June 16, 2005
Thursday

. . . on the range you call it greengrass, all one word . . . it came first like a tinge of pale green on the southern and eastern slopes . . . and soon it was like green velvet; and then, at last, in late June, like this. A sea of rippling grass.
— Mary O’Hara, My Friend Flicka

Mary O’Hara (1885-1980) was born in New Jersey and grew up in New York. She was a screenwriter in California during the silent film era. Her marriage in 1922 to Helge Sture-Vasa took her to Wyoming, where they raised horses for the Cavalry Division of Fort Francis E. Warren in Cheyenne. It was while living on the 3800-acre spread she named Remount Ranch that Mary O’Hara wrote the trilogy for which she is most well-known, My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, and The Green Grass of Wyoming. In 1946, when the Sture-Vasas divorced, they sold the ranch. A succession of owners used it as a guest house or a private residence. In 1995 it was bought by the Bangert family, who have returned the land to its roots as a working ranch, raising Texas Longhorn cattle.

Readers of this space know that it was my childhood reading of Flicka that inspired my interest in Wyoming. When I began planning this trip, I learned that Remount Ranch is in Buford, about 25 miles west of Cheyenne, and that the current owners welcome visitors. I think they expect visitors who want to examine the livestock before they buy, rather than just clicking a box on the website to purchase an animal, as if it were eBay. (A bull can cost upwards of $5,000. So can a cow. Calves are less.)

I wrote to them and said that I was not a cattle buyer, that my appreciation of livestock was limited to what I’d learned from reading the high school research papers of three generations of Future Farmers of America. I wasn’t asking to come into the house to sit where Mary O’Hara sat. I was requesting permission only to come onto the property to breathe the air and look at the vistas.

I left Denver before 7:00. I arrived in Cheyenne around 9:00, had breakfast at the R&B Breakfast Club (an Elvis-themed diner), and then headed out to Buford. The first twenty miles were over a paved road. At that point there were two signs, one pointing to Remount Ranch and the other advising that “county maintenance ends.” I eased the car (a conventional sedan, remember, not a rugged 4WD vehicle) onto a rutted gravel path and proceeded for three miles across land marked “open range.”

The entrance to Remount Ranch has the typical gate you see in movie westerns, two wooden towers with a crossbar bearing the ranch’s name. I could see a building up ahead that I knew was not the main house. I could also see, prominently displayed, signs declaring that this was Private Property, No Trespassing. And more signs warning of the “loose stock.”

The stock that were occupying the grassy areas on either side of the road were behind barbed wire fences. And they didn’t look at all likely to want to wander from the comfortable seat or attractive grazing spot they’d found. When I approached with my camera some of them looked at me for a moment, and the young ones skittered away. I found myself surrounded by the most serious quiet I had ever encountered, a silence punctuated only by the sound of the wind and the occasional long low moans of the cattle.

No one at the ranch had replied to my note, and I was reluctant to drive through the gate. What I had come to see was right in front of me anyway.

The pasture that lay to the south stretched out for about a thousand feet. It was covered in soft green grass rippling in the wind exactly as Mary O’Hara had described it. Then the land rose in irregular hillocks covered in the same green grass dotted by clumps of dark trees. Protrusions of gray rock and slashes of reddish earth added some contour. And above it all, the big sky, a brilliant blue feathered by thin clouds.

It was exactly what I’d seen Ken McLaughlin riding Flicka through those Saturday mornings I spent in front of the TV. Except that was in two-dimensional black and white on a ten-inch screen.

Here it was now, in color, shadow, and shape.

I held the enormous moment as long as I could.

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