After the forced march through the red desert, I owed myself a break. I couldn’t quite justify a full day off–that’ll come soon enough, in Pocatello–but a shorter, 15-mile walk to Fossil Butte National Monument offered a healthy reprieve, and the follow-up to Cokeville was also a little lighter. It’s amazing what a leisurely morning, with a bottomless cup of coffee, can offer in terms of relaxation and decompression.
While the walk across Western Wyoming was supremely memorable, I’ve been missing having towns to explore. And mini-marts to stop at for coffee. So my priority over these two days was to get a feel for two places, Kemmerer and Cokeville, that are well off the beaten path.
Kemmerer’s history (along with its border towns of Frontier and Diamondville) is proudly trumpeted throughout the town center. There are murals lining the walls, wood-carved signs, and large narrative posts, all emblazoned with Kemmerer’s trinity of fame: JCPenney, fish fossils, and mining. The pride practically dripped from the signage.
I was most surprised by the JCPenney link. As it turns out, James Cash Penney and his wife moved to Kemmerer in 1902, buying a small house that still survives in the town center. He launched his first store the same year, almost immediately adjacent to his home, though it was known then as the Golden Rule Store. This was driven by Penney’s core philosophy, which manifested in a couple of distinct practices. First, he charged one price to all customers. I didn’t realize that this was unusual, but apparently prices varied based on a customer’s social status. Penney also despised credit, viewing it as an immoral practice, and thus limited his business to cash, even though that disadvantaged him in some ways.
Clearly, though, those disadvantages weren’t crippling. Within ten years of launching the first store, there were 34 Golden Rule stores, spread across the Rockies. By 1973, JCPenney reached its peak, with 2053 locations. The 21st century has been less kind, as shopping malls declined, Amazon and other online vendors gained prominence, and the old-school department store model began to show its age. JCPenney declared bankruptcy in 2020. As part of the fallout of that move, the company put its original mother store location in Kemmerer up for auction. While Forbes speculated that the store would likely be liquidated, it’s still there, for now, and I suspect the town of Kemmerer will fight tooth and nail to preserve it in some form.
Speaking of things that are preserved in some form, Kemmerer falls within the Fossil Basin area, which also encompasses Fossil Butte National Monument. My walk to the monument initially followed the highway through gently rolling hills, pulling me away from the Oregon Trail for a stretch in order to loop through this significant place. Eventually, though, I was able to fork onto an old, decommissioned road, most of the pavement having long since crumbled away. Dark clouds lined the surrounding mountaintops, dumping rain all along the horizon. Somehow, I managed to evade the showers entirely; as I moved into the monument, Kemmerer was getting thoroughly doused.
While people aren’t allowed to dig for fossils at the monument, the surrounding region offers all manner of fossil hunting. This abundance was a long time coming. 53 million years ago, Fossil Lake sat here, spanning 930 square miles. Over the two million years that the lake existed, layer upon layer of sediment accrued, and today some 500 square miles of sediment beds survive–the perfect conditions for preserving fossils. While fish fossils earn pride of place in the promotional materials, the monument’s visitors center has all kinds of fossils, including a crocodile, bats, long-extinct mammals, turtles of all different sizes, loads of plants, and the most extensive collection of fossilized poop you could ever imagine.
The mining legacy is far more mixed. It’s revealing that the neighboring town is called Diamondville, when the primary extraction operation focused on coal. Evidence of the availability of quality coal in the area emerged in 1874, and the mining operation was launched soon after. The carnage that followed is extensive. A fire broke out in December 1898, and it just kept going for weeks. Two miners died six weeks later from the “black damp.” Another fire erupted in February 1901. 32 miners died on this occasion, including a father and son pair. In December 1905, a coal dust explosion wiped out an entire mining shift–18 men in all. The miners weren’t passive or resigned in the face of this; they worked to organize and push for improved conditions. They even brought in the big guns–Mother Jones herself! Local authorities hated seeing Mother Jones come to town, as she worked indefatigably, well into old age, to organize workers. She was kicked out of Colorado. In Utah, local authorities made up a bogus story that she had been exposed to smallpox as justification for quarantining her. Undeterred, union members burned down the house to set her free. While the Wyoming mining camps ultimately were successful in organizing, the benefits would be short-lived, as the Diamondville coal mine shut down in 1930.
Of course, the most dubious and alarming legacy is associated with Cokeville. On the bright side, the walk there was–for the most part–an absolute delight. After illicitly camping at the picnic area in Fossil Butte, and thus avoiding the worst of a series of wicked storms that ripped through overnight, I climbed a sharp ascent before dawn. I’ve been over 7000 feet for so long now that the thin air’s claws have been dulled, and I chugged merrily up and over the top of the basin. Unfortunately, as the pavement fizzled out, the muddy clay took over, and I spent the next few hours moving through the same repetitive process, with large clumps of mud clinging to my shoes, only to launch forward when the weight proved too much. Still, it was a price worth paying, because as the sun finally peeked through the thick clouds, it revealed some of the most dramatic views of the trip, with a canyon to my right and rounded peaks to my left. Most miraculously, there were trees!
Before too long, I was back on the Emigrant Trail, following the Sublette Cut-Off, which provided that shortcut from South Pass direct to Cokeville. The wheel ruts led me smoothly through the hills, eventually feeding into a dramatic descent into a sweeping valley… only for those ruts to suddenly disappear partway into that descent. I scrambled downward and then waded across a sea of sagebrush, only rediscovering the track when I reached the far side, more than an hour later.
While that slowed my progress, I still reached Cokeville by 2pm, which was a relief. The contrast to Kemmerer was immediately apparent. To some degree, that’s just a matter of size; Kemmerer’s population is 2400, while Cokeville’s is a fifth of that. But the latter smacks of decline. One of the two hotels on the main drag is out of business, and a neighboring commercial site is vacant. A Flying J Travel Center is the lone shop. More to the point, though, aside from a Meeker Marker, there’s no immediate sign of the town’s historical importance, or a story worth spotlighting.
As it happens, though, Cokeville is known for something. Just go to Wikipedia: “Cokeville is a town in Lincoln County, Wyoming, United States. The population was 502 at the 2020 census. The town is known for the Cokeville Elementary School hostage crisis.” Oh, crap.
Before the contemporary wave of school shootings that first grabbed attention at Columbine, Cokeville was the face of academic tragedy. In 1979, David Young was the town’s lone police officer… at least, until he was fired for misconduct. He moved away, married Doris Young, and found community in white supremacist groups, particularly Posse Comitatus. Its “anti-establishment and white separatist ideologies seemed to resonate heavily with David Young, who already resented the government and blamed them for his problems.”
David Young developed a plan. The goal, ultimately, was to launch an anti-government revolution that would culminate in the creation of a whites-only homeland in the Midwest. That would require money, though. So, the most sensible strategy for accomplishing that, he concluded, would be to take the entire Cokeville Elementary School hostage, in order to extort a wild amount of money via ransom. David and Doris, along with David’s daughter Princess, launched the plan on May 16, 1986, bringing plenty of guns and a “gigantic” bomb in a shopping cart. Princess bailed, but the other two pushed on, taking 167 people hostage–150 students and 17 adults. To keep everyone occupied, the Youngs passed out copies of David’s manifesto, “Zero Equals Infinity.” I enjoyed Suzuki Nathie’s take on this: “Needless to say, Zero Equals Infinity consists of wildly confusing, disjointed, and nonsensical screeds about Socrates, reincarnation, Newton, Shakespeare, mathematical theorems, mankind, Adolf Hitler, electricity, spiritualism, white supremacy, hydrogen fusion, Jesus Christ, metallurgy, law, chemistry, systems of government, New Guinean tribal beliefs, and “the nothingness of knowledge”. The manifesto, in short, is an absolute catastrophe of indiscernible madness.”
Law enforcement very, very gradually kicked into gear, but eventually the school was surrounded. Young demanded a two-million-dollar ransom for each kid, plus a phone call from President Reagan. The endgame proved to be equal parts tragic and pathetic. David Young, who had a string linking his wrist to the bomb’s detonator, left the classroom to use the bathroom. As he did so, he transferred the string to Doris. She turned her attention to the bomb in his absence, fiddling with some parts of the device. Nobody knows why. A teacher approached Doris to ask for water. Doris was so focused on the bomb that the teacher tapped her arm to get her attention. Doris sprung around in response, and in the process she jerked on the string, accidentally setting off the bomb. Utter devastation unfolded, with a fireball sweeping across the room and shrapnel firing in all directions.
David Young returned and took in the disaster. He saw his wife, Doris, burned and bloodied, barely alive. Shockingly composed, David pulled out a gun, shot Doris once in the head, and then turned to fire on a teacher. The wound in that case proved to be non-fatal. After that, he retreated to the bathroom, where he died by suicide.
How does a town’s history shape its identity in the present? Kemmerer celebrates a favored son, one who transformed commerce across the United States, and a rich natural history that has contributed to perhaps the greatest fossil collection in the world. Even the mining legacy, spotty as it is, can be framed in positive terms, most notably with the heroic efforts to organize and defend worker rights. But Cokeville… how do you rebound from such a tragedy? What is the road back to having pride in your community and the sense of safety and belonging so essential to considering a place to be a good, stable home?
