More Wyoming Flavor

In her memoir Skin Deep, Wyoming writer Karol Griffin visited the Owen Wister Suite in the Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow. Wister, a native of Pennsylvania, went to Wyoming for his health and wrote The Virginian (1902), considered the first western novel. 

The worn floral carpeting and old-fashioned mural on the landing made me think of all the feet that had come up these same stairs. I thought that, maybe, if we were quiet enough, we could hear the past, the passengers getting off the train and carrying trunks to their rooms. Maybe we’d hear Owen Wister’s fountain pen as he scratched notes about the people and the place, Medicine Bow seen through turn-of-the-century city boy eyes.