- We're hitting the highlights this week as "Wyoming Chronicle" reaches the end of its current season.

Join us for one last look back at some of our favorite people, places in history before we cross the finish line.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle".

(bright music) The colossal Gros Ventre Slide in Teton County occurred in 1925 when an entire mountainside collapsed.

The result was devastating and lasting, filling a mountain valley below, damning a river, creating a new lake, changing Teton County history, and leading to the deaths of six people.

In July, marking the 100th anniversary of the catastrophe, we met two US Forest Service experts, Ranger Todd Stiles and Geologist Mariah Radue.

- So it was June 23rd, 1925 and the north face of Sheep Mountain, it fell away catastrophically.

It was almost within the blink of an eye.

We're looking at the Gros Ventre Mountain range here right on the northern edge.

And as he said, it's mentioned, it's assumed that 50 million cubic yards.

There were people there at the time who witnessed it.

One of the cowboys was driving cattle on the north side of the valley and he said the winds were so great that it almost knocked him off his horse.

- Had to be terrifying for sure.

Assuming feeling pretty lucky though to make it out unscathed.

And you have to kind of think whether or not too the horse understood something was coming too, because a lot of times they're pretty perceptive.

But definitely he was lucky.

He had a horse that was fast enough to get outta the way 'cause it was a major close call and he was right there.

- How long do we think it took from the moment that you might have said, "Whoa, landslide," to "Thank God that's over."

Any ideas?

Did it take a couple of minutes or an hour or?

- That's my guess, it's minutes.

I mean, it is cool that we have such a good account of this landslide.

It was a hundred years ago, but we did have eyewitness and they were interviewed and so we have an understanding.

But I've heard a geologist might even use the word a debris avalanche to describe this because it was so fast.

- [Steve] So then the river gets blocked up and suddenly if you had a ranch property here, you have a lakeside property here now all of a sudden.

- Yeah, the lake was initially about seven miles long and after it was rising, it picked up structures and everything that was down in the valley where there were ranches.

So there were homes, the cabins floating, our horsetail ranger station, forest service ranger station, that was floating.

Initially picture these structures floating until they no longer floated.

So for that short, and there's some really great photos we have on some of our new interpretive signage.

- The guy sitting up on his roof.

- Yeah, that's Gil Huff.

Yep.

- That's the guy.

- The guy who outran it with his horse.

- And sure enough, two years later was it, another big wet spring, a lot of runoff.

What happened then?

- The lake levels rose higher than they thought they would and they overtopped the earth and dam.

So it was May 18th, 1927 that it overtopped the dam and it caused the Kelly flood.

- Kelly almost ceased to be when that flood happened.

- It was a tragic event.

Six people lost their lives, lots of domestic cattle, and all but two buildings were wiped out by the flood.

- Chad Hansen is a happily married man, but if there's a second love of his life, it's wild horses.

In 2025, the Casper College professor published a book that's both a gorgeous collection of photographs and a deep compendium of literature comprising poetry, scripture, essays, history, science and nature writing.

In June, he found a good place to meet "Wyoming Chronicle", not just to talk about wild horses, but to see them.

I read in the book you said, "When I found out that wild horses lived in Wyoming, it changed your life."

- It did.

Full disclosure, when I first moved to Wyoming, I had been bitten by the fly fishing bug.

- Understandable.

- And living in Casper, I thought I was in paradise.

The North Flat River runs right through town.

And so for about the first decade, that seems like that's about all I wanted to do was stand in a river waving a stick.

But when I found out there were wild horses, it did change things.

And now when my wife and I have free time, we tend to spend it in places like this.

- Early in the book, you sort of by way of introduction, you quote the great poet and essayist and writer Virginia Wolf who says, I believe it's, "There's no denying the wild horse in all of us.

- That's right.

- Can you tell us about, as you are putting the book together, how you thought to and decided to incorporate that kind of material into a beautiful picture book as well?

- I can only imagine exactly what Virginia Wolf meant when she said that there's no denying the wild horse in all of us.

But I have to believe that when she looked at wild horses, she probably saw similarities.

They're intelligent.

They're social.

They're admirable.

And I think when you spend time watching wild horses, it's kinda hard not to picture yourself wandering off and becoming one of them.

- Yeah, there's an enviable situation that they have, but we know they have challenges.

But boy, just being out here today and seeing where they are and what they're doing, there's that sense of awe that means a lot to you I know.

- I teach sociology and world religions and so I study mental health and I've looked at a lot of the patterns and the shifts and the changes in American mental health, for example.

And what we know is that time spent outdoors and on occasions when people feel really blown away by what they're seeing, there are mental health benefits that go along with those kinds of experiences.

And so part of the reason I wrote the book is that I wanted to give people a sense that we have opportunities like this in Wyoming.

- In recent years, a drive to improve civics education around the nation is beginning to pay off.

And no one is doing more for that effort in Wyoming than Gail Simmons, creator of Civics 307.

In March, she met us in Sheridan where her citizenship lessons included how to respond to the avalanche of political campaign material that arrives in the mail and candidates who might knock on your door.

- I'm looking at a training module in Civics 307 that is under a curriculum of how to be a savvy voter and having one module be, how do you process mailers in your mailbox?

- I'm tempted to answer that, but you go ahead.

- So you pull the mail out and you pick it up and you look at it.

If you are immediately angry, know that that is by design.

When you're angry or you're afraid, it's all lizard brain.

Your frontal cortex isn't working.

You're not thinking.

So if it makes you angry, understand that, look to see who put it out and then put it aside.

That's one piece.

- Anger and fear aren't the basis for good decision making.

- Exactly.

- Just never.

- So pull out the next one and if it makes you question, like you've got a concern or you want to know more, that's a good one to look into.

So again, turn it over, see who paid for it and put that into a second pile because that might be one that gives you a way to find out more information.

And it might be about an issue that you care about or an issue that you don't care about, but you know somebody else does that is, you know, impactful in the race.

And then pull the next one out.

And if it's about a specific candidate and about what they stand for, it's almost guaranteed that that's from the candidate.

So turn around, look at it.

Who paid for it?

Is it the candidate or the candidate committee?

And that's the third pile because those are the people, that's the mail piece that is trying to tell you who they are.

So that's the starting piece of who is that candidate, and use that.

So now you've got the three piles.

And when you're looking at that one that makes you angry, mark down who that came from because they might start getting sneaky.

Always look to see who paid for that particular piece.

So that's on how to do the mail.

I've got another one that's how do you meet a candidate at your own doorway?

They come, they knock up, and they say, "I'm Joe Smith.

I'm running for X, and I'm gonna keep them from stealing your guns."

Well, if you already know the one or two issues that you have, you can say you're gonna own the conversation.

"I'm so glad you stopped by.

That's not a particular concern of mine.

But perhaps you can talk to me about early childhood education or how do we preserve public lands," like the issue that you care about and have that be the conversation.

So it's about you, not them.

- In the days before improved fuel efficiency and bigger gas tanks, American roadways were dotted with offbeat roadside attractions aimed at getting motorists to stop at the accompanying mom and pop filling stations.

And one of the very, very best of those was the fossil cabin in Wyoming near Medicine Bow made entirely of dinosaur bones.

It still stands and we learned more about it in October.

- There was a gas station here for the Lincoln Highway, and as vehicles progressed in their technology, you could go a little further on a tank of fuel and you didn't have to stop at every gas station.

- And this was in, am I right in saying this, this was in the days before you saw a gas station that said Texaco.

What you saw was Ma and Pa's little gas station.

And they were doing whatever they could as automobile traffic boomed in the country to get you to stop here instead of the place down the road.

- The place down the road had a petting zoo.

- Yeah.

- And so, you know?

- Or a giant Paul Bunyan statue or... - Yeah.

- These were commonplace.

- Yeah, stopping here, you know, it was Ripley's "Believe it or not".

And you were looking for a roadside attraction, but you were so close to Medicine Bow.

So what made you stop to fill up your tank?

Fossil cabin.

It has 5,796 fossils in it.

Well, give or take a few that have walked off over recent years.

- You make the Lincoln Highway a big focal point of your work, know a lot about it and have traveled the length of it.

This is one of your very, very favorite spots of all.

Why is that?

- Yeah, I think the location of it, you know, it's fairly remote but, you know, it's a stop, and it's one of the earliest examples of roadside architecture, roadside attractions.

I love that.

It's this way, it's architecture, you know, it's a house, it's a building, it's a structure.

And originally, it had a flat roof.

So when you look at the old gas station postcards, you can see, you know, that's what it looked like.

It was all fossils.

You didn't see a roof on it and you could go into the structure and so you'd be surrounded by fossils.

- Yeah, so you could go in it.

- Yeah.

- And it then was a museum as well.

- Yeah.

- And not just a drive by.

It was a stop at.

With the site now long abandoned and the building now unattended and deteriorating, preservationists want to move the small but massively heavy structure into the town of Medicine Bow.

A task that's proving much easier said than done.

And as we learned in our interview, even being placed on the National Register of Historic Places is no safety guarantee for fossil cabin.

Carbon County is trying to do something with the fossil cabin, which has sat here for almost a hundred years.

But if you have your way and the plan that you have in place continues, it won't be sitting here for too much longer, right?

- That's correct.

- What's the plan?

- Well, the plan is this building was gifted to the Medicine Bow Museum in 2017, 2018.

As long as they could move it to a spot adjacent to their property in Medicine Bow.

We've had one contractor try early on and it kind of failed and he wasn't able to move it.

- Medicine Bow, how far away are we from that?

- About seven miles.

- Seven miles.

And there's only one way to move a building like this and it's proving harder than we thought.

How come, Megan?

What are some of the difficulties that might not have been apparent at the beginning?

- One of the biggest challenges is dealing with the type of materials being used in the construction.

So fossils are brittle.

They're very easily crumbled.

The other challenge is the weigh, right?

- It's a small building, I can't weigh that much.

- It's what, weighs a hundred thousand pounds?

It's pretty heavy.

- Yes, so you have the fossils as well as the mortar that comes from local construction materials.

So you have the local sand, the local stone that's been ground up, which also includes fossils itself.

So it very easily crumbles and moves apart, which is why you see so much trying to hold it together, keep it together for when it starts to move.

- So it's a fascinating combination to me of a building that obviously is incredibly solid, yet incredibly fragile at the same time.

Is this what the original contractor found difficult and it's continuing to be.

- [Megan] It is extremely heavy.

- It's on the National Register of Historic Places, correct?

- Yes, it is listed on the National Register.

However, the National Park Service doesn't like when structures are moved.

That's one of the things, which in Wyoming poses its own challenges.

So coming from a historic preservation perspective, I would rather see the building moved to a steward that's gonna take care of the structure and allow people to see it and interpret it for the public than to see it here just sitting and decay.

- Once something's on the historic register, do we, human beings, have some obligation to it then?

Or can it just be left to ruin if that's what happened?

- It's a big misconception.

You know, people think, "Oh, it's on the national register.

I have all of these restrictions now."

That's not the case, you know.

You can get listed on the National Register and in Wyoming, the next day, you could tear the building down.

- Is that so?

- There are no protections.

It doesn't save it from anything.

But it's a record.

It's a record of the history.

It's a record of what the structure looks like, where it is.

And it's important.

- It's a recognition but it's not a protectorate.

Researcher and linguist Dr.

Lanny Real Bird says Plains Indian sign language rightly could be called the first mass medium for communication in North America.

When we met him in December during a break in a seminar he was leading in Fremont County, the Montana State University educator said the ancient unspoken language still has a great relevance for human communication today.

- Nowadays with all these distractions like the phone, people don't even have the art of knowing how to listen.

- Yeah, yeah.

Communication.

It's just so foundational.

We want to be understood.

- Certainly.

- And here you're still educating people in a way that's been used, not just prehistoric, but it's ancient and survives today.

Why is it still worth knowing about, worth teaching others about?

- It is an excellent tool for communication, that's been there all along.

Why not use what has been given to you not only by nature, but what is already in our DNA.

Why not?

We can't distance the mechanism of our own body and deny it that there are some instincts within us that aren't maybe, you know, under the category of intelligence.

They're just natural.

And some people will be in denial that this is leaning more towards nature and not the scientific method.

You gave me a perfect example where a child used, you know, sign language to, you know, they want a bottle or they wanna rest.

Those are excellent examples that it is stamped in our DNA and we could utilize that, I guess that foundation, not only to teach mainstream knowledge, but indigenous knowledge.

We could use it to teach music, we can use it to teach math like add, subtract, multiply, divide.

- Everyone learns math or so many of us do.

1, 2, 3.

I mean, it comes to us.

We think of it before we've even thought of it.

- Certainly.

- And optimal combination of student competitors and a far-sighted coach has led the new eSports program at Eastern Wyoming College to national prominence, complete with the collegiate national championship in the familiar Battle Royale style video game called Fortnite, where the Wyoming team never lost once all year.

I wanna establish for everybody who didn't know this or doesn't know it or my question, there's absolute legitimacy here.

This is a sanctioned college competitive eSports program and there are dozens and dozens, more than a hundred, maybe more than that, around the country.

- Yep, there's three in Wyoming itself actually.

- What are the other two?

- Laramie County and then Northwest College.

- I see.

- Yes.

- As a coach, what do you do?

How do you and your team prepare and practice?

- So I start by sitting down with the players and getting to know where they're at skill-wise.

With like Ryder and Allen, although at different skill levels, they both had a pretty good understanding of Fortnite as a whole.

If somebody doesn't have a solid understanding, we start with the basics of aiming, movement, tactics, those type of things.

- And you had some players like that?

- Yes.

- They were here to learn.

They're beginners.

- Absolutely.

I got some coming in this fall that are more beginners.

Last spring we had Bridger join who was also on that national team and he already knew the game well.

And so what we worked on with those players is communication, holding your own mentally.

So when you are playing long stints of games, so like in the Nationals, there's times where you're playing a best of five and maybe you're playing two of those back to back.

So you have up to 10 games of Fortnite to play to take home a national title.

And that mental stability performing at the top level consistently over that time period, building that kind of mental and physical stamina with moving the mice and stuff is important.

- Is there any sort of physical training itself of, I don't know what, dexterity or its strength or quickness or anything like that that comes into this particular game or?

- So I like to categorize games in kind of two segments, macro and micro.

Macro being kind of that head knowledge, that grand understanding of the strategy and the ideas behind it that are outside of the game, and then the micro being your execution in the game.

Fortnite leans towards that micro side of it.

So it's about kind of executing well.

You have to be able to aim at somebody and click and hit the shots on them.

You have to be able to move quickly from A to B without hesitation, without screwing up your inputs.

And it's really, really focused on that.

There is that macro kind of knowledge side to it, but it's much more focused on that execution.

So a lot of what we work with the upcoming kids is getting that micro down.

Okay, so this is your aim sensitivity on your mouse, 'cause mice have different sensitivities.

So if I move it a little bit or move it a lot, how far does the cursor move, those settings and those things you get used to, and then you just do it over and over and over and again.

So it kind of becomes an extension of yourself.

- As you understand the skill level of the players, how good are they?

- My players are very good, I think.

Professionals are playing 12 to 14 hours a day.

They have these regimens, they have foods and nutritionists, and the teams bring all these people in to do these things.

We're not there, but we're not just lounging on the couch playing for fun either.

We're, I think, pushing towards that professional side where I encourage exercise, I encourage healthy diets, I encourage getting sleep and eating good couple days before tournament.

- It's not just Doritos and Mountain Dew.

- It's not just Doritos and Mountain Dew.

I don't recommend those before big match.

- And in April, as part of our grouping of stories tied to Wyoming's participation in the year's America 250 observances, we met Carbon County Museum Director Tom Mensik, whose new hands-on exhibit updates the story of Lillian Heath, the first woman ever to be licensed as a physician in Wyoming, and how she participated in the harrowing bloody story of one of Wyoming's most notorious men, the murderer remembered as Big Nose George, when she was still a teenager.

You may be sick of talking about the man named Big Nose George, but I think a lot of people in Wyoming who don't have much of detailed knowledge about Wyoming history at all have heard that name at least.

Who was he and how did he end up being connected to her?

- So Big Nose George, his gang attempted to rob a train and they kind of botched it a little bit.

And they were pursued by two lawmen named Tip Vincent and Robert Widdowfield.

- Great name.

- Yeah.

And so they found his hideout up near Elk Mountain and they attempted to ambush him and him and his gang attacked and killed these two lawmen here in Carbon County.

And they were locals.

And so everyone was very upset that they were killed.

Big Nose was recaptured in 1881 and brought back to Rawlins to be tried for murder.

And he was tried and found guilty of murder.

While he was in the Rawlins jail, now not the Wyoming State Penitentiary, but the Rollins Jail, which was over on Front Street at the time, he attempted an escape.

And so he attacked the jailer and knocked him out and tried to leave.

Now he was convicted by the way.

So he was set to be hung about a week after this happened.

So he attacked the jailer, escaped, and the jailer's wife actually managed to get the gun and force him back into his cell.

And so we have her pocket watch here next to the-- - I'm sitting here, we're so kind of chuckling and smiling about this, but of course this is deadly.

Serious business.

- Oh, for sure.

- People being killed.

Capital punishment.

Anything but funny at the time.

- No, definitely not.

- Continue.

- So George goes back to the prison, hurried back to his cell, and turns out the people in Rawlins had had enough of George's shenanigans and so they formed a lynch mob and yanked him out of the jail and found a light post and short drop, and a sudden stop later, George was dead.

So enter Lillian Heath.

- Enter Lillian Heath.

- And Dr.

Thomas McGee and Dr.

John Osborne.

Dr.

Lillian Heath, who was a teenager at the time, had been previously volunteering and training to be a nursing assistant with McGee.

She always had this medical bug.

She always wanted to be in the medical field.

And so one of the most famous events in Carbon County history took place when they performed the autopsy of Big Nose George.

One of the main aspects of that autopsy was the removal of George's skull and brain.

And so they kind of took Big Nose George apart.

And as a token of their appreciation, they gave the skull cap to Lillian Heath when she was about 16 years old as a memento.

- So this piece of the cranium, the bone and the skull, the skull cap, she kept it.

- She used it as a pen cup, a flower pot, a doorstop.

Her husband used it as an ashtray when he would smoke his pipe.

I mean, after a while, you kinda just forget really what it is and it's like, "Oh, that's just that weird thing I got when I was 16, and we gave the autopsy to that outlaw."

- We had another fun season with "Wyoming Chronicle" as we reached 10 counties and traveled nearly 8,000 miles in the course of our two dozen "Wyoming Chronicle" chapters, as well as six installments of our sister show, "Capital Outlook".

The primary videographer for Wyoming Chronicle again this season was Matt Wright with strong contributions as well from Jeremy Moore, Kyle Duba and Noah Smith.

Be watching between now and September because some of these highlighted "Wyoming Chronicle" shows might be repeated during our summer hiatus.

And remember, all of our "Wyoming Chronicle" shows can be viewed anytime online at both wyomingpbs.org and our Wyoming Chronicle YouTube channel.

And that's not just for this season, but for past seasons too.

Our production and content manager is Jeremy Moore and the general manager and chief executive officer of Wyoming PBS is Joanna Kale.

New Wyoming Chronicle installments begin September 11th.

We'll see you then.

You're watching Wyoming PBS.

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