|
Medicine Bow, 1920's, photo by J. D. Sagris.
The General Store and the bank were located south
of the railroad track. See next photo. The store is the one in which Owen Wister took a nap, later
featured in The Virginian. See text below. The store moved in 1931 to the Mercantile
Building and the bank moved to the building that presently houses the post office.
Medicine Bow, 1917.
At the time of the above photo, Medicine Bow had
two banks, two hotels, two garages and a population of approximately 300.
Medicine Bow. Today, as indicated by the entrance sign pictured on the previous page, the town
takes pride as the location of many a scene in Owen Wister's
The Virginian, Horseman of the Plains. The two hotels take their name from Wister's
novel. One is named the Virginian and the other, the Trampas Lodge, after the Virginian's
foe.
Wister, photo below right, in Chapter 2, introduces the reader to Medicine Bow:
Medicine Bow was my first, and I took its dimensions, twenty-nine buildings in all,--one coal shute,
one water tank, the station, one store, two eating-houses, one billiard hall,
two tool-houses, one feed stable, and twelve
others that for one reason and
another I shall not name Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent thought upon appearances;
many houses in it wore a false front to seem as if they were two stories high.
There they stood, rearing their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe of old
tin cans, while at their very doors began a world of crystal light, a land
without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis.
Into that space went wandering a road, over a hill and down out of sight, and up again
smaller in the distance, and down once more, and up once more, straining
the eyes, and so away.
Wister shows the same inventory in his diary for July, 1885, however, omitting in the above
references to the ladies and gents "walks" where standing on the seat was not a luxury but a
necessity. Perhaps, Wister's jaded view of Medicine Bow was influenced by his having
to sleep on the counter in the store, a scene which he also used in the novel:
July 21st
I slept from ten to twelve thirty on the counter of the store at Medicine Bow
and then the train came in bringing the lawyer and the fish--and
after much business talk and lifting tin cans we started off across the
plains at two o'clock....
Indeed, however, judging from Arthur Rothstein's 1940 photo of Medicine Bow immediately below, by
the middle of the following century things had hardly changed.
Medicine Bow, March, 1940, photo by Arthur Rothstein
Arthur Rothstein (1914-1985) was a photographer for the
Federal Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration,
from 1935 until 1940. He was most famous for his depiction of the Oklahoma
Dust Bowl with his 1936 Fleeing a Dust Storm depicting a farmer and his
two sons in front of a shack in an Oklahoma dust storm. The photo the following
year was featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Some controversy,
however, developed over at least one photo in which he was accused of making
conditions appear worse than they really were in order to assist with New Deal Legislation.
In the particular instance he moved a cow skull ten feet. For the remainder of
his life he regretted the photo.
Medicine Bow, 1930's
The Virginian Hotel is in center, fronting on the
Lincoln Highway. The Hotel was built by August Grimm, first mayor of Medicine Bow, and his
partner George Plummer and opened on September 30, 1911. The hotel featured
the first electric lights and sewer system in the town.
The railroad depot, toward the viewer, was, as above noted, built in 1913
and now houses a museum.
Next Page, Fort Steele and Parco
|