Cheyenne and Braae Road

June 13, 2016

After Hannibal we headed west, overnighting in Kearney Nebraska. We were expecting a sleepy town where we could get a meal and room. Kearney is bigger and more vibrant than we thought, with wide boulevards and every conceivable franchise. We never did figure out what was driving the growth, though we suspect the local branch of University of Nebraska helped. Most of the staff at the chain restaurant where we dined were students. I won’t name the restaurant for fear of your derision, we will leave it that we were tired and none of the nearby local spots appealed to us.

The next morning, Saturday, we drove on and on and on across the flat, boring but fruitful plains to Cheyenne Wyoming, lunching at a colorful roadside cafe along the way.

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We had booked into The Plains Hotel a beautiful historic hotel in the Cheyenne city center which has been restored to former glory, if not to full modern standards.

The hotel has an interesting history. In December of 1909 during a meeting of the Cheyenne Industrial Club, (later renamed the Chamber of Commerce,) a group of business leaders decided the city needed a luxury hotel befitting of the city’s growing influence in the new state. The territory had received statehood only 19 years earlier.

By February they had put together the financing. Fourteen months later the hotel opened. The hotel, five stories high, features a mahogany colonial style, plush carpets and is finished in marble. The first floor public areas take up the whole block and include meeting rooms, a large restaurant and bar and beautifully appointed, roomy lobby.

We have all experienced fine hotels in our lives, my reason for including its story here is the wonder that it was conceived, planned, financed, erected and opened in less than fourteen months, being built of exotic materials, during an era when there was minimal and slow connection to the rest of the nation for supplies. And it remains today as the city’s premier hotel a hundred and sixteen years later. (More the wonder to us as we watch the fiasco in our town where building a hotel seems to take closer to fourteen years.)

The Plains Hotel is across a park from the Union Pacific station and a large public plaza. The station and plaza have been kept in prime condition and are the main center of city social gatherings. Weekends during the summer months there are free concerts and food booths. This particular saturday they were featuring a Celtic theme.

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We sat at the hotel bar for dinner and a steady overwhelming commentary from bartender Brian who educated us on the ills of the nation and the world and his concepts of the proper solutions for each one. A couple of women came along and were unfortunate enough to also become entrapped. Geeser Gal wedged her way into the conversation and freed them.

One of the women, Trudy, works at the Terry Bison Ranch and campgrounds. She raised our interest and we headed out the next morning and found it about seven miles south of the city.

This is a twenty thousand acre ranch (Wyoming has a lot of space) where they combine a a large RV park, two restaurants, game preserve and tourist rides along with their main business of raising bison for the meat.

We  signed up for a train ride through one corner of the ranch, passing camels, ostriches and other farm animals until we reached the bison pastures.

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The train stopped.  About a hundred of the ranch’s three hundred bison came lumbering up for lunch.

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We were given feed nuggets and could directly feed these huge creatures by putting the pellets on their tongue.

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We stayed for lunch and had, what else, buffalo burgers.

That afternoon we signed on for our customary city trolley bus tour and museum tour. The tours are always challenged to find interesting tidbits of history and real estate to point out.

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Cheyenne is quite spread out and lacks a true historical district but it did have some interesting stories. They were the first state or territory to grant women suffrage. The vote passed the territorial legislature in December 1869 and the first election where women voted was 1870. When the territory petitioned the U.S. Congress for statehood, the Congress attempted to condition statehood on removing that clause. Wyoming refused, Congress folded and statehood was granted in 1890, being the only state with such suffrage.

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This is of more than casual interest to Geezer Gal. While we were in Cheyenne she dug into her family history. Her great-grandfather, John N. Braae, was born in Denmark in 1866. The family moved to Cheyenne in 1879. He married Margaret Jacobson and they had  a son, John R. Braae born in 1889 in Cheyenne.

The family and subsequent generations remained in the area around Cheyenne and Douglas Wyoming well into the 1930s. They had a large ranch on what is named Braae Road, among other services, capturing and breaking wild horses for sale. This was all happening while Wyoming Territory was being assembled from pieces of the Dakota, Idaho, Utah and Oregon territories and then converting to statehood, a very complex time involving not only those political battles but settling land issues with regional Indian tribes.

Through all of this Geezer Gal’s grandmother and mother and several of her mother’s brothers and sisters lived and worked on the ranch. Her grandmother and mother were both experienced horsewomen. Capturing, breaking and selling horses could be likened to making automobiles today, everyone in the territory needed them. The family was large and prominant in the area. Geezer Gal’s grandmother was the first woman to ride in the Cheyenne Roundup Parade, dressed in Indian costume.

When the automobile came along in the twenties and thirties the business died and the families dispersed, many to San Francisco and northern California.

In poking around Douglas we found and explored Braae Road.

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Braae Road is high quality gravel county road, tracking through rolling hills and open range, very appropriate for raising horses but too rough and rocky for farming. Today the road has several large cattle based ranches. In our explorations we crossed several cattle guards.

Many of you gentle readers residing in the west know what a cattle guard is. For the edification of the others, this picture saves us a thousand words.

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Cattle guards allow gateless roads in fence lines. Cattle won’t cross them, they instinctively fear stumbling and getting their feet stuck. The system works so well and the instinct is so strong that simply painting white stripes on paved roads has the same effect.

We headed on from Douglas to Cody, an afternoon of dodging intense thunder, lightning and hail storm cells crossing our path west. Whatever force or coincidence is protecting us, it continued almost uncannily. We never broke our pace and had only a few minutes of wiper time yet these black storms were pounding the highways before and behind us.

We reached Cody sunny, dry and with temperatures in the seventies.

-Geezer