Brokeback Prairie?

Our Great Tour of The American West in the summer of 1973 showed us a place that was nothing like the west that I'd remembered from cowboy movies as a kid. It was also a far different west than my mother used to talk about visiting in 1943 when she took her newborn infant son on three day's worth of train ride to get to Casper, Wyoming. Anybody knowing her in later life wouldn't believe that she'd ever do such a thing, but she did. She went to spend a couple of months with my dad who was stationed there in the Army Air Corps before being shipped off to India. I suppose today it's different still from what I remember.

We spent a night in Casper and headed to Sheridan to spend a few days with the Kehrwalds, who were friends of friends of ours in Miami. We got the Grand Tour of the area, got to ride horses and visit Indians. We fly fished for trout in mountain streams. We heard the local jokes for tourists. "Why do cowboys wear boots? That's where they jam the hind legs of the sheep so she can't get away while they're..." Well, there aren't many women out there on the prairie.

We got apologies for not being able to enjoy the local delicacy, mountain oysters, because they were out of season. Springtime is the season, when the calves and the lambs are born. They castrate the young animals and fry up their testicles. Supposedly they're very tasty. And they call them mountain oysters.

P.S. Want an archival quality print of this or one of my other photos? E-mail me at preacherpop42@aol.com for details.