I was disappointed we didn’t find the remains of a dugout near the confluence of Crooked Creek and the Nowood River.
Entering from the lower right, Crooked Creek is tiny, about as wide as Indy is long, but many parts of it are a good three feet down from the top of the bank. Vernon had an idea of where to look for the Lord’s house but we had to take a big detour around Crooked Creek to get there in the side by side.
Only 20 yards from the creek, almost completely surrounded by the old cuts of old sloughs, was the scattered stones of the Lord’s cabin’s foundation.
The round depression may have been a dugout cellar for storage.
A rectangular foundation can barely be seen, but if we are right, this is the place. We looked around and wondered, why?
Why so close to the creek with four little kids? Even if the creek has moved, it still would have been pretty close! We’ve seen the Nowood flood many times… and you’re too (IMO) close even with the elevation protecting you a bit. Also all those sloughs would be filled with water, leaving you living in a nest of mosquito pools. You could irrigate a garden, but we couldn’t quite make out where you could put one close to the house. Hauling rocks for the foundation, driving a team and wagon up into the mountains to cut and haul logs for a cabin… so much work!
I’m going to check a book at the library to see if I can find any more details about the Lord family. If I can’t find anything about them and I have no luck finding issues of the Wyoming magazine, I guess we will have to leave this story alone. It will become another quiet chapter in the book of homesteading in Wyoming.
