Podcast Script: Pioneers of Outlaw Country: The Lost Owl Creek Colony
They were daring adventurers, forgers of a new life, homesteaders …. and forgotten to history. These vanished people were true pioneers of Hot Springs County, Wyoming.
The Pioneers of Outlaw Country.
Cowboys, Lawmen and Outlaws… to the businessmen and women who all helped shape Thermopolis and Hot Springs County, Wyoming.
Here are their stories.
The Lost Owl Creek Colony
Many, many years ago, strangers came from the south and began to build homes in the solitudes of Wyoming. To the tribes who roamed this area, it was a prized hunting ground known for mild winters. They had fought bloody wars for their right to hunt the plentiful game and were jealous of any who also tried to claim the valley beneath the Owl Creek Mountains.
The Indians say in their own language: “Beautifully the Great Spirit looks at the other countries in the summer, but he lives here all the year.”
These newcomers were seen as a threat by the tribes. The strange people worked among the rocks in the mountains, the country yielding them rich treasures, not only furs, but gold and other precious metals taken from the ground.
According to their oral traditions, the Indians attacked and destroyed the outsiders in their new homes. They took as their prize the strange animals belonging to these interlopers. This was how the tribes in the Big Horn Basin first came to own horses.
Some dismiss this story as mere legend… a tale told to General George Sliney in the late 1800’s that he wrote down in his memoirs. But was it really only a myth?
For thousands of years, various tribes roamed in the shadows of the Owl Creek Mountains, part of Wyoming’s Rocky Mountain range. The mild winters made the area beneath the towering mountain ideal for winter camp and the nomadic tribes would return for generations. They left behind scattered evidence of their presence, including fantastical rock drawings they etched and pecked into the cliffsides.
By the 1800’s, this region was known as the Owl Creeks, nestled in an isolated corner of the Big Horn Basin. By then, it was held by the Crows and Shoshones who continued to fight a never-ending war with their powerful enemies including the Sioux and Arapaho. They sacrificed their lives and best warriors for the right to hunt and winter beneath the mountains.
In 1826, Fur trapper Daniel Potts described the land in a letter back home to Pennsylvania.
Rocky Mountains, July 16, 1826
Dear and Respected Brother,
“The valleys near the head of the (Big Horn) River and its tributary streams are tolerably timbered with cottonwood and willow. The grass and herbage are good and plenty, of all the varieties common to this country. In this valley the snow rarely falls more than three to four inches deep and never remains more than three or four days, although it is surrounded by stupendous mountains. Those on South, West and North are covered with eternal snow.
The mildness of the winter in this valley may readily be imputed to the immense number of Hot Springs which rise near the head of the river. I visited but one of those which rise to the south of the river in a level plain of prairie, and occupies about two acres; this is not so hot as many others but I suppose to be boiling as the outer verge was nearly scalding hot.
There is also an Oil Spring in this valley, which discharges 60 or 70 gallons of pure oil per day. The oil has very much the appearance, taste and smell of British Oil.”
With this letter, Daniel Potter enters history as the first white man to leave behind a written record of this region. However, if the legends of the tribes are true, the trappers were not the first white men to arrive in the Owl Creeks.
Cowboy and early pioneer Ed Cusack would have agreed.
It was 1885 and Hot Springs County and the Owl Creek region was a lawless place. The Embar ranch was the largest employer of the time and claimed much of the land as their own. They had over 12,000 head of cattle and paid nearly $4,000 each year into taxes.
Youthful cowboys trailing up the Bridger trail stayed and worked beside the teenage greenhorns who had run away from their homes back East. Many of these cowboys would go on to become either outlaws of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang or the lawman that pursued them.
Ed Cusack, a former cowboy from the Keystone Ranch, eventually built his Wyoming homestead about two miles up Owl Creek in the Big Horn Basin. For a time, he and his wife ran the Torrey post office on their ranch, named in honor of Colonel Torrey. After giving up that post to the new town of Thermopolis, Cusack became a deputy sheriff in the fledging, unruly land of what would become Hot Springs County. Later, he was elected as one of the first county commissioners and was well-respected in the community… and one not to tell tales.
Not far from Cusack’s ranch, J. D. Woodruff, a trapper, and afterwards, a stockman and banker in the town of Shoshoni, had built the first modern cabin in the Basin in 1871. However, as Cusack was about to discover, it may not have been the first cabin built in the area.
Cusack claimed, “There was ample evidence that long before 1885, Owl Creek had quite a settlement from the mouth of the North fork of the Owl Creek and down to the old Virgil Rice ranch. But all my inquires of the oldest white residents and several Indians failed to elicit any information in connection with this settlement.”
“Across the creek from where I built my house,” Cusack said, “I found the remains of a log cabin that had rotted down so completely that it was by the rarest accident I stumbled on to it. There were a few pieces of kitchen utensils scattered around and of the pattern of a hundred years ago. An old single-bitted axe of an antiquated pattern was uncovered close by.
“Still further down on what was later the Dan Dee ranch, I found the site of a large camp ground. Numerous pieces of old-style kitchenware were scattered around there, showing that white people had been in that vicinity. What became of them, I presume, will never be known.”
Cusack not only discovered the remains of old homesteads, but also found evidence of long forgotten battles.
“Under the cedar ridge, between Thermopolis and Owl creek, I found where juniper trees had been piled together to form a barricade, and the trees that had been cut showed evidence of white men’s work.
“I also believe that the breastworks on the top of Roundtop butte were the work of white men, who were besieged there by some much stronger party, either redskins or white men. But their fate will perhaps never be known, and forever remain a mystery.”
The evidence that Cusack discovered matched the legend shared by his neighbor and fellow pioneer, General Sliney. Questions continued to swirl. Who were these people?
In 1939, a pioneer journalist and former editor of the local Thermopolis paper, Andrew O’Donoghue, revived the mystery. The story spread across America when the Associated Press picked up his article about this long-lost people.
“Who were they – they of the lost colony of Owl Creek?”
Owl Creek, as most people in Wyoming know, rises in the mountains in the extreme southwestern part of the Big Horn basin, and enters the Big Horn River about six miles below Thermopolis.
The story of those earlier settlers in the valley presents as great a mystery as the disappearance of Raleigh’s lost colony in what is now North Carolina. Taken as a whole, it is really a greater mystery. For while nothing has ever been known of the fate of Raleigh’s colonists, history at least records who they were; when they attempted to found the colony and approximately the time of their disappearance. But not a speck of evidence has ever been discovered as to who the Owl creek settlers were; when they came there; whence they came, or the slightest clue as to their disappearance. The only thing of which there is any reasonable certainty is that they were white people and had located in the valley at least a century before Woodruff’s time.
Pioneer journalist, Andrew O’Donoghue, grew intrigued with the possibility of a lost colony. He began his investigation by going back in time to a conversation he personally had with another early visitor to the springs.
“In the fall of 1914, I met that grand old Scotsman, Robert Foote of Buffalo. He was a well-educated, cultural man. He told me that he was then over 80 years of age, and was one of a party who had visited the Big Horn Basin in 1858, and had camped at the Big Horn Hot springs. Their surroundings were still as nature had fashioned them – their natural beauty not yet ruined by damnable “improvements”.
This part of Wyoming still retained most of its primitive grandeur, the Big Horn basin epitomizing in its virgin state what still remained in those days of the pristine glory of the west.
Here, in its native habitat, wild life – buffalo, elk, antelope and deer – flourished in numbers almost unbelievable to us of the present day. The Indian was still monarch of all he surveyed and roamed the country as did his ancestors while the red man was still sovereign lord and king over North America.
In speaking of the Big Horn hot springs, Mr. Foote disclaimed credit of being among the first white men to visit them. He said he believed they were visited at an earlier date by Bridger and Baker and, perhaps still earlier by some of the Hudson Bay or Astorian trappers and possibly by some of the French and Spanish explorers.
In dwelling on the various phases of those early times, he never once referred to the mysterious settlers on Owl creek. Had he ever heard of them I am confident he would not have overlooked mentioning the fact.
Several weeks ago, this writer, accompanied by William F. Bragg, well-known writer of western fiction and historical narratives, made a trip along Owl creek and interviewed a number of the ranchers as to what they might ever have discovered regarding their unknown predecessors. We learned very little. Of course, we did not expect to find, at this late date, any relics. It is hardly probable that anything in that line could be discovered except by digging down several feet at certain points along the creek bottom.
Frank Buchannan, who now owns the old Cusack place, and who studied at the University of Wyoming, told us that some years ago while making some kind of an excavation, he dug up what appeared to be the remains of an old fireplace. Further than that, he was unable to furnish us with any more data that any of the other farmers or ranchers whom we interviewed.
Joe Magill, the first teacher in the Owl Creeks, was a personal friend of mine. He had spent over 50 years in the Owl creek region. In all the years I had known him, I never once heard him mention the vanished colonists who had, so many years before, located in the valley. The same is true in regard to dozens of other settlers and Indians whom I have met within the last 30 years.
Another remarkable feature of the Owl creek mystery – not a grave has ever been discovered along the stretch of more than 20 miles where evidence of settlement has been found.
The most plausible theory among the people of the Owl creek country is that the so-called settlers were hunters and trappers. It is known that the Hudson Bay trappers, in the middle and latter part of the 18th century, extended the field of their operations up the Yellowstone and Big Horn rivers and most of their tributaries. It is said that Owl creek was mentioned in some of their reports. It is possible that the “large camp,” mentioned by Cusack, was the rendezvous of a contingent of these men, operating in that region.
On the other hand, from the meager data so far unearthed, it would appear that the dwellings were erected with a view of permanency unusual in the construction of hunters’ or trappers’ cabins.
Be that as it may, as Ed Cusack said, the history of these vanished people will likely remain a mystery for all time.”
Or perhaps not.
The story told to General Sliney by unidentified Indians leave us tantalizing clues that Cusack and O’Donoghue did not have. According to the tribal account, the strangers came from the south with horses. They knew how to mine and hunt. According to Cusack, they left behind cutlery with old patterns.
New discoveries about this Lost Owl Creek Colony are still being made today. At the headwaters of the Owl Creeks, a date and indecipherable initials were found carved deep into the rock. The date was… 1798.
This gives us hope that, someday, we might find more clues which will help us discover who these lost colonists were.
