Interesting characters of Big Horn Canyon Country

Susan and I took an afternoon drive to one of my favorite places Sunday: the Dryhead country of southern Montana just north of Barry’s Landing and the Caroline Lockhart Ranch.

When you reach the Dryhead, it feels like you just stepped back in time about 200 years. As you rumble along the well-maintained dirt road, the sky opens up and the vistas are wonderful: the Pryor Mountains to the west, Big Horns to the east, the tall cliffs of the Black Canyon Area in the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area to the northeast and endless blue sky.

A breeze gently rippled the prairie grass when we stopped to admire the beauty, and there wasn’t a soul around, no car or truck moving as far as the eye could see. I found a pretty little side canyon to explore, one of those out-of-the-way places I hadn’t seen before in my 40 years living and exploring here.

When we first moved to Lovell in 1984, Delbert and Margaret Burrell shared their love of the Dryhead with us, showing us some secret places that we would love to visit again and telling stories that I wish I had written down at the time. Each pioneer homestead has a story to tell as the years take their toll on old cabins and rusting farm machinery and even an old derelict car.

Having interviewed Pat Steed and Karen Spragg two days earlier about some bridles Pat loaned to the Lovell-Kane Area Museum that had belonged to Caroline Lockhart, I thought of that amazing pioneer woman as we drove north past her ranch.

I’ve always believed that Caroline would be a fascinating person to portray in a movie, chronicling her amazing life. After growing up in Illinois and Kansas, she started her journalism career as a reporter for the Boston Post at age 18 in 1889, and her adventurous spirit was perfect for the sensational and flamboyant journalism of the time. When she wrote a story about exploring the depths of Boston Harbor, for instance, she herself donned the diving equipment and plunged to the depths, spending 30 minutes at the bottom of the harbor.

She also jumped out a fourth story window into a fire safety net when writing about the new device and performed other feats of that type.

When Caroline was doing a story about Blackfeet Indians for the Philadelphia Bulletin, she visited Cody around the turn of the century, fell in love with the area and the spirit of the Wild West and decided to move to Wyoming, doing so in 1904. She later bought the Cody Enterprise newspaper and became a fixture in Cody society, hobnobbing with the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody and helping to found the Cody Stampede rodeo.

She wrote several novels, three of which – “The Man from Bitter Roots (1916), “The Fighting Shepherdess”(1920) and “The Dude Wrangler (1930) – were made into movies and another – “The Lady Doc” – that got her into some trouble when folks in Cody recognized themselves in the characters of the book.

Caroline purchased what became known as the “L Slash Heart” Ranch just north of Barry’s Landing in 1926, and instead of writing about Old West characters, she lived the life of an Old West character, hoping to become the Cattle Queen of Montana. Indeed, she grew the Lockhart Ranch from 160 acres to 6,034 acres, and when she offloaded three loads of top-of-the-market steers at the market in Omaha in 1935, she must have felt like a cattle queen.

She returned to Cody in 1952, sold the ranch in 1955 and died in 1962 at the age of 91. Wes Meeker once told me he remembered Caroline coming to town and sitting at a local café wearing a flamboyant hat with a feather, though she surely wore ranching garb almost all of the time.

The Lockhart Ranch is a wonderful place to visit, the most complete and intact of the four historic ranches in the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. Wandering the grounds, you get that same feeling of stepping back in time.

I can imagine someone like Kathy Bates portraying Caroline Lockhart in a movie, and I can think of other interesting people from our area who could be portrayed in film, including Stephen Gervay’s wife Elizabeth, who walked out of the Big Horn Mountains in March of 1924 while several months pregnant after husband Stephen died during a hunting trip. Cold and starving, she reached the Carl Fink residence near the Big Horn River.

Or how about the amazing athlete Johnny Winterholler, one of the greatest all-around athletes in Lovell and University of Wyoming history, who survived the Bataan Death March during World War II, though it cost him the use of his legs. Our gym at Lovell High School is named for Johnny.

We have such rich history and so many interesting places in our neck of the woods. It is, indeed, a fascinating place to live.