A long-forgotten class struggle over nature in Wyoming

Emotions and facts at the 1948 hearings over a Lake Solitude dam

The Sheridan (Wyo.) County Courthouse provided a fittingly solemn setting for the hearings (courtesy IreneWyo - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia)

Clarke Gapen said he would “like to know just how many people in this audience has ever saw Lake Solitude.” It was February 2, 1948. He was speaking to an audience of more than 100 people at Wyoming’s Sheridan County Courthouse. And he was mad.

            Gapen, a former state legislator, owned one of the oldest ranches in the Paint Rock valley, on the other side of the Bighorn Mountains from Sheridan. The Bureau of Reclamation had proposed a dam at a place called Lake Solitude, near the crest of the mountains. It would provide Gapen and his neighbors with essential late-season irrigation water. But many people in Sheridan preferred Lake Solitude preserved. Spurred by the local dude ranching industry, they wanted to stop the dam.

            “This lake is on our side of the mountain. You people on the other side don’t give a damn.” As a hardworking rancher in a hardscrabble desert, Gapen wanted irrigation water. What was this contrasting wilderness idea? Who was advocating for it? And was their concern actually place-based—had they been there—or was it just theoretical? In other words, were they really local?

            Gapen spoke to the crowd in Sheridan: “You are not man enough to come out and fight, yourself, you have to go and get outside interests like the Izaak Walton League, who represents citizens from every State in the union. They don’t know Lake Solitude from Dome Lake or Lake DeSmet. We need this water. We need it vitally… And we aren’t going to ask the state of New York or Pennsylvania or Florida or California what we can do.”

When I was young and ambitious, I aspired to write about class. Class differences seemed to overlay so many of society’s disconnections. Class struggles were behind many of society’s problems. I wanted to go past all the superficial stuff that had been written before, to really understand and tell stories about class.

            Ah, the arrogance of youth. I’ve made some attempts; I’ve enjoyed my journey so far. But “I’m going to write about class” is the young writer’s equivalent of the pre-med student’s “I’m going to cure cancer.”

            Among the problems I encountered was figuring out what exactly class was. Money? Privilege? Taste? The world seems always full of rich but uncouth people, some of them powerful or happy or even both. Also money-poor but culture-rich people, some happy but others resentful. Both of these sets of people often act as if they’re underprivileged, even when they’re white men blessed with money or education. Where is the class struggle worth writing about?

            Last month I found one such struggle, and was reminded of those old ambitions. I was digging into the transcripts of the 1948 hearings about the potential Lake Solitude dam. I’ve backpacked in the Bighorn Mountains, but not to this particular lake, and with each preservationist’s description, I increasingly wanted to go there. It sounds like a beautiful spot far removed from the roads and pressures of society.

            But I’m also a sucker for underdog/underclass expressions of frustration. When Gapen and others complained that their ability to make a living was being hampered by rich people and out-of-state tourists (“dudes”), I wanted to be on their side.

            I’ve been at government hearings like the one Gapen spoke at. The emotional discomfort often make my legs restless. The raw, violent passion in the room feels like the precursor to a fistfight. I’m a coward when it comes to fistfights. And I’m not even sure which side to fight on! The vulnerability of those emotional expressions makes me want to endorse both sides at once. (So should I aim my fist at my own face?)

            It’s much easier for me to read a 1948 transcript of a faraway meeting. It’s not my fight, so I can distance myself from the intensity on the page. I can ask dispassionate questions: Why are the speakers almost entirely white men? The hearing featured no people of color and just two women. “Mrs. Thomas Stevie,” one introduced herself, using her husband’s name. “All I wanted to do is to back up the resolution passed.” The presiding officer clarified that it was a resolution from the Sheridan Junior Women’s Club that had already been introduced by another witness, and she responded, “That is right,” and stepped down.

            In the document, I can see that the dudes and the Sheridan businessmen are privileged. The women and people of color are not. And in that sense, the hardscrabble ranchers are privileged as well, regardless of their income. Maybe the wilderness itself—the animals and trees and droplets of water—is relatively underprivileged, and if I’d been in the room at the moment, I might have been tempted to speak up for it. But reading the document, I already know it’s going to win.

            Thus I’m free to ask: who are these people speaking to? This is a public hearing. There’s no jury. There’s no vote at the end. It was convened to bring forth facts that the government might have previously overlooked. Yet most of the witnesses want to provide arguments rather than facts. They seem to be speaking to themselves. They’re setting out to convince themselves of the value—the identity—of their stories.

            Their arguments are rooted in class. They talk about varying tastes in outdoor activities, and varying levels of income or privilege that allow some people to do them for work or leisure. This wasn’t the purpose of the hearing. But people always want to talk about class, not facts.

            Clarke Gapen could have presented statistics about the relative affluence of the east and west sides of the mountain. Or about disparities in rainfall, or the percentage of irrigated land. Or the comparative wealth generated by agriculture versus tourism. He even could have supported his class-based theories with genealogies of the leaders of the pro- and anti-dam movements. It’s very possible that none of these facts would have affected the eventual fate of the dam construction. But they are, at least, facts—what the presiding officer said he wanted to hear.

            Instead, Gapen and his neighbors made arguments about class. Their opponents did too. Both sides stirred emotions. They laid the groundwork for ideologies. They must have walked out of that room ready for a fistfight.

            That 1948 hearing encapsulated many of the problems that my friends who run public participation processes are always trying to overcome. Too few facts. Too much ignorance. Too little trust. A lot of time wasted. There have been many admirable process reforms.

            But reading these transcripts, it struck me that the old system had at least one thing going for it: Gapen and his neighbors got to make their arguments publicly, in front of authorities. They got to lay out their ideas about class. They got to express their view of the class differences between the two sides of the mountains, and their belief that such differences were behind so many of society’s problems. They showed us the shape of a class struggle.

Discussion:

• I quote Gapen and Stevie from “USDI Bureau of Reclamation, Transcript of Public hearing, Missouri Basin project, Wyoming Paintrock Unit, Sheridan County Courthouse, 1948,” Bureau of Reclamation, 1948. (That’s a link to a library record, not the document itself.)

• I was studying the hearings in order to write a story on the Lake Solitude dam. It was published this week, and I’m proud of it.