The Unlikely Origin of Tourism’s Sense of Authenticity

Reaching back to a tent restaurant erected there in 1919, Lexington brands itself, at least in part, the “barbecue capital” of North Carolina, a state with considerable heritage in that regard.

But it was a tragic train accident eight years earlier that occurred between that would-be tent site and what is now High Rock Lake that is more symbolic for tourism historically across the nation.

My Tar Heel Roots go back to 1650 but because I am the last of a line of five generations of Idaho ranchers going back to the 1860s and didn’t make my way to North Carolina until 1989, I’m considered “adopted” by those who could be considered far more relative “newbies.”

But it seems that wherever I’ve lived, including my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, I’ve crossed paths with William F. Cody.  It was least expected here in North Carolina as I began what would be the last half of a four decade career in community destination marketing.

When a freight train tragically smashed into one of three trains near Lexington, Cody’s “Buffalo Bill Wild West Show”s (sometimes known by other names) was in the midst of 40 performances throughout North Carolina between 1878 and 1916, including two in Durham where we live.

Over 100 horses were killed in the accident, and the vitality of the show that had also performed hundreds of times throughout the country and throughout Europe would never really recover.

But it is easily arguable that no other person did more to instill a curiosity for transcontinental travel across the United States in both Americans and those overseas.

His attention to detail and authenticity informed expectations. 

Equally significant, Cody redefined and instilled a deep appreciation for history, culture and artifacts among those living in relatively newly settled lands east of the Hundredth Meridian.

He seemed to innately grasp what place branding expert Bill Baker tries to impart wherever he is invited to teach.

The brand of a particular place is, in essence, its innate personality.  It exists at the intersection of what internal audiences and external audiences perceive it to be.

Today, more than ever, it is not something you conjure up or create, it’s simple who and what you genuinely are, something Cody understood was far more appealing than fantasy.

In a moment I will share a story or two about how Cody’s influence has helped shape the negotiation of authenticity over the decades about what it is and isn’t western, a negotiation still underway.

But first, for anyone unfamiliar or in need of a very quick refresher:

Cody was born in Iowa in 1846; the year after my ancestors began fleeing across the southern half of that soon-to-be state toward sanctuary in the Rockies.

Then his family moved to eastern Kansas where he lost his father.

At age 11 he worked as a rider carrying messages between drivers and workers on wagon trains before becoming a bullwhacker, then a trapper, miner and briefly a Pony Express Rider.

He enlisted in the Union Cavalry and after the war worked as a buffalo hunter for the railroad.  Cody then became a Chief of Scouts for the 5th U.S. Cavalry, leading the rescue of Wild Bill Hickok.

Eventually, he earned the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars.

Cody became a public figure and the subject of dime novels as well as outspoken about the rights of Native Americans.  In addition, he became a performer and show producer.

As a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, Cody was also instrumental in the nation’s first national forest and the national reclamation act.

The best way to get a sense of William F. Cody is to visit his namesake along the Absaroka Mountains in northern Wyoming as they give way to the Bighorn.

Cody, Wyoming is the eastern and to many the most scenic and least touristy gateway to Yellowstone Park.  It is also home to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, which is comprised of four museums including one devoted to Bill Cody’s story as well as a research library.

The little town is also home to the still operating Irma Hotel which Cody co-founded a year after that train wreck back in North Carolina. 

He began by acquiring and then expanding the T E Ranch up the more secluded South Fork from Cody in 1895 and then built a hunting lodge up on the North Fork where the road now leads to Yellowstone since the dam was built.

But Cody first saw the potential of this area in 1870 while leading a scientific expedition up the Bighorn.  It happened to be the same year an expedition was being led to examine the potential of Yellowstone.

Until then, exploration of river valleys along the Rockies such as the Henry’s Fork where my ancestors would settle were dismissive of any settlement potential.  But fresh eyes such as Cody’s changed all of that.

William F. Cody had a sense of authenticity that has inspired 150 years of nomenclature about the old West and is preserved today in details and artifacts such as clothing and dress and speech.

His shows inspired audiences to travel and to know what to expect.  They also helped negotiate what experts call the ongoing interplay and socially-agreed upon construct that we designate as authentic.

Tourism faces much courser fault lines than just authenticity today.  Take for instance, the one that exists between commercial hucksterism and genuine sense of place.

The West does too, and not just recently with standoffs by a few militants in Nevada and Oregon.

In 1939, a movement anchored in the Sheridan Rotary Club began with a threat to secede and break off northern Wyoming including Cody and Yellowstone into the State of Absoroka.

The frustration back then, as it had been during the “range wars” 50 years earlier was more about intrastate politics with the federal policies as a surrogate.

But as it does today, another fault line separated the views of preservationist northwestern and fossil-fuel driven northeastern Wyoming.

I thought of this on a cross country trip through my homeland a few years ago while listening to a story on the radio far more reflective of the West in which I grew up.

A rancher down on the South Fork, near Cody’s T E ranch, was out irrigating his hay fields in June of 2013 when he accidentally came between a Grizzly and her cubs.

Watch this very short video of this remarkable account and listen carefully to Nic Patrick’s remarks at the end.

If you are a regular reader, you may recall that my great-great-great grandfather, Thomas B. Graham, was killed in 1864 by a Grizzly in Cache Valley, Utah under similar circumstances, after having put his rifle down to help my great-great grandfather load some wood.

Like many ranchers, Patrick is a conservationist.  Also like many ranchers, he has another occupation.  For nearly forty years, he and his family have built authentic log homes, often for people who are drawn to live a version of the life Bill Cody depicted.

He understands something that William F. Cody came to understand during his lifetime.

Tourism can help preserve nature and the things it loves.  But unmanaged tourism can also often introduce changes that can kill the very the things it loves.

A lot is written today about gentrification of historic neighborhoods.  If well-managed so that socio-economic diversity is preserved, it isn’t a problem.  If not, the very soul of those neighborhoods and the reasons they became so popular is rapidly hollowed out.

However, gentrification can also occur in areas of the West around public lands.   Studies show that for both kinds of gentrification, tourism popularity can provide warning signals to policy makers that they need to instill protections.

Unfortunately, tourism circles today have far too few Buffalo Bill Cody’s.  Instead of being willing to debate the broader issues society faces, they are prone instead to circle the wagons.

It Never Leaves You

You can’t grow up in the tiny Yellowstone-Teton nook of eastern Idaho that noses up between Montana and Wyoming as I did during my formative years on an ancestral cattle ranch, without being constantly aware that it will happen again.

There are 40 distinct geologic formations there, but dominant is a huge volcanic eruption that took place there 2 million years ago.

That was the largest in a chain-reaction of eruptions that began 17 million years ago in the southwest nook of Idaho near its borders with Oregon and Nevada.

Sweeping to the northeast, the eruptions worked their way up what became the 400 mile Snake River Plain, which widens from 30 miles to 125 miles as it reaches my native nook where in the shadow of the Rockies that stupendous eruption created an alpine bench above the plain.

A much smaller eruption in that chain created the Yellowstone Plateau just 600,000 years ago and a crater, or caldera, as large as Los Angeles.

Five miles below its surface is a volcano of molten rock the size of Mount Everest, one of 10 Super Volcanoes in the World.

It will blow again someday and the consequences will be felt globally.

But a far greater imprint on my youth was a river formed from springs that filter through the Yellowstone Plateau where it leans on my native nook of Idaho, called the Henry’s Fork.

It surfaces at the Rocky Mountain Continental Divide just 10 miles from the headwaters of the Missouri River on the other side: the waters of the former destined for the Pacific and the waters of the latter to the Atlantic.

It is impossible to describe how beautiful this area is, especially the first 70 miles of the river’s 127 mile length, so I’ll just link to this video. This is the part my parents crisscrossed when they first brought me home from the hospital.

We crossed it to provision in Ashton, to and from school and church, to watch my dad play softball in the evening down near Chester and for Sunday family dinners along with my with my aunts, uncles and cousins down at my grandparent’s house in Saint Anthony.

The Henry’s Fork is where I learned to wade and explore, catch frogs and fly fish, as well as experience the transformative, spiritual influence of nature.

I rarely return, maybe every 20 years or so, but the Henry’s Fork never leaves you.

It is really more like five different rivers in that first half of the river from where a huge spring turns to a river within a hundred feet, through forests, winding across the pastures and native grasses of a caldera, down through steep canyons creating three huge water falls.

Along that stretch it collects creeks such as Buffalo, Elk and Robinson and rivers such as Warm River and Fall River which cascading out of the southwest corner of Yellowstone known as Bechler Meadows.

Herds of Elk “summer” in the meadows there and further up the Henry’s Fork, migrate just above and below the ranch my great-grandparents settled to “winter” at wildlife refuges at Camas and along Sand Creek.

Just beyond Saint Anthony, the Henry’s Fork breaks into channels becoming more like a large, inland delta as it collects the Teton River west of Rexburg and before joining the South Fork as it flows down out of Palisades to form the Snake River north of Idaho Falls.

The portion of the river so important to my formative years is between its headwaters and the Vernon bridge north of Chester.

Most of that time was spent exploring a half mile of riffles and runs located in the tail waters between the Ora bridge and the Ashton Dam.

We crossed the Ora bridge almost daily for one reason or another.  It is near there that my parents first met when my dad stopped to pull my mom’s family out of the gravel roadside’s roadside borrow pit.

When it was erected in 1911, the reservoir created by the Ashton Dam and the Ora bridge installed below it shortened the route to town for my rancher paternal great-grandparents and grandparents.

In the 1940s, its owner the Utah Power & Light Company brought my maternal grandfather and his family there for a few years to operate the dam.

The Henry’s Fork earned a reputation in the west for fly-fishing among enthusiasts in the 1930s but in 1975 I just may have had a hand in gaining it worldwide renown.

Before, during and after the Expo ‘74, a World’s Fair for the Environment in Spokane, I worked to help start a community destination marketing organization to leverage and build on the success of the event.

Part of our job was to interest outdoor writers in story ideas and pre and post trips related to the event as well as laying the groundwork for hosting the Outdoor Writers of America national convention.

Spokane, Washington hosted the six month affair, in part because of its proximity within a day’s drive from so many the Pacific Northwest’s great rivers, lakes, national forests and parks, including the Henry’s Fork.

Who knows? The effort may have even planted or germinated the seed for an article written in Sports Afield magazine in 1975.

The article appeared during my first year as the DMO’s chief exec entitled, The Best Dry Fly River in America—The Henry's Fork, written by Ernie Schwiebert.

Schwiebert, who passed away in 2005, was already a legend and respected author and illustrator.

As an architect, he took advantage of his business travels to scout fly fishing streams.  He had also influenced the founding and growth of a conservation group called Trout Unlimited.

Now 150,000 members strong with 400 chapters including one named for Ernie, this past year alone Trout Unlimited protected 1,400 stream miles and 7.8 million acres of land while reconnecting over 570 miles of spawning and rearing habitat and restoring over 140 miles of river.

But within a few years of Ernie’s 1975 accolade, worry spread among residents along the Henry’s Fork about its sustainability and by 1983 they coalesced in the formation of the Henry’s Fork Foundation.

Watershed organizations such as this were extremely rare back then and unheard of in eastern Idaho.

A relatively short river, the Henry’s Fork watershed still generates an incredible 2.8 million acre-feet of water supply each year including shallow groundwater.

For us lay folks, an acre-foot of water is 325,900 gallons.  About 59% of that flows downstream into the Snake along with 29% in the form of groundwater outflow.

The remainder is consumed for irrigation, expanded for domestic, commercial and industrial use or lost through evaporation.

One of the major economic drivers of this nook of Idaho is tourism and recreation including fishing, which relies on consistent seasonal flows along the river.

So the rub, even where there isn’t a drought, is to calibrate use of the river over the course of the year so that it is healthy, bio-diverse and economically viable for all uses.

At issue is irrigation, not because of overall consumption for that purpose, which has been stable since the 1970s, but because of the way it has changed technologically.

Rather than relying on snowmelt, it now relies primarily on groundwater recharge and discharge.  Officials everywhere often make the mistake of thinking of surface water and groundwater as different but it is all related.

Actually, rivers are crucial to groundwater and groundwater outflow is crucial to rivers.  They are inter-related.

Along the Henry’s Fork, about 24% of the groundwater is recharged by rain and snow.  Another 9% comes from stream seepage and 38% from seepage from canals.

Another 29% seeps back into groundwater when the irrigation is applied.  But irrigation technology has challenged areas along the river, resulting in too much in low areas and not enough in others.

Idaho, as well as North Carolina where I live, are very conservative states.  But unlike a regressive wing of conservatives in North Carolina,  lawmakers in Idaho, part of the more arid west, seem to know better than to tamper with water quality provisions.

Idaho also better understands, out of necessity, the importance of collaboration.

This includes close collaboration between federal and state agencies as well as collaboration between non-government organizations such as the HF Foundation, water users, landowners, businesses and other stakeholders working together as the Henry’s Fork Watershed Council.

Over the last few years, state and federal agencies have re-worked a management plan for the Henry’s Fork watershed.  They have distilled of more than 50 options in the areas of surface storage, groundwater recharge and water conservation, down to 12.

None of the options involve rolling back water quality standards as we apparently just did in North Carolina to please special interests.

The final product is a tactical plan for achieving strategic objectives in the future.  It is well worth reading and emulating.

There is a bright future for the Henry’s Fork River.  The river continued over the last four decades to rack up accolades for fly fishing.

But as noted in a recent overview by Trout Unlimited, fishing there is “indeed not what it used to be.  It is better.”

The Origin of All Too Rare Sensibilities

You could fit nearly 182 Durham’s in the land area of North Carolina.  In land area, it is the smallest urban county in the state, yet home to the fourth largest city.

So it is surprising to visitors that there are 232 working farms here, many supplying meats, dairy and vegetables to Durham’s nationally-recognized foodie scene.                                  

This may not seem like many given that North Carolina is still a largely rural state with 50,218 farms and livestock operations according to a census regularly conducted by the US Department of Agriculture.

Throughout the four-county metro area centered around Durham, there are about 2,410 farms and livestock operations, nearly half in Chatham County.

Unlike Durham, its metro counterparts have not set aside a third of their land area in watershed and areas where working farms are safeguarded.

This area is an important part of Durham’s sense of place, which in any place where it is still preserved and fostered, always includes not only “built” and “cultural” place-based assets but “natural” as well.

Durham “farms” include 46 livestock operations raising nearly 1,000 head of beef cattle.  The ancestral ranch where I was born and spent my early years in the 1950s in the shadow of the Tetons along the Henry’s Fork raised about that same number of cattle.

In that Fremont County nook, ours was not a large operation but still more than twice the size of the average farm or ranch there today and 8 times the median for operations there.

There are still 181 ranches there growing more than 9,000 head of cattle.  But many operations have turned to farming instead using the pivot irrigation common in northeastern North Carolina now.

As an adult, I spent four-decades in a field tasked as the guardian for sense of place in three different parts of the country, including Durham, but I trace my sensibilities for that work back to our ranch.

I was reminded a month ago of a time when my daughter helped bring this into focus for me when I read of the passing of Ivan Doig a month ago.

Doig was a native Montanan who was born about two hours north across the Centennials and nine years earlier from my roots in the Teton-Yellowstone nook of Idaho.

After earning degrees at Northwestern and the University of Washington (PhD.), he worked for The Rotarian, a magazine, which is where I first read his byline.

My daughter’s Dad #2 passed Doig’s memoir, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind to her and she, in turn, passed it to me knowing how closely it paralleled some of my early influences on the ranch.

It had been written in 1978 when she was five but I was half way through my career when she passed it on to me. It was when I was going on a decade past when I became one of the first in my field to incorporate sense of place as a foundational strategy.

But it wasn’t until I read This House of Sky that I realized how early my sensibilities for sense of place had been shaped.

I have the DNA of five generations of Idaho cowboys and horsemen.

But Doig grew up a sheepherder, along the Rocky Mountain Front, just south of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, an area I’ve crossed while crisscrossing the country with Mugs and which I wrote about a few months ago.

We both shared the 1950s under the big sky of the Mountain States before migrating to urban surroundings.  But one of the reasons Doig’s memoir resonates is that it more accurately portrays the reality behind what has become the cowboy mythology of the West.

It is tempting to think of This House of Sky as a true-story Lonesome Dove, written a few years later by Larry McMurtry, a contemporary of Doig’s who can also capture landscape, but in my opinion House is far more nuanced and relatable.

I still dust off the copy my daughter gave me and read it for inspiration.  It is also a reminder that there may be no greater gift than a child who, while it is foreign to her own background, truly grasps the essence of a parent’s.

As I conclude this essay, my finger fell on a quote from House, “Memory, the near neighborhood of dream, is almost casual in its hospitality.”

And so it seems with sense of place.

When Equal Just Isn’t Fair

Mentioned often in these posts is that I was born and spent my early years on an ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, the only son of an only son, a fifth generation Idaho rancher and sixth generation westerner.

But while delving into why that all came to an end, I’ve formed strong opinions about familial succession and distribution of estates.  Fairness often doesn’t mean equal.

More than 100 years ago next month, my great grandparents and grandparents migrated from both sides of the Idaho-Utah line and upper Cache Valley to that nook, about a half a century before I was born, so that their children would have access to land.

Accessible land in Cache Valley and Bear River Valley, part of a 7,500 acre watershed linking three states had already become difficult to find or too expensive.

So the family hitched up four wagons with teams of four horses each, along with a white-top buggy pulled by two horses, several saddle horses, and a hundred head of cattle and headed off on the 15-day, 200-mile trip north.

Between Spring and Snow Creeks, a mile west of the Henry’s Fork River, my great grandparents bought a ranch and homesteaded another while my grandparents and three of my grandfather’s siblings homesteaded others.

Within a decade, my grandparents began buying these parcels up as my grandfather’s siblings decided to turn to other pursuits or ranch somewhere else.

My great-grandfather had remarried two years after my great-grandmother died during the 1918 Great Influenza Epidemic, and inherited a step-family in the process.

As he neared the end of his life in 1936, he appointed my grandfather executor of his estate. But nine years earlier, my great grandfather and his second wife had begun selling parts of his land to my grandparents beginning with what we called the “Hole In The Ground” place.

A third was paid up front in cash with my grandparents paying off the remainder including interest of 7% by supplying half of the annual harvest each year after expenses and taxes.

Having to resolve issues among siblings and step-relations as well as having to buy and reassemble much of the ancestral holdings nearly crushed my grandfather’s spirit for ranching.

It also deepened his reticence for conflict resolution when it involved family.

Due to my grandfather’s health, after that my dad ran the ranch beginning in his teens and well into the 1940s.  After finally being permitted to serve in WWII, he returned to my mom and the ranch in July 1946.

Dad had been able to mechanize the ranch before he left and over the objections of my grandfather to meet the steep production quotas levied as a crucial part of the war effort.

He and mom continued to modernize the ranch after dad returned based on my grandparents commitment for them to inherit the ranch when they were gone.  This included leveraging tens of thousands of dollars of investment in new equipment and buildings.

But in the late 1950s, one of my dad’s three sisters began pressuring my grandfather for “her” share of the ranch, although she had never been much for that way of life or invested any time or effort other than growing up there.

My grandfather backed out of his commitment to his only son and daughter-in-law, inexplicably not even facilitating its affordable sale to them as his father had done three decades earlier for him.

Before her death in January, I took the opportunity during a Thanksgiving visit to ask my mom something more to the story: how she and dad came to the difficult decision to pick up and start a new life elsewhere, leaving those ancestral lands, friends and a generational way of life.

His dad wouldn’t even compensate them for their investment in the ranch because he had not been in favor of modernization in the first place.

Within a year or so, he would sell the ranch leaving it for my grandmother to distribute the estate after he died in the 1964.

I idolized my grandfather, who from the day I was born would travel up from my their house in Saint Anthony to the ranch each day to pal around with me doing chores.

I had only glimpses of how stubborn he could be, second-guessing my dad’s decisions, even insisting on raking hay with a team of horses, while dad and I idled along across the meadow behind him with a tractor and bailer.

It was probably as much that my parents knew they would never be able to run the ranch as they wanted as it was the distribution of the estate that was the final straw.

Relatives were often critical of their decision to leave, including those who stood to gain as well as other branches.

In hindsight, my grandfather could have handled things in many different ways.

As I have seen done here in Durham, even without selling it to my parents he could have granted shares in the ranch to each of his children but a greater share to my parents indexed for the sweat, tears and risks they had in operating it while growing the value of the other shares.

This is an instance where insisting that all shares be equal isn’t really fair.

My parents may have been too young to see or propose alternatives, but in the end, I think they wanted a new start, one where they could call their own shots.

They may have already had inklings that even though I loved the ranch and the history, my inclinations were not toward ranching, nor were those of my two younger sisters.

After leasing a place and being ripped off by a broker, they showed even more resilience by refusing to file bankruptcy and taking on entirely new lines of work, not only paying off the debt but going on to successful careers.

In our last in-person visit, my mom reiterated how much my dad had dearly loved ranching and he was very good at it.  But our parents were clearly more intent on propelling their three children further into the middle class.

Though frequently nostalgic for the ranch, my parents didn’t pine nor did they hold grudges.  Throughout their lives and our time growing up, visits with grandparents and aunts and uncles continued as though nothing had happened.

Memories of ancestral lands and my ranching heritage are romanticized for me now.  Somehow things worked out for the best for everyone involved.

But parents who are facing distribution of estates and businesses need to think very carefully about how to accomplish this, especially if some children are predisposed to the family business and willing to do and invest what it takes to sustain and grow it.

As my dad would often repeat while also applying it to doctors and bankers, “Don’t trust lawyers.”

For me, I have it easy.  Just one kid, and a pretty great kid at that who doesn’t have an entitlement bone in her body.

The Native Home of Hope

Authenticity is not a fad when it comes to sense of place,  but use - or should I say misuse – of the word has become one.

This will pass, and when it does the attributes of authenticity of place will remain by definition nearly temporal.

My personal story begins as the only son of an only son, born at the tail end of five generations of Rocky Mountain ranchers who gradually migrated during the hundred years before I was born from the Central to the Northern Rockies.

Our ancestral ranch is where I learned sense of place, e.g. the smell of sage brush, new mown hay, and rain on a dirt road, as well as the sound of a Meadowlark and the colors of Yellowstone Cutthroat in the Henry’s Fork.

But it is also where I first learned about myths: including myths about rugged individualists, the cowboy errant Knight and other stereotypes of the West that I see fleeting across the eyes of people who want to hear my story.

I didn’t read Wallace Stegner until I came across his incredible essay in my early 30s entitled, Sense of Place.  This is where he coined that term and I still recommend to anyone seeking an understanding of authenticity.

It was my daughter, then in her third year of college, who brought me to Stegner in more depth.  Having heard my story, she knew that the breadth and depth of his writings would resonate.  It is such a gift to be understood.

One of my favorites is a book of essays written over a span that covered my first two decades entitled, The Sound of Mountain Water.  The first was published the year before I was born, the last in the collection as I turned 21.

The namesake essay in the book is a lyrical description about my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho and its famed Henry’s Fork including this resonate memoir from his first visit there in 1920:

“I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river…”

It is a myth though that the west was settled by rugged individualists.

While that characteristic was prevalent, in several of his books, Stegner supports, as he does in one of the essays in The Sound of Mountain Water, that “cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves” the American West.

When all but two lines of my ancestors crossed the Rockies, to be followed by the remaining two within a decade, there were fewer than 90,000 people inhabiting 750,000 square miles (twice the area of Western Europe.)

There were fewer than 70,000 along the Rockies, nearly all living in what are now New Mexico and Arizona.

Even after the Gold Rush and the arrival of 11,000 Mormons by 1850, the entire West when my ancestors settled there was less than 1% of the US population at the time.

Ranches required an average of four square miles or 2,500 acres, so to avoid isolation and provide safety and shared resources, much of the West was settled on what is called a “village and square model.”

It’s also why early jurisdictions for governance there relied more on river basins and watersheds for boundaries.

Predominately, during the fifty years prior to 1890 as the West was won ranchers lived in settlements near craftsmen, artisans, granaries and supply depots and commuted out to their land and livestock.

Sometimes historians also refer to this as a “village-farm system.”

Much of what is depicted in novels and movies about the West as well as that depicted by many of those who profess to be westerners today is synthetic.

Pure and simple, the West evolved to what it is today through a sense of commons that revolutionized the sense of land and water ownership.

The myth of rugged self-reliance became evident during the 1930’s Great Depression.

Groups such as Mormon leaders felt their recently evolved welfare program would be sufficient and pressed by partisans expressed that somehow the new federal program which emulated it would create sloth and dependency.

But the Mountain states where Mormons were then centered became the largest per capita users of the federal aid program.  Mormon leaders marveled at the public works projects completed by those receiving it as a condition.

Given their history, they shouldn’t have been at all surprised.

Apparently, they had forgotten that it is trust that led to economic development of the West, just as a new study has found in a study of survivors of Atomic bombs that trust enabled them to rebuild from that trauma.

Today, a small group of regressives in the West are pushing to let special interests get their hands on public lands for mining and drilling, backed quietly by Wall Street interests who have over the decades, raped the West in similar fashion.

They are dismissing economic analysis, which I have written about previously, showing that rural counties adjacent to public lands have outperformed others and that counties where resource exploitation occurs ultimately fall much lower.

But it was not the various gold, silver and copper strikes in the early west that provided sustainable growth.

It was grass.

In part, it was this unique, resilient, drought tolerant wild grass that led my ancestors who had settled in 1860 along each side of the Utah-Idaho border to relocate to the northern extreme of the Upper Snake River plain to create new homesteads along the Henry’s Fork.

Famously framed by the Continental Divide, Yellowstone and the Tetons, this area of my origin is the culmination of a hundred mile stretch that is no more than 70 miles wide at its widest narrowing to 20 or 30 miles where I was born.

The sides of this valley range to 10,000’ framed by the Lost River and Lemhi ranges stretching down from the Sawtooths and on the east by the Caribou, Snake River and Teton ranges.

My ancestors were following an old stagecoach supply route between Utah and the mines in Montana which, beginning in the late 1870s, was becoming the path of a slowly emerging railroad eventually to supply tourists to Yellowstone.

But above where the Henry’s Fork joined the South Fork to form the Snake River, settlers such as my ancestors were surprised to find the landscape covered not by sage brush, but waist high, wild bluegrass from the river to the Tetons and north to forests of the Centennial range.

The area had already been transited by trappers and then a cattle company but it was still available to homestead.  But they still followed the modified “village-farm and ranch” model adapted from when their parents cross the Rockies in the mid-1840s.

My ancestors found that the western side of the Henry’s Fork was even better adapted to ranching.  They had modified the village-ranch model but settled this new area as they had others in the West through cooperation.

Together, they marked off land, built bridges and roads, created reservoirs and irrigation canals, established granaries for the poor, created cemeteries and erected school houses.

Tough, independent and self-reliant – certainly – but with an even greater commitment to cooperation, the commons, public education and the welfare of those less fortunate.

By the time I was born in 1948, a hundred years after ancestors began settling the Rocky Mountain west,  rich potato farms had replaced the bluegrass in our nook of Idaho, as they have the ranchland on the west side now thanks to pivot irrigation systems.

The West is always changing.  Although I haven’t lived there since the 1970s, I travel along the Rockies each summer on road trips with my grandsons and daughter. 

Much more dramatic than the subtle land use changes since my youth are the demographic and psychographic changes.  Much of Idaho has been inhabited by in migration that seemingly seeks to replace the real Idaho by making it a refuge for the synthetic West.

I don’t mean the Aryan Nation which was expelled fifteen years ago.  Places in Idaho are exurbs such as Coeur d’Alene.  While whites represent only 8% of the population growth in the past decade, they represent 73% of the flight to exurbs.

Most seem to be chasing myths created when misinformation is re-harmonized to fit worldview.

It is complicated but emblematic.  The best way to understand why my homeland now seems foreign, click to watch an episode of the phenomenal PBS America By The Numbers program entitled Our Private Idaho.

As a fellow North Carolinian once wrote, “You Can Never Go Home Again,” and that is sad.  But the West will keep changing.

But as Stegner wrote, the West is also “the native home of Hope.”  My hope is that it will once again claim its authentic roots.

Yellowstone As Metaphor

Because I am representative of both sides, I am eager to read a book due to be released this summer entitled, The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict.

It is a study of old west belief systems such as those held by my great grandparents, grandparents and parents who forged ancestral ranchland where I was born along the Idaho edge of Yellowstone.

It also concerns the overlapping “new west” concern for protecting and restoring habitat and wildlife.

But while the data is both quantitative and qualitative, Yellowstone is used as a spiritual metaphor for how Americans approach moral disputes overall.

My Idaho roots stretch back to territorial days a dozen years before the creation of Yellowstone as America’s first national park, straddled a few decades later, when my my ancestors who began settling the Rockies in 1847, forged the horse and cattle ranch of my youth along the park’s western border.

By the time I came along the Bowmans had pushed large populations of Grizzlies back into the park and equally proximate Targhee National Forest, almost eliminating wolves and subduing the resulting over populations of beaver. 

But ranchers back then had an innate grasp of ecological balance, and most were early conservationists, if not considered early environmentalists.  Today those camps have become tribes who see the other as enemies.

In my experience, the battle there is not between old west and new west but sterilized, extremist versions of each who refuse to listen to one another.

In other words a microcosm of what’s gone wrong with America.

In a quote in The Economist recently, Dr. Jeff Hardin a devout Christian and zoologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison put it succinctly while noting that “Many partisans subscribe to the post-Enlightenment idea that giving people lots of facts ought to be enough to convince people.”

Guilty as charged.

But today and maybe always according to Hardin, “most of us hold our beliefs in a tangled ball of yarn.”  “Tug on one thread, and people fear that their very identity is under attack.”

I don’t have much patience for some of today’s ranchers who see the rebalancing of populations of wolves, Grizzlies and bison as surrogate agents of the federal government.

But environmentalists can also fail to accept or inform opinions with new information, such as this report in High Country News, revealing that reintroduction of wolves is not a panacea in Yellowstone and that some ecosystems once altered may never recover.

Last month, a jury in my native Fremont County, Idaho convicted a hunter of illegally killing a Grizzly bear and it reminded me that in the 1840s when most of my ancestors settled in the Rockies, the historic population outside of Alaska of 50,000 Grizzlies between the Pacific coast and the Mississippi River had already been pushed back into what are now the plains states.

Settlements back then required hunters such as my great (x3) grandfather Thomas Graham to protect against Grizzlies.

He was killed by one in November 1864 while protecting another ancestor and livestock in Northern Utah about 28 miles from the Idaho border.

But until recently, the last known Grizzly in Utah were seen in 1923, the year my father was born.  Today, they no longer exist in six western states, including California the “Golden Bear” state, where they had been driven out by 1922.

By the time I was graduating from BYU in 1972, only a few hundred were in existence with a concentration in and around Yellowstone including Targhee National Forest near our ranch.

There were several hundred verified sightings in our nook of Idaho between 1965 and 2000.  Male Yellowstone Grizzlies can range more than 300 square miles, far more widely than other populations.

Between 1974 and 1979 when I was marketing Spokane, scientists tracked Grizzlies in and around my native nook of Idaho along the border of Yellowstone to document clashes with livestock such as cattle and sheep.

It was a lot less than ranchers believed but it only takes one encounter to inflame fears.  The truth is that raising livestock on rangeland is inherently risky for many reasons and predators such as wolves and Grizzlies are easy scapegoats as is the fear of disease from bison.

But thanks to endangered species protection, Grizzlies in and around Yellowstone are now back to a sustainable high of 700 or more Grizzlies.  Nor do they stay put, ranging five times the distance our ranch was from Yellowstone.

It may be time for delisting and based on the recent conviction turning the species over to state management, at least in Idaho where a management plan has long been in place.

In my native Fremont County nook of Idaho, ranchers, farmers, conservationists, settlements and sportsmen also have a proven track record of reaching compromises to protect the famed Henry’s Fork River, from which Grizzlies scoop up their share of native Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout.

But environmentalists are distrustful, giving too much credibility to the relatively small group of vocal ranchers who refuse to accept the importance of ecological balance or even sit down to listen even if to agree to disagree.

There are solutions but just as with the innovations of the Affordable Care Act, they come from admitting that some parts of alternative views are with merit, while acknowledging that something one might have disagreed with is actually working.

Our way out of gridlock is to put those with extreme either/or views on the sidelines and to return to the practical middle ground that is part of what made this country so exceptional.

A List of Names Never Forgotten

I wonder, “For how many decades can useful DNA cling to an old horseshoe?”

In the early 1970s, when she sold the house my grandfather had relocated from a parcel that they had assembled as part of our ancestral ranch down, she had one last thing to do before living in shifts with her four children.

The old house had originally belonged to my great-grandparents.  Moving it down to Main and Third in Saint Anthony, Idaho and fitting it above a new basement probably cost more than a new house but it had been where my great-grandmother died during the Great Influenza.

As she packed possessions to move, my Grandmother Adah made sure a heavy box of artifacts was shipped to me where I was just completing college.

In the box were pairs of horseshoes that had been worn by favorite horses trained and bred by my great grandfather and grandfather.  Each had been mounted on a beam in the basement etched with the names of the horses, Darby, Baby Queen, Bill, Thousand Springs and Senator Dubois.

Unfortunately, my grandmother didn’t keep them in any order, nor did she write down the names,  but they were made indelible in my memory from hearing and seeing my grandfather use them to tell the story of the long line of horsemen and horsewomen from which we are descended.

I remember when I was age 8 or so, helping grandpa add a pair while he held me up to print the name Dolly above them, the name of one of the five draft horses he had kept on the ranch after turning it over to my parents to operate after dad returned from WWII.

Not all of the horses named along the beam were work horses such as Gypsy had been, a pure black hand me down quarter horse, given to me as my first horse when I was age five.

Some were used for breeding quarter horses and/or raced and paraded as thoroughbreds at surrounding community celebrations.

The fame of some of those horses extended beyond their mythical esteem in my eyes.  Darby had been ridden in the parade in Salt Lake City for Theodore Roosevelt and his Roughriders.

Queen was trained by my great grandfather and given to my grandfather as a boy.   Bill was the first horse my grandfather trained and raced in community celebrations and rodeos.  Bill ran a quarter mile in 24 seconds once.

My great grandfather bought Senator Dubois as a retired racehorse.  Even at 20 years old, Senator turned in a quarter mile in 22.5 seconds when ridden by my grandfather in one of the early War Bonnet Roundups down in Idaho Falls.

Winning the 3/8ths mile event, it was the last for both of them.  Newly married, my grandmother, who would work right alongside my grandfather while training horses as well as mules, felt it was too dangerous.

Or to hear his version, at age 25, he was getting too heavy to race.

The War Bonnet started in 1911, and they were married in 1914, to give an idea of the timeframe.

One of my great grandfather’s contemporaries was the real Senator Fred Thomas Dubois (pronounced in Idaho and Wyoming with heavy emphasis on DEW followed by a quick tailing boys,) rather than the way his French Canadian parents had intended.

There is a tiny town named for him about 50 miles west of our ranch and another about 160 miles east in Wyoming. I suspect they were named for him because he broke with his party to support conservation and not because he did everything possible to disenfranchise Mormons prior to statehood.

Dubois first came to Idaho as the US Marshall for the territory about three decades after my ancestors settled along the Rockies.  At the time he was first appointed Senator of the territory, Mormons began settling up in the furthest nook of the Upper Snake.

He was not reappointed after his second term and left Idaho for good about the time our ancestral ranch was forged a mile west of the Henry’s Fork River, the closest you can be to Montana and Wyoming and still be in Idaho.

I suspect the irony was not lost on tiny Mormon settlements along the Tetons as my great grandfather and grandfather rode Senator Dubois at celebrations and in parades.

I doubt that being able to see the names along the beam in that 1915 house, which is still in use at 3rd and Main, would not help me specifically tie the shoes back to their owners.

But one set could probably be identified by DNA as belonging Thousand Springs.  He was a grandson of Man o’ War (shown in the image in this post,) arguably the greatest horse to ever race.

When he was 30 years old, Man o’ War died of heart failure seven months before I was born in mid-1948 but more than fifty years later, horsemen in a poll still ranked him America’s “Horse of the Century.”

In the era between WWI and the 1930s, horseracing, along with track and field, were the most popular sports in America; the NFL, NBA and MLB of that period.  In the wake of WWI, Man ‘ War inspired the entire nation.

I never knew his grandson Thousand Springs and my family’s tie to the great horse.  My grandfather felt he was a bit temperamental and mean,  but he is still legend enough in that Teton-Yellowstone nook of Idaho to be mentioned in books alongside my great grandfather who died in late 1936.

Thousand Springs is a cousin to Seabiscuit, made famous in the early 2000s in a book, documentary and movie including a memorable Randy Newman soundtrack.  Seabiscuit inspired Americans during the Great Depression as his grandfather had done after WWI.

With a two car garage in place of my grandmother’s famous flower garden, the Saint Anthony house is still there at 249 W. Main Street a block equitant from the Catholic Church and the Henry’s Fork.

So I suspect I could track down the current owners and learn if there are any names etched on that beam that I may have forgotten.

At age 31, Gypsy, horse I inherited as a hand-me-down from my father when I was five years old, died not long after I left for college.

Grandpa had passed away two years before and I never had the heart to check during visits home with grandma to see if a pair of Gypsy’s shoes were up on that beam.

I suspect not, although my Bowman side was pretty stoic except when it came to horses.   Whenever that big black cross between a Belgian draft horse and possibly one of those thoroughbreds crosses my mind so does her scent when I would blow into her nostrils as a sign of affection.

When she moved out of her house in the early 1970s and began rotating her time with each of her four children including my dad, her youngest and only son, Grandma Adah made certain a set of artifacts made its way to me at college.

They were pairs of horseshoes my grandfather had nailed to a beam in the basement of their home in St. Anthony, Idaho and that he used as I was coming up to repeatedly tell me the story behind each pair and about the long line of horsemen from which I descended.

They are priceless even without the specifics because they were the means by which my grandfather would tell me our family’s story, the same reason they are so pivotal to history museums.

One set belonged to Thousand Springs, a grandson of Man o’ War, arguable the greatest thoroughbred racehorse of all time and familiar to fans of books, movies, musicals and documentaries as the grandfather of a cousin, Seabiscuit.

At the age of 30, Man o’ War died of heart failure, seven months before I was born in mid-1948 a few years after horseracing slipped in decline except for the Triple Crown.

But more than five decades later, a poll that included horsemen declared him the American race “horse of the century.”

I descend from a long line of horsemen but even as the only son of an only son and the end of that line in both talent and name.

Already my eye had been caught by the cool 1950s cars St. Anthony Motors would then showcase right on the street where we turned off the old Yellowstone Highway for the two blocks to Grandpa and Grandma’s house, by backing them in at an angle.

That heritage today is carried on in the Pacific Northwest by my niece Megan, a stalwart at REI, who learned her lifelong love for horses when very young while going to the racetrack with her grandpa.

I can bet they spent most of their time in the stables and saddling paddock where accompanies by escort ponies, horses and riders warm up before a race.

Leaving Something of Ourselves Behind

A friend of mine who teaches strategic thinking and consults for organizations from time to time estimates that 2% to 3% seem to come by this skill naturally.

It was probably embedded beginning at age 3 in the way their parents and grandparents schooled them in pre-school foundational skills.

The professor estimates the percentage rises to 10% at college graduation and then levels off.  He finds it curious that so many  that pick it up naturally studied history in college, not business.

I’m not surprised, really.

Interest in history is piqued during those very early years, and when studied,becomes a way to make connections and see patterns in the world.  It’s about looking back to see forward, all foundations of strategic insight.

Maybe a required course in historical analysis should be required in business schools.

Driving  home from giving a lecture in the mountains earlier this week,  a passage penned by Dr. Peter Bieri for a “philosophical thriller (smile)” and published under the name name Pascal Mercier kept running through my mind:

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away.

And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there (Night Train to Lisbon.)”

When my paternal great-grandparents and grandparents homesteaded the ancestral ranch the shadow of the Tetons, where I was born and lived until the age of accountability, only one had Idaho roots dating to when it became a territory during the Civil War.

At the time, only 20% of Americans lived outside of the state in which they were born.  Today, it is 33%, half of college graduates by the time they are thirty but only 17% of high school dropouts according to the research in the book The New Geography of Jobs by UC-Berkley economist Dr. Enrico Moretti.

The book is an excellent primer on economic development.

When my paternal great-grandparents and grandparents homesteaded ancestral ranch more than a hundred years ago in the shadow of the Tetons where I was born and lived through the age of accountability, it was so the younger generation could afford land of their own

Only one had Idaho roots dating to when Idaho became a territory during the Civil War but all of them had been born in the Rocky Mountains.

Idaho, at the time, had fewer than 2 persons per square mile, “the census classification for frontier.”  At the time, only 20% of Americans lived outside the state where they were born.

Today, it is only 33% including half of college graduates by the time they are thirty but only 17% of high school dropouts according to the research in the book The New Geography of Jobs by UC-Berkley economist Dr. Enrico Moretti.

Homesteading land made available by the federal government back then worked much as a “relocation credit” Moretti proposes for today.

Homesteaders in the first two decades of Idaho statehood anticipated the routes of soon-to-be-laid railroads which those companies, such as the Oregon Short Line, actively promoted through intensive marketing.

Founded by Union Pacific, “short line” stood for the shortest route between Wyoming and Oregon but by 1889 that railroad was laying tracks north to Ashton four miles from our ranch, then by 1908 up 57 miles over the Rea’s Pass across the Continental Divide to the western gateway to Yellowstone Park.

By 1912, a spur had also been laid from Ashton southeast to Victor where connections were made over the Tetons and up the Jackson Hole to the southern entrance to Yellowstone and the much anticipated creation of Grand Teton National Park.

In 1954, my entire elementary school took a field trip along that spur behind a steam engine a few years before the demise of the Yellowstone Special and the Yellowstone Express passenger trains, one from Chicago and one from Los Angeles.

It was the end of an era but the old rail lines are now being leveraged into another kind of economic development.

Abandoned rail lines are now trails throughout Idaho including the two routes out of Ashton, a thirty mile rail-to-trail along the length of the Tetons and the 34 mile Yellowstone Branch Line Trail through the canyons of the Henry’s Fork from Warm River to the Divide.

In 1896, when Butch Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall Gang robbed a bank in Montpelier, Idaho near where my maternal grandparents would live during my early years, my paternal ancestors were still living just across the Bear River Range.

Soon they headed north to homestead against the Tetons when Idaho barely had 160,000 residents, after the National Forests were first established but before Targhee National Forest was created up behind the ranch in 1908.

But in 1906, Congress responded to powerful special interests by gutting some of the national forests and reopening some of the less forested land to homesteading through the Forest Homesteading Act.

Public use back then did not include recreation and although only 1.8 million acres were eventually patented for homesteads, the act effectively pried 12 million acres away for developers.

In all, by WWII, only 19% of public land had actually been leveraged into  homestead ranches and farms.

When the first of six transcontinental railroads began to tunnel through the Bitterroot Mountains of Northern Idaho, there were less than a thousand non-native people living there.  By 1900, there were more than 10,000 living in each of the two counties through which I’ll soon pass.

Many had moved there because of inexpensive public land given to the railroads and then sold to settlers before construction crews even began grading.  By 1900, these land sales reached 105,000 acrese a year.

That’s the year the lumbering industry arrived after depleting stands in the upper Midwest.  Before 1891, the land from near Spokane, across to Montana and north to Lake Pend Oreille belonged to the Coeur d’Alene Indians, about 500,000 acres left of their ancestral lands by treaty.

Responding to special interests, all but 70,000 acres was pried away.  Even given the Forest Homesteading Act, settlers were soon overrun by lumber “robber barons,” some through legal means, but much of it through fraud.

As I drive down from Lookout Pass and across northern Idaho again, three things will be on my mind.

First is that one day, we need to build in time to detour down the St. Joe River Scenic Byway along a series of Forest Service roads, hopefully astride my Harley Cross Bones.  For now, having Mugs along and my grandson’s eagerness to get to the lake take precedent.

Second is how ironic it is that the route of the Milwaukee Road’s old Hiawatha passenger train is now a 15-mile trail in Idaho alone from Lookout Ski Areas to Pearson for trail bikes and hikers, alternative forms of National Forest economic development.

Another rails-to-trails adaptation is rated one of the 25 best in the nation, a 72 mile asphalt Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes greeneway from the Tribe’s reservation at Plummer, along its namesake lake and up to the early 1850s Cataldo Mission before ending in Mullan.

One of the most spectacular views during my hiking days was heading up the St. Jo River north of St. Maries to its headwaters, a must for fans of the book The Big Burn.

One or the Forest Service heroes of the firestorm, 25-year-old Joe Halm, took his crew to safety there.  Little did I know as we hiked that stretch, that a few years earlier, a group of University of Montana students had climbed up the other side.

Well into a second century of controversy over Northern Idaho logging on public lands, they have been advocating for over 40 years for the roadless area to be set aside as a 275,000 acre wilderness area straddling each side of the Bitterroots.

Third, is what will soon be two Tribal Casinos on the plains above Spokane, near the original Longhorn (southern pit-style) Barbeque restaurant, one a leisure and convention resort opened by Idaho’s Kalispel Tribe and nearly through the approval process by the Spokane Tribe, just desserts I suppose.

To paraphrase Pascal Mercier, “There are things in us that we can find again only by going back to the places were we have left parts of ourselves behind.”

Thanks for keeping me company.

Remembering Ott’s Place

The old Jeep my paternal grandparents gave me fifty years ago a month before I turned 16 was already nearly as old as I was.  We had grown up together.

It didn’t have a radio or turn signals, which weren’t common until 1955, or seat belts, which were only becoming common place at the time, and it predated side view mirrors, which were not yet common even on the driver’s side.

Anyone riding in the passenger seat had to use a handle to manually operate their windshield wiper from side to side.

The original paint had worn off so my grandmother Adah hand-painted it the original red leaving brush strokes as a reminder.  Honest…you can’t make this stuff up!

It had plenty of torque, but the top end was between 45 and 50 mph. Marketed as the MC “war wagon,” it was before the “sport” was put in SUV. 

Purely “utility.”

But I loved that Jeep, and even with years of wear and tear around the ranch and the smell of fumes from the gas tank, it was a hit at school, although not the “chick magnet” my daughter called Jeeps of this type when she reached that age.

My first-ever memories of riding in it are with either my dad or my grandfather on quick trips to and from our ancestral ranch and town usually to pick something up from the blacksmith or the coop or if with my grandfather, a quick stop at an old bar called Ott’s Place (smile.)

Apparently, my mom read him the riot act when she learned, but Ott had twice been mayor of Ashton, and besides, my uncle Louie was probably downstairs playing poker.

Slot machines and gaming tables games had been outlawed in Idaho when I was born but in my early years I would still see slots in the entrances of old cafes in remote areas such as ours.

Idaho voters banned both again during my early years but in places such as Ott’s that just meant they were placed out of sight.

Waiting for my grandfather, I would sit on a barstool next to the big picture window in front thumbing through the town calendar with everyone’s birthday on it including surrounding ranch and farm families.

After a little less than a mile on the trip to town, the narrow gravel road dropped steeply down from a bluff to the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, then crossed over the old Ora bridge beside which I learned to fly-fish long before that river became world-famous.

As the road climbed back up the other side it was suddenly as though you could reach out and touch the Grand Teton Mountains 15 miles to the east.

Ashton, Idaho, then not quite 50 years old, was at its peak population of 1,200 residents.  Its founders had a real estate business along with a drug store and fountain a couple of doors west of Ott’s where we would stop next.

Out front, my grandfather would “kick the tires” with an old friend, Charles C. Moore, who he always called “governor” because a few decades earlier he had been elected from that remote Yellowstone-Teton nook to two terms as the Governor of Idaho.  This was in the 1920s.

Any prescriptions had to be dispensed by Dr. Hargis though, a friend of my grandmother’s who had also been there since the founding and still made house—or in our case ranch—calls, and would for many years hence, although my parents made a mid-summer dash 50 miles downriver to the nearest hospital for my birth.

On each trip, we would drive past the Hummel Motel where a few months after it opened our family took a respite with our friends the Long’s, from cabin fever when our ranch was snowed in much of the winter.

That’s me in one of the images in this essay showing off some of my moves while stealing my first kiss.  Actually, that day my friend Shawna did the stealing (smile.)

Re-clad in logs and river stone, it is the famed Angler’s Inn today.

Back then schools didn’t close when the road closed to buses after a huge snow storm, so my dad would drive that Jeep through the drifts picking up four or five other schoolmates we collected along the way.

Dad hated school when he was that age attending a two-room school house just north of the ranch.  Back then my grandmother, who served on the school board for more than twenty years, also boarded eight school teachers in our small ranch house.

If the buses still weren’t able to run when school let out, I would wait at my aunt Deon’s until dad could pick me up.

I always thought my old Jeep had been selected because my dad saw them used during in WWII by the Army, but I’ve since pieced together that my grandparents had been partial to Willys-Overland vehicles in the 1920s.

J.N. Willys was a serial entrepreneur who parlayed a bicycle distributorship into ownership of a firearms store called the Elmira Arms Co. which was also a manufacturers rep (wholesaler–go-between to dealerships) for cars such as the Pierce Arrow and the Overland Motor Companies Runabout.

When Overland ran into financial trouble, Willys bought it in 1908, scooped up some related technology suppliers, and renamed it Willys-Overland which was soon the largest manufacturer behind Ford, increasing annual output from 400 cars to 200,000 in eight years while relocating manufacturing to Toledo where Jeeps are still made today.

In 1926, Willys-Overland launched a very advanced touring car branded the Whippet.

My homesteading grandparents had done pretty well during WWI providing draft horses to agents who came through on behalf of the British and American armies.

They had switched to cattle during the roaring ‘20s and that’s when my grandfather fell in love with the Whippet and bought one of the Model 96 touring cars.

That’s my dad sitting on the hood in the image in this essay so that Whippet is probably a model year 1927.

By the time I was first taking rides in our Willy’s Jeep, I had discovered that Whippet abandoned in a grove of trees south of our meadow next to an old buckboard buggy.

At first I mistook it for a Ford Model A.  But my grandfather quickly filled me in on the difference.  The two cars were contemporaries but the Whippet came first and was in some ways technologically advanced, although the Ford Model A was far more prolific.

Linked is a Whippet the same vintage as my grandparent’s on display in a Pennsylvania antique car museum today.  It cost $750 before upgrades when they bought it.  His was probably closer to $1,000 with the larger engine.

Seating five, it was still the most compact of American cars back then, setting speed and endurance records during a 24-hour race at the Indianapolis Speedway when the track was truly brick.

I still manifest those Willys’ roots today.

Life Intersections

Just under where the nose of Idaho pokes up into Montana, a few miles from where I was born and spent my early years, lies a choice between two mountain passes over the 10,000’ Continental Divide.

You can take the much more traveled 7,072’ Targhee Pass the dozen or so miles northeast on US 20 to West Yellowstone, Montana, an entrance back into Wyoming and the national park.

Or, about the same distance northwest on Idaho Route 87 summits the 10 miles over 6,844’ Raynold’s Pass between the headwaters of two of the nation’s largest and most important river systems.

One is the origin of the great Missouri River, flowing east into the Mississippi before reaching the Gulf of Mexico.  The other, the origin of the Snake River and then the Columbia River before reaching the Pacific.

This is also one of the coldest spots in Idaho.  The average temperature in the winter is 22 degrees.  It averages 43 inches of participation, an amount similar to Seattle, New York or Durham, North Carolina where I now live but more than 70% of that comes from snow.

My nearly ten-year stint during the 1980s in Anchorage, Alaska, which is the trailhead for the famed Iditarod, was not my first exposure to sled-dog racing.

In 1917, eight years before the famous dash to Iditarod with diphtheria serum for which Alaska’s nearly 1,200-mile race is named, the inaugural American Dog Derby ran 55 miles from West Yellowstone, Montana to Ashton, Idaho, a tiny town about four miles from our ranch.

The Derby was held annually (with the exception of WWII) until I turned 13 in 1961.  Then it resumed about four years after I was recruited to Durham.  The Iditarod runs in March.  The American Dog Derby races in mid-February about the time Anchorage celebrates Fur Rendezvous each year.

Funny how one’s life intersects common pathways.

Ashton is where I took the bus to grade school beginning in 1954.  The sled-dog race took a shorter route from West Yellowstone in 1917 when “Tud” Kent, who was from Island Park about 20 miles north of Ashton, won that first 55 mile race.

Eventually the route was shortened to 25 miles, considered a mere sprint in Alaska.  Today, the Derby is a series of races roundtrip from Ashton running east tracing the Henry’s Fork on old Idaho route 47.

Today’s route crosses over the scenic byway just below Mesa Falls and Bear Gulch, through the sliver of Yellowstone Park that is inside Idaho, over the Wyoming border to Cave Falls, which spans Fall River on its course from Bechler Meadows as it runs down into Idaho and into the Henry’s Fork.

Then the racers make the return trip back to Ashton.  The race involves two of these 50-mile round-trip heats on consecutive days.  During the 18 miles from Ashton to the Park boundary and then the seven miles to Cave Falls, annual precipitation will vary from 20 inches to 80 inches a year.

The hero of that first race in 1917 was a bulldog similar to my English bulldog Mugsy.  Running for “Wind River” Smith, the bull dog wouldn’t quit when others balked so he was moved to lead dog and took the team to the finish line.

I believe it.  Mugsy turns into a sled dog whenever you mention taking a ride or a walk.  An advantage for bull dogs would be their low, stocky build, powerful thighs and huge over-sized paws.  Their smushed in breathing apparatus would seem a disadvantage, but maybe not in cold thin air at high altitude.

American Derby winners haven’t always been American huskies, Ashton’s mascot.  Some years teams of setters, Gordon and Irish, have won.

My Mom’s best friend’s father and her brother, Warren and Don Cordingly, were championship mushers.  Warren won the Ashton race and also set records winning races in Canada.

His son, a year or two ahead of my Dad in school, won his first race when he was 17 years old and won two more times after that.  A 90-mile segment of the Derby is named in their honor.

The name Cordingly is memorable for another reason.  My first memory of seeing someone after they had died was being lifted suddenly at age 5 by my Mom to view Warren’s wife Ethyl in her casket, something you never forget.

Mom’s friend Vera owned the place just north of us with her husband Burt who traveled as a jockey racing horses.  I often played with their children and their cousins when I was growing up.

I suspect my great-grandparents had not just been drawn two hundred miles from their place near Richmond Utah to buy a ranch in that nook of Idaho so their sons including my grandfather could homestead places of their own.

The climate probably appealed to his Swiss Amish roots on the shores of Thunersee.

My great-grandparents, grandparents (who consolidated all of the ranches into one) and my parents grew livestock on the ranch, first horses, then cattle.

About a quarter of the land was sage brush and forested hills dissected by a meadow used for forage and to raise hay for the winter from a few acres we farmed with feed crops including a place we called “hole in the ground.”

Grown were grains, some stored in several small granaries for use throughout the year, and some to sell to the big granary in Ashton.

The altitude drops from near 10,000’ up at the headwaters of the Henry’s Fork down to between 5,000’ and 6000’ where the ranch was.  The precipitation at that level was around 15-20 inches, mostly from snow that averaged five feet or more.

Right on the cusp of where that was possible, we dry farmed the feed crops because irrigation wasn’t feasible.  People who dry farm there today and others across America use technology such as John Deere’s Green Star System.  The frost-free growing season in that nook of Idaho ranges from only 60-100 days you have to make the most of it.

Many ranchers and farmers from that part of Idaho are probably among the 26% of Americans including a third of Republicans and half of Tea Party members who respond on surveys saying that they don’t receive benefits from government.

Today, you see many of them “texting” while driving their huge tractors or sitting with their feet up while listening to satellite radio because they use GPS to not only self-guide the tractor but calibrate from seeding to fertilizing to harvesting achieving just the right soil and moisture conditions on each inch of ground.

The GPS and technology for satellite radio is based on government funded research.  Grazing on federal lands, accepting price supports and benefitting from reclamation studies and projects to conserve watersheds such as the three along the Henry’s Fork for irrigation, all qualify as taking benefits from government.

There isn’t anyone in America who doesn’t get some benefit from government.  To think otherwise may be a world view but it is also hubris.

The DNA of Career and Self Discovery

During my nearly four-decade career in community destination marketing, two of the three communities I represented were totally new to me.  It is a phenomenal experience to see a community through totally fresh eyes and seek to distill its temporal brand.

That’s why it meant to much to me recently to see the depiction shown in this blog (click on this link or on the image to enlarge) of how Salt Lake Valley would have appeared to two great x 2 grandfathers and a great x3 grandfather as they entered the valley as advance scouts for a the vanguard wagons to enter in 1847.

Today I visit my daughter and grandsons there often.  Although an Idaho native, I lived about midway down that Utah valley for a year in the mid-1960s.

This was in the summer before entering Brigham Young University, located in the next valley south, where I completed an undergraduate degree in 1972.

I’ve visited sites in the Salt Lake Valley where a handful of sets of great x2 grandparents and three sets of great x3 grandparents made homes within five years of the time this image depicts, but nothing is as powerful as seeing it as they saw first saw it.

A few stayed for generations at the outlet of one of the canyons midway down the left side of the valley, but most of my ancestors moved on within a year or two to settle many other valleys not only in Utah but Idaho and Arizona.

Maybe the ability to see the potential of what was unique about a place was woven into my DNA.  It has struck me, that maybe instead of backing into my career, as I’ve often joked, I was actually drawn there to make contemporary use of this innate ability.

The depiction is part of an atlas published last year by BYU was added to my library.  The publication immediately won acclaim from the Cartography and Geographic Information Society and fortunately,  BYU Magazine posted links to a few of the maps and images this summer.

I’m a native of a part of Idaho that is 265 miles north of Salt Lake, tucked into the Yellowstone-Teton nook just a few miles from that state’s borders with Montana and Wyoming and the Continental Divide through the northern Rockies.

Any participation with my Mormon culture lapsed four decades ago but parts of anyone’s culture are always coursing through their veins.  Seeing the image above got me thinking about parts of my heritage I tried to leave behind.

At birth and for many of my early years, I lived in a four-room cabin clad with squared logs that was tucked into a bend of Snow Creek, a mile from the Henry’s Fork River. 

For half a century before, it had been my grandparents home on the southeast corner of our ancestral ranch until they moved 14 miles to St. Anthony after my dad returned from serving in a WWII tank battalion where it had charged across southern Germany and much of Czechoslovakia, liberating the infamous Dachau Concentration Camp.

It was never expanded because even in good years there are always other priorities on a working ranch.

My first recollection of my own shame was how I felt when I was forced to admit to friends in first grade - both townies who had rooms of their own - that I slept on a pull-out couch in the living room of our house.  In the preceding years, my middle sister and I slept on bunk beds in my parents bedroom.

I had other fleeting feelings of unworthiness at school back then when it was learned that I did my homework standing in the corner under a lamp on top of a console radio.  Also, when some falsely judged me as anxious or weak as has happened throughout my life, because my hands shook with Essential Tremor.

Impressionable though minor in the scheme of things.

However, I realize now after reading Daring Greatly by Dr. Brené Brown, a researcher in such things and TED lecturer, that my parents ensured this self-doubt did not take root by fueling my confidence and resilience not by artificially puffing up my self esteem but by teaching me to let go of what people thought about me.

Unfortunately, it would not be until later in life that I would recognize that many others I encountered would pretend they were ten feet tall or bullet proof merely, as the book notes, as a means of numbing and masking their own uncertainty.

I grew to view vulnerability as a strength and a sign of courage and grit.

However, in those early years, as I strived to overcome self doubt about some of my circumstances, I was guilty of judging my homesteading grandparents, whom I loved deeply, because they spoke with a deep country accent.

I similarly judged my aunts and uncles as we gathered frequently for Sunday family dinners at my grandparents house because they always seemed to talk too loud, argue too much and at times sound bigoted.  For their time they probably weren’t.

For years, I ran from that heritage.  Running from Idaho is what a friend since the 1970s called it.  It motivated me, but three things occurred within a year in the mid-1970s and I stopped running.

First, stretched thin by an evolving career and going to law school at night, I found myself separated by several hundred miles from the regenerative influence of my little girl.  At the time, it seemed I was only able to to visit every few months, a mistake I regret.

I was at a low point when I first heard two cross-over country hit recordings that reminded me of my past.

One which I had originally heard around the house when I was growing up, “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain,” was given new life by Willie Nelson, now a classic.  It launched a new “Outlaw” sub-genre.  The other was the country-rock classic “Take It To The Limit” by The Eagles.

Both took me home again and back to my roots.

Third, I received a box from my grandmother.  She was selling her house to live in rotation with each of her children, including stints with my parents.

Accompanied by a sweet note about my grandfather, Grandma Adah included ten sets of horseshoes he had kept that has been worn by his favorite horses from the time he was young, many of which he raised and trained.  Others had been worn by animals he raised and trained before they became famous.

She knew how much they meant to me dating from my first memories.  They had been nailed to a beam in their basement.  She also knew how much my grandfather had meant to me, having spent nearly every day together doing chores for my father around the ranch from the time I could first walk.

Within a year, my grandmother also passed away and this period was soon bookended by the autobiographical significance I found in “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” sung by Waylon Jennings and Nelson:

“Them that don't know him won't like him and them that do,
Sometimes won't know how to take him.”

I stopped running from my origins in rural Idaho and fully embraced my heritage, my people.  I also realized that it was from my roots that I came by my drive, determination, grit, passion and character along with a love of learning and the ability to rise above circumstances.

I soon regained my ability to project confidence even during the times I felt vulnerable but without losing authenticity. Throughout my career, I excelled at standing up against bigotry and for those who were truly vulnerable, and as a passionate advocate on behalf of misunderstood and disparaged communities.

I sense all of this when I look at the image above and, while a work in progress, I am grateful for my roots and to be who I am.

“The One Less Traveled By”

As iconic as they are, the range of Teton Mountains is only 40 miles long, where they form the border between Wyoming and the nook of Idaho where I was born and spent my early years.

There are two routes through the Tetons.  One around the south end over Teton Pass is the most traveled but my heart prefers the 40 mile graded gravel road around the north end along the border between Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.  A Jeep and the company of a Bulldog are recommended.

The route, named because it runs from Ashton Idaho to Flagg Ranch in Wyoming, also has ancestral significance.  In 1915, long after he and his brothers and sisters and my great grand parents began ranching and homesteading in that Idaho nook, my paternal grandfather Mel Bowman and his brother George took a part-time winter job over that road.

With a four-horse team and wagon, they hauled cement from the mile-high rail head in Ashton around the north end of the Tetons where it was needed for construction of Jackson Lake Dam near Moran, Wyoming.  The road which climbs to 7,500 feet had been first created as a stage coach route along a path worn by bands of the Shoshone People and other Native American tribes.

My grandfather and his brother made many trips over the road that winter, each four days over and two days back.  They had to use logs to slow their decent.  Overnighting in tepees along the way in camps like Cascade, they did all of this for $80 per trip plus food and feed for the horses in freezing weather.

Today, the route takes a little more than three hours over a graded gravel road that gives life to the song “Idaho” by fellow-native Josh Ritter when he sings – “And the winds to gravel roads Idaho oh Idaho.”  To the south are views of the Tetons and their namesake national park.

To the north is Yellowstone’s Cascade Corner where spectacular waterfalls spill over the edge of the Pitchstone Plateau into Bechler Meadows to which Elk migrated across our ranch each year.  Fall River collects the others and emerges into Idaho where it flows into the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River about six miles downstream from what was our ranch.

Mostly though, the view along the Ashton-Flagg Ranch Rd is of incredible forests, meadows and streams.

It is a three hour journey over dirt road to the junction with the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Parkway above the north end of Jackson Lake.  The famed Jackson Hole isn’t a town.  It is a valley.

Flagg Ranch, Moran and Jackson Lake are at the north end, the town of Jackson at the south end, at the end of a stunning hour drive.  Jackson Lake is a natural, glacial lake.  The dam was created to raise the water level.

The Jackson Lake Dam was all part of a series of dams constructed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation called the Minidoka Project.  They opened the vast Snake River Plain that arcs across Idaho’s southern edge from Idaho Falls to Boise and first made it practical to farm and famous for potatoes.

My grandfather’s gig as a teamster wasn’t my family’s only experience with dams.  Water is more important than land or other resources in the West.  He also served as a director of the Arcadia Reservoir & Canal Company for many years which included an earthen dam on Upper Sand Creek, owned in shares by the ranches and farms on 2,000 acres below.

He was justifiably proud of a repair to the dam he engineered that saved a lot of money.  My parents met and married during World War II when my maternal grandfather, Mark White, served as a “water master” on the Ashton Hydroelectric Dam, a mile from our ranch, which just underwent a major overhaul after 100 years of service.

He later supervised Stewart Dam in the southeastern tip of Idaho where the meadows and wetlands of the 6,000 foot high Bear River Valley are regulated for irrigation by a series of canals, dams and pumps.

It slices along the Old Oregon Trail where the valley cuts between the Wasatch and Caribou mountain ranges just before Bear Lake bridges across the Utah border and emerges onto the five-hundred-mile, 133,000 sq. mile Colorado Plateau.

Between the two dams runs the fault line of my youth.

It was John Wesley Powell who established that homesteading in the arid Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West would require a much different approach than it had in the East and Midwest.  He argued that irrigation dams were as important as canals, levees and railroads had been to economic development.

Dr. Wallace Stegner, in his outstanding biography of Powell entitled Beyond The Hundredth Meridian, credits this one-armed Civil War veteran with inspiration for creation of most of the science-driven agencies of the federal government.

He famously overcame intense opposition from western and southern Congressmen to have the United States fund creation of its first detailed topographical map.  In my opinion, this may well be the single most incredible spur of economic development in our nation’s history.

He also battled with western members of Congress to protect small, yeoman farmers and ranchers from predatory private irrigation companies who would over promise, and then when the lands were abandoned, would scoop them up for a song or enable large land companies to do so.

He would agree with those seeking genuine regulatory reform but he would have no patience for those who today masquerade instead under that label to enable parasitic special interests, who instead of creating value, seek it through legislative favor while shifting costs to the general public.

Come to think of it, he would agree with Republican friends of mine who argue convincingly that the only regulatory reform we need is for executive branch officials at every level to fairly, passionately and even-handedly execute the regulations we already have.