Is Mountain View Prejudiced Against Rural America? | Post 31 | Wyoming
It’s all land across northern Wyoming, and nothing reveals more about land than the occasional, isolated man-made structure.
Just about the only establishment I encountered between the road out of Gillette…
…and this lone house on the prairie…
was a bar in the Campbell County community of Spotted Horse:
The Spotted Horse Bar gets rave reviews online, often from excited travelers ripping westward, like me, towards Yellowstone National Park. Several a reviewer note that Spotted Horse’s population is just two [sic], and that you’ll miss the bar if you ”blink” — a figure of speech somewhat undermined by the bar’s stark roadside, road-crest siting and the noticeable presence of a rearing spotted horse figurine and tall Standard Oil relic.
Regardless, this location has certainly served as a pit stop throughout (Euro)American history. From the 1920s till at least the 1960s the Spotted Horse Bar was a (very remote) post office and gas station. And a signpost in the parking pull-off suggests the Astorian Overland Expedition passed through in 1811 — an effort by the Astor family’s original American patriarch, John Jacob, to establish fur trading routes and gain intel on a region non-Native Americans knew only through the findings of the Lewis & Clark Expedition.
Also hard to miss in north-central Wyoming was this barrage of concrete grain elevators:
The faded signage clued me into their origin: This is the old stomping grounds of Sheridan Flouring Mills, Inc., a major early- to mid-20th century regional grains company that produced Best Out West pancake mix and Tomahawk animal feed. The defunct company’s headquarters and primary facilities were in nearby Sheridan, now converted to the Mill Inn, motto: “The Best Rest Out West”.
The open Wyoming roads I traveled, like U.S. Route 16, often feature long arrays of wooden snow fences:
These fences protect vulnerable roads from deep and drifting snows, but as their open slats and perpendicular orientation to the road hint, they are are not in fact physical barriers. Rather, snow fences control snowfall by slowing down and creating turbulence in winds, causing snow to release from the air just downwind of the fences — and in spots more desirable than the middle of an important east-west route.
Wind, snow. Also, fire. On the edge of Bighorn National Forest I spotted a caravan of Santa Fe Hotshots vehicles.
The Santa Fe Hotshots are one of the over 100 Interagency Hotshot Crews sponsored by various U.S. government agencies to fight wildfires and handle other fire management issues like prescribed burning. A kind of special forces of firefighting, hotshots can spend many consecutive days during forest fire season living out of their trucks and in the wilderness.
Wind, snow, fire, and — finally — dammed water. Between Cody and Yellowstone I encountered the Buffalo Bill Dam along the Shoshone River, a pre-World War I project to render the Bighorn Basin more agriculturally productive. I missed the dam itself, but passed through — if memory serves correctly — the first tunnel of my virtual trip:
Man-made features notwithstanding, Bighorn and Yellowstone accentuated the stunning natural wonder of Wyoming. In Street View, Ten Sleep Canyon at the western exit of Bighorn is spectacular and has to rank among America’s great mountain descents:
Ten Sleep, the town, boasts a tourist-pleasing facade or two, and Wikipedia suggests the area was a early-day Spotted Horse, serving as a Native American “rest stop” situated ten days’ travel — i.e., ten “sleeps” — from various important destinations.
One irritation of Street View travel is low resolution imagery in areas Google has not visited in, say, over a full decade. This happens in swaths of rural America, and such are the conditions between Greybull and Yellowstone (including parts of Cody proper, such as the iconic Buffalo Bill statue, The Scout, last captured by Google in 2007).
Google clearly devotes more resources to updating imagery in major cities and well-plied routes, and that bias is understandable in terms of generating the most (and most up-to-date) information as fast as possible for the most (and most connected) people.
But for this virtual traveler, the decision to refresh Market Street in San Francisco at least seven times since 2014 — at the expense of Wyoming — rings of the same prejudice undermining American cohesion. In a nation of binary polarization — where “Pro-America, Anti-Trump” no longer understands (or tolerates?) “Make America Great Again”, and vice versa — a gap of interest between manically connected Mountain View, Calif., and rural places like Emblem, Wyo., seemingly removed from high-speed gigabytery lifestyles, is unsurprising.
Why should Google bother with the “middle of nowhere” (per one Spotted Horse Bar reviewer)? Because, as I’ve learned throughout this Street View travel experiment — and again in this very post — stories are everywhere. Even small towns regularly have worldly stories to tell. Indeed, Emblem (pop. 10), though shunted to archival 2007 Google hard drives, conveys the ever timely lesson of ethnicity and tolerance.
Settled by German immigrants, Emblem was originally Germania — a problematic name come World War I. Neighboring communities pressured Germania to come up with a new name reflecting an “emblem of liberty”. The suggestion appears to have been taken literally, and the region’s elevated farming terrain is also known as Liberty Bench.
If Google is like a documentary filmmaker, biases and point-of-view revealed by which footage goes to the cutting room floor and which shiny images are projected to the audience, let it be said that somewhat contemporary Street View imagery (2013) reappeared in Yellowstone.
Alas, the dominant visible trend in Street View are the park’s dead pines. Scarring the East Entrance Road, the fallen trees appear to be victims of at least a couple of threats. Some sources note the damage wildfires have wrought — especially a 1988 blaze — while others cite a massive outbreak of mountain pine beetle. The severity of the two blights, researchers say, are mutually related.
I wrapped up this Wyoming segment lakeside at a man-made structure, Lake Lodge.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Gillette, Wyo.
- Spotted Horse, Wyo.
- Clearmont, Wyo.
- Buffalo, Wyo.
- Ten Sleep, Wyo.
- Basin, Wyo.
- Emblem, Wyo.
- Cody, Wyo.
- End: Yellowstone National Park, Wyo.
Trip to date:
Blog post sources:
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The Richest Hill on Earth | Post 32 | Montana
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Federal Regulation of Apostrophes, and Other Stories About Land | Post 30 | Wyoming
