Gunn Project Highlights Historic Archaeology

     Life is sweet when everybody wins. A recent grant project at the museum is an example of this happy circumstance. Last year the museum was contacted by James Lowe of TRC Mariah Associates Inc. of Laramie. His company was beginning work on a surface survey of the Gunn town site trash dump as part of the mitigation work being done on a PacifiCorp power line project. As part of this sort of development, corporations are  required to do a certain amount of archeological work when they will be disturbing a culturally significant site.

            Very often the results of these archeological studies are filed and forgotten. In this case, at the suggestion of the Rock Springs BLM District Office, Mr. Lowe contacted the museum to see if there were some way that this information could be put to use. As a result, the museum is developing an exhibit and  DVD production about Gunn and the use of historic archaeology in studying past dwelling sites. The DVD and exhibit is funded by a grant from PacifiCorp and the objects in the exhibits are loaned by Rock Springs Grazing. The display is still in production and will eventually be placed at the Rock Springs/Sweetwater County Airport where the museum maintains a set of changing exhibits. 

            Gunn, Wyoming was a town established adjacent to the coal mining development of the Gunn-Quealy Mine Company on the west side of Baxter Basin, north and east of Rock Springs. The town and mine opened in 1907 and the mine operated until 1948. As is common with many abandoned coal mining towns in southwestern Wyoming, all that remains of the town is numerous foundations, partial sandstone walls, historic trash dumps, and outhouse depressions.  The survey associated with this project concentrated on the trash dump site near the town.  

            Artifacts observed in this dump site were mostly domestic trash such as food cans and bottles,  and broken crockery. Some mine-related refuse was found as well, including blasting powder kegs and metal pipe valves. A selection of these artifacts will be included in the exhibit.

            The interpretive results from the study show a snapshot photo of life in Gunn, Wyoming during its years of occupation. What the people were eating and drinking is shown from the food cans and bottles. Broken crockery fragments show two things; first, the population’s socio-economic status can be inferred based on the quality of their household goods, and second, the ethnicity of some residents can be guessed from the foreign origin of some of the pieces. 

            Many of these hypotheses are backed up by records research about the occupants of Gunn. The manufacture dates of most of the items recovered (1900-1930s) fits neatly within the occupation period of Gunn (1908-1948). Porcelain pieces of Japanese origin could either be traced to the sizable Japanese population among the miners, or to upper-middle class home where Japanese porcelain was popular at the time.  Thus these could have been heirloom pieces for Japanese families, or else priced possessions of the more well-to-do families in Gunn.

            Thanks to our good corporate neighbors at PacifiCorp, the Gunn project will show what life was like in a small Wyoming coal town in the early 1900s as viewed through what is left behind.  Studying a community's garbage is a different, yet very telling way to view history.

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What's in Store

      In the mood for a little romance? Just in time for Valentine’s Day the Museum Store has several books about love—cowboy style. How to Win A Cowboy’s Heart: Favorite Western Recipes by Kathy Lynn Wills,  Just One Fool Thing After Another:  A Cowfolks’ Guide to Romance by Gladiola Montana and Texas Bix Bender, and Wahoo!: Cowboys in Love by Texas Bix Bender would make great gifts for lovers of the West.

            From now until 2006 events will be held to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the newly-acquired Louisiana Purchase. We have several books about the event including; The Journals of Lewis and Clark edited by Bernard Devoto, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose, and Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, a photographic journey with text by Dan Murphy. Just for fun we also have “beanie” dolls of Lewis, Clark and their stalwart Shoshone guide Sacajawea and her baby. 

            Other new historical books include; Cherokee Trail Diaries: Volume 1 and 2, Cherokee Trail Diaries:  Volume 3, The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman, Jr., Fire: A Force of Nature, Water: A Gift of Nature and Empire Express by David Haward Bain. This last is considered by some as the  most complete book on the subject of the transcontinental railroad.

            The Museum Store also offers a nice selection of art items related to southwestern Wyoming. We stock a print of a pencil drawing of old Lincoln School in front of Castle Rock by Bonnie Logan LaFond as well as a  portfolio of watercolor sketches by Thomas Moran. This is a set of eight watercolor prints on heavy paper. 

            Note cards also featuring the work of Moran are available. The “Cliffs of Green River” cards are available now and cards featuring “Cliffs of the Upper Colorado River” should be here by March. 

            In addition,  the Thomas Moran prints on both canvas and paper which sold extremely well over the holiday season are still available. “Cliffs of Green River” and “Indian Paradise”  were so popular that we are pursuing the addition of more Thomas Moran prints. Moran produced several paintings of Green River’s magnificent rock formations, but it is taking considerable detective work to track them down in print.  

            The Museum Store also carries Horseshoe Nail Art by Phyllis Benson. These are unique, western, free-standing and hanging figures made from horseshoe nails. 

            We have recently added a line of old-time toys and have had a lot of fun with our customers figuring out how they work. These include finger tops, puddle jumpers, tom- tom rattles, wooden cup and ball toss and wooden flutes. 

            Definitely not to eat, but to cuddle are our new canned grizzly bears,  cougars, and wolves. These plush animals are native to Wyoming and each sealed in its own can. 

            Dinosaurs are everywhere at the museum. The store features “dinosaur eggs”,  grabbers, pens, and pencil sharpeners as well as “instant prehistoric animals.” These little sponge fellows emerge from a capsule and grow before your eyes when dropped into water.  Also new is a dinosaur woodcraft kit especially for pre-schoolers.  

            The Museum Store keeps the same hours as the museum, currently 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Board Message
Kevin Holdsworth

           The museum store has just finished a very successful holiday season, certainly its most successful ever.  Generally speaking, museum stores provide important services to patrons by providing souvenirs of a visit and material for further study.  For some patrons shopping at a museum store can be the highlight of a visit.

            The Sweetwater County Historical Museum store is a not-for-profit enterprise that operates under a 2002 Memorandum of Understanding for the benefit of the museum itself, the Sweetwater County Historical Society and the museum foundation.  Revenue generated from sales is used solely to support the Historical Society, the museum and their projects. The museum board has directed the museum store to sell items of particular interest to patrons, including scholarly and historical books, fine art reproductions (of local subjects), items associated with the railroad, and proprietary objects—museum t-shirts, hats, pins, etc.  It is not the intention of the board or museum staff for the museum store to compete with local business but rather to enhance the visitor experience, and indeed, to give patrons more reason to spend time and money in Sweetwater County.

            The museum is fortunate to have Linda Holland in charge of the store.  Linda combines a background in accounting (she is a CPA) with experience and interest in retail sales.  Linda has done a fine job keeping accurate records and making the store an inviting and unique space.

            The museum store is a keystone of any museum.  There are two ways to make county-sponsored museums self-sustaining: through an endowment and through revenue-generating activities.  The Sweetwater County Historical Museum board and staff will continue to work to ensure the continued viability of the museum through these two methods.

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Curator's Corner       
Mark Nelson

          Now that another year has passed us all by, it is time to look back on the previous year. 2002 witnessed the continued growth of the museum’s collections. Thirty donations were made to the museum during the year, resulting in the addition of 225 artifacts to our collection. The museum staff would like to once again thank all who contributed to the museum’s collection this last year.

            In November, Fern Gaensslen was kind enough to donate a wonderful collection of toys to the museum. If you visited the museum during the Christmas season, you probably saw some of the toys, as they were featured in Gary’s Christmas exhibit. The museum’s toy collection has developed into one of the strengths of the museum’s holdings. 

            Our offsite storage facility is now much more environmentally sound thanks to the installation of heating units and insulation. We now have the ability to keep the facility within professionally established temperature ranges. Thanks to Art Kline for his cooperation in installing the insulation and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the grant funds used to purchase and install the heaters.

            Many of the E.G. Proctor negatives that are housed in the museum have been scanned and will soon be utilized for exhibit purposes. The images are wonderful and present  a real slice of life in Green River during the middle portion of the last century. Tentative plans have been made to make a variety of these images available for public viewing in the basement hallway in the months ahead. 

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Exhibits Roundup  
Gary Perkins

          Our Christmas exhibit was the largest we have done in years. We moved the furniture exhibits into storage in October giving us a rare opportunity to bring out almost all of the museum’s huge toy collection, some of which was just donated last fall. 

            I wish we had the room to keep the toys on display all year round but we don’t. Mark and I packed them away at the end of January to make way for some new exhibits. I used our large format printer to create text and photo panels for “Life in the Coal Camps,” “The Other Side of the Tracks: The Minority Experience,” and “In and Out of the Home: Women’s Life in Sweetwater County.”

            I found the exhibit on the minority  experience one of the more interesting and difficult ones to write. To get a better understanding of our county’s history, we sometimes have to look at areas that do not portray us as we wish to be seen. The treatment of minorities in our county is one of those areas.

            Starting with the 1885 Chinese Massacre in Rock Springs, our county has had numerous setbacks in race relations. While African-Americans were fairly well treated by the Union Pacific Coal Company (some would say that the UPCC treated all of its workers equally badly), blacks and other non-whites experienced segregation and discrimination in other parts of the county. With that in mind, I decided to include the story of two lynchings of black men in 1917 and ’18 in the exhibit. 

            I’ve included the story of the Japanese railroad worker’s treatment by the railroad during the Second World War and sections on the Basque and Hispanic experiences in our county. 

            Of course, all immigrants experienced problems being assimilated into our society. We are in the process of mounting the exhibit panel telling the story of the immigrants. The newcomers to the coal mines always seemed to be used as pawns in keeping the unions at bay.  Caught in the middle between the hostility of other miners who saw their jobs threatened and the anti-immigrant sentiments that grew to dominate the national scene beginning in the late 1800s, the immigrants struggled valiantly to build new lives for themselves in our county.

            I included in their story the importance of the church and their ethnic social organizations in maintaining a sense of identity. 

            In our exhibit on women’s life in Sweetwater County, I tell the story of women both inside and outside of the home. No matter what career field women chose, they faced discouraging difficulties. Although Wyoming, nicknamed the “Equality State,” was the first territory, and later state, to give women the vote in state and local elections and allow them to own property, it was not until 1920, fifty-one years after the Wyoming Territory first granted women the right to vote, that women were given that same right in federal elections. In addition to  legal road blocks, women had to contend with widely-held beliefs that they were intellectually inferior and temperamentally and physically incapable of success outside of the home. 

            In addition to a description of what being a homemaker entailed one hundred years ago, I included the story of single women homesteaders, business women and professional women. Women’s stories used as examples include Elinore Pruett Stewart ( a woman homesteader and writer). Dr. Charlotte Hawk (a doctor in Green River), Eleanor Eggs (an early business woman), and Martha Campbell ( a business woman who lost three husbands and three children). Photos of women who worked for the coal company during World War II are included. 

            I decided that the coal mining and law and order exhibits also needed to be redone. Although not completed, the mining exhibit will now include a section on labor relations and a separate exhibit on trona mining will be constructed. Law and Order will be expanded to include the 20th century and feature a section on the Cantrell and Duke trials as they have both received national attention.

            Prohibition, prostitution and gambling along with the boom years of the 1970s will be covered.

            To enhance these exhibits the museum has ordered two more 360 degree glass cases to display mannequins dressed in period clothing. I will soon be dressing a mannequin in one of the magnificent Catholic priest’s robes given to the museum several years ago. I will also dress a mannequin in a complete Slovenian woman’s costume. These textile displays will complement the story of the immigrant’s experience. 

            Other exhibits in preparation at this time include Education, Medicine, Oil and Gas Industry, and Land Use in the County (to include wild horses). The next temporary exhibit on the horizon is a display on the reenactment of the Pony Express using items worn by Duke Yowell when he participated in the 1960 commemorative ride.

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Director's Report
Ruth Lauritzen

            Our museum has always had excellent support from our corporate neighbors in Sweetwater County. Working through  the Sweetwater County Museum Foundation,  the museum has received numerous grants over the years for projects such as exhibits,  publications, media productions and public art projects. We are grateful that these organizations see the importance of arts and culture in our local communities and are willing to donate funds toward such efforts.   

            The Museum Foundation is currently working on such a project in conjunction with the City of Green River. The City Council has committed over $85,000 to the creation of statue of John Wesley Powell. The artist is David Alan Clark who was raised in Green River, and currently lives in Lander. The Museum Foundation, with the support of the Museum Board, is raising funds for the construction of a base, installation and lighting of the sculpture.   

            The piece is a ten-foot bronze of the great western explorer who began his 1869 and ‘71 expeditions down the Green and Colorado Rivers from the little frontier town of Green River City.  Powell’s influence on the land policies of the frontier West and the sheer drama of his trips into the unknown are an important aspect of our local history. 

            The bronze will be placed in a prominent location  on Flaming Gorge Way, enticing people driving through our community to stop. It is hoped that the visitors will then take the opportunity to visit the museum and learn more about Powell and the history of our area. Museum visitors will be directed to other areas of interest in the county including Expedition Island, the Whitewater Park, Rock Springs attractions, Flaming Gorge and the Wild Horse Loop Tour, among others. 

            Currently we have commitments of $5,000 from the Union Pacific Foundation and $500 from Wells Fargo Bank. There are several other grant requests outstanding. 

            The City of Green River plans to have the sculpture completed this summer and will host a special dedication event. 

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Volunteer Opportunities

     If you have an interest in volunteering at the museum please call Ruth at 872-6435 or 352-6715. Volunteers may choose to work as much as they wish, coming in on a regular schedule or just helping out for special events. If you have special talents and time to give we would love to hear from you.

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