Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

Lightning Flat in History

<< < (2/4) > >>

Gabreya:

--- Quote from: Kd5000 on August 22, 2008, 04:26:32 pm ---I wonder what it was like in 1963?  Was it already a ghost town?  Thanks for the photos.  L.F. is sure off the beaten trail.

--- End quote ---

Probably so.
Of course, it was probably at least one hundred people living there but, hey, I could be wrong.

Marge_Innavera:
At work awhile back, I found a fairly recent Rand McNally atlas that had Lighting Flat on the Wyoming map.  I believe it was the 2006 edition, and Lightning Flat disappeared from their maps after that.  Here it is below, showing LF's geographical position in relation to both Sheridan and Devil's Tower.



(For the full-sized image, hit "quote" and delete the "width=" part)

Front-Ranger:
Interesting. Today, there is not even a foundation stone to be found at the location of downtown Lightning Flat! Only a bunch of fields, the occasional fence and, to the northeast, a lone forlorn house with a patch of irises gone wild.

Marge_Innavera:
Yeah, doesn't that seem odd?  But it isn't unusual with small towns and homesteads.  We like to think that once we build something it's permanent but it doesn't seem to take long for man-made structures to vanish once no one is using them.

There's an interesting book out now called The World Without Us that shows what would happen to major cities if the people disappeared.  And it isn't just theoretical -- cities have been found hidden in rain forests and jungles in both South America and Asia that were major centers of population at one time.

Penthesilea:

--- Quote from: Shakesthecoffecan on August 19, 2008, 01:13:20 pm ---Jim from Findingbrokeback.com has come across two photos of what Lightning Flat looked like back in the day.

The town, he learned, was settled after the first World War and had a newspaper in the 1920s.

Here is the Newspaper office and the Dance Hall:

--- End quote ---


Three and a half years later, I came upon the same site. And then upon this thread.

The site is Wyoming Tales and Trails - Featuring photographs and history of old Wyoming


The Lightning Flat section begins just less than half the page down. It shows the two historical photos Shakesthecoffeecan posted and has also two recent photos, credited findingbrokeback. :)
Brokeback Mountain is mentioned on the site. :D

I liked especially the newspaper excerpt from 1922.
What they sold for "news" is, well, strange.
It's rather an early precursor of facebook than a real newspaper.

"Raymond Kraft spent a part of the day at the Alex Scott home Sunday.
Mrs. Ira Cadwell had the end of one of her fingers torn off by a food chopper last Saturday."

Really? They reported who visited who and distributed the info to everybody in the paper?

Just imagine to read this in the paper: Ennis Del Mar had a foreign visitor who stayed the whole weekend. The license plates on the man's truck indicated he was from Texas. :o :o :o


Makes me understand Ennis' fears even more. I mean, we're now almost a century further in time than 1922, but Ennis and Jack in the sixties were only 40 years apart from a local newspaper reporting stuff like the above (the real quotes, not my made up one). I doubt such reports were still common in the sixties, but neighbours in small communities probably still knew too many details like who visited, who married, and so on. Maybe even do today.

Poor Ennis. The lines between well justified fears and paranoia are understandably blurred.


The website is interesting beyond LF, BTW.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page