On November 12th the museum held a successful open house with many visitors. We sold some great Christmas gifts from our gift shop and enjoyed seeing our friends and supporters. Thank you for all the support!

Our museum gift shop recently added many beautiful items from artist Mary Cunningham, former Kaycee resident for many years. We hope you stop in and take a look. These are perfect for gifts or just to treat yourself.

We enjoyed a beautiful day on Powder River east of Kaycee seeing the sites of the Bozeman Trail and other early frontier sites. Thank you to all who attended in support of the museum, and all the landowners, speakers, and volunteers who made the day possible. Thank you!

The museum had a great turn out for the presentation by historical author Tom Rea on March 5th. The presentation covered everything from the ancient peoples that once inhabited the famous valley to the more recently famous, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We will continue with some additional related tidbits and stories on Facebook if you would like to learn more. If you would like to purchase Rea’s book, please contact the museum at 307-738-2381. We appreciate all of our followers and supporters!

If you have not been to the museum in a while, you may want to visit and see two of our newest displays.

One of the new display cases features the role of rodeo in Kaycee, and local rodeo stars such as Deke Lathum, Larry Sandvick, and Chris Ledoux. Artifacts in the display include chaps worn by Larry Sandvick while winning rodeos as well as artifacts associated with the Deke Lathum Memorial Rodeo and Chris Ledoux’s career.

The second new display case reorganizes and better displays all of the items associated with many of our local pioneer women. There are many small personal items that are now much easier to view, as well as unique jewelry, pins, and dresses. There are several beautiful quilts, and artifacts belonging to many other early local women.

Thank you to all our tour attendees and volunteers for making our annual Hole in the Wall tour a success and an enjoyable day. The weather was absolutely perfect. Thank you everyone!

And for those who wanted our 34 year old recipe for coleslaw that was served at lunch, here it is:

Lunch at the Hole in the Wall

Cole Slaw  for  50-60 people

 5 heads cabbage, grated or sliced fine

5 green peppers

5 onions  (medium)

set aside

5 cups Apple Cider Vinegar

5 cups Oil

2 1/2 cups Sugar

10 TBLSP. honey

10 tsp. salt

5 tsp. celery seed

Bring these ingredients to a boil, boil for a few minutes then pour over the slaw.  DO NOT STIR until cool.

With support from the Wyoming State Historical Records Advisory Board, the museum recently preserved digitally 40 VHS and audio cassette tapes in a digital format. This short example clip shows Bob Winingar speaking about his Dad in WWI, along with museum interviewer Sandy Dixon and Brock Hanson reads a short poem written by Bob’s Dad.

Over the last year, the museum has been working with the Kaycee Community Voice to preserve and share the many historical interviews that ran in the paper over the years. The Voice gathered all the articles together, retyping in some cases, and gave them to the museum to put into a book format. The text had to be formatted for consistency, readability and printing as well as edited for any spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. The articles were ordered by date, and a table of contents and index were added. The book is 303 pages, and just as the original interviews were wonderful to read, so is this book. The reader will know many of the people, places and families, but may not know how amazing some of these people were or are. If you want to know Kaycee history and all the fascinating early history of the area this is a great start. It is for sale, at the museum, for $20 plus tax. Since we are closed until May, we will have it available at the annual talk on February 16^th or call the museum and we will arrange to get it to you on a staff workday at the museum or by mail. All proceeds support the museum.