Spring Mud In Lander

When I first came to Lander none of the streets were paved. In the spring, Main Street was often a river of mud. Teams of horses pulling wagons kept it churned up so that it was almost impossible to drive a car up or down it. It was also hard to cross the street on foot. Some store owners laid planks on top of the mud so people could get across, but after a while the boards themselves got so muddy and slick from people's muddy boots that the planks didn't do much good. It was easy to slip off of into the deeper mud of the street. Most of the planks eventually sank into the mud from the weight of traffic on them.

One time when I came to town from sheep camp, it was getting on toward evening and there was a hard rain falling. To get out of it, I ducked into the lobby of the theater. There were a lot of people in there for the same reason I was. The guy selling tickets told us that there was a good picture show that night, so we might as well buy a ticket and wait for the rain to let up. I bought one and went in to watch the show.

There wasn't much light as I started down the isle, and the floor was so slick with mud from people's boots that I started to slip and slide down toward the front of the theater. I grabbed at a seat as I went by, and when I stopped I was next to a cowboy who already had a seat on the isle. "Howdy stranger," he said, "I'll move over and you can sit by me if you want."

He was wearing a pair of wet wooly chaps, and they got everything they touched wet. I was able to keep away from them until another cowboy, a friend of his, also with wet wooly chaps stopped at that row of seats and asked us to make room for him. We all moved over a seat, and now I was stuck between two cowboys with wet wooly chaps. By the time the picture show was over I was so wet I might as well have stayed out in the rain.

After the picture show we went into a nearby saloon to get warm. I came out an hour or so later to see a pretty nice Stetson hat floating down the street. I found one of those long poles the bartender used to crank the canvas awning above the windows up and down, and reached out to get the hat. When I lifted it up I was surprised to find a cowboy under it. I asked him if I could give him some help getting out of the mud, but he said, "No thanks, I'm on a good horse." So, that gives you some idea about what the streets were like in Lander back then during the spring of the year.

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