The Indian Wars Refought

      ONE SUMMER DAY AROUND THE TURN OF THE LAST century, two men in overalls, one holding a roofing hammer, stood in a Casper street and looked at a new building.

      “I guess that’ll show the cow crowd who’s got the big sugar in this town,” said one.

      The other man smiled as though testing his lips and said, “One or two, maybe. You should a went into lawyerin, Verge, it’d be your buildin we are puttin up.”

      “Rather have a ranch. That’s where the real money lays.” “There he is right now,” said the man with the hammer, nodding at the tall frock-coated figure striding toward them with his scissory gait. He did not look at them but at the building.

      “Well, well, boys,” said lawyer Gay G. Brawls. “That’s the queen of Casper, and we’re the ones put her up.”

      In the decades after statehood every Wyoming town had to have at least one imposing building. These banks, courthouses, opera halls, hotels, railroad stations, and commercial buildings were constructed of local-quarry stone, of concrete blocks shaped to resemble stone, and some were iron-fronts ordered from catalogs. Few have held on to their original purpose and so today a cell phone company operates incongruously in a handsome opera house, and the ornate Sweetwater Brewery is occupied by a fence company.

      The iron-front Brawls Commercial gave the impression of a kind of extravagant prosperity, surrounded as it was by flimsy false-front wood structures. The various parts of the building—handsome cornice, pilasters that separated windows and doors, a lintel stamped with Egyptian motifs separating the ground floor from the upper story—had all been shipped by railroad from St. Louis. A neoclassical entry with garlanded cornices and inset colored glass distinguished the front. On that summer day in 1900 lawyer Gay G. Brawls carried his own papers to his new office upstairs. The ground floor housed a dry-goods shop behind the town’s first plate-glass window and featured bolts of calico, fustian, and trimmings. In the back was an up-to-date selection of men’s suits, which the proprietor, Mr. Isaac Frasket, altered to fit the broad-shouldered, small-waisted cowboys who plunged for the outfits. He paid an extra rent to store hatboxes and millinery supplies in one of the rooms on the second floor, side by side with boxes of old depositions, wills, and case notes.

      Brawls’ practice was busy and select. The best-known of his clients was William F. Cody—Buffalo Bill. Lawyer Brawls, in concert with other legal beagles, helped the showman teeter along the edges of his various bankruptcies occasioned by business dealings with the infamous Denver newspaper and circus entrepreneurs, Bonfils and Tammen.

      Lawyer Brawls, thirty-three years old when his building went up, had long horseman’s legs, black hair as fine as cat fur, and a beard shadow like a mask. He was almost a handsome man, his appearance spoiled only by a reddish mole on his left eyelid, but the brilliant aquamarine color of his irises pulled attention away from that flaw. He seemed made for the saddle but suffered an allergy to horses at a time when horses were transportation. Even ten minutes in an open carriage set his eyes streaming and a clenching headache ricocheting behind his eyes, so he walked everywhere, and if a destination was too far to travel by shank’s mare he didn’t go. He owned one of the first motorcars in Casper.

      In 1919 Mr. Frasket, the old dry-goods merchant, died and his corpse was shipped back east. An ice cream parlor rented the premises and became a popular gathering place. Seven months later Gay G. Brawls himself, on his way back up to his office after a lemon phosphate, dropped some business folders on the stairs, stumbled and slipped on them, cracked his head, and after a week in a coma, died at age fifty-three.

      His son, Archibald Brawls, also a lawyer, and as tall and dark as his father and with the same blue eyes and born-to-the-saddle cowboy good looks except for a mouthful of bad teeth, moved into the second-floor offices. His hours in the dentist’s chair taught him something of pain.

      “Mr. Brawls,” said the dentist, “I can make you a good set a nutcrackers, pull out these diseased teeth, and after she heals up, with the new plates you’ll be free from pain forever. And the new set will look good, not like these bad gappy ones.”

      “Do it,” said Brawls, and within a month his bad old ivories had been replaced with dentures that seemed carved from a glacier.

      Archibald Brawls’ business was lively in the 1920s, despite his youth. He acted for an important rancher north of Casper, a man with political connections whose deeded land abutted the Emergency Naval Oil Reserve No. 3, just then becoming infamous as Teapot Dome. The rancher, John Bucklin, had more than once dined with the Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, a political animal who wrested control of the reserve away from the Navy and then leased it to oilman Harry Sinclair in a classic sweetheart deal. Fall was a man who disdained the nascent conservation movement in favor of full-throttle resource exploitation, setting a certain tone for the future. Big money changed hands and Bucklin worried about being swept into the government’s dustpan of investigation. The accumulating legal paper crowded Brawls’ office. But, as he said, showing his icy smile, it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody a little good. The Teapot scandal was a turning point in his career, and after Fall went to prison, young lawyer Brawls’ interests shifted from petty affairs such as deeds and wills to representation of timber and oil interests, railroads, irrigation rights settlement, and the wonderfully cloudy law of mineral leases.

      He increased his storage space, stacking his father’s papers and books in the back of a deep closet. He added his own legal junk, the boxes jammed high and tight.

      He made money all through the Depression. Others in Natrona County got rich as well. While the rest of the country was suffering dust storms and bread lines, Casper enjoyed a flood of oil profits. It set off a building boom. The Brawls Commercial was no longer the premier structure in the town.

      In 1939 Archibald Brawls bought a ranch north of Casper—the former property of Bucklin, whom he had counseled in the Teapot Dome affair—and on weekends began to live the life of a distinguished rancher. It pleased him to improve his herd with pedigreed stock. The property was mostly yardang and trough, the tops of the ridges shaved smooth by eons of westerlies. It lay just on the northern edge of the great wind corridor that sweeps the state from the Red Desert to the Nebraska border. But, although Brawls and his wife, Kate, a blond with a face she had clipped from a magazine and the caramel eyes of a lizard, entertained important politicians and ranchers, although their New Year’s galas and Fourth of July ranch barbecues were great events in Wyoming society, somehow their lives were tragic. Brawls wanted to build up a ranch kingdom with