A Humble Reminder of a Rugged Past

A Humble Reminder of a Rugged Past

When Bob Kothe moved from Michigan to Gillette, Wyo., three years ago, he was fascinated by how recently the West was settled.

“There were Europeans in Michigan as early as the 1600s,” he says. “Here, in northeast Wyoming, settlement was happening in the early 1900s. You can still talk to the children of those homesteaders.”

And thanks to Kothe, it’s possible now to step into their lives.

Kothe arrived in Gillette to run the Rockpile Museum, which is named for a nearby rock formation and documents the history of the Gillette area and northeast Wyoming. The free museum, funded by the county and donations, hosts some 14,000 visitors a year. Its artifacts include American Indian stone tools, railroad equipment, ranch wagons, quilts, saddles, guns, and more.

To bring history even more to life, Kothe was determined to find an original homesteader’s cabin to demonstrate how the early settlers lived. His quest came to fruition last year when he and other museum workers and volunteers arrived in Gillette with a one-room home, relocated from a spot on the prairie about 30 miles southwest of town. The plank structure, covered outside by tarpaper, measures 12 feet by 14 feet. The roof is galvanized metal. Pieces of a cardboard box patch chinks between the planks, and there are two windows, one door, and no other amenities.

“School kids tend to be wide-eyed when they see it,” says museum registrar Karen Barlow. “It’s about the size of a typical bedroom today, and kids find it amazing that whole families once lived in places that size.”

The cabin stands in tribute to a not-too-distant time when many Americans dreamed, not of status symbol homes, but of hard-won land. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed settlers to claim 160 acres by living on them and plowing fields.

“The big surge of homesteaders in this part of Wyoming came after 1910, in the middle to late teens,” Kothe says. “This cabin was built in 1918 by a man named Staley Archibald, and his family stayed and ranched for three generations.”

Most homesteaders here didn’t stay nearly that long. Vast, treeless grasslands in this semi-arid corner of Wyoming are well suited to cattle and sheep ranching. Plowed fields and crops, as stipulated by the Homestead Act, proved another matter.

“Some farmers hung on for a while, because there were several abnormally wet years around the time when homesteaders were moving in,” Kothe notes. “But the drought of the 1930s just cleared the land here.”

Not all homesteaders intended to stay. For some, the idea was to live a five-year adventure in the West and then profit by selling their acres to ranchers, for whom more land meant bigger herds.

The remains of homestead farms are hard to spot in the ranch country.

“When we were trying to locate a cabin, three or four of us would pile into the museum car and we’d see cabins across the prairies,” he recalls. “We probably looked at 40 structures. There were some log cabins, but we ruled them out because they weren’t typical on these treeless plains. Lots of homestead homes were sod houses or dugouts cut into hills, but most of those didn’t survive.”

Like Staley Archibald, homesteaders often used lightweight construction materials, since they had to haul those supplies by the most primitive of roads. So the tiny homes were often quite portable. After the Archibalds lived in the cabin for several years, it was hauled from site to site across their ranch to serve several functions. Children in the 1940s knew it as their one-room school—and as their teacher’s residence. After that it became a bunkhouse for hired ranch hands.

Thanks to Kothe and colleagues—and to Archibald descendents who donated the building—the cabin has moved for a final mission. It’s in an unfamiliar town setting now, but next to a natural landmark homesteaders knew well: a towering formation of boulders, visible far across the plains in the years before Gillette was developed.

The boulders, like the museum, are called the Rockpile.

Paul Higbee is a freelance writer in Spearfish, S.D.

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