What’s in a name?

by Doug Crowe
Tuesday, October 2, 2007 2:00 PM MDT

A while back, I was musing about street names, which goes to show you how bored I was at the time.

Why are our streets named as they are? Some are obvious, of course -- the use of letters (A Street, B Street, etc.) and numbers (First Street, Second Street, etc.) for example. Also, numerous dead presidents (and one live vice president) have been honored by having a Casper street named for them.

More recently, as our fair city has expanded into various subdivisions, the use of wildly obfuscatory terms has come into vogue.

After all, descriptively named streets such as Godforsaken Alkali Flat, Shifting Sand Dune or Windswept Gravel Ridge could hardly be expected to stimulate home sales.

It would be better to employ euphemistic monikers like Cuddly Puppies Drive or Laughing Falls Circle or Kissing Breezes Way.

However, my personal favorite "street-naming protocol" is the longstanding Casper tradition of honoring craven killers. Take Wolcott Street, for example. It was named for Major Frank Wolcott, who managed the VR Ranch east of Casper in the late 19th century.

Major Wolcott was an instigator and planner of what came to be known as the Johnson County Cattle War.

He went on to lead the force of cattle barons and hired Texas guns that invaded northern Wyoming with the intent of "exterminating all who were thought to be rustlers."

They planned to march to Buffalo, seize the courthouse and the arms of the militia stored therein and then proceed with their gruesome work.

On their way, they encountered Nate Champion and Nick Ray at the KC Ranch. Both men were killed on Major Wolcott's orders, and the "invaders" moved on toward Buffalo.

Two days later, these invaders were trapped at the TA Ranch south of Buffalo and surrounded by enraged Johnson County citizens.

They escaped annihilation only through a last-minute rescue by the U.S. Calvary (the invaders were lousy tacticians, but they had good political contacts).

Even after all this, Major Wolcott remained obsessed with the idea of a bloodbath in northern Wyoming and vowed, "The bloodshed has not yet begun."

And then there is Durbin Street. John Durbin was one of a party of six men who lynched Ellen “Ella” Watson and James Averell in southwestern Natrona County on July 20, 1889.

In her book, “The War on Powder River,” Helena Huntington Smith describes this hanging as "probably the most revolting crime in the entire annals of the West."

All of the men involved in this travesty were well connected politically. This, coupled with the disappearance of every witness to the crime, allowed them to avoid prosecution.

Durbin was, however, wounded by Frank Buchanan, who had followed the lynching party and tried to stop it. He subsequently snuck off to Rawlins, where he caught the next train to Cheyenne to avoid arrest.

Later, he was named to the executive committee of the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association. Ultimately, however, he sold his Wyoming holdings and moved to Colorado.

So I'm thinkin', why not resurrect this tradition? The way the city is growing, there will be lots of new streets to name. And there is certainly a considerable pool of modern-day homicidal maniacs from which to draw.

How about Manson Street ... or Bundy Avenue ... or Jeffrey Dahmer Boulevard ... or maybe John Wayne Gacy Way?

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