David Picard: Cowboy Prankster
He was a runaway, logger, sheep herder, railroad brakeman, cowboy, homesteader and… a prankster.
This French Canadian was a true pioneer of Hot Springs County, Wyoming.
The Pioneers of Outlaw Country.
Cowboys, Lawmen and Outlaws… to the businessmen and women who all helped shape Wyoming.
Here are their stories.
Dancing until midnight and beyond. Loud live music and stomping feet. Babies piled under chairs and in any conceivable space available. It was the ingredients for the perfect joke.
I am your host, Jackie Dorothy, and today we are traveling back to the late 1800’s of Wyoming where dances were held on remote ranches and in local school houses. Neighbors would travel from miles around to enjoy the live music, good food and company of each other before heading home to their lonely lives on the plains. These dances could go into the early morning and, on occasion, for several days. The smallest children would be stowed away under tables and chairs to sleep while their parents enjoyed the dance and lively music.
In 1902, Owen Wister described one such dance in his best-selling novel, The Virginian.
The Virginian passed through the store-room behind the kitchen, stepping lightly lest he should rouse the ten or twelve babies that lay on the table or beneath it. On Bear Creek babies and children always went with their parents to a dance, because nurses were unknown. So little Alfred and Christopher lay there among the wraps, parallel and crosswise with little Taylors, and little Carmodys, and Lees, and all the Bear Creek offspring that was not yet able to skip at large and hamper its indulgent elders in the ball-room.
Lin McLean and the Virginian were standing in that place set apart for the sleeping children; and just at this moment one of two babies that were stowed beneath a chair uttered a drowsy note. A much louder cry, indeed a chorus of lament, would have been needed to reach the ears of the parents in the room beyond, such was the noisy volume of the dance. But in this quiet place the light sound caught Mr. McLean's attention, and he turned to see if anything were wrong. But both babies were sleeping peacefully.
Excerpt from 1929 The Virginian starring Gary Cooper
This was the most notorious cowboy prank known throughout the world. Gary Cooper, a famous actor and heart throb in the 1930’s and ‘40s, had his break-out role playing this prank on the bewildered mothers of the fictitious Bear Creek.
In his western, The Virginian, Owen Wister wrote in length about this ‘baby swapping’ prank and other antidotal stories. Between 1885 and 1895, the Philadelphian son of a well-to-do family had kept journals of his adventures as a tenderfoot tourist in Wyoming. The young Harvard student and lawyer recorded stories of what he himself witnessed or that were shared with him over the campfire.
Soon after the novel’s release in 1902, eager residents of Thermopolis, Wyoming scoured the book for incidents and characters that Wister had based his stories on to see who they knew between the pages. Within weeks of the publication, people began to claim that they knew who the prankster was.
People who knew Owen Wister personally, such as Elizabeth Short, told historian Dora McGrath that the prank happened in the rural countryside of Hot Springs County. Although the location varied with each telling – from the Gooseberry Ranch to the Lost Cabin – all fingers pointed to one culprit, David Picard.
David Picard was a likable, hard-working rancher with a heavy French accent. He was a year younger than Owen Wister and they could have even met. At the time that Wister was roaming the country side as a rich gentleman of leisure, Picard was cowboying, herding sheep and trying to build up a homestead on the remote Bridger Creek, a stage stop on the way to Thermopolis.
Born in 1861 in Canada, Dave Picard had run away from his family and 12 siblings when he was just 13 years old to work in a logging camp. From there, he ended up on an emigrant train and herded sheep in Laramie’s Shirley Basin. After working for a time as a brakeman for the railroad and deciding that it was too dangerous, he headed for Kane, Wyoming to be a cowboy. On the way, he stopped at Lost Cabin and ended up working for a ranch, making the area his permanent home.
Over the years as a cowboy, sheepman and rancher, Picard grew to know nearly all of the outlaws in the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang and counted many of them as friends. During the Wilcox train robbery and other sprees, his ranch became one of their relay stops when they needed to make a quick get-away.
In 1892, during the Johnson County Wars, he was on the opposite side of the feud between wealthy cattle barons and small homesteaders as that of Owen Wister who was friends with the leaders of the Invaders. Along with his best friend and future brother-in-law, Vince Hayes, he was ready to go fight the infamous Invaders and defend their friend Nate Champion. However, the battles were over before the young men made it over the Big Horns to Buffalo and Champion had been killed in an ambush.
On this particular day, cattle wars were the farthest thing from the young Frenchman’s mind. He was at a dance, according to researcher and historian Sister Mary Krass, at Gooseberry, a remote ranchland famous for its sheep. Located in the Big Horn Basin between Meeteetse and Thermopolis, the region was ruled by the Sheep Kings and Queens who would host social events to break the monotony of everyday life on the plains.
“From the Gooseberry Ranch,” Sister Krass writes, “comes the story of the changing of the babies’ clothes. While the mothers were enjoying a dance held there, Dave Picard, a cowboy, played a prank which caused hours of confusion. With quiet dexterity he changed the clothing of the babies in such variety of ways that it took hours before the mothers could undress them and put them back into their own clothing.”
Another account has Dave Picard attending a gala in Lost Cabin with his wife and children where a practical joke was pulled on a few of the parents. All the children were sleeping in another room while the adults were dancing until daylight. The unnamed prankster wrapped the children with blankets and mixed them up. One dance-weary mother had gotten all the way home before she realized that she had the wrong child!
Owen Wister himself claims not to know the true origin of the prank. In 1893, Wister and Harry Groome, a contemporary and fellow Philadelphian, went to Texas for a vacation on the ranch of Fitzhugh Savage, also a Philadelphian.
In an excerpt from his lengthy entry for February 21st, Wister wrote:
One of the neighbors here – Jim Neil – … is fond of putting up jokes on strangers; and one evening when he took supper here, Groome and I tried to make ourselves out in conversation more ignorant of the West than we are, hoping to draw some stories from Mr. Neil; but we drew nothing. He is always after Thoroton, it seems and on one occasion told him this story.
They had a dance somewhere – one of the regulation dances where the babies are all brought and piled in a corner while their parents jump about to music. After the thing had got going full swing, some unknown person got the babies and changed all their clothes – putting the linen of Mrs. Jones’s little boy upon Mrs. Smith’s little girl, and so on. In the dim light nobody noticed, and all went home with the wrong baby. Next morning there was the devil to pay, and for a week the whole countryside was busy exchanging and identifying babies.
Thoroton believes this for a fact. Savage told me it was all Neil’s invention. I maintained Neil’s invention is not up to that high level and that he read the story somewhere. The other day he was over here again before I was up in the morning, and I shouted out to Savage to tell Neil that he got the baby story out of the back of an almanac, which Savage did. Neil said that it must be in the almanac for next month, then. But he admitted that he had heard the story down at San Saba.
To devise a trick of that completeness, clean out of your head while you were talking to an Englishman would indicate most unusual powers; and I think, that if the thing did not actually occur, somebody though of doing it while they were actually at a dance with the pile of babies in sight. Then the flight of imagination would be one of which even I might be capable.
Over the years, others have also claimed to be the prankster or to know where the prank occurred. A young woman, the great-Aunt to Gary Kellog, said she and another girl helped David Picard switch the baby’s clothes. Some say the culprit was William Hines, a Casper cowboy, who switched just two children – a boy and girl – which their parent’s didn’t catch until they were 80 miles apart. Other reports from the 1930’s said that the place the baby swapping prank took place at the Goose Egg Ranch. Historian Alfred Mokler denied that this was true and wrote an article for the Casper Tribune stating that “The Virginian” was fiction, not fact.
Mokler wrote:
“The Goose Egg ranch house is referred to as the place where they exchanged the babies in “The Virginian,” and it would be hard to prove the claim unfounded.”
The above is from one of Casper’s occasional contributors to the public press, and the same person said to this author: “You spoiled a good story to your “History of Natrona County” when you cautioned your readers not to place too much reliance upon the story that a former CY cowboy represented the Virginian.
The answer is the same now as then. The “History of Natrona” is not a work of fiction, but “The Virginian” is.
History is a record of fact. Romance is a product of the imagination. Between history and romance stand legend and traditions. Legend is history shrouded in romance, or history modified, amplified, or altogether transformed by romance.
There are many romancers who would pass themselves as historians. They indulge in fanciful tales of imagination and self-glorification, adding a little traditional history and legend here and there to give their story the appearance of history.
Western history, the reclaiming of the West from savagery to civilization, has suffered more from exaggeration and misinformation by romancers than any other part of the United States. Correspondents, publicity men and reckless writers everywhere have used the West as a butt for their effusion, to the determent of western history.
In the preface for “The Virginian” Wister says that he has purposely changed the names of people, ranches, creeks and mountains, and he warns the readers of his very interesting story that his description of the country is not correct, nor are all the events mentioned supposed to be true.
“The Virginian” is a novel, a fictitious narrative, a feigned and invented story, a fabrication, a product of the imagination; and nothing more is claimed for it by its author.
Here is a brief history, a record of facts concerning “The Virginian.” Owen Wister was a friend of Judge Jay L. Torrey of the M--- (Em-Bar) Cattle Company. In the early ‘90’s the two men spent a summer together at the company’s headquarters on Owl creek, in the vicinity of Thermopolis.
Wister was a good mixer and spent much of his time with the M—cowboys, who delighted to relate to him many stories and legends, covering the events and experiences of cowboys from the Panhandle in Texas to the Muscleshell in Montana. Many of these stories were as highly colored as the cowboys could paint them.
Wister collaborated, amplified and embellished these stories, and they were published as semi-historic, in book form, but the book did not “take,” and was a financial failure. The author returned to the Owl creek country the following summer and collected all the romantic stories that the cowboys told around the camp. Added to these stories the author exercised his own imaginative powers, and “The Virginian” was produced which brought him fame as an author and made for him a fortune.
The setting of the story is supposed to be in Wyoming, but the events, highly colored, as before stated, occurred in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana and other states where the cowboys were employed.
The Goose Egg ranch was originally owned by the Searight Cattle company of Texas who built a fine stone ranch house in the late ‘70’s or early ‘80’s, near the banks of the Platte river, about fourteen miles west of Casper, near the old town-site of Bessemer, which was used as headquarters for the company. This was one of the finest ranch houses in Wyoming at that time, with four large sleeping rooms upstairs, and a fireplace in two of these richly furnished room. A large living room, an elegant bedroom, and elaborate dining room, kitchen and butler’s pantry composed the downstairs rooms.
It is said that high carnival was held in this mansion of the plains when the owners and their friends visited the place, and if the old rooms could relate what occurred in them in the early days the story would be even more interesting and exciting that the story of the “The Virginian.”
There are several ladies of Casper who positively claim that they were the babies who had their clothing changed by the two drunken cowboys, and the change was not noticed by their mothers when their cloaks and hoods were put on them and they were tucked away in the buggies and were taken home, and it was not until their mothers commenced to undress them to get them ready for bed that the discovery was made that they had brought home with them their own baby’s clothing, but not their own baby.
It may not be polite or diplomatic to say that this baby mix-up never occurred at the Goose Egg ranch house, or any other house, but sober thought and common sense will tell anyone that the whole story is unfounded. Can anyone imagine a dozen mothers gathering up a dozen babies and putting their hoods and clocks on them and not one of them discovering that the baby was not their own. It is safe to say that there is not one mother in one hundred but who would make the discovery the first second she had the child in her arms. The whole story is preposterous and contrary to reason, instinct and nature. A father might have done such a thing if John Barleycorn had deadened his senses, but never a mother.
The Goose Egg ranch house, now deserted, dilapidated and fast going to ruin nevertheless is an interesting place to visit and many people go out there during the summer months. The author stopped there one Sunday afternoon last September and there were two young couples going through the house. One of the young ladies inquired if I was acquainted with the author of the “History of Natrona County,” who said that there was no truth in the story of the barbecue, the dance and the “change being made in the babies.” “Yes, I knew the author of the history, slightly,” I said. “Well if I could meet him, I would tell him what I thought of him for trying to be so smart,” she said. “If I see him, I will tell him for you,” I said. And she never knew, and never will, unless she reads this.
But whether you want to believe Wister’s story or not, the history of the Goose Egg ranch house, published in the “History of the Natrona County,” is well worth reading.
But central Wyoming is not alone in its claim of possessing the old house where the exciting episodes occurred as described in “The Virginian.” Northwestern Nebraska, not satisfied with taking the water from the Platte river that of right should belong to central Wyoming and building up a prosperous agricultural country, while the land of Wyoming is as dry as the Eighteenth amendment to our constitution, is now trying to take “The Virginian” story away from us, and thus blast the claims, popularity and notoriety of our cowboy who would be the Virginian and our matrons who would be the babies that were “exchanged.”
Just read Nebraska’s claim:
“Many of the incidents contained in “The Virginian” by Owen Wister, were the experience of the people in the Panhandle of Nebraska and eastern Wyoming thirty years ago,” according to Shumay’s “History of Western Nebraska.” “One of the stories told was that of the pranks of two cow punchers at a dance.” Says the author. “While the mothers of a number of sleeping infants were dancing the boys changed the wraps which the babies wore, and changed their positions, to the end that when the dance broke up, most of the parents started home with the wrong baby. As the discoveries were not made until the parents were at home, in some cases, twenty miles from the scene, it took considerable time to straighten out the tangle of who was who in babyland.”
Thus concludes Historian Mokler.
Now you are left with the question. Was it just a cowboy tall tale? Or perhaps David Picard, a young cowboy with a French accent, seized an opportunity to pull a prank in remote Wyoming that became legendary?
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