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:
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.
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. 
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.
