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Renée Jean

Business

Kelli Tracy feels like she’s “living in a Hallmark movie.” She and her husband just closed on their own brick-and-mortar store in downtown Sheridan, and she’s now celebrating her 10th year in business. 

These days, her Lil Bee’s Bohemian clothing line ships all over the world, and the business brings in a comfortable $600,000 to $700,000 a year in sales. 

But, like any Hallmark movie, getting to “happily ever after” wasn’t an easy task. 

The journey started when she was unexpectedly laid off from a big corporate job in Florida as a quality assurance compliance manager. It was scary.

“I had just moved in with my now husband but, at the time, my boyfriend,” Tracy recalled. “And he was like, ‘Well you need to get a job. You need to maybe go back to bartending or go back to doing something so you have money coming in.’” 

Tracy had done plenty of bartending in college and had no intention of going back to it. She had a completely different idea, one people told her was crazy at the time.  

“The next day I started my own boutique with clothing out of my closet,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “That’s when Instagram first started. Like it was just coming out and the algorithms were great. Everything was great.”

She propped a mannequin she bought from California — a model she named Lola — in front of her phone, dressed it in her own clothes, and opened a Shopify account. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Lil Bee’s Bohemian was born."}]

Starting out, her biggest problem wasn’t finding customers. She had plenty of people clamoring for the outfits she was styling. 

Her trouble was finding inventory priced low enough that she could resell it with a healthy profit margin. 

“I didn’t know there were places like Fashion Go or like Marketplaces and all the things,” she said. “You can go to Dallas Market and like find all your vendors.”

Initially, to get inventory, she’d go to places like Ross and Marshalls to buy items for the outfits she was promoting on Instagram. It was rare, but if the outfits didn’t sell, she’d just return them.

That strategy wasn’t going to work long-term, she realized. She had to figure out something else.

“Then I met a lady named Holly who owns Baja Ranch and she’s the one who helped me,” Tracy said. “I was buying a bunch of her stuff off eBay, because it was really cheap, to resell. And so she asked me like, ‘What are you buying all this stuff for?’”

When Tracy explained she was starting a boutique and needed inventory, Holly explained where she could go to find wholesale items to resell. 

“I mean, you can buy from me,” she said. “But you can get all of this stuff here.”

And the prices would be much less expensive. Wholesale pricing, Holly explained, would let Tracy keep her margins, without relying on returns.

Tracy, meanwhile, helped Holly figure out how to start Instagram and Shopify accounts so she could improve her business model.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A $12,000 Surprise"}]

Once she had reliable wholesale sources, sales were booming. But there was a big problem. Somehow, despite making many, many sales, the money wasn’t adding up. 

“I was like, ‘Man, where is all the money?’ Like I know I didn’t spend all this money,” she said. 

Eventually she figured out that many of the purchases were landing in her business’ PayPal account. She thought that money would transfer to her bank account automatically, but it was sitting there, quietly waiting for her to go in and authorize its transfer.

“I was almost to the point of bagging it,” Tracy said. “I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this. I can’t really afford more stuff.’ And then I wound up with all this extra money.”

The business was saved, and Tracy realized she had to get more organized. The scare pushed her to tighten up her books and treat Lil Bee’s less like an experiment and more like the real business it was becoming.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"One Closet Wasn’t Enough"}]

As the business grew, so did its footprint inside the couple’s home. 

It was no longer just her own closet. It was every closet in the house. She put racks in the spare bedroom, the living room, and even one hallway.

“It was just taking over the house,” Tracy said. “It was bad. I remember looking over at my husband and his two kids and the dog and they all looked at me like I was crazy.”

Finally, one day her husband said, “Hey, if you go get a place like a studio or like an office, this whole entire closet here could be your personal closet.”

Tracy heard what he was really saying. It was time for Lil Bee’s to grow wings and fly. 

“I had the keys to a showroom the next day,” she said. “Within 24 hours.”

The business doubled in size and quickly outgrew the showroom. She moved it next to a big warehouse, and just kept upgrading from there. 

“At one point, I think I had two, maybe three warehouses,” she said. “It just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

The growth looked impressive on paper. At peak, Lil Bee’s was doing more than $1.4 million a year in sales.

But the pace was grueling, the overhead relentless, and she was working all the time. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Right-Sizing Her Business"}]

By year eight, she made some decisions that shape the business as it is today. 

First, she decided to start making her own clothing designs instead of just buying and reselling other people’s ideas.

That would also allow her to boost the quality. No more thin, disposable stuff. She wanted pieces that people could keep and love forever.

She also decided just how big she wanted Lil Bee’s to be. 

“It just got to bee too much,” Tracy said. “It was just more, more, more.”

She realized that if she downsized her business, she’d still remain profitable and she would have more time to focus on her own designs.

That turned out to be a fortuitous move. Her ‘70s-inspired clothes caught the eye of a rising country star — Lainey Wilson.

Wilson, then an artist in Nashville, was a regular customer. 

“She bought bell bottoms from me and she called it ‘Balling on a budget,’” Tracy said with a chuckle. “She even spoke about Lil Bee’s on the Bobby Bones podcast.”

Eventually, Wilson and Tracy teamed up on a collaborative clothing line built around flared jeans and boho blouses. 

“We created four items together,” Tracy said. “It was a really cool, button-down top, a pair of jeans, like acid-washed black jeans, a bandana, and striped bell bottoms.”

As Wilson’s career took off, however, the partnership became more complicated. New managers stepped in, and access to the star tightened. 

“I couldn’t just call her up anymore,” Tracy said. “I didn’t take it personally though. She’s a wonderful person, and she’s the same way in person as she is on stage.”

The Lainey Wilson chapter was a fun, unexpected part of her business journey, but it’s not the one Tracy likes best. 

That's the one she’s in right now, designing her own clothes and selling wholesale to 146 stores across America as well as stores in Canada. She also ships orders direct around the world and has a loyal following in Australia. 

The boutique shop she just closed on in Sheridan exactly 10 years after starting her business is a full-circle moment. 

The store is just 800 square feet. But it feels just right for now.

“It’s packed so full of just amazing beautiful stuff,” she said. “I’ve got my entire line in there — all my blouses, and jewelry.”

There are sweaters, jackets, dresses, tallow makeup, bags and a hat bar, too. 

“When you get in there, it’s like a time capsule back into the '70s,” she said. “It’s groovy, and there’s not one thing that’s plain. It’s like a maximalist dream.”

It’s a dream that’s also planted in the one place in the world she’s decided she likes the best of every place she’s ever roamed — Sheridan. She got to know the town after visiting some friends, and just decided it’s where she’s always belonged.

“It’s just marvelous,” she said. “This last Christmas we had the Holiday Stroll and it snowed. I mean, it snowed so much that night, it was just marvelous. Everyone was out there with hot chocolate and their scarves and I was like this is nuts. Like I’m living in a Hallmark movie.”

Lil Bees and Kelly Tracy 8 16 26

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

<title>How A Sheridan Woman Turned Her Closet Into A Funky Worldwide Fashion Business | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Laid off from a corporate job, Kelli Tracy started selling clothes out of her closet on Instagram. Ten years later, she owns Sheridan’s Lil Bee’s Bohemian and ships her '70s-inspired designs to people all over the world from her Wyoming storefront.

How A Sheridan Woman Turned Her Closet Into A Funky Worldwide Fashion Business

ELK MOUNTAIN — Margaret Karstoft’s grandfather came to America from Sweden in 1870. He spent three years earning the money needed to bring his family to Elk Mountain, where he worked as a tie hack.

Karstoft is among longtime Elk Mountain residents whose memories are now preserved in a new 30-minute legacy film commissioned by the Elk Mountain Museum. 

Created as an America250 project, the film distills hours of interviews into an oral history of the Carbon County town — from its tie hacks and sheep camps to its blizzards, dances, and stubborn will to survive. 

The museum has also retained the raw interviews as part of its archive, and given copies of the tapes to their families. 

Karstoft’s grandfather had a backbreaking, seasonal job. The men lived in tents, working through the winter on Elk Mountain, a place where the brutality of wind and cold are legendary among locals.

The men hewed their ties by hand, one timber at a time, then hauled them to the river, where they were floated downstream in the spring, after it had warmed up enough to melt the ice. 

“My grandmother wanted to come to this country because she heard that the streets were paved with gold,” Karstoft said in a soft voice. “She wanted to come here because it was hard times in Sweden at that time, too.”

In the film, old-timers tell of wind sometimes so harsh men had to crawl rather than walk, and blizzards where they had to trust their horse to get them home. But they also remember neighbors who banded together to help each other not only survive but thrive.

Tie hack camps in Carbon County shut down as large corporate ventures in 1912, but many people in Elk Mountain were still cutting railroad ties by hand into the 1950s. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Bob Johnson was one of them."}]

“It was before chainsaws or anything like that,” Johnson said. “We used a handsaw and an ax. I had a measuring stick and it was 102 inches long. That’s how long a railroad tie was back then. They had to be 102 inches. I cut a lot of those.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Bill Jones remembers peeling the bark off railroad ties."}]

“It froze on there in the wintertime,” he said with a chuckle. “That was a ‘good’ job.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Before Elk Mountain Was The Crossing"}]

Elk Mountain today has 144 people, according to the most recent census. It has always been a tiny town, however, even from inception. When it was incorporated in 1909, it recorded 98 residents in the 1910 census. 

Its peak population was recorded in 1980 at 338, on the coattails of a regional energy development boom in Carbon County that started in the late 1970s and continued into the early 1980s. 

Before it was incorporated, people had a different name for the area. It was just called “The Crossing.” It had been a convenient stop along the Overland Trail in the 1860s, with the nearby river offering reliable, year-round water. 

Fort Halleck was built just west of The Crossing in 1862 to protect emigrants, mail carriers and telegraph lines In the developing area.

Nearby Carbon, which incorporated in 1868, was much larger with a peak population of 1,140 in 1890. But its coal mines closed in 1902 — the same year a mercantile store opened at The Crossing, followed by the Mountain View Hotel in 1905. Both the hotel and the store remain standing. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Life In A Wind Tunnel"}]

Elk Mountain has always been a place where weather sets the rules — especially true in winter. 

“Up on that mountain, the wind can blow,” Shorty Richardson said. “Me and Pete Johnson, we went up on one ridge and we had to cross the top of that. I ain’t saying I was tough, but Pete Johnson, he was a horse, and we was on our hands and knees crossing that ridge, because we couldn’t stand up, the wind was blowing so hard.”

Powd Boles remembers his dad chaining a large sled to a telephone pole so it couldn’t blow away at night. 

“That’s how hard the wind blows down through there all the time,” he said.

One day Pete’s brother, Bill Johnson, noticed a fellow walking what locals refer to as the UL flats, looking for something. 

“He asked the guy, he says, ‘What’s the trouble?’ He says, ‘Well, I’m looking for the wheel for my anemometer. It blew off last night and I’m looking for it,’" Richardson said. "And Bill says, ‘Well, how hard was the wind blowing?’ He says, ‘Well, it registered 200 and then it died.’ So he said, ‘I don’t know how much harder it blew, but it did register 200.”

Richardson believes the wind blows so fast because it’s coming in down between mountains, forming a wind funnel. 

It’s not unlike pinching a garden hose, causing the water to flow out with more force, but in this case the “water” is the wind.

[{"type":"text","text":"Getting To The Dance On Time"}]

Neither wind nor cold stopped people from getting to town for dances, though, Powd Boles added. He remembers the time a fiddle player was snowed in upriver and couldn’t get to town for a dance.

“So Henry Cheesbrough, he had a Jeep, and he says, by God, he’d run up and get the fiddle player,” he said. “So he ground up there and got the fiddle player, and they were having a dance here in the Odd Fellows Hall. 

"Old Cheesbrough, he just drove through the front doors, drove right up to the bandstand, and dumped the fiddle player off.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Then he drove right back out the same doors he’d come in. "}]

“The next day he had to, by God, go to town and find new doors for the Odd Fellows Hall,” Boles said with a laugh.

Another time, Boles remembers that a couple who wanted to get to a dance couldn’t get anything to start but an old tractor.

“So they drove it all the way down from the UL down here to the dance,” he said. “That was in the middle of wintertime, and of course that tractor didn’t have no cab on it or nothing.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Winter Fun, Winter Peril"}]

Winter was a time for fun. There was ice-skating on the frozen pond and there was skiing behind neighborhood vehicles. It was safe enough then because there were no major highways. 

“You’d go up over where the roads are going into people’s ranches or meadows,” Bill Jones recalled. “You had to bounce over them a little bit when you ski. And then we’d have a whole line of sleds hooked together and somebody pulling us with their pickup around the streets. If you were the last one, sometimes you’d get snapped around.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Winter wasn’t all fun and games, though. "}]

“We used to follow the telephone line across this one spot we called UL Flat,” Bob Johnson said. “The horse knew the way, and I knew the way kind of, if you could see.”

In a blizzard, though, Johnson learned to listen for telephone wires overhead. 

“You could follow them to get home,” he said. “It used to take me 45 minutes to come down this direction and nearly two hours going back against the wind and the crosswind.”

Cheryl Bowen remembers her dad making her stand with her back toward the wind to avoid her face becoming frostbitten.

[{"type":"text","text":"She, like many children in that day, rode horseback to school."}]

“You couldn’t wear jeans to school, so I had to pack my dress,” she said. “And then I put my dress on to attend school.”

[{"type":"text","text":"When Sheep Ruled The Range"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Elk Mountain was sheep country when he was growing up, Boles said. "}]

“Everybody had sheep back in the old days,” he said. “Predators got too thick and they couldn’t find any help to herd them, so that was the end of sheep. But Carbon County was like the largest sheep-producing county in the United States at one time.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Johnson remembers living in a sheep wagon with his brother. "}]

“My mother would live down on the ranch a mile and a half away,” he said. “We’d have lanterns, and we’d have a stake in the ground. We’d light a lantern to keep the coyotes away.”

His mother would climb up on the cellar to see if the light was burning at their sheep camp. 

“If we had a light in our sheep wagon, it meant we were done flagging sheep and we were cooking supper,” Johnson said. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Boles’ family was among the first to bring Angus cattle to the area. "}]

“Everybody else had Hereford cattle,” he said. “And everybody thought they were stupid for raising black cattle. But when they’d ship in the fall, their calves always weighed over 400 pounds and everybody else’s weighed like 310 or something. So they were a step ahead of everybody else.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Making Do On The Ranch"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Families worked hard and knew how to stretch a dollar, Karstoft said. "}]

“We’d get flour in feed sacks,” she said. “My mom always tried to get a couple of them that would match, so she’d have enough material to make us clothes. That’s all we had were clothes made out of flour sacks. She did everything. She milked cows, fed chickens ...”

And she also cut the heads off those chickens herself whenever it was time to make dinner.

During times of war, women were also out in the field helping hay, Richardson added.

“There were no guys, they were all at war,” he said. “And you had to feed your livestock. It was a chore putting it up back then. Not like now. We’ll probably put up more hay in 15 minutes now than they used to put up in a day back then.”

[{"type":"text","text":"There also used to be many more little ranches, Boles added. "}]

“It’s 50, 60 head of cows,” he said. “Now all them little places are gone. The big outfits have bought them out, so all of them little places are history … when I was a kid, I suppose they delivered mail to probably 40 people out there. Now my wife runs the mail and she delivers mail to seven people.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Why They Stayed"}]

Many of the people who live in Elk Mountain today can trace their ancestry to the original homesteaders, and say they’ve never thought about leaving.

“I had chances to go elsewhere, and I always came back,” Jones said. 

“It’d be hard to leave, I guess, now,” Boles said. “I wouldn’t know how to act anyplace else.“

What Karstoft has always liked about Elk Mountain is the “small town” living. 

“Everybody knew each other, everybody helped each other,” she said. “Of course there was disagreements, too. There always are. But it was a beautiful place to settle.”

Richardson knows he could retire somewhere else — Florida, California, Arizona.

“I’m going to stay here,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, but anyway, I’ll be here till it’s done.”

Through the years, what Richardson has seen is there’s always just enough to keep the town going. 

“There will always be an Elk Mountain,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”

Thanks to the legacy film project, there will always be stories of the people who made it so, from the tie hacks and ranch families to the children on horseback and the neighbors who helped each other not only survive, but thrive.

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Elk Mountain history Powd Boles 8 16 26

<title>Elk Mountain Old-Timers Keep Remote Town’s Wild History Alive One Story At A Time | Cowboy State Daily</title>

To preserve the town's legacy, old-timers in remote Elk Mountain, Wyoming, are sharing their tales for a film project. The blizzards were so bad, they say, you had to trust your horse to get home.

Elk Mountain Old-Timers Keep Remote Town’s Wild History Alive One Story At A Time

Kerry Drake

John Adolfi, a creationist in Syracuse, New York, searched for many years for Noah’s Ark and a race of giants who supposedly walked the Earth. But until he died last November, the elusive Pedro Mountain Mummy found in Wyoming in 1932 still clearly haunted him.

In 2005, Adolfi posted a $10,000 reward for the tiny mummified remains of the 

” as he came to be known in the region. Pedro hasn’t been seen in public since 1950, but in the past 76 years the mummy has been the source of extraordinary speculation about its origin.

Adolfi’s goal was to have the mummy tested through DNA samples, magnetic resonance imaging, and improved X-ray technology to establish exactly what it was so he could disprove the theory of evolution.

Countless newspaper and magazine articles have been written about Pedro, who is also the subject of a host of videos on YouTube and was featured on an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” in 1994. 

Some of the videos make sensational claims, including that he was a member of a tribe of 

But was the human-like Pedro an example of the Nimerigar, a mythical tribe of savage pygmies with sharp teeth that Native Americans thought were hiding in the mountains? 

Nimerigar is literally translated as “people eaters,” and it’s said they shot their Indian prey with tiny bows and poisoned arrows. 

In 1941, the Milwaukee Journal asked in a headline, “Did a Race of Pygmies Once Live in America?” According to this account, the preserved mummy was a 65-year-old man.

Most disturbing was the article’s claim that X-rays showed “food in the stomach appears to have been raw meat. The teeth in the front of the mouth are pointed and of the flesh-eating variety.”

Or was the mummy an example of a benign race of humanoid pranksters? 

One aspect of the legend is that people who go near the San Pedro Mountains in southern Wyoming should carry something shiny to offer the Little People as a gift, so they knew no harm would come to them.

Perhaps all the fascination is due to the fact that while so little is known about the mummy, including its whereabouts, there is no doubt that it existed, that it looked freakish, and there are still copies of X-rays — but not the X-rays themselves — that have led to scientific speculation that Pedro was either a full-grown adult or an infant with an abnormality called anencephalus, in which only the brain stem develops. 

Complicating matters was the appearance of a large wound on top of its head.

There is just enough photographic and other evidence left for people to claim Pedro was anything they want it to be.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Wanted To Disprove Evolution"}]

Two decades ago, Adolphi told then-Casper Star-Tribune reporter Brendan Burke — who became so curious about the mummy that he added Pedro to his unofficial beat — that he realized proof of a previously unknown prehistoric relative of man would not disprove evolution.

But Adolphi maintained that a new humanoid species would poke holes in the paradigm evolutionists have created regarding human origins.

Six months later he was interviewed again by Burke, who reported that while Adolfi said he received many leads, none had panned out.

A Wyoming woman told him the mummy was in the possession of an Indian tribe not based in Wyoming. But Adolfi investigated and determined that tip was a dead end.

So was another person who reported seeing Pedro at a garage sale in New Jersey. And an 86-year-old Wyoming man who had what appeared to be a hominoid mummy that could fit in the palm of one’s hand.

But the man was not willing to have the artifact X-rayed, Adolfi said, because he didn’t want to know if it was an authentic Nimerigar corpse or a vegetable carving. And the man wanted to continue believing that his mummy was “the real deal.”

Adolfi said he was willing to pay less money for evidence of other pygmy mummies, but he apparently never got his hands on one.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"A Middle Eastern Cousin?"}]

 on his YouTube channel Lost World Museum, though, is fascinating. 

Adolfi interviews a man with a Middle Eastern accent and wearing clear plastic gloves who wants to show him his own find. The man speaks in a foreign language to someone off camera, and relays the answers in English.

The man unwraps what looks much like Pedro from Wyoming, but in a slightly different pose and with a lot more hair. He says the artifact was discovered about a half-meter underground by accident.

“Unfortunately, we can’t share too much with (viewers) about location or what’s going to happen with this little fella,” Adolfi says. “But I wanted you to see this for yourself, examine it, and ask yourself, ‘Is this a full-grown human? Or is it just a mummified fetus?’"

“The doctor here says it is fully human,” the man volunteers. “It’s estimated to be 1,500 years old.”

“They do have plans for it,” Adolfi says when the man is gone. “I know there are some questions about the legalities of it. I know if this was in the United States, such as the Pedro Mountain Mummy, there’s Native American rights there, and obviously there's archaeological rights there, there are human rights there.

“But over in the Middle East, Far East, there are laws and whatnot that you have to follow. But they’re big boys, and they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do, I guess.”

Adolfi speculates that the mummy “is going to be put in someone’s private collection, and it’s never going to be seen again.”

Wherever Pedro is, or whether he still even exists, George Gill, a University of Wyoming anthropology professor, has seen the medical research and he said it’s definitely an anencephalic infant. 

He said in 2013 that further testing on a female pygmy mummy later brought to Gill and sent to Children’s Hospital in Denver to obtain X-rays, a DNA sample and a radiocarbon date yielded the same result.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Pedro’s Strange Journey"}]

The Pedro Mountain Mummy was discovered in 1932 by two gold prospectors, Cecil Main and Frank Carr, who detonated some explosives near the Pathfinder Reservoir and opened up a cave, according to an article in the Oct. 21, 1932, Casper Tribune-Herald.

Inside on a ledge by itself was Pedro, sitting with his feet tucked under him and his arms crossed. 

In 2013, the website Atlas Obscura described Pedro: “His skin was brown and dried by the arid Wyoming climate, his mouth was drawn into a placid scowl — a lean Buddha with a misshapen head.”

It was estimated that if the mummy had been standing, it would be about 17 inches tall. It weighed less than a pound.

In 2005 New York creationist John Adolfi offered a $10,000 reward if someone brought him the "Pedro Mountain Mummy" found in Wyoming in 1932 but never seen in public after 1950. With Adolfi's death in November, no one will ever claim the reward.

Wyoming Obituaries For
July 27th, 2026

July 27

David W. Kendall, 77

Doris Mae Redjou, 97

Leona Pauline (Falkner) Van Buggenum, 85

Lloyd Lynn Perry, 58

Jeannie Irene Eman, 88

Carolyn Jean (Krouse) Rayl, 91

George Durward Langston, Jr., 85

Barry Lynn Boyson, 69

Donald “Donnie” Ray Edwards, 63

Daniel Scott Patterson, 59