Devil's Gate--the name conjures difficult passage and portends a doubtful outcome. In this eloquent and captivating narrative, Tom Rea traces the history of the Sweetwater River valley in central Wyoming--a remote place including Devil's Gate, Independence Rock, and other sites along a stretch of the Oregon Trail--to show how ownership of a place can translate into owning its story. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, Devil's Gate is the center of a landscape that threatens to shrink any inhabitants to insignificance except for one thing: ownership of the land and the stories they choose to tell about it. The static serenity of the once heavily traveled region masks a history of conflict. Tom Sun, an early rancher, played a role here in the lynching of the only woman ever hanged in Wyoming. The lynching was dismissed as swift frontier justice in the wake of cattle theft, but Rea finds more complicated motives that involve land and water rights. The Sun name was linked with the land for generations. In the 1990s, the Mormon Church purchased part of the Sun ranch to memorialize Martin's Cove as the site of handcart pioneers who froze to death in the valley in 1856. The treeless, arid country around Devil's Gate seems too immense for ownership. But stories run with the land. People who own the land can own the stories, at least for a time.

It has an unlikely name, the Sweetwater River valley, and it occupies one of the most rugged of spaces in the rugged state of Wyoming. In it or near it masses of Native Americans hunted, a woman was hanged, migrants froze to death, and thousands of pioneers paused at the valley's Independence Rock on their way to Oregon. Who owned the land then and owns it now has control of a vast repertoire of American history. Rea follows the stories of the land and how they changed according to who owned it, ranging from early settlers to one of the most prominent early ranchers who was instrumental in the only lynching of a woman in Wyoming all the way to the present, in which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints operates a museum in honor of forebears said to have died of exposure in the valley in 1856.
Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

It has an unlikely name, the Sweetwater River valley, and it occupies one of the most rugged of spaces in the rugged state of Wyoming. In it or near it masses of Native Americans hunted, a woman was hanged, migrants froze to death, and thousands of pioneers paused at the valley's Independence Rock on their way to Oregon. Who owned the land then and owns it now has control of a vast repertoire of American history. Rea follows the stories of the land and how they changed according to who owned it, ranging from early settlers to one of the most prominent early ranchers who was instrumental in the only lynching of a woman in Wyoming all the way to the present, in which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints operates a museum in honor of forebears said to have died of exposure in the valley in 1856. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This history of how land--and history itself--became a prize not to be lost in the American West includes 24 black-and-white illustrations and 2 maps.