Federal Regulation of Apostrophes, and Other Stories About Land | Post 30 | Wyoming
I’ve traversed some mighty open spaces of late, but here in Wyoming — America’s least populated state — Street View speaks especially of land.
For starters, the prairie is back. After an interlude of rolling, forested Black Hills, the flat of ranches and cattlescapes I’d seen in Nebraska returned to my screen:
The far horizons seem to stretch even further with the knowledge that my virtual self is now over 1000 miles from both Chicago, in one direction, and Seattle, in the other. Here, in the middle, no metropolis could possibly overcome the vastness. Land and space are in charge to an extent I never see out East or West.
Still, in Street View, northeastern Wyoming feels not so much desolate as unfrequented. The built environment is a bulky satellite dish by a peeling farmhouse; SUVs loitering at a remote shed; a signpost requiring vehicles to stop at a small town’s “port of entry”. This is the landscape where, 130 years ago, Harry Longabaugh roamed, got jailed for stealing a gun, horse, and saddle, and earned a nickname after the town where he did the deed: The Sundance Kid.
West of Sundance, though, verticality and density rematerialize — both as abruptly as an igneous event. I first spotted Devils Tower at a bend on U.S. Route 14:
The natural protrusion — a U.S. National Monument — sticks up 1,267 feet over the nearby Belle Fourche River, and only as I drew closer did the road let on that Devils Tower would not be nearly as isolated as its solitary profile suggested: A spat of monstrous billboards; specks, then splashes of arriving visitors; a final quiet curve; then, boom, a spread of Welcome Center structures and vehicles more numerous and active than I’d seen in a while.
In Street View, even the virtual version of a National Monument exudes the anticipation of site — that here, in remoteness, visitors like you (and not) have congregated to see something nationally special, that the climax will be revealed slowly, that the final reward will require patience and possibly some effort, so that when we leave, we have not only seen but also accomplished.
As eager as the rest to see Devils Tower close up — 400,000 visit annually — I clicked my way to the front of the line and through the park gate. The encircling ascent teases the tourist, frequently obscuring the butte behind trees. Roadside, some visitors photograph prairie dogs. Then, we are all in the uppermost parking lot, readying for the final hike to the foot of Devils Tower itself. The walk includes a wooded trail, and I meet fellow tourists en route. Families gaze at the tower from prime vantage spots, and it’s some time before I can finally line up a tourist-free shot of the country’s very first National Monument — so declared by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1906.
My guidebook, Wikipedia, offers only mysteries as to the name “Devils Tower”. First, it is indeed Devils — not Devil’s — Tower. Ever since the days of the Sundance Kid, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Board on Geographic Names has frowned upon apostrophes (and periods) in geographic naming. The nomenclature standard is not applied universally, but when it comes to natural features, the Board has approved only five genitive apostrophes in nearly 130 years, primarily when clarity demanded it (e.g. Carlos Elmer’s Joshua View (of Joshua trees in Arizona)). The Board’s archives, however, and oddly, do not record any justification for the anti-apostrophe policy.
As for “Devil”, Native American names for the tower range from “Bear’s Lodge” to “Tree Rock” to “Brown Buffalo Horn”. It seems that, back in 1875, a white man’s interpreter erred in translation, somehow coming up with “Bad God’s Tower”. Proposals to modify the site’s name to include (or re-designate as) “Bear’s Lodge” have not gone far.
Back again on U.S. Route 14, westward, the road is open and the land pancake once more. I took advantage, clicking deep and fast down the arrow-straight highway. What speeds could I reach? By the time I passed a motorist with the same idea, I had topped out at 157 miles-per-hour.
Such topography represents the heart of the Powder River Basin, which geologically speaking is a structural basin, hallmarks of which include a physical depression (the slight dip here bounded by the Bighorn Mountains to the west and the Black Hills to the east) as well as significant coal and petroleum deposits.
Indeed, Wyoming is by far America’s largest coal producer, and the Powder River Basin is by far Wyoming’s top coal-producing region. In Street View, the signs of extractive industries are as conspicuous as a lone laccolithic butte. Here, trains carry endless cars of coal; 18-wheelers deliver monstrous tires for mining trucks; and the country’s oldest, continually operated surface coal mine — the Wyodak mine — and its associated plant straddle the road into Gillette, the self-proclaimed “Energy Capital of the Nation”.
Gillette, situated due north of Cheyenne at the confluence of coal, oil, methane, and Interstate 90, is now Wyoming’s third largest city (~30,000 people). It is also the Gillette of the Gillette Syndrome, psychologist ElDean Kohrs’s term for the swell in crime and ugly community fracturing that — he argued — accompanies rapid population growth, namely Gillette’s jump from 3500 in the early 1960s to over 12,000 by 1975 and 22,000 by 1979.
Though the academic rigor and general applicability of Kohrs’s thesis is questioned, the hometown Gillette News Record acknowledges the city’s boomtown history of trailer shantytowns, water shortages, high divorce and depression rates, etc., and references to “Gillette Syndrome” appear in discussions about the social ills afflicting today’s North Dakota fracking economy and other latter-day Gillettes.
My route through Gillette did not uncover signs of sin city past, and for virtual travelers more at home with the environs of Seattle, Chicago, and East Coast conurbations, Street View offers both unfamiliar and familiar. There’s a roadside gun shop (nice re-use of mining truck tires on the shooting range) and an edge-of-town saloon welcoming hunters.
Downtown, the breadth of Gillette Avenue and miles of visibility lend a Western vibe to what is essentially an Anywhere, USA, Main Street. Moreover, just like old mill towns of the East, the comfortable homes and tree-lined streets are not on Gillette’s outskirts, but on a hill above the city center, with a view of the industrial neighborhood, railroad tracks, and landscape that built the town.
And some residents stick with the same model car for decades.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Four Corners, Wyo.
- Sundance, Wyo.
- Devil’s Tower, Wyo.
- Moorcraft, Wyo.
- End: Gillette, Wyo.
Trip to date:
Blog post sources:
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