Out in Places Like Wyoming [4,b]

PineBluffs, Albin, and Golden Prairie

For decades my Grandmother Nordstrom received the Pine Bluffs Post in the mail.  It would arrive, as I remember, in a roll with a paper sleeve, a band really, that carried my grandmother's name. In the years after we had moved to New Hampshire from Wyoming, my grandparents would come to stay for six or eight months at a time, splitting time between their daughter in New Hampshire, my mother, and their daughters in St. Paul, the twins.

Within two weeks of their arrival, the first Post would arrive with a yellow forwarding label pasted over the paper band.That small-format weekly newspaper carried mostly "local news" about the families and events in its readership area, which included Albin, where my grandparents built and served the Baptist Church. The Baptist Church and the Albin Cemetery were our furthest destination for the day.

After the Ames Monument, we drove out of the mountains into clear skies and warmer temperatures, we headed for Albin, via Pine Bluffs, a town of about 1,100. Some forty miles past Cheyenne the bluffs rise abruptly from the level plains and, sure enough, there are pine trees on its sides and along the top. I had an odd epiphany as we approached: despite knowing of Pine Bluffs for 60 plus years, I had never thought of the name in descriptive terms.

As I-80 reached the bluffs, we turned north toward Albin on state road 215, 17 perfectly straight miles of flat farmland. Huge fields of now-harvested wheat and fields of dried standing corn and sunflowers line both sides of the road. At the unmarked intersection where 215 meets 216 we stopped to inspect a small white frame church that we thought might be "the" church, but it was Roman Catholic not Baptist. It sat by itself among expansive fields. Albin, a small group of houses and buildings, is visible from that intersection, a half mile to the west.

On a list of Wyoming  towns listed by population, Albin ranks 130 out of 178. Dead last is a place called Lost Springs with four human beings. Size and scale are important factors out here.

We had wondered how difficult it might be to find the Baptist Church, but we shouldn't have worried. The town is about two blocks east to west with a paved side street running south and another, this one dirt, running north.  The Baptist Church is the last building on the west end of town.

The church lot was empty. We walked around the grounds a bit before I tried the door. It was unlocked so we went in calling "Hello? Hello-o!" We looked in the sanctuary and knocked on the door to the pastor's office. Above a flight of stairs to the lower level hung a quilt with "Welcome" in English, Swedish, and Spanish. The Swedish suggested we were on the right track.

Clearly someone had been working in the church during the morning and had, understandably, stepped out for lunch.

The wall to the right of the small foyer was full of photographs showing important stages of the church's history. The first of these photographs was one I recognized. It is a formal portrait of my grandparents with their four children taken in the early 1930s.

My mother and her older twin sisters are hard to tell apart at a quick glance, especially in a photograph of a photograph. [I believe my aunts were wearing dark scarves.] But this picture has particular significance for those of us who belong to this branch of the Nordstrom family; it is one of very few existing pictures of our uncle Dean.



It felt good to have found the right place, to have made this connection, even without someone to talk with.  Beside the photograph of my mother's family below a photograph of what I am guessing was the parsonage is a picture of the church building that my grandfather had built.  The current structure replaced the wood-frame sancturary in the 1951.

Beneath it is a photograph of the congregation gathered at the front of that church.


We took some pictures and then went outside for more. The view from the center of the street is nearly identical in both directions.

 Because the cemetery was not on church grounds as I had imagined, we needed directions to find it; so we crossed the street to the post office. It was 12:20. The post office had closed at 12:00, although we could see that there were two women sitting in a back room working at a table.  I rapped on the outer door until one of them came.  I introduced myself and asked about the town cemetery, where my uncle is buried. Turns out the town cemetery is not even in the town; it is 3 miles east of town among fields at a big bend in the road.

We drove out there and began our search.


The headstones are a roster of Swedish names -- Larson, Anderson, Sorensen, Palmquist, Pearson, and so on. It is likely my grandparents had known most of these folks or their parents.We looked at rows of these headstones reading the names aloud for about ten minutes before I found "Nordstrom -- Albert Dean -- 1923-1936" close to and partly obscured by a juniper tree.

We stood and looked at it for a few minutes. I was not sure what to think or how to feel now that I had found his marker since I knew my uncle only from a few photographs and from scraps of stories rarely told. He was gone long before I came of age.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, I found myself thinking not of my uncle at all but of my mother and of my grandparents, my grandmother especially. Dean is
the lone member of my mother's family to be buried here; the others are all in Minnesota or other distant places. He was a boy in another life -- a life before his sisters grew into women and married and had children of their own and grandchildren. Now, they are all gone after long lives, my grandfather in his 70's, then my grandmother and my aunts and recently my mother, all in their 90's.

I know I will have other, maybe better, responses after I process this small occasion.  But I think now I understand better why my grandmother kept subscribing to the Pine Bluffs Post all those years. She had known virtually everyone in town at one point and had wanted to keep up with their families, the graduations, the marriages, the births and death. She wanted to keep those things alive even if she could not be there.

But there was another reason I had not thought of before.  The Post was, in its way, a link of sorts, a connection with the boy she had had to bury so young and then to leave out on the prairie,so far away, in that earlier lifetime.

Out in Places Like Wyoming [4,a]

Heading East: The First Stop, Ames Monument.

On day two of our adventures in Wyoming, a Friday, we woke up early expecting to see snow on the ground.  We had been told it was overdue.  We had been told it was in the forecast. And when we came back to the cabin after dinner on Thursday evening, light rain was coming down as a kind of slush and temperatures had dropped into the low thirties. A part of me expected blizzard.

Though a thin film of ice coated the puddle outside our front door on Friday morning, there was no snow on the plains.  In the predawn light we could see snow in the Medicine Bow Range to the west and on the Laramie Mountains to the east, but not on the flat lands between.

The sky was still largely overcast except for a slight gap along the eastern horizon. So as the sun came up we had a brief opportunity -- five minutes or so -- to take pictures.

After breakfast we headed east. Our plan was to visit the two churches my grandfather Nordstrom had pastored and to stop at several spots along the way that my family had frequented when I was very young. Time permitting, we would drive into Cheyenne either coming or going. My father had lived in Cheyenne most of his years until he graduated high school.  My own solitary memory of Cheyenne was attending Frontier Days with my grandmother in July, once upon a time, although the exact year or my precise age is now beyond recall.

We took I-80 around Laramie and then after a drive through that the Laramie Mountains to the east we headed for Cheyenne. In the pre-Interstate era, those dark days of two-lane travel, the highway went through every town along its main street, which is why they are often called Main Street. In Laramie, the main street is called Grand Avenue.

When we traveled to visit my Nordstrom grandparents at their last church in Golden Prairie, driving through Cheyenne slowed the trip considerably.  I have vague recollections of stopping along a night darkened street at a particular store so that my father could buy various kinds of popcorn as a treat.  It is the popcorn, especially the caramel popcorn, that I remember, not the town. On drives like that my parents would sing together.

On one occasion I recall my parents having a sudden, hushed conversation about a sign they had seen in a store window that apparently said that Indians were not welcome. I cannot be certain about more details from that distant evening, but the fact that the sign created such immediate and deep concern for my parents made an impression on me that has not diminished. This would have been, perhaps, 1953 or 54, when I was four or five.

It had not snowed at the ranch, but it had snowed in the Laramie Mountains overnight. I estimated 3 or 4 inches where the wind had not swept it away. Temperatures recorded on the car thermometer dropped from 39 near Laramie to 33 as we reached the summit. The sky to the west and north was very dark and the wind was blowing. To the south was clear sky.

Just east of the summit we turned off  I-80 to see the Ames Monument, which is close to the interstate on a muddy unpaved road that had a serious washboard surface. The Ames Monument is a 60 foot granite pyramid built by the Union Pacific Railroad to honor the Ames Brothers, who were instrumental in the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 19th Century. It marks the highest elevation (8,247 feet) of the original route.

The Ames brothers, Oliver and Oaks, like many industrialists, especially from the 19th Century, were heroes to some and villains to others. While the brief accounts I have read all tell pretty much the same facts, the story is pretty much that the triumph of the transcontinental railroad was offset by the greed, corruption, and influence peddling that brought it into being.

A railroad town called Sherman was built near this spot; but when the railroad was rerouted several miles to the south in 1901, the town disappeared. Today the monument just seems to rise from the ground out in the middle of nowhere, fitting perhaps for the Ames brothers.  A telling footnote here: the plaques atop the monument intended to honor the brothers offer relief busts of Oliver and Oaks on opposite sides; in both cases, from what I could see, the noses have been shot off.

I remember the Ames Monument from childhood. We had stopped there on occasion although I cannot imagine why. Apart from its historic importance, which is fairly singular and would have been lost on small boys, all I remember is squinting for family pictures on the sunny side of the monument.

Stefan and I did a little picture taking as the pyramid is such a distinctive feature in this winter-bleak landscape.

A short distance away, on the other side of I-80 is a better spot for little boys, more fun and more memorable. Vedauwoo is an area of rock formations that offers incredible possibilities for climbing and exploring.

But as the weather was discouraging and we had planned to head toward the Nebraska border to see if we could find my grandfather's churches, we decided to catch Vedauwoo on the return trip. We got in the car and headed east.