historical lands

My detour from the interstate paid off, though for a while I doubted I’d track down the obscure treasure I hoped to find. Even if I hadn’t, the way the old Lincoln Highway glimmers like a silver thread across the golden high plains made the extra hour worth it. I must have seen three dozen pronghorn, too, and four more mule deer standing in the middle of the road, something I experienced multiple times when I left on this trip two weeks ago. I also found out the post office in Rock River, Wyoming, closes at 3:30 p.m. weekdays. I stopped there (in that town of 200 or so) after my second pass around to ask if someone might know where I could find a now-defunct tourist attraction of mid-century lore, built during the Great Depression and billed as the “Oldest Building in the World.”

I could have turned south a quarter mile from the post office and returned to I-80 in about twenty minutes. Instead I stuck fast to my alternate route and headed northwest toward Medicine Bow, of Western legend. About fifteen miles later I drove up to a sign indicating a historical site near a few abandoned ramshackle structures behind a wire fence. The dashboard thermometer said 51 degrees, but outside the wind was so strong I could barely get the car door open, and it felt much colder while I took pictures. I’d seen dustings of snow here and there on both sides of the road, looking like basins of salt, and now I knew why none of those areas had melted.

The historical markers were about Albany County train robberies and nearby Como Bluff, a monumental landmark of international importance because of discoveries made there by paleontologists 140 years ago. Crews excavated fossils of whole dinosaurs at the site for Yale and other institutions, capturing the public’s imagination as the young, religious nation recovered from the Civil War and took early steps toward industrialization and Darwinism. Were these finds in the Territory monstrous reptiles or mythical angels? Were they buried by time or by God? When I parked and got out with my camera, I’d admired the nondescript landscape, but until I read the sign I had no idea I was looking at a geographical promontory in the annals of scientific research. Now I know the bluff has been added to the National Register of Historic Places, and I’m glad, but my coming upon it was merely coincidence.

The attraction I’d hoped to find, by the way, known as Fossil Cabin, was off to the left. It’s barely mentioned on one of the signs and has seen better days. Its creator had hoped to draw tourists to his gas station, if I have the story right, and it remained open as a museum until only seven years ago. Now the windows on the four-walled structure are broken out, the cabinets are empty inside, and only faded dinosaur paintings and sagebrush remain, along with a sign that reads “Believe It Or Not.” Also, “No Trespassing” signs half-heartedly warn vandals away from the cabin and its unusual mortared walls built out of thousands of fossilized dinosaur bones, an architectural anomaly that from a certain point of view still makes Fossil Cabin, despite its recent neglect, the “Oldest Building in the World.”