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style="font-weight: bold;">When Jackson Hole became the Old West
A wooden sign on Teton Pass welcome visitors with a silhouetted cowboy pointing to the valley: “Howdy stranger, Yonder is Jackson Hole, Last of the Old West.” A similar signs waits at Jackson Hole Airport.
Last of the Old West?

The sign was first erected in the 1930’s with the help of then-Mayor Harry Clissold, who is rumored to have  posed for the image of the cowboy on the sign himself. A newer version of the sign remains as a valley icon, even if its claim is debatable
Though no Kidds, Holidays or Earps ever lived here, Jackson Hole has spent decades playing on its Old West history, which includes trappers, a few outlaws and some honest ranching families. But the century-old fixture in the valley that has changed the landscape more than any other is the tourist.

They started coming to dude ranches in the early 1900’s, and their numbers have increased steadily ever since, booming in the ‘50s and ‘60s because of motor traffic to national parks. And that’s when the town’s image really started to change, because the motor tourist only stopped long enough to buy a hamburger and some gas, and then they split. Some business owners got to thinkin’ that Jackson Hole needed something to capture their attention.

One old-timer, Clover Sturlin, began to perform a nightly, unscripted mock shootout with his buddies, the Cache Creek Posse, on the Town Square. Sturlin explained how it all started in a 1966 newspaper editorial published in the Jackson Hole Guide.

“In the month of February 1957, Jimmy Mercill asked Clover Sturlin, What can we do here in Jackson to stop the people from just going through town? Something we can advertise on the Western Order,” Sturlin wrote, referring to himself in the third person.

Sturlin, a charismatic Jackson Hole character, was an instant hit. Within a few years he had been written about in National Geographic, TV Guide and several other publications. One journalist estimated he could draw a crowd of a thousand “kiddos” in a night to witness one of his high-energy shootouts.

Sometimes Sturlin would mock holdup a jewelry store and take the clerk hostage; other times he would mock hijack a mail wagon, but the character was always hungry for gold and most of the time wound up dead on his horse. The show had a lot of unscripted flavor, where blanks were sometimes fired at too-close a range and on one occasion Clover broke his leg while being tackled by another player.
Sturlin said he started working the range at the age of 10, drove stagecoaches around the West, and was said by friends to have a unique command of the English language. He was a natural actor and someone who embellished real life experience to create one of the most convincing live Westerns in America.

Clover’s supporting cast, the Cache Creek Posse, were “an independent organization of businessmen in town,” according to an April 1958 Jackson Hole Guide article, and many of them had pioneer parents. Some of their names, and names of their supporters, dot the valley today.

When they built a small building on Town Square to host the stage coach rides, they had to defend themselves against townspeople who didn’t want a tourist attraction in the heart of town.

“Isn’t it worth the sacrifice, the little bit of land, the building any of our grandparents of 1865 would have been proud of, to try and get some extra dollars here in Jackson?” A “member” of the Cache Creek Posse wrote in another newspaper editorial.

“Maybe the Park is sacred,” he wrote, “but so is our tourist dollar, which most of us depend on.”

Also during that era, Hollywood films came to town. Producers, actors and crew gambled at the Wort and watched country-western performers play on the stage there. The Pink Garter Theatre received national attention, and a couple of Pink Garter Theatre productions were sent off to Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Old West Days, which draws thousands of tourists, was started in the early eighties. And today, Clover and the Cache Creek Posse still rock the Town Square every evening but Sunday.

The roles are now played by actors from the Playhouse, whose emotive posture and practiced stage presence give themselves away, but they put on an entertaining show none the less.

Before the show, even in the rain, tourists show up to stake out a spot as early as 5:15 p.m. for the 6 p.m. show. Afterwards, children walk up to put cash in the actors’ cowboy hats - a tradition started by Clover and his businessmen.
The actors remind people to gocheck out Grease, which they will perform, wearing jeans and cowboy boots, after each shootout at the Jackson Hole Playhouse.
Tell them we sent ya,” they say. JHW 
-Henry Sweets

Incomplete history of JH national parks
On occasion, local outdoorsmen joke that Grand Teton National Park exists to draw tourists away from other (to-remain-unnamed) pristine and wild lands.
Other valley residents surmise that the national parks attract people to an area that would otherwise remain wild and free. A map of U.S. highways supports both theories, the parks forming a cross-country stage stop loop that guides travelers to certain areas while keeping them from venturing too far into rural territory.
The official origin story is still different, though built on the same certainty: national parks are for tourists.

This year, the National Park Service is counting on the down-economy to draw more regional and national traffic, and it’s offering fee-free days to encourage more people to get out of their homes.

GTNP spokesperson Jackie Skaggs said that the park has already surpassed its visitor count from last year. During the months of January to May 2008, the park had 864,803 visits, 348,306 of them being by “recreational visitors,” which the park considers to be people other than employees, vendors and the like. Over the same period this year, the park counted 891,863 visits, 357,100 of them from recreational visitors. The numbers are up, Skaggs, noted, though the season has been unusually rainy.

Yellowstone has seen a rise over the same period from 321,939 in 2008 to 357,036 this year.

Although oral histories tend to herald the position that U.S. national parks were built with a conservationist, national treasure mentality, Jackson Hole’s national parks appear to have been designed with the intention of drawing visitors to the area.

“Although Americans in the twentieth century would identify Yellowstone with the virtues of wilderness preservation, they established the park to claim the economic potential and national pride they saw in its natural curiosities,” wrote Chris Magoc in Yellowstone: The Creation and Selling of an American Landscape, 1870-1903.  “As the reserve became a preeminent symbol of the touristic American West, Indians – another symbol of that heritage – were banished from its environs because they were bad for business.”

The “they” in Magoc’s book primarily refers to Northern Pacific Railroad, which sought to fund its expansion West, by attracting passengers to the “Wonderland” of Yellowstone. It’s advertising campaign includes pretty girls in Western gear, cowboys, bears Old Faithful and a racing train.

These efforts and acquired human behaviors during the 1970s, gave Yellowstone tourists the impression they could canoodle safely with wildlife, according to Do (Not) Feed the Bears, by Alice Wondrak Biel. From 1935 to 1975, Biel wrote, visitors reported 1,897 bear-related injuries, and the park reported killing 1,101 bears that had become a problem.

Attitudes have changed, since, Biel wrote, resulting, in part, from the park’s updated 1972 mission statement and the Endangered Species Act of 1975.
However, visitors can still be seen feeding bears in both parks.

At GTNP, schemes to attract tourists never got as outlandish as they did in 1960, when J.L. Peterson proposed a three-mile lift from the east side of Jackson Lake to Grand Teton peak, but the idea appears to have crashed before it took off, a fate nearly suffered by GTNP itself:

When Yellowstone’s superintendent Horace Albright (1919-1929) traveled to Jackson in 1919 to sell the idea of expanding the park south, he told townspeople it would be to preserve and promote “the Old West.” This, according to Robert Righter in his book Crucible for Conservation: The Struggle for Grand Teton National Park.
Albright was part of a contingent that wanted to protect elk migration routes into the Hole, the argument being that it made no sense to protect elk in Yellowstone, if they were unprotected outside of its boundaries.

Cattle ranchers and homesteaders chased Albright out of town, Righter continues, but local dude ranchers, seeing the potential in bringing more people to the area, became allies of the movement.

One early convert was Struthers Burt who pushed the idea of a “museum on the hoof”: “wild animals would be fostered and/or reintroduced, houses would be uniformly log, roads would be unpaved, and the town of Jackson would retain a strong frontier flavor.”

Yellowstone, the first national park in the U.S. and “arguably in the world” according to some sources, took a little over two years to conceptualize and institute by 1872, but the establishment of GTNP was a highly politicized battle, pitting “rugged individuals” against the federal government.

It involved cattle ranchers, dude ranchers, homesteaders, conservations, East Coast money and influence (J.D. Rockefeller) and distinctly different missions between the National Forest Service in Washington and the local Forest Service, made up of valley residents. Righter’s book chronicles the more than 30-year struggle to found Grand Teton National Park.

“This ongoing struggle between development and preservation is a pervasive theme that spans time in Jackson Hole,” Righter wrote, “from the early days of settlement to the present.”

Today, South Jenny Lake is one of the busiest areas in the park. It contains a visitor center, a ferryboat launch and access to Hidden Falls, as well as to Cascade Canyon - a means of entry to Teton Crest Trail.

On Saturday, the South Jenny Lake parking lot overflowed onto the entrance road – what appeared to be more than 100 cars, trucks, RVs and touring motorcycles, few with Wyoming plates.

The trail around Jenny Lake and to the falls was backed up, 10 to 20 people at spots. At one point, they held up the line to photograph a sunbathing marmot. Children dropped wrappers, and parents picked them up. Passers-by alerted each other to “the moose, just 15 minutes from here.” They buzzed, satisfied and perfectly unaware of certain mountain ranges to the east and west. JHW
-Matthew Irwin

In retail windows
John Boyer is about as old-line Jackson Hole as it gets. His grandfather and namesake was early Jackson Hole native John Wort, who was born here in 1900 and established the historic Wort Hotel with his brother, Jess, in 1941. 
Boyer runs Boyer’s Indian Arts and Crafts, a shop his parents opened in 1962.

During its first 10 years in business, the store was a fly fishing shop called Rod and Reel, although selling handmade Native American wares proved to be more lucrative and less stressful than the long hours needed to accommodate fly fishermen. Today, John Boyer runs one of the Town Square’s oldest surviving businesses, and it’s still in the original location. The shop is rife with local history. One living legend, the outdoorsman Jack Dennis, tied flies at Rod and Reel before lending his name to his own flagship Town Square shop.  

These days, Boyer struggles to reconcile today’s Jackson Hole with the way it used to be.

“I feel like a stranger in my own town,” Boyer said soon after he sold a polished knife to a visitor fresh off his Harley Davidson. The man said he had been in the shop when he last visited the valley, in January.  

Boyer said it’s not the ever-changing face of commerce on and around the Square that dismays him, but the encroachment of large buildings, particularly the new parking garage and Center for the Arts. 

“It seems like nobody cares about the history of this town anymore,” Boyer said.
Politics aside, for most people a visit to Jackson Hole, or any iconic destination, is not complete without some souvenir to commemorate the experience. While a handful of shops along the Town Square still stock a lifetime’s worth of kitschy Western trinkets, many retailers have moved away from the proverbial rubber tomahawks of yesteryear. 

“These days you’re seeing people wanting quality things that weren’t made in China, they don’t want to see the same knickknacky things everywhere,” said Jinger Richardson, who owns Legacy, a high-end art gallery, with her husband. 
Jackson Hole has been a center for high-end Western art since before the Richardsons opened their gallery nearly 20 years ago. The growing national influence of the National Museum of Wildlife Art has helped boost the demand for upscale works depicting Native Americans, wildlife and rugged landscapes, Richardson said. And some people want to keep up with the neighbors who have an original oil painting above the wall. 

But even while many visitors may pass through local high-end galleries as rites of sightseeing, the overwhelming majority will never spend thousands of dollars or more on artwork.

This only helps partly explain the popularity of tree ornaments sold at shops like Moose Be Christmas.

“You’d be amazed at how many we sell, especially the ones with moose, bears and the elk antler arches on the Town Square,” said Letecia Hernandez, a seasonal clerk. She added, “And it’s so far away from Christmas!”

Any discussion about bygone Americana on Town Square would be incomplete without mention of Jackson Drug, the old-fashioned soda fountain that shut its doors in 2001. In a sign of a more gentrified Jackson Hole, the space, once popular for milkshakes, reopened as a high-end rug and gift shop.

There’s still a couple of ice cream parlors on Town Square, but the frozen malts are a little more old-fashioned at Moo’s Gourmet Ice Cream, in the back of Beaver Creek Hats. Actually, the fact that owner Rick Bickner refuses to use the artificial ingredients that helped flavor the ice cream at Jackson Drug and made it gum up is a very modern way of thinking. But his local’s knowledge and the details like a choice of roasted malt powder (light or dark), draws some visitors back to Moo’s whenever they visit Jackson Hole. 

“After 18 years in business, this place has become a landmark,” Bickner said. “People come here for something other than a franchise that they can find throughout the states.”

One notable shift in retail over the last decade is the decline in familiar chain stores. People who lived in or visited Jackson Hole around a decade ago will remember the Town Square outlets for global brands like Gap, Ralph Lauren, Fila and United Colors of Benetton. But those brands pulled out over time, and all that remain are Coldwater Creek and Eddie Bauer, which can seem out of place given the current popularity of stores that cater to a more specific niche of goods associated with Jackson Hole and the West.

Recently, the old Jackson Drug building was listed for sale. 
Bickner said he once believed, if only half-seriously, he had a business partner in Larry Rockefeller, son of Laurence, who, lamenting the loss of the old soda fountain, once told him, “If Jackson Drug ever comes up for sale, I’ll help you get it back.”

The building, at 98 Center Street, is currently listed for $6.97 million, according to a realtor’s Web site. 

“He said maybe he could help out, but couldn’t just buy it to put me in there,” Bickner said. “Oh well.”   JHW
-Ben Cannon


Photo by Matthew Irwin
Tourists queue for a vista over Jenny Lake.

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Western Americana | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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