Going Feral: Was, Some Gave All: Chuck Ward Cabin. Big Horns, Public Lands, and some recollections.

Going Feral: Was, Some Gave All: Chuck Ward Cabin. Big Horns, P...: Some Gave All: Chuck Ward Cabin, Big Horns. : I'd seen this cabin before, but I'd never walked up on it.  It's a Wyoming Game an...

Was, Some Gave All: Chuck Ward Cabin. Big Horns, Public Lands, and some recollections.

Some Gave All: Chuck Ward Cabin, Big Horns.: I'd seen this cabin before, but I'd never walked up on it.  It's a Wyoming Game and Fish cabin, from the days when the wardens s...

The reason to post this is probably obvious, and not. The obvious part is that it fits in with the blog's theme.

Chuck Ward Cabin, Big Horns.

I'd seen this cabin before, but I'd never walked up on it.  It's a Wyoming Game and Fish cabin, from the days when the wardens stayed in remote areas during some parts of the year, with a dedication to long time Warden Chuck Ward.

Ward was probably best known during his life time for giving the KTWO Game & Fish report, which occurred periodically, probably weekly.

 

The less obvious one is the bit of a recollection, vicarious though it be, of Mr. Ward.

This cabin is located on a tributary of the Middle Fork of the Powder River.  It's always been a popular spot for fisherman.  A neighbor of mine, whom I dearly miss, held it as his favorite fishing spot, and its a favorite of mine as well.  Oddly enough, it's one that I didn't fish until I was in my adulthood, probably my 30s.

That's an interesting recollection as well, as I'm a pretty wide ranging fellow.  I'll travel a long ways in a day to hunt or fish, but my range now is much larger than it was back in my teens and twenties.  I started driving in my teens, of course, and at that time I'd range, by myself, or with my cohorts, far to the west to the neighboring county, and somewhat to the east to the neighboring one.  Going north, into the Big Horns, was something I didn't do all that much, although I did a little.  For that matter, I can recall going into the foothills of the Southern Big Horns with my father.  We must have been hunting.

Going deep into the Southern Big Horns, however, is something I didn't really do very much until I came back from law school, but I very much did then.  Odd thing to recall, however, is that my father had routinely done that with a a friend and uncle of his before I was born, and a little afterwards.  Since that time, I've expanded into what was his range, reaching some of it only within the last couple of years, but I've also greatly expanded on it and was starting to do so when he died, which is now something like 30 years ago.

On Ward, my father did not hold him in high regard.

The reason is connected to this location.  My father went fishing with my Godfather, a good friend of his throughout his life, and on the way out, they were stopped by Ward.  Ward thought they'd taken more than their limit of fish.  He must have been watching them from a distance or something. Ward was wrong, but he demanded to search the truck, and did.  He completely unloaded it.

When he was done, he found that in fact they had not taken over their limit.  He then said something like, "well, I guess you can load it back up".  

My Godfather made Ward load it back up.

***************************************************

I called outback law enforcement this past week.

I actually emailed the BLM law enforcement branch, for the first time ever.  I knew they had Rangers, but I've had no occasion to call them and indeed I've never spoken to one before.

The reason was that some months ago, August I think, I went out to a place that I often to to in order to hunt and fish.  It's a parcel of BLM land.  I'm often the only guy who hunts or fishes there, although there are some others who do occasionally.

On that occasion, and I can't quite recall which I was doing, as I started to walk in I discovered a large camping ten was pitched in a cottonwood stand, to my enormous surprise.  I've never seen anyone camped there before, but it's not illegal.  It was the opening weekend of antelope bow season and my assumption was that it must be a bow hunter.  Given that, I backed out and left that spot.

Not all that long after that, but still at least a couple of weeks, I was back out and saw that the tent was still there, and a guy sitting in a camp chair in his camp.  It's not my antelope area so I assumed that antelope season must still be on.  Again, I left.

Some weeks after that I went back dove and duck hunting.  Given that, I approached the spot from a different direction entirely.  I did see doves land in some cottonwoods in the cottonwood grove and almost took a shot, but it didn't quite work out, so I walked towards the grove.  I was clean up on it when I suddenly walked right up on the camp.  It was very well camouflaged.  At that point, a man was out, and as I was carrying a firearm, I rapidly changed directions, but he saw me and called to me.  I apologized for walking up on the camp but he started to close the ground to talk to me. 

My dog is an American Retriever and he's still a puppy, but a giant puppy.  He's friendly with everyone. . . but not on this occasion.  He rapidly closed the ground from where he had been to where this fellow was and it was not friendly at all.  I was afraid my do would attack him.

One thing I've learned over the years, and it will sound odd, is to trust the instinct of friendly dogs and cats.  The first mixed breed of this general type I had loved everyone save for a couple of people, and they proved to be very sketchy.  This one had never reacted negatively to anyone before, but it now was, and it clearly regarded the man as a danger and seemingly as one who had to be taken out.  Most of the time he's a giant goofy fellow, but at this moment he was a Chesapeake Bay Retriever and I was his charge.  

I called him back with some difficulty.

Just as I did that, the man said "I like dogs" and started to rapidly close the ground with my now withdrawing dog.  That caused the dog to explode with self defense.  I  got him called off, but I had to resort to a my collar to do it.  

This from the same big goofy dog that only a month or two prior had closed the ground with a young man and his children near this spot as he wanted to be petted.

I briefly spoke to the man, apologizing for the dog.  He didn't seem to be quite right.  I also apologized for walking up on his camp, noting that I knew it had been there but that I assumed he'd be gone.  He denied that he'd been camping there.

Over the weekend I want back out for doves and chukars.  I was very careful this time about the camp, and yes, it was still there.

Now, my assumption, and I'll be frank, is that the camper is homeless, although the tent was a large one and he had an electric bicycle.  But at this point he's living on the public domain and driving off the wildlife.  I emailed the BLM.

Yesterday they went out. They called me from the camp.  They were there at the time, but the camper wasn't (my wife later noted that the camper probably had a job in town, which is probably correct).  They asked if I had a photograph of the camp, which I didn't, as they were trying to place the date he showed up there.  I related what I knew.  They told me they tagged the tent with a warning that it needed to be gone in fourteen days, the longest you can camp on the public domain.

They also asked me if there had been a lot of trash located there.  I honestly told them that I hadn't noticed it, but then, I wasn't really in a position to.  They told me the spot was trashed up.

What I didn't note, and perhaps I should have, is that when you cross a fence to enter into this area there are now piles of toilet paper from somebody shitting on the public domain.  Okay, I know that nature calls, but this was just dirty.  Most professional campers, if you will, dedicated hikers, stockmen, etc., just don't shit near a road an leave the toilet paper all over.

Anyhow, a Ranger called me back late in the day.  He'd been back out and had engaged the campers, it turned out there was more than one, in conversation. They told him they were pulling out today.  

My guess is that they'll just move to a new location on the public domain.

This isn't something I noticed much until just recently.  Last year there was a camper on a BLM spot near the river for weeks, clearly camping out of his SUV.  And I saw a Game Warden confront a guy living in his car some distance downstream from there.

I'm not sure what to make of all of this.  Homelessness is a horrible tragedy in our country and I'll tolerate a lot of urban and even urban/wilderness interface camping.  This is, I'm sure, what that was. The Rangers referred to it as a "vagrant camp", which I'm sure is a term they didn't just start using yesterday.  But this also has an aspect of the Tragedy of the Commons to it.  At least the guy in an established BLM campsite I noted above was in a developed campsite.  These guys were trashing the public land.  There's not a bird to be seen in there now.

Going Feral: Angi Bruce's Resignation As Game and Fish Director Catches Sportsmen By Surprise

Going Feral: Angi Bruce's Resignation As Game and Fish Director...:  A good article getting at some of the things that I've wondered about: Angi Bruce's Resignation As Game and Fish Director Catches S...

Angi Bruce's Resignation As Game and Fish Director Catches Sportsmen By Surprise

 A good article getting at some of the things that I've wondered about:

Angi Bruce's Resignation As Game and Fish Director Catches Sportsmen By Surprise

This article notes the influx of out of staters into the Game and Fish.  I've really noticed it.  This has been going on before Bruce was installed, but her installation really emphasized it, and it's not a good thing at all.

We've noted that here before.  

We used to really think highly of the Wyoming Game & Fish Department, but it's really dimmed over the years.  I still do, but it's not what it once was.  I've noted that a bit here:

Indeed, I was recently stopped by a warden and frankly he wasn't very nice.  That's a new trend as well.  I don't like it.  But not only was he not nice, he was extremely intimidating carrying a government issued handgun on a government issued gunbelt and wearing a government issued flak jacket.  

I've really hated the militarization of the policy and this is all part of it. Everytime I see a policeman anymore, including a game warden, they're dressed like they're going into Hue in 1968.  All policemen of every type are civilians.  They're simply deputized civilians.  They shouldn't look like an occupying army.  And if the treat people rudely, and many do, and are standing their armed treating you like you are a detained Vietnamese villager, it's scary.

I've mentioned such encounters a number of times  on this blog. The first time was when I went to great efforts to Jeep into an area all while on public land.  I'd done it before, and received a compliment from the warden then serving that area.  On this latter occasion, which was only about a year or two later, the warden basically flat out called me a liar and followed me out in his pickup truck, which he was lucky not to roll.  He apologized.  He was from California. The year after that, I did the same and was outright harassed in a very hostile manner by a different game warden.  It was so bad I called to complain about it.  I received an apology from the District Warden on that occasion.  This past year I had the encounter above, which was scary to a degree.

On that one, it had a bit of a happy, sort of, ending.  I called to complain but couldn't get in touch with anyone.  Somebody I knew, however, who has a different sort of relationship with the Game & Fish called and it had a huge reaction from the warden himself, who is now my best buddy in the field when I encounter him.  

He, at least, is from Colorado.

Anyhow, every time I look up a new warden, they're from somewhere else, and in the case of the Director, she was.

I didn't follow her service much.  I do know, however, a man and his son in which the son had a live desire to be a Game Warden.  He pursued it in college.  He didn't get on.  It's very difficult to get on, but he attributed it to a sort of agenda.  I don't know if it's really the case that the agenda exists or not, but I sure liked the wardens better when they were mostly locals.

I don't want an out of state head of the Game and Fish.

Related threads:

New Wyoming Game and Fish Director.

Labels: 2020s, 2024, Iowa, News, Wyoming, Wyoming Game and Fish Department

The road not taken.

Sigh. . . 

Going Feral: Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, November 3, 1945. Wyoming Game Wardens Game Wardens Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson murdered.

Going Feral: Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, November 3, 1945. Wyom...: Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, November 3, 1945. Chinese Civil War, G... : China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict ...

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, November 3, 1945. Wyoming Game Wardens Game Wardens Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson murdered.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, November 3, 1945. Chinese Civil War, G...: China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict and two Game Wardens were found dead near Rawlins. The Chinese Civil War w...

Linked over from Lex Anteinternet, which also discussed the Chinese Civil War.

Saturday, November 3, 1945. Chinese Civil War, Game Wardens Killed.

China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict and two Game Wardens were found dead near Rawlins.

The Chinese Civil War was the topic of a political cartoon as well.

The murdered Game Wardens were Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson who were killed by ardent Nazi sympathizer and German immigrant Johann Malten.   The same Game Wardens had arrested Malten for game violations when investigating, interestingly enough, claims that Malten had been involved in espionage and was relaying weather reports on shortwave, something that was illegal during the war when there was a blackout on weather reporting as the information was useful to submarines.  Upon visiting Malten's cabin in the Sierra Madres they found he had committed numerous game violations.

On this occasion they were stopping by to see if Malten had continued to ignore the law.  They were shot down out of hand when they arrived.

Malten burned his cabin down and it was officially reported that he'd died within it, although the evidence of that is very poor.  There were reported sightings of him for years thereafter.

And a selection of 1945 cartoons.

I knew about this story because former Wyoming Game Warden David Bragonier wrote about it in his book about Wyoming Game Wardens, Wild Journey: On the Trail With a Wyoming Game Warden in Yellowstone Country.  It's a good book, and I recommend it.

Bragonier discusses this event, although I clearly don't remember everything I read in his account.  That's probably not too surprising as I read the book in 1999.  What I recall but didn't see in the accounts on the murder you can find here is that the investigation was associated not only with the killer's German nationality and his strong Nazi sympathies, but also with shortwave radio transmissions that could not be pinned down.  

There's a bunch of interesting things that could, and if a person had time, should be explored here as the story raises all sorts of undeveloped oddities.

One of them is that Lakanen and Simpson are two out of the three Wyoming Game Wardens who were murdered by immigrants (to the extent I know why the various ones who lost their lives in the line of duty did).  I'm not saying that immigrants murder game wardens, but this is an interesting fact.  The other one is John Buxton, who was murdered by a youthful Austrian immigrant in 1919.  In that instance he had taken a .30-30 Savage rifle from a 17 year old who drew a revolver and killed him.  The reasons that Buxton was checking the boys is unclear.  Stories frequently claim they were hunting out of season, but that seems incorrect.  They were certainly overarmed for rabbits, however, with a .30-30 being way too large for that pursuit.  Buxton might have been checking them as their activities seems suspicious, which frankly they do, or because there was a state law at the time that prohibited aliens from carrying firearms.

The killers handgun, we might note, was concealed.

I only note this as its odd.  Hunting is common in Germany and Austria, and indeed there's a strong hunting culture there, but it's highly regulated.  As a result, poaching is fairly common as well, even though its highly criminal.  Indeed, one of the SS's units during World War Two, the Dirlewanger Brigade, was originally made up of convicted poachers, although it moved on to other criminals over time.

Anyhow, I wonder if these people were just hugely out of sink with any culture at all.

In the earlier murder, it's been noted that the young men had been in run-ins apparently with Italian immigrants in the same location. Austro Hungaria and Italy had been on opposite sides of World War One.  Again, I'm not saying that caused the murder, but I do wonder if they conceived of themselves as being very much on the outside of things.

Another interesting thing, although having nothing to do with the focus on this page, is the lingering Nazi sympathies in some quarters amongst German immigrants who chose to continue to live in the country.  That carried on, quietly, well after the war, even after the news of the Holocaust became known.

Odd.

If Malten was actually a spy, that may explain the killing in and of itself.

Another thing this story oddly brings up is the extent to which trapping remained economically viable.

Trapping was pretty common in Wyoming up into the 1970s, when there was a fur market price collapse.  I had, well still have, traps, although I haven't set them for decades.  In the 1970s high school kids like myself supplemented our incomes by trapping or hunting coyotes for their furs.  The market was so lucrative at the time that there were people who flew in from out of state and hunted coyotes near Miracle Miles, something we didn't appreciate very much as we didn't have those sorts of resources available to us.  The Federal Government was also big into predator control at the time which we also didn't appreciate much for the same reason.

Furs are, fwiw, an actual renewable resource fabric, one of the few.

Fur coats were a big deal for women at this time and would, again, be throughout the 1950s.  They were not nearly as much of a luxury item as people like to remember.  My mother had a heavy mink coat that she brought down from Montreal that she wore on really cold days.  As a kid I loved it when she brought it out, due to the feel of the soft minks.  

It was, in spite of Donald Trump and the Sweet Home Alabama crowe dof the GOP may believe, colder then.

I've never looked into it but I suspect that synthetic fabrics had as much to do with the decline in furs as anything else.  That started during World War Two and is well evidenced by the Air Force's switch from sheepskin flight altitude flight jackets to synthetic ones.  That trend continue into the 1950s and I suspect it just generally caught up with fur coats by the 1980s.  Indeed, the association of fur with luxury somewhat increased in that time, with it generally being the case that things are regarded as luxurious not only for their scarcity, but because they really aren't needed.

More on fur clothing some other time.

I guess the final thing I'll note is how dangerous of job being a game warden is.  A lot of the crimes you investigate are, by default, armed crimes.  

Given that, it's amazing to look back and realize that when I was a kid wardens didn't carry sidearms.  They weren't allowed to.  I recall when that changed and many did not take up what was then the option to carry them.  Now they're required to.

Indeed, I was recently stopped by a warden and frankly he wasn't very nice.  That's a new trend as well.  I don't like it.  But not only was he not nice, he was extremely intimidating carrying a government issued handgun on a government issued gunbelt and wearing a government issued flak jacket.  

I've really hated the militarization of the policy and this is all part of it. Everytime I see a policeman anymore, including a game warden, they're dressed like they're going into Hue in 1968.  All policemen of every type are civilians.  They're simply deputized civilians.  They shouldn't look like an occupying army.  And if the treat people rudely, and many do, and are standing their armed treating you like you are a detained Vietnamese villager, it's scary.

A little of that comes across, I'd note, in Bragonier's book, in spite of my recommendation of it.  It's a good book, but he displayed an element of contempt for the public he served in it.

David Bragonier must be, I'd suspect, gone to his reward by now  His biography indicates that he was born in Iowa in 1937 and moved to Wyoming after graduating high school.  He became a game warden over twenty years later, in 1958, something that would be extremely difficult to do now due to the education requirements.  He briefly worked for the Forest Service before that.

A man becoming a Game Warden at 39, which he did, would be really unusual now.  Probably impossible.

I actually have twice tried to plow that field myself, rejecting it once as I just go engaged.  I would have been about 30 at the time.  It'd be completely impossible for me to become a Game Warden now as I not have a wildlife management degree.  I suppose that requiring that specific degree is a good thing, but I do miss the days when a lot of Game Wardens were basically from ranching families.  Even when I was that age, many of them fit that category.  My cohort was probably about the last one that would meet that description.

I went on, of course, to a successful career in the law, and I was already a lawyer, of course at age 30, and had been for a few years.  I took one fork in the road.  You aren't supposed to look back.  Luke tells us, in a different context, that "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God".  I'll confess I've looked back a lot.

Having said all of that, I spoke the same warden (turns out he's very green) as I found a poached elk about two weeks later.  I had to guide him in, by phone, to the location.  He was very nice on that occasion, and that's how things should be.