Pine Bluffs, WY

Pine Bluffs, Wyo.: Ancient Crossroads

Gleaming white in nighttime floodlights, Our Lady of Peace shrine stands like a beacon on the east edge of Pine Bluffs, Wyo., while at the other end of town, an archeological dig offers a peek at 10,000 years of human occupation.

The statue is here partly because the town of 1,153 is near Interstate 80. The busy highway is the latest to bring people to the town nicknamed “The Frontier Crossroads,” a reference to its location on ancient aboriginal pathways, a 19th-century cattle trail, and the first transcontinental railway. Pine Bluffs was born when the Union Pacific tracks arrived in 1867.

Before 1900, it was an important watering place for cattle herds on the Texas Trail, as well as a cattle-shipping center. The town with extra-wide streets—designed so a four-horse team and a wagon could turn around without backing up—is still a commercial center for area farms and ranches.

A 30-foot cast stone depiction of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Peace, was the dream of Marjorie and Ted Trefren of Cheyenne, Wyo. After Marjorie’s visit to European Catholic shrines in 1991, she noticed on a map showing U.S. shrines that Wyoming had none.

“I said we should have something for Wyoming,” she recalls.

The couple began looking for land where everyone could see the shrine and finally bought five acres next to Interstate 80, at the base of the bluffs for which the town is named.

The Trefens contacted monument companies all over the country in a fruitless search for a suitable sculptor, then found Robert Fida in the Cheyenne Yellow Pages.

Fida created a 6-foot sculpture from which a mold was made for a fiberglass cast. Laser technology he designed took measurements used to create a computer-generated foam enlargement. Then pieces of a fiberglass mold were crafted to hold concrete made with ground white marble for the statue. Our Lady of Peace, one of the largest Marian statues in the United States, was completed in October 1998.

While St. Paul’s Catholic Church was not involved in creating the memorial, parish members attend Mass there.

“They tell others about it and people stop. Occasionally someone will come to the rectory looking for information about it,’’ says the Rev. Thomas Cronkelton, St. Paul’s priest.

Mayor Leonard Anderson says both the shrine and the archaeological dig attract tourists who benefit the local economy.

The town owns the buildings and land of the High Plains Archaeology Museum and Field Lab complex downtown and the Windows on the Past Interpretive Center at the dig. Artifacts date from early American Indian camps more than 10,000 years ago to the early 1900s, when the site was the town dump.

Site director and Pine Bluffs native Charles Reher, who found artifacts at the base of the bluffs as a boy, says the site is a huge complex, a series of overlapping accumulations covering a good portion of a square mile.

“The main site area that we’re excavating is just one small corner of it,” says Reher, head of the University of Wyoming anthropology department. Artifacts found in the 22 levels include chipped stone pieces, pottery shards, fire pits, and teepee rings.

“It was utilized by people who became the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota. It’s just one step from the Lakotas in the early 1800s to the ranchers and homesteaders in the late 1800s,” Reher says.

“So it’s never been not occupied,” he comments. The area has water, numerous edible and medicinal plants, firewood, and game. “Ecologically, it’s one of the best places to be for a hundred miles in all directions.”

Eleanore Wagner Field is a freelance writer in Cheyenne, Wyo.

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