that violence has become more common and more egregious over the course of her career.

“Several years ago, we had a physician who was pregnant, and that physician was punched in the stomach by a patient who knew she was pregnant, because the patient was mad at the care the physician was providing,” she said.

Garcia said her hospital averages roughly 50 incidents of workplace violence involving patients or family members each year. She worries what it does for retention in an industry already struggling to recruit workers.

"If people know about this workplace violence and we don’t come up with solutions, they may be less likely to go into nursing,” she said.

Why So Much Violence Against Doctors And Nurses?

The roots of the problem lie in the nature of hospital work itself, especially in emergency departments and other nerve-racking units where pain, fear and family crises often converge, according to Josh Hannes, former vice president of the Wyoming Hospital Association.

People arrive injured, intoxicated, distressed, or terrified for a loved one. Then there’s the intensely personal nature of the care, which can blur boundaries in dangerous ways. 

This makes hospitals fundamentally different from other workplaces, as well as more volatile, Hannes said, adding that the issue has worsened in recent years in part because it’s not well understood.

“It's really an untold story,” he said, offering the example of one of his associates whose head was grabbed and thrown into a hospital door by a patient. "Most people don’t realize the literal danger their providers are in when they're at the workplace.

“People think of police officers or corrections officers and the risks for violence in those professions, and that makes sense, but they don't know this is happening to people who work in places that are meant to be places of healing.”

Hannes said one solution is to treat health care workers more like police officers, by which he means enhancing penalties for violence against health care workers.

That approach has been adopted by many states. Wyoming is not one of them.

Wyoming Among Few States Without Protections

Wyoming lawmakers have tried to address violence against health care workers.

Bills introduced in 2023, 2024 and 2025 would have strengthened reporting requirements, created workplace-safety standards and increased penalties for assaults against health care workers. None became law.

“It got caught up in the whole Freedom Caucus — they said, ‘These are special rights for a class of citizens’— and it went downhill from there,” said former state Rep. Dan Zwonitzer, R-Laramie, who sponsored the first major effort in 2023, adding that stripped-down versions his bill in successive years hit the same roadblocks.

“It had the medical community behind it,” he said. "It had tons of frontline stories talking about what happens and why it’s needed … and we still couldn't get it passed."

Opponents argued that creating health care-specific penalties risked turning the law into a patchwork of protected occupations rather than applying equal justice to everyone. 

In addition, some legal experts say there is insufficient evidence that increasing punishment severity deters violence in hospital settings.

Though nurses like Christian have an existing legal remedy, recourse is complicated where mental health is involved, as may have been the case in Rock Springs this past week, implied Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County CEO Kari Quickenden in a statement to Cowboy State Daily.

“Hospitals throughout Wyoming and across the country are seeing an increasing number of patients experiencing behavioral health crises,” said Quickenden. "Caring for these patients safely and compassionately is one of the most complex challenges facing health care today, and Sweetwater Memorial remains committed to providing that care while protecting the safety of our employees, patients, and visitors."

Reform advocates say this is more reason to establish new legal standards.

“The profession recognizes that there is a difference with psychiatric situations,” said Hannes. “This is not about taking people like a geriatric patient who has cognitive problems and trying to throw them in jail.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"What Will Christian Do?"}]

While in the locked supply closet, a doctor told Christian his nose appeared broken, but he didn’t fully grasp the severity of his injury until a colleague handed him a mirror in a treatment room later.

“When I saw myself I said, 'OK, this is definitely something bad that happened to me,'” he said. “Seeing my bloody face with the nose that wasn’t straight anymore, seeing the damage — that’s when all the emotions really hit.”

Five days after the attack, he had two black eyes and a sore nose. He expects the physical injuries to heal. The emotional ones are harder to measure.

Christian is a Fort Worth, Texas, native who came to Rock Springs on a short-term nursing contract. He fell in love with the area's outdoor recreation and welcoming community and decided to renew his contract. 

He’s recently signed his third consecutive renewal, but the incident last Monday has raised questions about whether he’ll renew for a fourth. 

For the first time in his career, Christian is considering leaving emergency medicine altogether.

Christian followed his father and older brother into nursing, and said he chose emergency care because it felt the most impactful.

“I've always loved taking care of people,” Christian said. "If somebody got hurt, I always wanted to be the first one to try and help in whichever way I was able to."

According to Wyoming Medical Association Executive Director Sheila Bush, Christian is a prototype of health care workers who she described as people wired to help.

“The thing that gets me the most with this whole issue is the fact that our health care workers are one of the only professions that are strictly there to provide care and heal people,” she said. “They are located in facilities that cannot deny care, especially in an emergency situation.

“They are in health care because they want to help. They're not always trained in self‑defense always. They don't have any tools to enhance their ability to defend themselves.”

Christian was a prototype in this regard as well.

“I've never been in a fight,” he said. "I’d never gotten hit with a bare fist, ever."

He told Cowboy State Daily he intends to pursue criminal charges against the patient who assaulted him, and he is working with the hospital’s legal team to that end. 

In addition to personal recompense, he hopes his experience will inspire changes for the industry. 

“The biggest thing for me is just some kind of change, so that nurses … especially in this state … just feel safer going to work,” he said.

Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County emergency 2 7 26 26

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

<title>Patient Attacks Rocks Springs ER Nurse And Chases Him Through Hospital | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A patient attacked a Rock Springs emergency nurse, breaking his nose and chasing him through Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County this past week. "He was fully focused on trying to get me," the nurse said. Health care leaders say this is not unique.

Patient Attacks Rocks Springs ER Nurse And Chases Him Through Hospital

Heinz mark

Mark Heinz

Wildlife

Wyoming hunters seeking next fall’s trophy bulls and bucks can start looking now. After months of explosive growth, elk and deer antlers are about as big as they’re going to get for the year.

Good nutrition is the key. With the onset of spring, bucks and bulls must first recover the body mass they lost over the winter. Then they continue eating like hogs, pumping additional nutrients into antler growth.

In peak season, typically in early summer, antlers can grow up to an inch a day.

During the process, a fuzzy substance called “velvet” covers the antlers. It looks like its namesake, but is actually skin, dense with blood vessels and covered with short, dense fur.

As summer wanes, the velvet starts to dry, and the animals rub it off on trees and brush.

Once the velvet is rubbed off, elk emerge with a clean set of headgear, just in time for fierce, 

 associated with the rut, or mating season.

The elk rut starts in mid-September and lasts “well into October,” retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Bruce Smith told Cowboy State daily.

The deer rut usually starts in late October, peaks in November and might run into December.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Cycle Starts In February"}]

Buck and bulls go through a yearly cycle of growing, shedding and then re-growing their antlers, with each set getting larger than the previous year’s.

Large bull elk start shedding their antlers as early as February, said Smith, who was the senior biologist at the National Elk Refuge near Jackson from 1982 to 2004 and now lives in Bozeman, Montana.

Smaller bulls and spikes (male elk that have only single-tine, spike antlers) might not shed theirs until April or May, he said.

With that jump-start, larger bulls might start growing antlers by April, Smith said.

However, they’re still trying to make up for the nutritional deficit coming out of winter.

Antler growth can’t really kick into high gear until late spring or early summer, when green, nutrient-rich grasses and other plants become available, Smith said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The cycle is similar for deer, he said."}]

Elk are primarily grazers (grass-eaters), while deer are browsers, relying heavily on shrubs and forbs.

After mid-July, hot dry weather settles in “like we’re having now,” Smith said.

Foliage starts to dry out and its nutritional value wanes, so antler growth slows to a stop.  

Bull elk might then seek green “riparian areas and wet meadows,” which could help boost a final antler growth spurt, Smith said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Nitrogen And Lead"}]

What all of that means is that hunters eyeballing bulls and bucks now, in mid-July, can have get a reasonable estimation of how big they’ll be during the fall hunting seasons after the velvet comes off, Smith said.

He noted that elk habits can be driven by “nitrogen and lead.” (The latter being a reference to the lead in hunter’s bullets).

"They are attracted to nitrogen, and they’re afraid of lead,” he said.

The nitrogen, or nitrates, is the primary nutrient that is easily digestible and promotes antler growth, Smith said.

Antlers might frequently be called “bone,” which is reasonably accurate, he added.

“It’s certainly more like bone than another other particular tissue or structure that you might find in the animal’s body,” Smith said.

The entire region had a mild winter and early spring, which bodes well for wildlife, and antler growth, Smith said.

He lives in Montana, which also saw significant rains recently. That also helps with antler growth.

So, Smith expects at least average antler growth in Montana bull elk this year.

It might not be so great in Wyoming, which leaned toward the dry side this spring and early summer, said avid hunter Owen Miller, who lives in northeast Wyoming.

“They (antlers) grow fast from the start of the growing stage. This time of year, it looks like they’re growing faster because each tine (point) is growing,” he told Cowboy State Daily.

 “A dry year, like this summer has been, also has an effect on them. With less green foliage around, and being dry, it has fewer nutrients,” he added.

“Both bucks and bulls can be smaller than the previous year, due to water shortages and fewer nutrients during drought,” he said.

Mule deer rack 8 24 23

<title>After Growing Fast Through July, Elk And Deer Antlers About As Big As They’ll Get | Cowboy State Daily</title>

During the peak antler growing-season of spring and early summer, Wyoming bull elk and buck deer can add an inch per day to their antlers thanks to lush foliage. Now that it's the peak of summer, antler growth will grind almost to a halt.

After Growing Fast Through July, Elk And Deer Antlers About As Big As They’ll Get

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

Wyoming Life

[{"type":"text","text":"Frank Canton was known for his eyes. "}]

Rancher Elmer Brock claimed that Canton had "yellow coyote eyes." Edward Burnett, a rancher who also knew him well, said that when Canton got his steely eye on a man that settled it.

“Canton carried a gun, perhaps sometimes two of them,” Burnett said. “I never knew of his using one. His eye was sufficient.”

Canton was also a man with a secret identit

 admitted his real name was Joe Horner. 

According to Margaret Brock Hanson in her book “Powder River Country,” Canton had gone on a cattle drive through Kansas when he was a teenager in 1869. On his way home through Texas, he found trouble.

“The stories vary as to the adventures of these boys,” Hanson wrote. “But it seems that they got to Jacksboro where they all got liquored up and tried to shoot up the town.”

Near Jacksboro was Fort Richardson. Hanson said the story she heard was that Buffalo soldiers tried to arrest the cowboys and some were killed. The boys escaped and headed west to unsettled country. 

[{"type":"text","text":"At Comanche, Texas, they robbed a bank."}]

“Evidently, young Joe Horner was not in on the robbery and was left behind when the other boys left town in a hurry,” Hanson said. “Therefore, Joe was the only one who was arrested.”

Another story was that Horner could not reveal his alibi without compromising a girl of good repute. 

He was tried, convicted and given a long jail sentence. Horner was said to have escaped with the help of the girl or her family. Other rumors said the jailer’s daughter became enamored with him and helped him escape. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Working for the Association"}]

In Canton’s autobiography “Frontier Trails”, there is no mention of 

 as a teenager or even that he changed his name. He does write about joining a big cattle drive when he was 17 in the spring of 1869, and about subsequent cattle drives.   

By 1878, the fugitive accepted a position with the Wyoming Stock Raisers’ Association as field inspector, with headquarters at Cheyenne.

“My duties were to take charge of the criminal work on the range, protect the interests of members of the Association, recover stolen property, and furnish evidence against stock thieves,” Canton wrote in his memoirs.

He was sent to the Yellowstone River country in Montana, with headquarters at Miles City. He then investigated a report that the Crow Indians were killing some of the association’s cattle and selling the beef for elk meat.

Canton said he took advantage of the trip to look over the battleground where Gen. Custer and 278 men were killed two years earlier at Little Big Horn.

“History calls this the 'Custer Massacre', but according to the Indian custom, I would call it a fair fight,” Canton said. “Custer made the first attack on the Indians and after that they had to fight and they certainly did fight to a finish.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"City Thugs"}]

When Canton arrived in Montana, the railroad ended in Miles City. The only way to travel west was by horse or stagecoach.

Canton said the railroad company furnished free transportation from the East to all laborers. 

se criminal element in the big cities took them up on the offer.

“The result was that the country west of Miles City, Montana, was soon overrun with the most desperate gang of cut-throats that ever went unhung,” Canton said.

He complained that the cattle thieves and the stage robbers along the Yellowstone were bad enough, but when this bunch of city thugs was turned loose, law-abiding citizens were surrounded by unbearable conditions.

“The officers were brave and determined, and did their duty, but there were not enough of them,” Canton said. “The actual residents in Montana then took a hand in the game.”

According to Canton, vigilante committees were organized and second warnings were never issued.

“If the first warning was not obeyed, you would probably find several dead bodies hanging to telegraph poles,” Canton said. “The vigilantes soon ran the crooks out of the towns.”

Granville Stuart, president of the Montana Stock Association, then recruited 50 cowboys in a war of extermination against the criminals on the range and along the Yellowstone, Musselshell and Missouri rivers.  

The criminals who escaped were said to hav

Canton moved from Miles City in 1880 and settled at Buffalo, Wyoming, still in the employ of the Wyoming Stock Association. He homesteaded 480 acres 

iles southwest of Buffalo at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains, where he began farming and stock raising.

“It was the best rendezvous for outlaws that I have ever seen,” he said. “And they were there, plenty of them.” 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Elected Sheriff"}]

Burnett, the rancher who knew Canton well, said the high life in the little adolescent city of Buffalo was altogether too much for the sheriff and deputy.

“The County Commissioners could not put them out of office, so they put in Frank Canton as deputy sheriff and stock inspector,” Burnett said. “He called to him a little sawed-off Texan of the name of Jim Enochs, and they hung a man or two and then things settled down nice and quiet.”

Canton was elected sheriff of Johnson County in 1882. He appointed John McDermott as undersheriff to take charge of the office and hired 18 field deputies.

“I had but little time to stay in my office for the next two years, for I was in charge of the field work myself, and in the saddle most of the time,” Canton said.

Burnett said Canton was sheriff for two terms and could have had a third, but he thought McDermott was entitled to the office so he did not run.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Neighbor Rancher"}]

Burnett, according to the Wyoming State Archives, was a native of Durham, England. He immigrated to Texas where, in 1880, he joined a trail herd bound for Wyoming. 

In Johnson County, Burnett settled on the Forty-One Ranch near Buffalo, which became one of the largest cattle ranches in the Powder River country.

“After Canton went out of office, he lived on a farm adjoining me,” Burnett said. “Cattle stealing and killing beef got bad.”

Burnett dug for coal about two miles away. One morning, he

 “A beef has been killed in those hills where you dig your coal,” Canton said. “Let’s go and look it up.”

Burnett said he saddled his own horse, Angel Eyes, and off they went. They found the head and hide of the beef and circled around looking for trail signs. When they got together again, Burnett asked Canton if he had found anything.

Canton produced the sleeve of an old shirt and said, “When we find the rest of this shirt, there will be a hanging.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Burnett looked at the shred of shirt."}]

“That’s a piece of an old shirt of mine,” he said. “My wife tied up a lunch for me the last load of coal I dug. The rest of the shirt is at home."

Years afterward, Burnett told this story to a neighbor cowman who said, “What was the brand on that beef you killed?” 

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

After he left the sheriff’s office, Canton returned to his job with the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association. Soon after, he became involved in the Johnson County War on behalf of his employers.

On April 9, 1892, it was Canton who led the Regulators to the KC Ranch, where the ensuing battle ended in the deaths of Nick Ray and Nate Champion.

[{"type":"text","text":"Ray was shot and killed in the opening minutes. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Champion killed at least four of the Regulators and wounded others. "}]

At 5 p.m., Canton set the house on fire. Champion burst out of the house firing his Winchester rifle and was shot 28 times. 

Champion had taken his boots off, symbolically not dying with “his boots on,” a term used to describe the death of an outlaw, according to historian Clay Gibbons.  

Two days later a huge posse, led by Sheriff Angus, surrounded the Regulators at the TA Ranch. Fortunately for Canton, the U.S. Cavalry's arrival rescued him from having to surrender. 

The newspapers portrayed Canton and the others in a favorable light because of the influences of his employers.

Canton, like the other Regulators, was freed. He left Wyoming

He eventually became adjutant general for the Oklahoma National Guard. It was there that Canton confessed that he was Horner, and the governor of Texas granted him a pardon.

Despite Canton’s tactics and cold eyes that Burnett said would have made Canton a good banker, the rancher ended his own memoirs about Canton with praise.

“As a neighbor, Frank Canton was one of the best,” Burnett said. “He had the greatest virtue of all which is Charity.”

Frank Canton and Johnson County War 7 25 26

<title>Wyoming History: Ruthless Sheriff Needed A Secret Identity From Cattle Rustlers | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Johnson County Frank Canton was so ruthless with cattle rustlers and quick with a gun that he needed a secret identity. “If the first warning was not obeyed, you would probably find several dead bodies hanging to telegraph poles,” he once said.

Wyoming History: Ruthless Sheriff Needed A Secret Identity From Cattle Rustlers

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

He was a collector of cars, coins, guns, clocks, rocks, friends and anything else that claimed his interest.

And if there wasn’t a garage on his property, he built one.

A year after the passing of Dale Corkill his widow, Patricia, and stepdaughter, Amanda Lake, are trying to find good homes for two of his four-wheeled possessions. 

He and Patricia closed on a house in Glenrock, sent three cars to its garage, and then he died of cancer at a Riverton hospice on May 21, 2025, a week before he was to move in.

Patricia Corkill said she did not realize how many cars her husband of 26 years owned at the time he died, but she pulled out a stack of titles she had to get transferred into her name.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He had them stored in various garages."}]

“It took half a day at the clerk’s office to get everything switched over,” she said. “Then I had to go back. You should have seen the no-smiley faces.”

A Glenrock widow has stories to tell about her late husband who was a prolific collector of cars, rocks, clocks, guns, gadgets, and much more. A year after his death, she's still trying to "find good homes" for his 1925 Model T Opera car and 1931 Model A.