Devil's Gate: Owning the Land, Owning the Story

by Tom Rea

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 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.

310 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 20, 2006

Reviews

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting history of "oregon trail" based on one place along that route, sweetwater river valley in central wyoming. lots of stuff happened there, and also not much in that out-of-the-way place. indians and all kinds of game lived there, jackson photographed it, fremont measured it, sun family started stores and toll bridges there, mormon hand carters died in droves there, usa reclamation dept built dams there, fat cat ranchers lynched competition there, mormons bought gentile ranches there, boy scouts had a blowout jamboree there, and "old timers" based their pulp books there, and blm sold them to them. annie proulx even built a house there. author's conceit is how euros objectified the land transforming it from a given like air, relatives, water, into a commodity to be measured, gridded, owned, stolen, and each successive meaning is layered over the top like sheets of water,one over the other. power usually gets to tell that meaning too, but not always. some of the rocks there are independence rock, devils gate, simenoe hills, whiskey gap, south pass. paperback a reprint of original 2006 hb.

[Memphis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very illuminating history of a place that could've easily been dismissed as the middle of nowhere. Women going West, Mormons, Indians, Boy Scouts all mark histories here. I like stories about the amazing wagon trails that shaped the country. As an East Coaster they seem a little exotic and always make me wonder if I would've had the guts/grit/desire to do such a thing.