Note: On Aug. 6, 2025, my hometown newspaper, The Pinedale Roundup, abruptly ceased operation. It was one of 8 newspapers in rural Wyoming towns that shut down without warning, after parent company News Media Corporation announced it would cease operations, effective immediately. In honor of the 100-plus-year run of my hometown paper, I am sharing my essay, “Tracing a Community in Conversation,” here. The essay originally appeared in the Ink anthology, published by Hippocampus Books in 2021. Also see my post, “The Case for Community Newspapers,” published on this blog in 2020.

When pioneer C. Watt Brandon made the long journey west from Minneapolis to the Green River Valley in remote western Wyoming in 1904, he likely was not thinking about what constitutes news. Instead, I imagine he was thinking of how he could establish a regular and civilized system of communication in cold and rugged country that was still wild and untamed. His uncle, John F. Patterson, was doggedly trying to start a town on a churning mountain creek 110 miles from the nearest railroad. Patterson had already approached two ranchers in the valley with a business proposal: If they would each donate five acres of their land for a new town site, he would build and stock a general store near the water. They would name their town Pinedale. Patterson vowed to give parcels of land to anyone who wanted to start a business in this hardscrabble place. He convinced his nephew to leave his newspaper job in the city and journey 1,100 miles west to start a newspaper.

A newspaper, Patterson reasoned, was a critical component to defining a town. The printed word was a way to connect the ranchers and homesteaders who were scattered like chaff across the high country. Moreover, a newspaper was a mouthpiece, touting the open land, wide sky and unimpeded promise of a place that begged for citizens to make it come alive. Brandon arrived in the spring and set out to find subscribers. If he could nail down 500 subscriptions at $2 a year each, the enterprise stood a chance. He forded streams in high water on horseback and crossed miles of hard, virgin terrain to meet with potential patrons.

After visiting what he claimed was every home within 50 miles of Pinedale, Brandon had acquired enough subscriptions to make a go at a newspaper. Smitten with the great cattle country and sure of its future, he drove a sheep wagon 110 miles south to Rock Springs, where he picked up a printing press. The press was so heavy it took him and his team of horses 5 days to travel back to Pinedale. At times, Brandon had to unload parts of the machine and carry them himself up steep embankments.

The inaugural issue of the Pinedale Roundup was hardly impressive when it rolled off the press on Sept. 8, 1904. Even with his beast of a printing press up and running, Brandon still did not have all the paper or printing materials for the six-column newspaper he had envisioned. He asked that his readers be indulgent and not expect too much. He promised to say all the good things he could about Pinedale.

“All seem to realize that a newspaper may do much towards settling up this country and bringing its many resources before a people who are looking for just such homes as we have to give, and may also succeed in interesting capital to bring improvements which we greatly need,” he wrote in his debut editorial.

Page one was black with newsprint and few headlines. Two ads flanked the right column, along with 3 local cattle brands. Dr. W.A. Hocker, Physician and Surgeon in Kemmerer 100 miles south, advertised that calls in the country would be promptly attended to. The news was divided by area: Merna (”Supt. Anderson of the Forest Reserves has been seen in these parts lately”); Big Piney (”All are pleased with the abundant hay crop this year”); Valley Roundup (”P.V. Sommers passed thru [sic] Pinedale recently en route to Pacific Spring, where he expects to recover some of the horses stolen from his camp near the Black Butte during July … Mr. Fred S. Boyce, who has been on the sick list for some time the past summer is again on duty, rather thin and pale but still in the ring”). In the Cora section, Brandon mused: “A friend of mine asked me the other day the name of the joint on the left hindleg of a cat, the joint the cat usually sits on. I was unable to reply. Will some kind reader inform the editor so I may know in the future.”

Readers would know who was cutting hay when, who the horse wranglers were and who was cooking the meals for the cowboys. They would know what day Howard Fueguet and his friend from Philadelphia were heading into the mountains for their six-week mountain sheep hunt and who their guide was. These were the happenings of a town in the progress of being made. This was the news, unfussy and colloquial and meandering.

*****

I was fifteen in the spring of 1999 when my parents first suggested I call the managing editor of the Pinedale Roundup and ask for a summer job. I laughed. Me, an emotional, academic-nerd teenager, working for my hometown newspaper? But I was also giddy. What if I could tell stories about this place where I was born and raised – and be paid for it?

You are a beautiful writer, they said. (I glowed inside but chalked up that comment to solid parental bias.) You know a lot of people in Sublette County. You know stories are out there, and you can be the one to help tell them, they said.

I wasn’t thinking about news as much as I was romanticizing the art of storytelling. I thought about the people I knew in my hometown, the connections that my dad always made as the second-generation owner of his dad’s namesake, Bucky’s Repair, a small engine repair and retail shop. Sun-beaten old ranchers and snowmobilers high on the mountain-fresh air and jaw-dropping off-trail rides came into the shop every day spouting stories of beaten paths, wrecked machines and personal glory. I thought about the places that held sweet memories for me: the wood patch and Beaver Hill, Halfmoon Lake, Elkhart Park, the Mesa. Could I, through writing newspaper stories, invite readers to not just appreciate, but love, this place and its people? Pinedale was quickly becoming a melting pot of outsiders. Long-time ranchers and thick-skinned cowboys who were born and raised in this country often clashed with the newer, greener in-town residents who hailed from places like central Texas and northern California.

I pondered the looming possibility of scoring a job at the newspaper. What teenager would just jump on the phone and ask to speak with the managing editor of her hometown paper, let alone hope a job would come of it? I imagined the job of a newspaper reporter demanded more importance and more life experience than that. Yet (my mom reminded me), what was the worst that could happen?

“The editor would tell you they don’t have any openings at this time,” Mom said.

“No,” I said. “She would laugh and tell me they don’t have any openings at this time.”

The managing editor was the wife of my high school English teacher. That pricked me with another sliver of insecurity. He was by far my favorite teacher in the high school, and I had an “A” in his class. What would he think if he found out I called his wife and asked for a job?

“He might think that’s pretty cool,” my dad said, a thought I hadn’t considered.

Finally, I summoned my nerves, called the Roundup, and asked to speak to the editor. She met with me in her office the following week, and by the end of our conversation, I had a job at minimum wage writing a weekly community profile piece for a new section of the newspaper we had invented on the spot: Neighbors.

That name, Neighbors, carried with it a wholesome, simple and appeasing connotation. I knew how stories used to be in the newspaper: They acknowledged family connections and spun a web of local activity. (Pinedale citizens were somewhat surprised Tuesday at lunch hour to see a fine young cow moose come trotting down the road east of town very much unconcerned and leap over the fence into the J.F. Patterson field and make her way across the pasture toward Pine creek [sic]. J.C. Reynolds who happened to be coming into town in his Buick at the time was able to get a very good view of the animal which appeared to be about a two-year-old and at one time was within 40 feet of her. Many about town secured their first view of a moose.) They offered aimless wisdom and advice. (An old housekeeper who has been the victim in her day of almost every kind of accident that can happen to a housekeeper says that whenever a kettle of jam or preserves is scorched set it immediately in a pan of cold water to restore the flavor.) By its very name, Neighbors would aim to honor and preserve those connections.

In my first week of work as an intern reporter at the Roundup, I made a list of the community characters I wanted to interview. I was indulging myself, I knew: I had mostly free reign over this brand new section of the newspaper, and I wanted to show my hometown the lively past and present of the people who made it tick. I started with people I knew well: my third grade teacher, the dog catcher, the owner of the local hardware store who pedaled around town on a recumbent bike. Then, I cracked open the white pages and read the names page-by-page. With a pencil I starred the names that were either legendary or vaguely familiar to me. There was Don Kendall, the first CEO of PepsiCo who owned the famed Kendall Ranch. There was Scott Grossman, a barrel chested expert billiard player with a shock of black hair. Dad said I should talk to Chris Nichols, who had lived in Sublette County forever and had more stories than I would know what to do with. Jeanne Raney was a speech pathologist who worked at my old elementary school. I didn’t know exactly what a speech pathologist did, and I wanted to find out.

My first newspaper story ran on June 17, 1999, about Pinedale’s valedictorian for that year. He was a genius – I couldn’t fathom talking to someone so smart, let alone interview him. My heart thudded in my chest as I paced the Roundup office the day he was to come for the interview. My editor told me to calm down. We both spoke English, didn’t we? Start there and ask him how he’s doing, she said.

Every once in a while, my dad came home from the shop with a name or a story. Through his grapevine I interviewed a single woman who built her own log cabin using only hand tools, the last Pearl Harbor survivor in the county, and James Baker, the former Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush who had a ranch somewhere east of town. When an ersatz mountain man wandered into town via U.S. Highway 191, I tracked him down at the rodeo grounds. I sat in his canvas tent while he told me about his summers of trekking the high country from California to Wyoming with a horse and a knapsack, doing his best to imitate the mountain men of the 1800s despite his aching back. I interviewed wrinkled couples on patterned sofas in dark living rooms, scratching out their secrets to a half century of marriage. Each of the people I talked to handed me offerings of wisdom. Some knew what those offerings were before we even shook hands. Others opened doors to me tentatively and asked, “Why me? I have nothing interesting to say.” The more I interviewed and wrote, the bigger I realized my role as a reporter was. I came to see that I was the conduit who could move people’s unrefined fragments of thought into a wider community conversation. There was gleaming power in that – not only in offering their stories to a wider world, but also in helping them realize they had something worth sharing.

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” Arthur Miller once said.

I hoped that each of my stories in the Roundup were an invitation for the community to talk to itself.

*****

By January 1905, the Pinedale Roundup was anchored with ads (LAND! LAND! LAND! IRRIGABLE LAND. BEST ON EARTH. On the easiest terms you ever heard of!) and pulsing with loosely reported, unadorned stories. One bore the headline, “LEAVING THE CITY: Tired of the Trials of City Life Many Are [Heading] to the Country.” It read:

Back to the ranch is now the dream of thousands of people who begin to realize that the city doesn’t hold all of life that is worth having. Ten or fifteen years ago all the talk and tendency was of and to the city. Every city boy was determined to stay in the city, and every country boy of energy and ability had made up his mind to go to the city in search of fortune. Now city boys plan to live in the country, and thousands and thousands of men and women, grown tired of the narrowness city life means to the less fortunate, are hoping and planning for the day when they may leave the smoke and grime and imprisoning walls of the city behind and seek the country with its open spaces, its pure air and its freedom.

Another story in the same issue reported that Mr. W.E. Enos, the owner of the company building the telephone line between Daniel and Pinedale, purchased 325 head of yearling steers for his ranch on the Green River, at an average of $1.50 per head. In Daniel, Christmas dinners were given at the homes of D.F. Harrison, Dr. Montrose and Ira Dodge. Other friendly faces from nearby parts were recognized in Daniel.

“Come again,” the paper insists, “the latch string is out.”

From the Burns section, Billie Todd, Alex Price, Shorty Nolan and Jack Frazier returned from the Pinedale dance O.K., and Mrs. Poole was visiting with her mother on Horse Creek. Christmas raffle prizes included a hair bridle, a mounted elk head, a Japanese muffler, a mounted antelope head and a shot gun. A silk quilt handmade for a needy woman failed to draw enough raffle tickets.

“Many are out of their money and few were made happy,” the report reads.

Townsend & Hall of Daniel, Wyo., sought General Merchandise – Dry goods, Boots and Shoes. Prices Reasonable. The Fremont Saloon in Pinedale carried a full line of High Grade Whiskies and Cigars. Nice Cool Beer was Always on Draught [sic] in Rock Springs.

Articles in a June 1905 issue announced that 10,000 trout were planted in Burnt Lake, 25-by-100-foot town lots were on sale for $25.00 and the first tourist of the season had arrived in Pinedale.

“B.F. R. berts [sic] killed a wolf down near Sand Springs recently. We hear that a great many of these enemies of cattle are seen,” one report reads. Another says, “H.E. Allen started Wednesday with a load of beef to Rock Springs. He will return with freight for the New Fork store.”

The news in August 1907 was that a 1900-pound Gale 27 Horse Power became the first automobile on the streets of Pinedale, making the 110-mile trip from Rock Springs in seven hours.

The Pinedale Roundup, with its subscription cost of $2.00 per year, was avidly chronicling a town’s early progress.

*****

In February 2001, less than two years after I whetted my storytelling chops with that first interview, the Pinedale Roundup was bought out by its rival, the owner of the Sublette County Journal. Rob Shaul, a bold and innovative entrepreneur with family in the area, had started the Journal in 1996, intending to bring a fresh perspective of local history and hard-hitting news to the county. The Journal was a fierce competitor of the Roundup, having branded itself as The Newspaper of the Green River Valley. My grandpa, who grew up on the Beaver Creeks west of town (his news area would have been “Beaver” in those early Roundup editions) was a regular contributor to the Journal. He wrote “Bucky’s Stories,” colorful and unrestrained musings of his life navigating the implacable mountain terrain. Eventually, I would come to prize those stories for what they represented: not just larger-than-life chronicles of my family, but also annals of the type of grit and determination required to thrive in a desolate, wild place. But back then, I had no use for the Journal, nor my grandpa’s stories. The Journal was nothing more than a power trip for a trailblazer who wanted to flex his own mental muscles.

The sale of the Roundup came fast. One day I was finishing a story on the high school Nordic ski team, and the next day I was given a box and told to pack up my stuff. Rob Shaul swept in with the force of a bull, touting his minion staff and big ideas. When the dust settled, nearly all the faces at the Roundup were new. I hated every one of them.

But the arms race to win over the community with the most accurate and attentive local newspaper was far from over. Four women who comprised the core of the former Roundup Staff – a designer, a sales lead, a photographer and a reporter – banded together to form a new publishing company and under it, a new newspaper. Two months after the turbulent Roundup takeover, on April 5, 2001, the inaugural issue of the Sublette Examiner hit local newsstands with a quiet determination. Front-page headlines reported that Sublette County was the second-fastest-growing county in the state, and that the Rural Health Care District would hire three EMTs. The Wyoming Game and Fish underestimated the amount of rangeland the county’s mule deer herds used in the winter. An ad on page three announced the 20th “Aniel Daniel” Chili Cook-off at the historic Daniel Schoolhouse 11 miles west of town. At the bottom of the editorial page, which announced Rhonda Swain as Editor, Cat Urbigkit as Reporter, Deanne Swain as ad designer and Delsa Allen as photographer, was the Abraham Lincoln quote: “To sin by silence, when one should protest, makes cowards out of men.”

Below the names of the four big players, my name was listed as an intern, along with two of my classmates – a photography intern, Tara, and a design intern, Tiffany, Rhonda Swain’s daughter.

In her debut editorial, Rhonda Swain called for community involvement to make the Sublette Examiner a true community newspaper. The community page, “Wyoming Winds,” published the Senior Menu and congratulated the Big Piney Middle School wrestling team, the Rustlers, for running “roughshod” to sweep almost every category at the District History Day competition. A photo of Gene Bryson, winner of the Fremont Lake Fish Derby, compared the size of his 21-pound lake trout to his two-year old granddaughter. The trout, of course, is bigger.

The short-lived “Neighbors” column of the Roundup became “Personalities” for the Examiner. My first article profiled eighth grade volleyball and track coach Jennifer Proud. The story is full of clichés: Proud has “a fiery spirit,” remembers her “first taste of competition” and is “constantly on her toes.” But that didn’t matter. I felt like I was part of something big – a community uprising, in a sense. I knew well that the pen was mightier than the sword.

The launch of the Sublette Examiner a seamless transition on the surface and a roiling act of rebellion beneath. Conversations around ongoing hot topics populated the early pages. In a letter to the editor in Issue 2, Vol. 1, Richard Winckler wrote, “If the [new] bike and walking path don’t go through, one of these days someone is going to be driving along, not paying enough attention to the road, and clobber Chuck Vitt and his pooch walking, or Ken Konicek jogging, or Mike Lewis bicycling, or one of a bunch of other folks whose names I do not recall at the moment.” Another letter by Samuel Taylor begins, “Are you really trying to tell me that you believe these drilling rigs and their drilling operations have some kind of effect on stress in deer? I’m tired of hearing it.”

The annual Pinedale Boat Club Barrel Guesses took up half of page 10. Guesses for when the barrel on the still-frozen Fremont Lake would reach the shore range from 4:10 p.m. on March 20 to 4:30 p.m. on June 10. The winner, like always, would take home a cash prize.

On page 11, a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin read, “If you scatter thorns, don’t go barefoot.”

According to the classifieds, you could buy a 1700 square-foot custom cedar home for $235,000.

*****

In 1908, C. Watt Brandon traded in his Pinedale Roundup for a good chunk of land and a tobacco pouch full of elk teeth offered by Billy Wells, well known in the Green River Valley as one of the first dude ranchers in Wyoming. Elk teeth was as good as money in the early 1900s, because they contained ivory.

“I have taken an interest in my work, and that which has been news has been treated as such,” Brandon wrote in an editorial on Jan. 1, announcing the sale. “… but at the same time there have been many occurrences and doings, which would have been considered news by many, but the publication of anything in connection therewith would have caused much unpleasantness and sorrow possibly in homes. Many of these things we have refrained from making news of.”

Brandon moved south to start a new newspaper in Kemmerer, Wyo, another lonely town he saw in need of stirring up promise. He never lived on the Wells ranch. “One good paper can do much to advance the interests and resources of this country and through the local columns keep the people of the various communities in touch with each other,” he wrote in his farewell editorial to Pinedale.

After four years, Wells would sell the newspaper to Charles F. Patterson, the son of the town’s founder, John F. Patterson. Charles Patterson used the newspaper to advocate for the town’s incorporation and wide scale improvement. “A thousand bucks a year should make Pinedale a swell place to live,” Patterson wrote in an August 30, 1911, editorial. “Possibly we could have enough out of that thousand a year, to in time give us a system of water works, a street lighting system … Let’s get the town ‘wise heads’ together and debate the matter.”

I graduated from Pinedale High School in 2002 and left Wyoming to pursue a degree in English at a liberal arts school halfway across the country. My college years unfolded less than two hours from Brandon’s former news post in Minneapolis. On July 31, 2006, both the Pinedale Roundup and the Sublette Examiner were sold to Wyoming Newspapers, Inc. According to the Examiner article, News Media Corporation Chief Executive Officer John Tompkins made the Examiner partners “an offer they couldn’t refuse, including a pledge to work with the community to continue to grow this community newspaper.” With the acquisition of the Pinedale Roundup and the Sublette Examiner, Wyoming Newspapers, Inc. owned 11 newspapers across the state.

Both local newspapers still go to press each week: The Examiner is published on Fridays, still its hallmark Lincoln quote: To sin by silence, when one should protest, makes cowards out of men. The Roundup comes out on Tuesdays. Both operate under one staff, in an old wood building on the west end of town that once housed the Pinedale Bible church. The building itself is for sale.

Volume 19, Issue 16 of the Sublette Examiner cost $1. In it, you’ll read that the Bondurant BBQ’s secret beans recipe calls for 25 pounds of bacon and 7 pounds of dry beans. The mushroom harvest in the Bridger Teton National Forest will be extended. Harvesters are allowed to gather 3 gallons without a permit and for no fee. A permit is required for commercial harvesters, costs $300 and is good for 14 days.

At 7:54 p.m. on June 25, a rancher moving 300 head of cattle called to ask for traffic control for the following morning. On June 26 just before 11 p.m., a caller reported an injured moose on the highway that needed to be put down. An injured hawk was seen south of town on June 27. On June 28, a herd of antelope ran in front of a driver on Paradis Road and one got all wrapped up in the fence, but finally got free. Later that day, the paper reported, “a caller said a steer’s head was stuck at the fairgrounds.”

“That paper is about as fat as it ever gets anymore,” my mom said. Volume 19, Issue 16 is 16 pages. The Roundup is usually less, with mostly the same stories.

In July, my dad (now retired from Bucky’s), husband, two boys and I spent five days in the Wind River Mountains on a pack trip that was every bit as wild as I imagined it would be.

“This would have been news 100 years ago,” my dad said as we swatted mosquitoes and stared at the blue-tongued campfire one night. It’s not news now, of course, and I don’t blame anyone for that. No one is interested anymore in who is in town visiting with whom, or what the garden club talked about at its monthly meeting. We all have bigger fish to fry. What might be newsworthy about our trip is that our seasoned guide sees less and less kids in this rugged wilderness country. Why is it that fewer and fewer families are choosing to spend their vacation time outdoors in hard-to-navigate, slimly populated places?

To me, the role of a local newspaper has always been about conversation. But it’s also been about quenching curiosity. A good reporter will ask the questions that everyone is asking. But then, she will keep asking questions, because answers lead her like breadcrumbs down the path of a good story.

For my hometown newspapers, I envision a restoration of old stories, both for entertainment and for historic preservation of place and time. Brandon founded the Pinedale Roundup and the same time a town itself was being founded. That meant that a community and a way to get to the community were occurring side-by-side.

“We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper,” Richard Rodriguez said in an interview with Harper’s Magazine in 2009.

But places still ask questions, and people long to understand their connections to a place.

It used to be that a local newspaper was a civic need. Is it still?

It used to be that a newspaper was the strongest indicator of a community’s survival and progress. Is it still?

“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” said Arthur Miller. I would like to think that a good newspaper is a community talking to itself.

Now, whenever I come home, the pale colors of the high country, the shadowy, jagged sweep of mountains and the big bright sky stir up a restless nostalgia inside me. Place prompts questions: How long has the Corral Bar on Main Street been for sale, and why are the current owners selling? Who in Sublette County has any dream of taking over that bar, the long-thriving business that takes in whipped cowboys and biker tourists and 20-somethings, slick with oil from the field and barely above the drinking age?

I want to believe that community news matters still. I want to believe that reporters and editors, photographers and publishers, are genuinely and fiercely interested in the power of story, and the way that stories and communication bring people together. I was, and still am, an idealist.

What conversations are taking place now?

I will always believe in the power of story. Stories connect people. Through them, we realize we are more alike than we are different. Of that, I am sure.

The post Tracing a Community in Conversation (a personal essay celebrating my beloved hometown newspaper, which abruptly shut down on Aug. 6, 2025) appeared first on Kate Meadows Writing & Editing.