His degree earned, Rob shared with El that he had been awarded an assistantship to teach and take courses toward a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. El knew that if she agreed to go with Rob, she would leave behind her loving and supportive family and the familiarity of the two small towns she called home. The passion was too great, though, and the pull too strong. She wanted the West, and she wanted lots of horses. “I told Rob that Wyoming was fine with me.”

  In late August of 1956, El and Rob loaded up their car “and possibly a trailer,” El recollected, “since we had an awful lot of stuff,” including two collies, one kapok-stuffed coat, a pair of snowshoes, El’s bike, and her grandfather’s refitted wooden “Old Maine” canoe. They headed west along U.S. Route 30. With that, quite suddenly, El’s unrelenting dream to spend a life out west, surrounded by lots of horses, became a practical reality.

  Just Up Route 230

  Chapter 6

  IT WAS MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3RD. A LIGHT SNOW HAD JUST STARTED TO FALL when El and Rob Smith stopped on U.S. Route 30, not yet “old Route 30,” just as the two-lane gravel-and-oil trans-American road leveled out from its steep descent. The couple had made the arduous climb from Cheyenne over the wind-whipped summit of the Laramie Range, where the highest point of the transcontinental route, named the Lincoln Highway, marked an elevation of 8,640 feet.

  From where the couple stopped, they could see to the west the Laramie Valley, where the town of Laramie, which by then was calling itself a city, was nestled. At an elevation of 7,220 feet, it was a dry and windy place. Bland, blocky houses crowded around the downtown area, dusted heavily with soot from the trains that rumbled through daily. All the trees were gnarly cottonwoods, and they were lacking. Bleak, brown grass and a brittle sage-scratched prairie spread out in all directions and forever. The late summer palette of browns was interrupted only once, by a large plot of green that El mistook for a meadow. It was part of the University of Wyoming’s land. Called Prexy’s Pasture, this grazing section in the center of the campus was still on the books as the location where horses were to be hobbled while their owners attended or taught classes.

  If El felt a wave of homesickness for family and familiarity, she didn’t let on. If the dry, chilly, stinging wind on her face made her suddenly long for the green grass, trees, rolling lawns, and northeast humidity of Melrose, Massachusetts, elevation 95 feet, and Freedom, New Hampshire, elevation 439 feet, she said not a word.

  She was worried, though. “I came here for lots of horses, and I knew I couldn’t have them in that compressed town. It wasn’t what I wanted at all.” She shaded her eyes and peered further across the valley, her view made hazy by the swirls of horizontally blowing snow. Jelm Mountain, Sheep Mountain, and the Snowy Range Mountains rose in the distance. Offices were surely closed in town, for the young couple had arrived on Labor Day. On Tuesday, then, El would see about a place to live, up near those mountains. The couple spent the night at the Snowy Range Motel, near the bridge over the railroad tracks to the west side of Laramie. The townspeople, El and Rob discovered, were friendly.

  At the university’s Agricultural Extension Office, El was told of the immediate availability of a small, rustic cabin on Sodergreen Ranch, just a stone’s throw from the Big Laramie River. The cabin squatted near a big house and a huge old barn, all of which were owned by the Lewis family of the Lewis Ranch. El and Rob could rent the cabin for a month until the house became available for rent. El did not hesitate to sign the papers and was instructed to “head southwest from here just up Route 230 for twenty-three miles, go past Sodergreen Lake on your right, and then turn left at the first entrance you come to.” El might have missed the lake, with nary a landmark nor the greenery customarily surrounding northeastern lakes, but she held the keys to the cabin, and although a total newcomer to the vast country of endless prairie and few signs, she already sensed where her home was. “The whole vista was primitive, and that’s what I had longed for. I loved all the woods, the fall colors, the wooden bridge, and being out in the country. I belonged.” She and Rob, with her collies, the small and athletic Barry and the elegant, full-ruffed Bonnie, made themselves at home in the cabin on Sodergreen Ranch in short order. Even blind Bonnie adapted quickly enough to lead the German-born Barry about the place as if she had lived there forever.

  The towering barn stood to the west of the house, which faced west. Just south of the house and barn flowed the Big Laramie River, its origin in the mountains of northern Colorado. The old barn had once been a way station for the stagecoach that had brought vacationers and those eager to fish the mountain streams. Out front of the house was an oversized, circular, graveled area. In days past, it had served as an easy turnabout for the stagecoaches’ teams of horses.

  The ranch structures had been hand-built in 1878 by Swedish homesteader Oscar Sodergreen, who had lived on the property with his wife and their daughters Cora, Sonny, and Susan. Thick, tall pine trees had been felled and planed into heavy timbers, and stout boards were connected with dovetail joints. All the work had been done by hand, and no nails were used. In the barn, El found an old adze, Mr. Sodergreen’s carved initials visible on the handle. Adzes and hand saws, craftsmanship and brute strength, and the determination to create a home on the lone prairie had been responsible for these sturdy and functional buildings.

  In her book Just Beyond Harmony, Gaydell Collier described the tiny, four-room cabin that briefly was home to the Smiths. “Framed by a thickness of large cottonwoods … it looked overgrown and abandoned, but also snug and permanent. … [It] looked square, and the roof sloped up on all four sides to the center chimney. … [An] enclosed porch ran the width of the front. … Wild roses ran rampant … and the burbling sound of gentle water lent a cheerful aura.”38 It was a long path from the primitive house to the privy; the kitchen was equipped with only an old, enameled cookstove and a hand-pump; and there was no running water. El never uttered an unkind word about the cabin. It was perfect. She was sure, however, that the ranch begged for horses, lots of them. And if there were horses to be had, El would find them.

  El soon made the acquaintance of John Gorman, who was at the time Assistant Professor of Animal Sciences at UW and had authored the book Western Horses. He took El on as a student of Western riding and, after only a few classes, was talked into letting his affable, energetic, pony-tailed yet highly practical student from the Northeast “borrow two horses, one for me and one for Rob.” El appreciated Dr. Gorman’s instruction but found it interesting that much of the information was familiar to her. “I did learn, though, how to put roses correctly down the draft horses’ manes for parades.” At the end of the class, El returned the horses and set out to find her own.

  Even before her search began, El was confronted with what she saw as a critical decision: to buy a saddle and continue to cook on the massive cast iron stove that was primarily designed only to heat the big house, to which she and Rob had now moved, or to buy a new electric stove. “Most people might choose modern, but that old stove gave off lots of heat. It was a big old thing with a place for mittens. You had to keep feeding it and cleaning up after it, but I loved it. It was better than electricity. It was practical. Besides, I needed a saddle more than I needed to cook on any fancy new stove.”

  The horse purchases imminent, El chose slick fork saddles, from the SIMCO company out of Tennessee, for herself and for Rob. His cost $85, and hers $75. “My golly,” El said of her purchase, “they were expensive saddles, but they were nice.” She wanted only what was best for her first horses in the West. A slick fork saddle, which looked like a typical Western saddle, featured no knee rolls. It also lacked carving on the flexible fenders, allowing for more comfort for the rider. A light saddle, its seat was fairly flat, and there was very little slope from the pommel (the swell in front of the seat) to the cantle (the swell behind the seat). The reddish leather was of high quality. Most importantly, the saddle was designed to sit well on, and conform to, almost any horse. Thus, El didn’t have to deal with too wide or too narrow a gullet (the underside/backbone of the saddle). The saddles were easy to clean, with just the use of saddle soap and Lexol. “That didn’t mean we didn’t have to take care of the saddles. Saddles must be treated with care. In transporting, showing, or roping, no rider should ever want to throw them on the ground or just toss them in the back of a pickup where the motion of the truck will rub and wear away the leather. If they’re taken care of, they’ll always look like new. The leather will last forever. I still have Rob’s.”

  Rob’s older sister and her husband worked a cattle ranch in Bozeman, Montana. She said she had a Thoroughbred named Ranger for Rob. El made the trip to Bozeman by herself. With Barry and Bonnie as companions, she drove through unfamiliar and unforgiving territory, pulling an empty wooden one-horse trailer, to fetch the horse who, she assessed, “turned out to be not so great at racing.” The trip with what El assessed as an “adequate” trailer was not without its adventures, but El, daughter of the daring Walter S. Fracker Jr., was ready for the adventures that seemed to always accompany trips.

  “Before I left, a woman asked for a ride as far as Douglas, Wyoming. She had a little brat with her, who kept throwing things out the window. I was happy when I could leave that woman and her child behind. Then a terrible storm hit at the pass into Bozeman. At one point, I had to find a place for Barry and Bonnie to relieve themselves, so I got off on the side of the road. The storm was so bad, I had to keep the dogs on their leashes. I had just decided to sleep there till morning, since I couldn’t see a thing, when a big rig with bright lights passed, and I knew I could follow it into Bozeman. I took off.” This newcomer to the west had intuitively and decisively picked up a practice known well to old-timers and seasoned travelers of the West: When visibility doesn’t exist, get behind a trucker.

  El bought Prince, an American Saddlebred, from a Colorado State University student. Advertised for sale in the Laramie newspaper as a five-gaited horse, Prince turned out, according to El, to be a three-gaited horse. “He loved to jump. He loved it so much that he would jump by himself.” She described him as “a wonderful, gentle, nice horse even though he was high-spirited.” He was trained for steer roping but soon became accustomed to El’s use of him in everything from instruction to Jubilee Day parades. “I had to teach him how to be comfortable with the flag. I’d never done that before. So I put a blanket on a pole and rode him around and around the pasture. He did everything right. The neighbors thought I had lost all my marbles.”

  Training Ranger, the Thoroughbred, was El’s job. Rob’s connection to horses went only as far as his love for El. He was intrigued by the West and by horses, and even learned, under El’s tutelage, how to properly care for and shoe a horse. Dealing with quirks and stubbornness and reversing any poor training, though, was best left up to El.

  Ranger was not without his challenges, and El was not without her love for any opportunity that involved horse and rider training. Once, after taking Ranger on a morning-long trail ride parallel to the Big Laramie River, El turned Ranger for home, at a walk. Ignoring El’s cue, Ranger took charge and bolted toward home and hay at a gallop, displaying an equine behavior known as being barn-sour. Barn-sour behavior wouldn’t do, not in any of El’s horses!

  “I would call what I did intuition,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it knowledge back then. Every time he got it into his head to bolt, I started turning him round and round and round, in tighter circles, to slow him and make him mind my leg and body cues, to show him who was boss. Evidently that was the right thing to do. I kept it up nearly all day, as long as it took us to get back home at a walk. He never bolted again, and I was pleased that he and I had learned a lesson.”

  El and Rob had patiently counted the days till they moved into the big house. It was admittedly large for one couple, with two stories and an attic, seventeen large rooms in all, but El was already brainstorming how she could use the space to fit her dreams. The house looked west, toward the barn. Through the entry and to the south was a bathroom, a pantry, and a kitchen adjacent to a spacious living room. Just outside the kitchen was the water pump house, with the pump precariously perched on a sewing machine. Through the entry and to the left, or north, was an equally roomy dining area, and just beyond, a bedroom. A sunny living room, a craft room, and the stairs to the bedrooms were to the back and north of the house. Those who had ever stayed upstairs in any of the five or six rooms depicted the house as a drafty place. When the wind blew through those big rooms, the guests feared the roof would come off.

  Even the pups had their own room. One can’t manage on the Western prairie without a healthy dose of cleverness, and El was clever, working with what she had on hand. When El’s German Shepherd, Minx, had her litters, El placed her and her pups in a back room that served, when there were no litters, as a second living room, complete with ping-pong table. El altered the low single window in the room to provide easy access to the outdoors and then constructed a pen in the outdoor space below the window. When the pups needed to be put out, El conveniently dropped them out the window. From the pen, she could plop them back inside.

  As happens in many small towns in Wyoming, even before the Smiths had settled in the big house, their circle of friends began to grow. On a particularly windy afternoon, El chose to ride her bike farther up Route 230 to the Jelm Post Office, a small, isolated wooden building just off the main road. She referred to her exhausting push up the road and into the characteristically ferocious wind as “resistance training.” Her plan included, in proper New England fashion, a visit with the kindly postmistress, Phoebe MacDougall.

  As El was preparing to leave, Margaret Johnson strolled into the post office. Margaret and Everett Johnson, married in 1947, lived just west of El and Rob, on the ranch that had been owned and worked by Everett’s parents, Wes and Geil Johnson, and had been settled by Everett’s grandparents and great uncle in 1879. When Margaret learned of El’s plan to ride her bike the three-and-one-half miles back home, she responded in ranch-friendly fashion by lifting El’s bike into her car trunk and stating, “I am going to take you home.” Thus began the close friendship between the Johnsons and the Smiths. Margaret’s daughter, Joyce, described El and Rob as “part of the family, nothing less.” El didn’t see Margaret “as a mother figure in any way. She was a mentor and a dear friend. She helped me with so many things, including introducing me to the families who would become part of our lives.”

  El made a particular impression on the young Joyce. Horse-crazy herself, Joyce fell in love with El. “I idolized her. She had so much knowledge, especially about horses. And she had that strong New England accent. She told us that she’d spent several years overseas with her husband Rob, and so I was convinced that hers was an overseas accent, probably German.”

  With no television, Joyce looked forward to neighborhood get-togethers of plentiful food and conversation, especially those with El and Rob. “Some evenings, we’d go down to their place, which was so wonderful with all its big rooms, and El would always have a cake ready. Despite later stories of El’s dependence on Bisquick for cooking, these were homemade cakes, although she might have baked them ahead and then frozen them.”

  What Joyce and El soon held in common was their love of the big barn. “Close to 100 years old,” said Joyce, “that barn was my favorite place in the whole world to play, starting when I was five or six years old. As you entered, to the left were the five or six stoutly built and wide horse stalls, open in the back, with no gate, and a feeder in the front. When the guests went to the big house for their lunches, the stagecoach teams, of two horses each, were led to the barn, with all their harnesses still on. They went right to their own stalls and were then tied with their halters. They were hungry and nickered in anticipation of the hay that would be put down to their mangers from the hay mow above.”

  The Johnsons spread the news that there were newcomers to the area, and El and Rob Smith were absorbed into the community. Fall picnics drew large and amiable crowds, and when winter descended in full force, skating parties were held on the canal that carried water from the Big Laramie River to Sodergreen Lake, on the other side of Route 230. This same canal was where, in the summers, El paddled her beloved grandfather’s canoe.

  As friendships developed, the Wyoming wind became responsible for triggering a significant change in El’s life. Back east, where breezes blew, a name could afford to be shortened to a single soft staccato, such as “El.” El’s new friends, who in daily practice bellowed into the wind’s blast, knew that even the slightest bit of additional weight to a name, if only in syllables, was a necessity under the big sky and over the vast prairie. Without discussing it among themselves, El’s new friends began to call her “Ellie.”

  Ellie and Rob settled in the big house just after Rob began his teaching assistantship and doctoral coursework in the University of Wyoming Chemistry Department. It was October, and although the vibrantly colored maples of New England were not to be seen, the trees and brush came alive with autumn’s bloom, described as “so beautiful” by Joyce, “with the red fringe of the willows and the yellow cottonwood leaves above. And there were those bountiful lavender lilac bushes surrounding the house, certainly planted by a previous dweller.”