- "Wyoming Chronicle" returns.

We're out of the starting blocks for our 18th year, beginning with today's preview of what's coming up in the new season.

We'll find out how Wyoming's America 250 poster was created, how it was judged first place in the entire nation, and why that outcome was pretty much expected.

We'll visit the strange and striking Ames Monument, a towering tribute to a pair of brothers who were indispensable in building the Transcontinental Railroad.

Fort Phil Kearny was the biggest military installation of its kind in the nation, built to protect travelers on the old Bozeman Trail.

It failed in that mission, in large part because of a nearby battle 160 years ago this summer, and we'll meet the woman who worked to bring the Vietnam War Memorial Moving Wall to her small town.

Plus, the man whose job transporting and erecting the powerful portable monument has taken him to every state in the union, including this year, to Wyoming.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS, this is "Wyoming Chronicle".

There's a nationwide poster contest annually among the 50 US states based on history, archeology, and historic preservation.

Wyoming not only enters it every year, it wins it much of the time as well.

- So the contest has existed since 1996, and I think Wyoming has not received a top three award only six or seven times, and I believe we've received first prize 13 times now.

- And this year helped by an America Wyoming 250 grant, the state historic preservation office went all out to create its best contest poster ever, and did exactly that.

And for the first time, the poster planners did something for the contest they'd never done before.

They paid an artist to create a painting just for this.

- So it is a real commissioned artwork featured on the poster this year, and I was able to do that because I got a 250th grant to commission an artist.

So we went through the open call process through the Wyoming Arts Council and artists could apply to do the commission, and the artist that was selected is whose art you're seeing on the poster is Robert Martinez of Riverton.

Robert used some of my ideas to develop the artwork.

- That's how commissioned art typically works.

"I have an idea for something I'm not capable of doing it the way you could.

Could we work with you on it?"

He agreed to do that.

When we met you at the Archeological Fair last year, he was there actually, and I think we got a little bit of video of his demonstration he was doing.

You said at that time, you were already talking about this year's poster with him then.

What was going on?

- So we had already commissioned and entered into contract with Robert at that point, and he actually brought me a proof of an idea to the Archeology Fair for me to look at, and I did look at it.

- You offered feedback as we said- - Yes, yes, and we went through the sort of feedback process and further refined the idea after seeing that.

- What were some of the things you wanted it to show based on what you knew his artistic sensibilities were?

- Originally, I knew I wanted it to be on a historic map because Robert works using graphite on maps, or ledgers.

- Yeah.

- Historic documents, so I knew I wanted a map of Wyoming since we're commemorating the 250th anniversary of the country here in Wyoming.

I knew I wanted elements of the relationship between Native Americans and the horse in 1776.

In Wyoming, in 1776, it had not yet been colonized and so I wanted to reflect that the accuracy of the time period.

I specifically wanted technological elements that a horse might be used for because that's often what's reflected in the archeological record.

- What?

- Is the remnants of technology.

- When people think of the word technology today because of this huge role that current technology plays for everybody, you might not understand what you're talking about.

What's technology in that painting?

- So I'm specifically talking about the contraption on the horse that's pulling some blankets.

It's a travoise or travoy.

Prior to the use of horses, tribes would've used dogs to pull things on their travoy or travoise.

So that's the bit of technology that's showing.

I wanted a Plains Indian woman to be represented in the artwork because women are often underrepresented in the archeological record and I wanted to sort of draw attention to the role that women obviously have played in society throughout the millennia.

And then I wanted to tie it even more directly to archeology in Wyoming.

And so that's the petroglyphs that are represented in the background of the image.

In the upper left of the image is a petroglyph of a horse from Hot Springs County, and that image is particularly salient over the last couple years because the rock art was being damaged by cattle.

- [Steve] Really, what were they doing to it?

- Rubbing up against the formation that the art is on.

And an archeologist local to the area brought it to the attention of some archeological organizations in the state who helped fund a fence to protect the artwork so the cattle would stop rubbing on it.

- And there are lots of ways you might say we're educating the public, but this is a particularly good one.

It's educating the public and getting young people interested in something is super important, isn't it?

- You know, I hung a lot of posters on my wall as a kid.

- Yeah.

- So we hope kids are still doing that with these posters today.

- The railroad finance scandal that enveloped the Ames Brothers and many others in the 19th century is a dim memory today for most, but the massive granite monument to the brothers who were key to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad still stands solidly in Southeast Wyoming, a striking enduring oddity from its time to ours.

People would have seen the brown sign probably on the interstate many times.

I don't know how many have come over.

I'll say I've lived in Wyoming for dozens of decades and I've never been here before today.

(Christina groans) It's really something.

- It is really cool.

- What in the world is this doing here?

- So Ames Monument, Ames Monument is 100% here because of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Everything about this monument has to do with the Transcontinental.

We're really no more than a couple of miles away from I-80.

You can't see it from the interstate.

- Right.

- [Christina] So you really do have to get off the interstate and come down the dirt road to take a look at the monument.

- Yeah, we did that this morning.

It was foggy up here.

This is Memorial Day weekend where you never know what kind of weather you're gonna get.

- Yeah.

- But we're up at 8,300 feet or something, we're on a mountaintop.

- It's a little chilly.

- Wyoming, it's breezy chilly up here, but we came down the road.

- Yeah.

- In the fog this morning and there it sort of looms out.

And boy, it's not a road sign, it's not a little cabin or something, it is a manmade pyramid.

And like so many things in Wyoming had to do with the arrival of the railroad.

- Yeah.

- What we know is the two railroad companies started from the West Coast and the Mississippi River essentially and built toward each other, and not quite in Wyoming.

- Not quite.

- But just below the border in Utah they met.

The Ames brothers were part of what was known then as the Union Pacific, and eventually that was the name for all of it, coming from East to West.

- Oakes and Oliver Ames had joined in a business with their father very early on, you know, in the 1840s, 1850s.

And their business was agricultural equipment.

- Shovels, I- - Specifically shovels.

And so you could still buy an Ames shovel, they're no longer owned by the family company, but you can still buy a shovel, and they were founded out of Easton, Massachusetts of all places.

And these two brothers became very active in railroads and in politics.

And Oliver became the president of the Union Pacific and Oakes became a congressman in our United States Congress.

- I see.

So you know how to make shovels, let's build a railroad across the country.

(Christina laughs) Now, railroads existed before the Transcontinental Railroad did, but the prospect and the idea and the concept of building, it was about 1800 miles, I think, across parts unknown, a lot of it still, largely unexplored, uninhabited territory.

Safe to say an absolutely monumental undertaking.

- Oh, incredible, incredible undertaking.

- Yeah.

- And my understanding is that when President Lincoln pulled in Oliver, pulled in Oakes Ames into his office and said, "You gotta help us build this railroad," they had only built about 12 miles a track.

- 12 miles.

- 12 miles a track.

- Over the course of- - A couple years, Oakes and Oliver were kind of tasked with creating the financing to be able to move this railroad forward.

- Now, I think any student of American history understands the term you just used, the financing of the Union Pacific Railroad.

Of course, it was a success- - Huge.

- Because the railroad was built.

- Yes.

- But also one of the great scandals, really, of all American history and the way that the public, and the government, and the landowners, and the people, the investors, everybody was ripped off.

- Yes.

- To the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, even in those days.

- Yeah.

- Which would be billions of dollars today, really, really just... And there's no question about it.

The Ames brothers were implicated in some of that.

There were other more notorious scoundrels in this, and we're not breaking any news here.

- No.

(laughs) - This has all been investigated, but that's what happened.

But it was an odd time, sort of, wasn't it?

The robber baron era, these were the people who sort of got things done in a way before the regulatory and oversight climate- - Yeah.

- Really even existed.

- Yeah, this is... You know, the Transcontinental was quite the public-private partnership.

- Yeah.

- Oakes Ames was in a really unique position as a congressman in the United States Congress and got involved in what became the Credit Mobilier scandal.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And unfortunately, you know, was probably more of a scapegoat than anybody else.

- Yeah.

- It kind of crushed his spirit.

He was centered by Congress.

- Yeah.

- And didn't live very long after that.

- And that's sort of what led to this.

There were people who decided that at the very least, we wanna try to restore his reputation a little bit.

Is that how you've come to see it?

- Yeah, and restore... Yu know, the Union Pacific, hands down, probably would not have gotten nearly as far without these two gentlemen.

- Yeah.

- And so, you know, the Union Pacific really wanted to honor that, wanted to have a monument, of course, with Union Pacific money- - Yeah.

- To be able to put something that would honor both them as well, in my personal opinion, you know, the Union Pacific.

- This was a powerful organization that had a lot of money, proud of what had been accomplished, and maybe thought we wanna remember- - Yeah.

- Who did this.

- Yeah.

- And we'll let other people criticize what they did.

- Yeah.

- And that did happen justifiably.

- [Christina] Yep.

- But let's build this here.

- And why here?

- Why here?

In 1882, before statehood- - Before Statehood.

- [Steve] The railroad completed in 1869.

What was this site in 1882?

- Yeah, so if you look around this site today, it's not particularly a place where you would think you might put a big large monument.

- Yeah.

- But this is actually the highest point- - [Steve] Okay.

- On the Union Pacific Transcontinental Railroad coming from east to west.

- Right.

I can, where I'm sitting, and we'll make sure we get a shot of it, can look over and see the place, the actual place, the only place where the rock came from.

- Reeds Rock, Reeds Rock is just over my left shoulder, and Reeds Rock was the source for much of the monument.

And, you know, there's very few pictures of the monument being built, but the ones that we do have kind of include crews pulling rock from Reeds Rock.

- There are lots of vantage points where you can... This is what it looked like then.

- This is what it looked like then.

- Yeah.

- And, you know, I always tell people, "If you have bad eyesight like me and you squint a little, the houses become blurry, you can feel the railroad chugging along, you can feel one of the big boys coming up the hill, and just be in that space."

- Yeah.

2026 marks the 160th anniversary of a landmark battle in the Plains and Indian Wars.

That, by some measures, nearly equals the much more famous Battle of the Little Bighorn, which took place 10 years later.

In 1866, the Fetterman Fight in present day Johnson County was the biggest US army defeat on the Plains at the time, and it led the US government to shut down its largest military installation west of the Mississippi, Fort Phil Kearny.

Fort Phil Kearny, under your guidance and considerable leadership, has opened a hugely expanded visitor and interpretive center.

Considerable undertaking, I suppose.

- It was a lot of coordination between a lot of people, and it turned out really well.

- So inside, not only do we have a building that must double what you had before.

- Yes.

- And a lot of new interpretive materials for people to go around, be educated, familiarize themselves with the site and the history and the significance.

This is not something you're gonna be able to do very often.

- No.

- What's better about the site for someone who wants to learn more about it?

- We have more room to do more exhibits- - Yeah.

- So we can talk about more.

We also have extra space inside for programs.

We've been getting a ton of community support and people coming out to listen to our different speakers or book signings or whatever, and we have just been able to utilize the remodeled space for what was originally there and our expanded space too.

The Fort was only here for two years.

It is such a blip in time when there were people here for over 12,000 years.

And so we only talk about the first... Well, these two years that the Fort was here, but people were here before.

We wanna talk about, especially the tribes that the Fort would've dealt with, they allied with the Crow or the Crow allied with the US Army, but then there was also the Cheyenne, the Lakota, the Arapaho that all have history here.

And so making sure we went to those different tribes and worked with them and said, "What do you want people to know coming through here?"

And kind of explain that.

And then we explained the Army, not just army life, but this was a whole town with families, and children, and women, and civilians, and so highlighting their experiences too, and then tying that all up together.

- What's going on here then?

- Well, gold had been found in Montana, Virginia City area, and John Bozeman said he found a shortcut through territory he wasn't supposed to be in, (laughs) and the US didn't have a treaty to come up through here.

And so the trail was very popular and settlers were getting attacked all the time by various tribes and so the government decided to build three forts along this Bozeman Trail to help protect the settlers going to the gold fields.

And Fort Phil Kearney's the center one, the largest one, and it was the headquarters.

- The people who were living here didn't like that.

- No, it was right in the heart of... Right next to several sacred sites for them.

It's where they came to resupply lodgepoles for their homes, where they hunted.

This is like somebody bulldozing a highway through your house, basically.

It was a big deal, and so the army was definitely not welcome here.

- Yeah.

I'm glad you mentioned resupplying of wood for homes.

This is a great spot for a fort, and I know it was scouted out pretty well.

And one thing that it wasn't was near a forested area particularly.

And as you pointed out, the Fort itself relied on a big, sturdy, thick wooden wall, which was logs standing side by side.

Where'd the wood come from?

Because looking around where we are, there just isn't enough.

- There's not.

Most of it came from what's now the town of Story, about four or five miles away, and they would go over and get their wood for not just the stockade wall, but for building, for fuel, for cooking, all of that.

There were also cottonwoods around here by the creek and the lower stockade was made of cottonwood.

- So a slow moving wagon train with a bunch of logs on it, wood on it.

A fairly easy target for someone wanting to interfere with it, which is what kept happening.

- Yes.

- It reached its terrible peak, I guess we would say, late in 1866 when a famous, but maybe not quite so famous as it could be battle called the Fetterman Fight.

The Fort is in a pretty good spot for a lot of ways, but there was one key shortcoming, which was... - They were a long way from wood.

- Which they needed.

- Which they needed to build the Fort and for heating and for cooking.

So they took wagons and went out to wood cutter camps to get the wood and bring it back to the Fort.

And the tribal folks saw this and they said, "You know, if we harass the wood trains, they'll send relief forces out and maybe we can get some decoys and maybe we can get them to chase the decoys, then we could ambush them."

So they tried this ambush idea on December 6th, and it almost worked.

Then they tried again on December 21st and they attacked one of the wood trains.

Colonel Carrington gave orders to Fetterman and Grummond to take a relief column out with explicit orders to not chase any of the Indians over Lodge Trail Ridge.

- So what did they do?

- They chased the decoys over Lodge Trail Ridge.

They'd selected a small group of decoys for the Arapaho, Eagle Head, and Black Coal, for the Northern Cheyenne, Wolf Left Hand, and Big Nose, and among the Lakota, American Horse, and Crazy Horse.

So they did chase them over Lodge Trail Ridge and then the decoys went out along the ridge here.

They chased them out there, and as the cavalry and infantry chased the decoys, they began to hesitate.

And the oral history is that the decoy Big Nose from the Northern Cheyenne stopped, whirled around, and taunted them.

There's even a story that he rushed in and bumped against one of the infantry men and then ran off again.

So the infantry and cavalry continued to chase the decoys off the north end of the ridge where they met a large contingent of Oglala Lakota who were waiting for him.

And then finally, there were a few soldiers who made it back to the monument behind us, to this area, where they were then dispatched.

But the battle itself took about 40 to 45 minutes, so it wasn't a particularly long battle.

And the soldiers were in a bad spot because they were still... The infantry were still using the muzzle-loading Springfield rifle.

- For people who might not understand what the great disadvantage of that would be in a close quarters fight, it's that one shot at a time, and then you have to reload the thing in this cumbersome way.

- Yeah, so you can get one volley off and then if you're faced against mounted warriors, you're pretty much out of time.

That might be.

The cavalry did have carbines.

And actually the interesting story there is that the at the fort, they did have a regimental band and they came with carbines.

So Carrington gave the carbines to his cavalry, but it still didn't make any difference.

They were just outgunned and outnumbered on this particular day.

Another interesting story is that with the cavalry was a bugler named Metzger, and he was a German immigrant, probably immigrated to the US in the mid 1860s, fought in the Civil War, but ended up here as part of the cavalry unit.

And he was here.

And when they recovered the bodies after the battle, his was the one that had not been mutilated.

He had actually been covered with a buffalo robe and left untouched in the oral history from the tribal side, as they were honoring his bravery that he kept bugler, and at the end was hitting warriors with his bugle and smashing his bugle.

For people who don't realize this, why would a bugler have been on the battlefield to call signals to the troops?

- Kathy Levasseur and Aaron Gray had never met before she started working with him to bring the Vietnam War Memorial Moving Wall to Wyoming in August.

She's the local woman who picked up and relocated to Newcastle from Cheyenne to spearhead the project.

He's the man who drove it there, and with the help of the high school football team, set up the half-size replica for its short, but unforgettable visits.

We're here because of the thing that I think viewers can see behind you in the shot that you're in.

What is that back there?

- That is the Moving Vietnam Memorial Wall that travels around the country to different communities.

- I see, how did it happen to come to Newcastle, Wyoming?

- It happened to come to New Castle, Wyoming because we have found a grant writer who wrote a grant that allowed us to bring it here to our community, and I was searching for a grant writer who could do that for us because of my brother who died as a result of his service in Vietnam.

- So there's a family connection deeply personal to you.

- Yes.

- Is his name on the memorial?

- No, no, he did not die in Vietnam, but he was poisoned by Agent Orange.

- In case people don't know, it's a replica of what?

- The original Vietnam Wall, which is on display in Washington, DC.

- Permanently there.

- Permanently there.

- You've seen that?

- I have seen that.

I'd wanted to go there for a long time, and my daughter took me there because she never knew her uncle.

She wanted to give me the honor of going to the wall to DC in his memory.

- Yeah.

- [Kathy] It's a wonderful thing, every American should see it.

- Yeah.

- [Kathy] And that's why they have the traveling walls.

- You were so impressed by this that when this grant opportunity came about, and the grant, let me mention, was part of a state program, right?

- Yes, the state of Wyoming had a certain number of grants that they were issuing for the 250th anniversary of the United States.

- You didn't even live in New Castle at the time, did you?

- No, when I first became aware of building the memorial, I lived in Cheyenne.

- So you uprooted your whole life in a way?

- I did.

- And moved from Cheyenne to New Castle.

Now, it wasn't unfamiliar territory, you've told me.

- No.

- What do you mean?

- I grew up in New Castle.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And came back in 2023 to work on the Veterans Memorial for New Castle, for which we have a committee formed, and they've been working for several years to get a Veterans Memorial built here in the city of New Castle to show respect to our past veterans.

There's a price to bring the wall here.

- Yes.

- Which is a reasonable price, and the truck driver's in charge of setting the wall up with local help.

- Yeah.

- Not really a title, I guess you could say volunteer/driver/scheduler.

- You're in charge of- - A little bit of everything.

- Getting the Memorial Wall from place to place.

- Yes, half size of the wall in Washington.

- [Steve] Half size, but big.

This is not some small thing.

- But very impressive.

- I'm hoping people here can see it.

It must be about six feet to the top or something?

- [Aaron] The panels start at the apex at 68 inches in height and then they run down to 54 inches in height.

- Where were you before you got to New Castle?

- We were at our shop in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, White Pine, and we had a stop in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania that we just came from.

- Yeah, so a long way from Wyoming.

You spent a lot of time on the road.

- A lot of time on the road and we leave here and we head towards Lockport, New York.

In New Castle here, they had the whole football team come out, great bunch of kids, and it was a very fast setup.

- [Steve] So this is a couple dozen kids of- - Yes.

- Big, strong boys at least.

- Big, strong boys.

- Yeah.

- And it makes everything go smooth.

- You pull in, you unload the truck, and then what's it take to... I mean, you become the foreman at that point, right?

- Yeah, basically, yeah.

- "Here's how we're gonna do it, everybody understand?"

- Yep.

- And you (indistinct)- - They follow directions very well.

- Yeah.

That's barely a glimpse of the interesting people, places, and history that will take us around Wyoming from now until next summer on Wyoming PBS.

Come along with "Wyoming Chronicle".

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