By Phil Roberts, 8-14-2026
When brother David was just starting his newspaper, the Medicine Bow Post, he received quite a number of tips about people or places that might be interesting to readers–in a coal-uranium-oil boomtown (once a center for cattle and sheep) that had been without a newspaper for a half century when he set up shop in 1977. Just at the dawn of the age of computerized typesetting, David spent every waking moment talking to people for news stories, human-interest features, writing them for print, typesetting, selling ads, designing the ads to the customer’s approval, and handling subscriptions and mail out.
He asked me one day if I could come out from Cheyenne and interview what sounded to be an interesting person who raised coyotes in a boxcar on the plains, a few dozen miles north of Rock River along the dirt road dead-ending at his place. As any curious person would do, how could I resist? David (but for his tight print schedule, would have enjoyed doing the interview himself)) had spoken to the man’s sister(?), niece (?) by phone from where she lived in Laramie. Harry didn’t have a phone, but she went up there about every weekend to take him his mail and she’d check to see if he’d like doing it. Answer came back the next week: an enthusiastic “yes.”
Off I went on the scheduled day. It was easy to find his place, (“Just get on the dirt road and when you run out of road, you’re there.”)
Harry, in his 70s and of slight build, came out to greet me as I pulled up in his yard. He was wearing bib overalls, laced work boots and an implement company-labeled cap. At first, I thought the little pup chewing at his shoelaces was a dog. As he walked me into his boxcar-house, he cautioned me that this little coyote pup was friendly, but the dozen or so inside of various ages were still mostly wild. He said he didn’t want to become too attached to them because he was raising them for their pelts. He explained that when he first got into the business some years before, the bunch liked living with him so well that the entire group all became his friends (and with each other). Even though he knew he shouldn’t do it, he started giving them each a name. When it came time to turn them into pelts, “I cried for days,” he admitted.
While the published story would be mostly about his unusual “roommates,” he told some stories about living so far from the nearest town. Some nights, particularly in the winter, he said, he would light the kerosene lamp, throw another handful of coal into the stove, and braid some horsehair rope. As he showed me his latest remarkable, tightly-wound length (“almost-finished”), he told me he learned the skill from “an old guy he knew over in Rawlins” who learned how to braid the rope in the state penitentiary in Rawlins. That fellow had learned it from a guy who Tom Horn taught before he was hanged in 1903 inside the Laramie County Jail in Cheyenne on the “Julian gallows”!
David asked me about the interview. “It was great, but I kept my eye out for his roommates who, lucky for me, weren’t hungry that afternoon!”
