
Home Again
Listen now.
Series.
Back in the 1930’s, a trading post swapped Northern Arapaho artifacts for food and other basic necessities. Decades later, a descendent opened boxes in a storage room of the Episcopal Church in Laramie, Wyoming. There, she found a photo of her grandfather, Chief Yellow Calf.
“And so I talked to my grandfather, and I said, 'Grandfather, is there something that I'm supposed to do here? Show me. Guide me.'”
80 years later, the church has finally returned the artifacts to the tribe. We attend the ceremony.
The local newspaper, the Pinedale Roundup, didn't break the wolf torture story. Why not? Because last winter, News Media Corporation that now owns the paper laid off everyone at the paper except the editor, Cali O'Hare, to run the entire show by herself. It’s part of the corporate consolidation of local news. There’s now a national effort to stop these legacy papers from becoming “ghost papers." One woman's story of running a paper in the middle of breaking international news.
It’s been a year since a man brought an injured wolf into a bar in Sublette County, Wyoming. What does it tell us about how small-town life is changing? A very personal story from the perspective of someone who grew up there.
Some people are getting creative about solving their affordable housing problems by building unusual homes like straw bale or modular. Here's one woman who went modular: "The pretty good house concept is generally like, 'where's that sweet spot of balancing higher levels of performance and cost.'"
Wyoming economist Samuel Western is a master at tracing back the beginnings of issues in the American West. He’s an economist with a deep fascination for history and culture that get at “the gray in between” in truly revelatory ways. He talks with host Melodie Edwards about his new book The Spirit of 1889.