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Kerry Drake

CHEYENNE — Arden White was a man with a plan. He knew the target of his would-be affection would be headed to her college class.

“I just waited until I saw she was coming around the corner,” he said. “I asked if she’d go out with me. Oddly enough, she said yes.”

“He ambushed me!” recalled his wife, Betty, on the occasion of their 75th wedding anniversary a week ago. 

The party was arranged at their Cheyenne home by their three children, Gary, Sharon and Ann.

They dated for about a year at Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College, now Colorado State University, in Fort Collins. 

Then Arden made an announcement to his girl and his family. The conflict between the United States and Korea was heating up, and he’d decided to follow some of his friends and join the Navy.

Arden was stationed at Treasure Island, California, a man-made island in the San Francisco Bay. The Navy put him to work as a keypunch operator, using an early data entry system that had people punch holes into cards, encoding information for computers.

It was a specialized clerical job, and virtually assured him that he wouldn’t be reassigned to a battleship. He spent the duration of the war at Treasure Island.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Popping The Question"}]

While home on leave, Arden popped the question: “I think I’m going to be there for a long time, so why don’t we get married?”

“I said, ‘Sure,’” Betty recalled. 

That didn’t sound like the parents who raised her, said Ann, the baby of the family, who was born in 1966. She was preceded by Gary in 1953 and Sharon in 1956.

“I remember them being pretty strict and having everything planned out, and they never wavered,” said Ann. “So for them to be so willy-nilly and spontaneous doesn’t fit with the memories I have of them.”

Guess they must have been in love, as they clearly still are. Their children are happy they put together the party, inviting family and friends to share their special day. Betty had copies of several family histories she’d put together for guests to take home.

Betty and Arden were married in 1951, in her family’s church in Eaton, Colorado. They were both 20, but Arden’s mother had to go to the courthouse and officially give her permission for the marriage to take place. Girls only had to be 19.

“Discrimination!” Betty said, laughing.

Then they moved to Berkeley, California, and he returned to his stint in the Navy. Moving halfway across the country wasn’t something people in her family normally did, but Betty said, “I was kind of the maverick in the family. Everyone else stayed close to home.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Back To School"}]

Arden was supposed to serve for four years, but he had other ideas about his future. 

“I asked for an early release,” he said. “I wanted to finish my bachelors degree back in Colorado, and so did Betty.”

One day his chief walked by and tersely said, “Well, you got it.”

“I said, ‘What did I get?’ and he said, ‘Your early release.’ He was not pleased,” Arden remembered.

But the Whites sure were. Betty earned her bachelor's degree in home economics. Arden graduated too and took some correspondence classes by mail. The G.I. Bill had helped him pay for his education, and he had decided to pursue a master’s degree so he could teach at the high school level. 

The couple and their son Gary moved to Kansas, where Arden got a job teaching at a high school. That’s where Sharon was born. Then the family moved to Greeley, Colorado, where he received his master’s degree in education at Northern Colorado.

“I found out I was doing rather well academically, so I had the idea, ‘Let’s see if they’ll let me apply for a doctorate.’ And they let me do it.”

Arden needed a job and found one teaching at Northern State College in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He liked everything but the cold winters and hot summers. He hated the climate, and so did his family.

Betty was a bit more diplomatic. She didn’t scrunch up her nose at the thought of their two years there. 

“Aberdeen was a lovely place to live,” she said. “But the climate was terrible.”

Then the college’s main building was destroyed by a fire. 

“That was the end of that,” Arden said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He began looking for another job."}]

One day Arden was at a golf course when a friend told him there was a vacancy at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. 

“Well, that suited me — the location did," he said. “They asked me to come for an interview.”

He had one of his sisters-in-law give him a ride from Aberdeen to Cheyenne, then caught a bus for the trip over the hill to Laramie. After the interview he flew back to South Dakota just in time to make it to a class he was teaching.

At 9 a.m. Monday his phone rang. “They said, ‘Would you take the job for this (amount)?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll take that,’” Arden said. So the family packed up again, but they wouldn’t leave for a long time — 30 years.

While he was at the College of Education, Betty was a stay-at-home mom when their children were young. As they grew older, she took a job working in the UW athletic department ticket office. 

Arden was promoted to the head of the counselor education program. It’s a job he said he enjoyed, especially when he could combine it with his love of fly fishing in the Snowy Range.

“He could go out in the afternoon, catch some trout and be home by dinnertime,” Betty said. 

Arden and his boss referred to their fishing trips as their “department head meeting.”

Betty learned to fish, but said she wasn’t good at it “because I needed help getting the fish off the hook. But I really enjoyed the Snowies.”

By the time Ann came into the picture, her family had a routine of hiking, camping and fishing and she did not get to vote on her participation.

“They took me on one camping trip when I was 3 or 4, and I was such a pain in the ass, I remember someone ended up carrying me because I refused to walk anymore,” Ann said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“That was me,” Gary reminded her."}]

“Their idea of camping was you park your car and you hiked with all of your stuff — the tent, the sleeping bags,” Ann continued while her siblings chuckled. “They ate the little powdered food, caught and ate the fish, and I’m not any of that. They still went, but they just shipped me off to my grandparents in Ault for a week.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Wonderful Parents"}]

Despite not sharing her parents’ love of the outdoors, though, she said they were wonderful. 

“Dad always made sure we went to church every Sunday and spent the day together,” Ann said. “They never fought. They never argued. And they never swore. Well, Dad did sometimes when he was golfing.”

Despite their parents’ passion for college, Gary said they didn’t insist that they get degrees. 

“But Dad was always focused on us all having a job,” Gary said. 

He discovered that he loved working in agriculture, and went to work at UW’s greenhouse and planted flowerbeds on campus.

After visiting some friends at CSU, Gary approached his father and asked if he could go to school there.

“He told me as long as I could graduate in four years, he’d help me out,” he recalled. “It took getting some credits in the summer, but I did it.”

Sharon left Laramie when she was 19. She saw someone she liked in a band and told her friends, “I’m going to marry that guy.” 

Sharon went to Cheyenne and it took a week, but she found him. They’ve been married for 49 years.

After Arden retired from UW, he and Betty stayed in Laramie for a few years before moving to Cheyenne. Gary lives in Powell, and Ann moved to Illinois.

The Whites have enjoyed traveling together, with their best memories being Washington, D.C., and New York City. Asked what she saw at the former, Betty said, “Everything. The Smithsonian. The Washington Monument. The White House.”

On two trips to the Big Apple, the couple saw eight plays. The first one was “Cats.”

“There was one I had no idea what was happening,” Betty said. “It was a man on a ship and he was talking loudly and he spit all over himself. That’s what happens when you sit in the front row.

“We don’t like to talk about that,” she added with a wry smile.

Why do they think they’ve been together for so long?

They stared at each other for a minute or so. 

“She’s very accommodating," Arden said. “She was always willing to move wherever we needed to be.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“He’s very patient,” Betty said."}]

“I can’t explain it. She’s brighter than me,” Arden said, and when she tried to brush off that assessment, her husband simply said, “That’s true.”

“We found out in high school she was going to be the valedictorian — until I showed up,” he added. “Her parents weren’t all that pleased with me.” 

Kerry Drake can be reached at: Kerry.Drake33@gmail.com

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

<title>Cheyenne Couple Celebrate 75 Years, Husband Still Amazed Wife Agreed To First Date | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Arden and Betty White of Cheyenne celebrated their 75th anniversary this past week with family and friends. In recalling their first date, Betty said Arden ambushed her. Arden said he was surprised she agreed to go out. "Oddly enough, she said yes.”

Cheyenne Couple Celebrate 75 Years, Husband Still Amazed Wife Agreed To First Date

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

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

Raymond Felix brought a brand-new bike to Sturgis this year. New to him, that is.

“We bought it about two weeks ago,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I traded my Sporty in. I said, ‘We’re going to Sturgis, so I want a better bike.’”

The bike is a 2017 Softail Slim FLS with 5,000 miles on it, “practically new” for what was Felix’s first trip to Sturgis. He went with his family — his mom and dad, Leon and Alisa, and his girlfriend, Yessenia Marenco. 

The four were among hordes of bikers — literally thousands — riding the Devils Tower loop for a Sturgis Rally tradition called Wyoming Wednesday. 

Sundance’s claim to fame on Wyoming Wednesday is a burnout contest that’s been going on for more than half a century in front of the historic Dime Horseshoe Bar.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Legend Of The Burnout"}]

Local legends say the Dime Horseshoe Bar’s burnout actually started inside the establishment, which takes its name from a horseshoe pattern inlaid into the bar top with dimes.

The story goes that a bar patron decided to do a burnout inside the bar and the owner chased him out.

Other riders joined the fun, putting on their own spontaneous burnout event on the street in front of the bar.

It started a tradition that has continued ever since, though these days it’s more of a planned thing, complete with bike mechanics who swap used tires for new, saving the bikers’ good tires for their return trip to either the Sturgis Rally or home. 

The bar has since also built a stage for the bikes, elevating them above the crowd so everyone can see. That also helps keep the smoke over everyone’s heads. 

A set of fans blows the clouds of acrid, billowing smoke away from the bikers. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Big Father-Son Moment"}]

Felix had a dream for his first Sturgis, and watching the Dime Horseshoe Bar’s Burnout in Sundance was it.

But he didn’t just watch the burnout as he’d planned.

Jess Jones, owner of the Dime Horseshoe Bar along with her husband, Casey, is persuasive that way. 

She kept calling for entries, and Felix’s dad, Leon, kept urging Raymond to enter.

“They talked me into it,” he said. “I was like, ‘All right, let’s do it. I’m down for it.’”

Felix’s parents have been coming to Sturgis — and to Sundance’s burnout — since 2011. But until this year, Raymond couldn’t join them. All four work for the same delivery-driving business, which makes planning time off together tricky.

“It’s hard for all of us to take vacation at the same time,” Leon said. “This is the first year we got to do it.”

A friend showed Leon and Alisa all the cool places to go, including Sundance. 

“We love it,” Alisa said. “It’s amazing. Seriously, every year we look forward to coming.”

For Leon, finally sharing Sundance with his son — and seeing him compete so well in the burnout — was not just a great memory. It is a father-son milestone he cherishes. 

“It’s like a father’s dream to have your kid come ride with you,” he said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hitting Sixth Gear"}]

Felix had been told he probably wouldn’t be able to cycle his engine past fourth gear. 

But when he hit four without signs of strain, he kicked it up to five and then six. 

Smoke, he explained, is the whole point of a burnout. 

“The bigger the cloud of smoke is, the better,” he said. “So you go through first, second, third. You want to keep the gears shifting. But so it handled six just fine.”

Family and friends replayed the moment he hit sixth gear, and Raymond’s eyes lit up.

“Check this out,” he exclaimed. “The sixth-gear pin! I was in sixth gear!”

That ultimately earned him enough crowd appreciation that he took third place, along with a $250 cash prize. 

First place, and the $750 in prize money, went to Bill Snider, a regular from Michigan who said he will put the money back into his bike.

Snider was in Sundance hanging out with his daughter, Erica Goble, and her fiancé.

Goble drove to Sundance from Colorado to be with her dad, and said she thought the event was “pretty cool.”

Snider told Cowboy State Daily he spends little time at the Sturgis Rally itself, preferring to spend his rally time in tiny Sundance and Hulett in Wyoming.

“We go over there, but we go over there once, buy a T-shirt and leave,” he said.

In Wyoming, he said, he has found people are welcoming and treat you like family — and that’s what keeps him coming back.

Burnout 20260812 165049 8 15 26

<title>Why Sturgis Riders Have Packed Sundance, Wyoming, For 50 Years Of Its Annual Burnout | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally riders have packed Sundance, Wyoming, for its annual burnout for more than 50 years. Legend has it the burnout started inside the Dime Horseshoe Bar. “The bigger the cloud of smoke is, the better,” says one rider.

Why Sturgis Riders Have Packed Sundance, Wyoming, For 50 Years Of Its Annual Burnout

There is just something about the Elk Mountain Hotel that inspires devotion.

Peter Thieriot, for example, was warned that the Elk Mountain Hotel was nothing more than a money pit. 

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

Locals joked that the hotel required a tetanus shot before walking in.

No one was laughing once Thieriot finished restoring it. 

He took the hotel back to its studs, then rebuilt it room by room by room.

Nine layers of wallpaper were stripped from the dining room. Samples of each layer still decorate a wall just outside the dining room, even though Thieriot no longer owns the hotel.

Christine Neel is the hotel’s present-day owner. 

She did what a lot of small-town Wyoming kids wind up doing — leaving Wyoming. 

Her folks packed up and moved to Texas before Neel graduated from high school. She went to Texas A&M, becoming an “Aggie,” with a major in nursing and business.

But when the 120-year-old Elk Mountain Hotel went up for sale in January 2020, she leapt at the chance to take over the tiny boutique hotel in little Elk Mountain, where the elevation of 7,264 feet far exceeds its population of 146 people. 

“I’ve been in love with the hotel since childhood,” Neel told Cowboy State Daily. “I grew up not too far from there on a ranch … I remember going to brunches over there, attending weddings over there, before and after the renovation.”

When she heard the owners had decided to get out of the hotel business, something clicked. 

She suddenly knew she wanted to own that hotel.

“I think it just has a charm like no place else has,” she said. “I’ve always just loved it. So I couldn’t say no when the opportunity came up.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Reborn From Ashes"}]

Neel says many travelers find the Elk Mountain Hotel by surprise when they’re traveling to Yellowstone National Park along Interstate 80. 

It’s a pleasant surprise for most. Tripadvisor shows a 4.8 out of 5-bubble rating, and it’s easy to see why.

At first sight, it’s like gazing into another time and place, and then melting into it with each step toward the hotel. None of the rooms have televisions, which deepens the effect.

There are no air conditioners humming, either.  

Tiny refrigerators and microwaves are the only nod to the modern world — and they do not bother. They’re quiet.

The hotel sits at the base of Elk Mountain, in the same spot where the Overland Trail once had its stage stop, just east of the Medicine Bow River.

The establishment was then known as The Crossing. 

After Union Pacific finished the Transcontinental Railroad, The Crossing fell into disrepair and burned down in 1905.

A man from Wales named John Evans built a new hotel on top of the ashes, naming it Mountain View Hotel. It was white with green trim then, and it’s white with green trim now.

No one knows exactly how or why Evans came to Wyoming. What is known about him is that he was adopted by the Jones family and worked for a time at the Evan's Bro’s Store in Carbon, now an abandoned coal town southwest of Medicine Bow.

Eventually, Evans married his adoptive sister, Mary Ann Jones.

The couple had 10 children, seven of whom died very young. Some of those children are buried at the old Carbon Cemetery.

When the couple moved from Carbon to Elk Mountain to work for J.S. Jones, they had two living children, Joseph and Aubrey. John ran the bar and Mary was the cook. 

They bought The Crossing from Jones in 1903. Two years later, after their son William was born, The Crossing burned down.

The couple borrowed money from Mary’s sister Catherine to rebuild the hotel. 

They had 16 bedrooms upstairs and a bar and dance hall downstairs. It had indoor plumbing and Elk Mountain’s first power plant. In addition to itself, the hotel’s coal-fired plant supplied power to neighbors as well. 

The dance hall quickly became a community gathering spot for dances, parties, political rallies and town meetings.

In the 1920s, John Evans and his boys built an open-air dance pavilion.

Many famous people would come to play at the Garden Spot Pavilion, including Lawrence Welk and Louis Armstrong.

The hotel’s 12 rooms echo some of that history. 

Two are named for both Welk and Armstrong. Others are devoted to famous Wyoming figures Jim Bridger, Esther Hobart Morris and Eliza Swain. 

Another honors someone infamous: “Big Nose” George Parrot.

Each room leans into its historic namesake, with relevant photographs, artwork, and history hanging on the walls. 

The hotel is framed by mature trees and a profusion of pink hollyhocks — perfect for the Victorian architecture.

Inside, the vintage charm continues with a warm mixture of leather, wood, and posh upholstery alongside photos of historical Elk Mountain figures that help tell the hotel’s unique story. 

The restaurant serves steaks and pasta, along with homemade desserts and cocktails. Reservations are required.

Stay there once, and it’s easy to understand why people keep coming back. Because there’s just something about the Elk Mountain Hotel. 

Elk Mountain Hotel 20260811 095626 8 15 26

<title>How Wyoming’s Elk Mountain Hotel Went From Money Pit To Historic Showplace | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Built 120 years ago when an Overland Trail stage stop burned down, many warned its previous owner it would be a money pit to restore. He did it anyway, and now the Elk Mountain Hotel has become a showplace on the National Register of Historic Places.

How Wyoming’s Elk Mountain Hotel Went From Money Pit To Historic Showplace

Jake nichols 720

Jake Nichols

Harvard University once claimed to possess up to three books in its libraries that were bound in human skin.

Thanks to relatively new technology, two of the works in question have been debunked, but not without leaving one proven authentic and opening a rabbit hole filled with questions.

[{"type":"text","text":"First, books bound in the largest organ of humans are a thing. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"In fact, the practice was once more popular than one might think. "}]

Second, in response to binding books in human skin, Wyoming history says, “Hold my beer.”

The Cowboy State has an ashtray, a medicine bag and a pair of shoes all made from the remains of a notorious outlaw who met his demise at the end of a rope.

[{"type":"text","text":"Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover"}]

Two decades ago, the internet was abuzz with hoax-or-real tales of literary works bound in human skin, particularly a few tomes reportedly owned by an Ivy League school.

It started in 2006 after an article appeared in the university publication “The Harvard Crimson.” 

Written by Samuel Jacobs, who was named editor-in-chief of Time Magazine three years ago, “The Skinny on Harvard’s Rare Book Collection” zeroed in on three unique books in the university’s 15 million-volume collection purportedly bound in human flesh.

Jacobs fleshes out the texts, ranging in content from medieval law to Roman poetry to French philosophy. A lawbook, for one, has been discredited in its claim to be skin-wrapped. It’s bound in flesh, but not human.

“Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae” is a Spanish lawbook containing material dating back to 1605. It was bought for $42.50 from a New Orleans book dealer in 1946 and shelved in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard, according to the library’s curator, David Ferris.

Nothing about the book’s cover seems out of the ordinary, though it appears to have a hue suggestive of skin tone. It’s what is handwritten in purple ink on the book’s last page that sets one’s skin to crawling.

“[T]he bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632.”

DNA tests performed in 1992 proved inconclusive. The tanning process was partially to blame, but truthfully, technology just wasn’t up to the task until more recent scientific advancements in what is known as peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) made positive identification possible.

In-house testing performed by Harvard using the analytical technique for protein identification PMF proved conclusively that Wright’s remains do not bind the 400-year-old book, nor do any human’s. The cover is sheepskin.

Another book in question — a 1597 French translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses housed in the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine — also was proven to be sheepskin even though a small penciled annotation appearing on the inside cover reads: “Bound in human skin.”

[{"type":"text","text":"The Hide That Binds"}]

The myth busting leaves Harvard with one final volume touted as epically epidermically bound.

“Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinées de L’ame” is part of Harvard’s massive Houghton Library collection. The meditation on the soul and afterlife was gifted by the author to a friend, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, sometime in the mid-1880s.

Bouland, a noted medical doctor and prominent bibliophile, bound the book with the skin from an unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke. A note was found inserted in the book after it was donated to the university in 1954 by the widow of John B. Stetson Jr. (yes, that Stetson, son of John Sr., founder of the famed cowboy hat company).

The two-page note is handwritten in French by Dr. Bouland. It reads, in part:

“This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman.”

The same testing conducted in early 2014 that disproved Harvard’s two anthropodermic-bound books was able to confirm the binding of “Des Destinées de L’am” as most likely that of a human.

Other written works confirmed bound in human skin can be found at the John Hay Library at Brown University (four volumes) and the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (five books, including three of which came from the skin of the same woman).

Perhaps the most famous example of anthropodermic bibliopegy is a book gathering dust on a shelf at the Boston Athenaeum.

The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen Alias George Walton

,” is a memoir of Walton’s. He narrated the autobiographical story to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison while on his deathbed in 1837.

He insisted the book be bound in his own skin and given to a man, John A. Fenno Jr., who fiercely resisted Walton’s attempt to rob him. Fenno’s daughter reportedly gifted the work to Boston Athenaeum, but the library/museum has no written proof of that. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Literarily Interred"}]

This is the macabre story of a once-common practice of binding books with human skin — and how Wyoming did that one better by skinning notorious Wild West outlaw "Big Nose George" and making him into a pair of shoes. His skull was made into an ashtray.

Beverly J. Purvis, 62