Wallows Creek Road

One hundred sixty acres on Wallows Creek Road, ten minutes south of Buffalo. The number is not a round-off. One hundred sixty acres is a quarter section under the public land survey, the exact allotment Congress attached to the Homestead Act of 1862, and the reason fence lines across Johnson County still run true north and south. Washington kept enlarging the ration for country this dry, to 320 acres in 1909 under what was openly called the Dry Farming Homestead Law and to 640 in 1916 for stock raising, which is a fair measure of what a quarter section had to have going for it to be worth the filing. This one has a natural ground spring on it.

The creek that gives the road its name is carried in the geographic names record under an older form, Buffalo Wallows Creek, which is a plain description of what the herds left in ground like this before the surveyors arrived.

Johnson County was organized in late 1879, formally recognized in 1880, and seated at Buffalo when its government took office on May 10, 1881, named for E. P. Johnson, a Cheyenne attorney. The town had grown up around Fort McKinney, which began in 1876 as Cantonment Reno at the Bozeman Trail crossing of the Powder River and moved in 1878 to Clear Creek, where the water, forage and wood came out of the Bighorns. The Army left in 1894, the state took the post over as a soldiers home in 1903, and it serves as the Wyoming Veterans Home today. Buffalo incorporated in 1884; the Occidental Hotel had been on Main Street since 1880. By local account the town's name was drawn from a hat in that building, and the entry that won was Will Hart's hometown of Buffalo, New York.

Everything south of town is the ground the Bozeman Trail crossed from 1863 on its run from the North Platte to the Montana gold fields, straight through the Powder River country, the premier buffalo hunting ground of the northern plains. In April 1892 the range war that took the county's name ended on the same stretch. Frank Canton led fifty hired men to the KC Ranch on April 9; two days later Sheriff W. G. "Red" Angus had them surrounded at the TA Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek with a posse of about four hundred, and the siege broke on April 13 when the Sixth Cavalry rode out from Fort McKinney. The TA went on the National Register on March 26, 1993, its trenches still legible in the grass.

Native short grass, cured gold for most of the year, with a green draw running the length of the parcel and the spring feeding it. Power runs nearby. Several benches sit high enough to take the whole western horizon, and the tract is offered as a single 160 or split along the survey line into two eighties, so one buyer can build and graze or two can share the road in. Johnson County School District Number 1, ten minutes back up the road to Buffalo at 4,645 feet.

There are no structures on it, nothing to take down, nothing yet decided. The western horizon is the Bighorn front, and its high point is Cloud Peak at 13,167 feet, which still carries the last glacier in the range on its northeast slope. From here that is the view out of a kitchen window nobody has built yet.

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