17,757 Acres Conserved in Carbon County

From the Wyoming Stock Growers Association Land Trust.

Kendra Mitchell, Administration & Communications Manager (307) 772-8751 kendra@wsglt.org FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE   17,757 Acres Conserved in Carbon County Cheyenne, WY – Nov. 4, 2025 – On October 29, 2025, the Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust and Ryan Lance, President and Manager of the Pathfinder Sand Creek Ranch, finalized a conservation easement to permanently protect 17,757 acres in Carbon County— safeguarding productive agricultural land, vital wildlife habitats, and historic open-spaces.   “The conservation of the Pathfinder Sand Creek Ranch builds on generations of stewardship that define Wyoming’s history,” said Executive Director, Christine Adams. “Through our wonderful partnership with the Pathfinder Sand Creek Ranch, we’re ensuring that this working landscape continues to support agriculture, wildlife habitat, and open space for generations to come. Together, we honor the legacy of those who came before us while conserving the Wyoming we love for the future.” Located near the historic Sweetwater and North Platte Rivers, the Pathfinder Sand Creek Ranch is rich in both agricultural and cultural heritage. The property sits at the heart of one of Wyoming’s most historically significant landscapes — where the Oregon, Mormon, Pioneer, and California Trails, collectively known as the Emigrant Trail, cross its northern boundary. These routes once guided nearly half a million travelers heading west from the early 1800s through the 1860s, leaving a lasting imprint on the land and Wyoming’s history. Just 10 miles west of the property lies Independence Rock, a famed waypoint along the Oregon Trail where more than 5,000 emigrants carved or painted their names into the granite outcrop, marking their passage through the frontier. Nearby landmarks such as Devil’s Gate and Martin’s Cove — both recognized for their importance to the Mormon handcart pioneers — further underscore the area’s deep historical and cultural significance. The Pathfinder Sand Creek Ranch also played a role in Wyoming’s early ranching history, with its roots tracing back to the 1870s Tom Sun Ranch and Albert J. Bothwell, who began acquiring land in the Sweetwater Valley in the 1880s. Bothwell’s endeavors in agriculture, irrigation, and settlement helped shape the region’s ranching traditions and contributed to key moments in Wyoming’s territorial history, including the era of open-range conflicts that culminated in the Johnson County Cattle War of 1892. Today, the Pathfinder Sand Creek Ranch continues its agricultural legacy as a working cattle operation. The land supports a mix of yearling and cow/calf pairs that graze across its extensive rangeland pastures. In addition to its ranching operations, the Sweetwater River Conservancy Conservation Bank (SRCCB) operates on the property to support a healthy, intact greater sage-grouse population. The SRCCB’s conservation efforts benefit far more than sage-grouse; it also enhances habitat for elk, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, 34 species of waterfowl, including 16 migratory shorebird species, along with numerous small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. “Pathfinder is pleased to partner with the Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust on the conservation easement on the Sand Creek Ranch,” said Lance. “The protections created through the conservation easement will not only ensure that greater sage-grouse and other habitats are safeguarded in perpetuity, but the deep agricultural heritage of the ranch endures in future generations.” The Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust is honored to continue working with landowners who share a dedication to conserving Wyoming’s working lands and the history they represent.

###  The Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust is dedicated to conservation through ranching. Based in Cheyenne, the non-profit organization serves the entire state and is Wyoming’s only agricultural land trust. Through partnerships with families, the Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust holds and stewards agricultural conservation easements on more than 307,000 acres of land throughout Wyoming. Founded in 2000 by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, it is one of the largest regional land trusts in the United States.     For more information, visit wsglt.org

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, November 3, 1945. Wyoming Game Wardens Game Wardens Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson murdered.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, November 3, 1945. Chinese Civil War, G...: China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict and two Game Wardens were found dead near Rawlins. The Chinese Civil War w...

Linked over from Lex Anteinternet, which also discussed the Chinese Civil War.

Saturday, November 3, 1945. Chinese Civil War, Game Wardens Killed.

China's civil war was acknowledged now to be a major conflict and two Game Wardens were found dead near Rawlins.

The Chinese Civil War was the topic of a political cartoon as well.

The murdered Game Wardens were Bill Lakanen and Don Simpson who were killed by ardent Nazi sympathizer and German immigrant Johann Malten.   The same Game Wardens had arrested Malten for game violations when investigating, interestingly enough, claims that Malten had been involved in espionage and was relaying weather reports on shortwave, something that was illegal during the war when there was a blackout on weather reporting as the information was useful to submarines.  Upon visiting Malten's cabin in the Sierra Madres they found he had committed numerous game violations.

On this occasion they were stopping by to see if Malten had continued to ignore the law.  They were shot down out of hand when they arrived.

Malten burned his cabin down and it was officially reported that he'd died within it, although the evidence of that is very poor.  There were reported sightings of him for years thereafter.

And a selection of 1945 cartoons.

I knew about this story because former Wyoming Game Warden David Bragonier wrote about it in his book about Wyoming Game Wardens, Wild Journey: On the Trail With a Wyoming Game Warden in Yellowstone Country.  It's a good book, and I recommend it.

Bragonier discusses this event, although I clearly don't remember everything I read in his account.  That's probably not too surprising as I read the book in 1999.  What I recall but didn't see in the accounts on the murder you can find here is that the investigation was associated not only with the killer's German nationality and his strong Nazi sympathies, but also with shortwave radio transmissions that could not be pinned down.  

There's a bunch of interesting things that could, and if a person had time, should be explored here as the story raises all sorts of undeveloped oddities.

One of them is that Lakanen and Simpson are two out of the three Wyoming Game Wardens who were murdered by immigrants (to the extent I know why the various ones who lost their lives in the line of duty did).  I'm not saying that immigrants murder game wardens, but this is an interesting fact.  The other one is John Buxton, who was murdered by a youthful Austrian immigrant in 1919.  In that instance he had taken a .30-30 Savage rifle from a 17 year old who drew a revolver and killed him.  The reasons that Buxton was checking the boys is unclear.  Stories frequently claim they were hunting out of season, but that seems incorrect.  They were certainly overarmed for rabbits, however, with a .30-30 being way too large for that pursuit.  Buxton might have been checking them as their activities seems suspicious, which frankly they do, or because there was a state law at the time that prohibited aliens from carrying firearms.

The killers handgun, we might note, was concealed.

I only note this as its odd.  Hunting is common in Germany and Austria, and indeed there's a strong hunting culture there, but it's highly regulated.  As a result, poaching is fairly common as well, even though its highly criminal.  Indeed, one of the SS's units during World War Two, the Dirlewanger Brigade, was originally made up of convicted poachers, although it moved on to other criminals over time.

Anyhow, I wonder if these people were just hugely out of sink with any culture at all.

In the earlier murder, it's been noted that the young men had been in run-ins apparently with Italian immigrants in the same location. Austro Hungaria and Italy had been on opposite sides of World War One.  Again, I'm not saying that caused the murder, but I do wonder if they conceived of themselves as being very much on the outside of things.

Another interesting thing, although having nothing to do with the focus on this page, is the lingering Nazi sympathies in some quarters amongst German immigrants who chose to continue to live in the country.  That carried on, quietly, well after the war, even after the news of the Holocaust became known.

Odd.

If Malten was actually a spy, that may explain the killing in and of itself.

Another thing this story oddly brings up is the extent to which trapping remained economically viable.

Trapping was pretty common in Wyoming up into the 1970s, when there was a fur market price collapse.  I had, well still have, traps, although I haven't set them for decades.  In the 1970s high school kids like myself supplemented our incomes by trapping or hunting coyotes for their furs.  The market was so lucrative at the time that there were people who flew in from out of state and hunted coyotes near Miracle Miles, something we didn't appreciate very much as we didn't have those sorts of resources available to us.  The Federal Government was also big into predator control at the time which we also didn't appreciate much for the same reason.

Furs are, fwiw, an actual renewable resource fabric, one of the few.

Fur coats were a big deal for women at this time and would, again, be throughout the 1950s.  They were not nearly as much of a luxury item as people like to remember.  My mother had a heavy mink coat that she brought down from Montreal that she wore on really cold days.  As a kid I loved it when she brought it out, due to the feel of the soft minks.  

It was, in spite of Donald Trump and the Sweet Home Alabama crowe dof the GOP may believe, colder then.

I've never looked into it but I suspect that synthetic fabrics had as much to do with the decline in furs as anything else.  That started during World War Two and is well evidenced by the Air Force's switch from sheepskin flight altitude flight jackets to synthetic ones.  That trend continue into the 1950s and I suspect it just generally caught up with fur coats by the 1980s.  Indeed, the association of fur with luxury somewhat increased in that time, with it generally being the case that things are regarded as luxurious not only for their scarcity, but because they really aren't needed.

More on fur clothing some other time.

I guess the final thing I'll note is how dangerous of job being a game warden is.  A lot of the crimes you investigate are, by default, armed crimes.  

Given that, it's amazing to look back and realize that when I was a kid wardens didn't carry sidearms.  They weren't allowed to.  I recall when that changed and many did not take up what was then the option to carry them.  Now they're required to.

Indeed, I was recently stopped by a warden and frankly he wasn't very nice.  That's a new trend as well.  I don't like it.  But not only was he not nice, he was extremely intimidating carrying a government issued handgun on a government issued gunbelt and wearing a government issued flak jacket.  

I've really hated the militarization of the policy and this is all part of it. Everytime I see a policeman anymore, including a game warden, they're dressed like they're going into Hue in 1968.  All policemen of every type are civilians.  They're simply deputized civilians.  They shouldn't look like an occupying army.  And if the treat people rudely, and many do, and are standing their armed treating you like you are a detained Vietnamese villager, it's scary.

A little of that comes across, I'd note, in Bragonier's book, in spite of my recommendation of it.  It's a good book, but he displayed an element of contempt for the public he served in it.

David Bragonier must be, I'd suspect, gone to his reward by now  His biography indicates that he was born in Iowa in 1937 and moved to Wyoming after graduating high school.  He became a game warden over twenty years later, in 1958, something that would be extremely difficult to do now due to the education requirements.  He briefly worked for the Forest Service before that.

A man becoming a Game Warden at 39, which he did, would be really unusual now.  Probably impossible.

I actually have twice tried to plow that field myself, rejecting it once as I just go engaged.  I would have been about 30 at the time.  It'd be completely impossible for me to become a Game Warden now as I not have a wildlife management degree.  I suppose that requiring that specific degree is a good thing, but I do miss the days when a lot of Game Wardens were basically from ranching families.  Even when I was that age, many of them fit that category.  My cohort was probably about the last one that would meet that description.

I went on, of course, to a successful career in the law, and I was already a lawyer, of course at age 30, and had been for a few years.  I took one fork in the road.  You aren't supposed to look back.  Luke tells us, in a different context, that "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God".  I'll confess I've looked back a lot.

Having said all of that, I spoke the same warden (turns out he's very green) as I found a poached elk about two weeks later.  I had to guide him in, by phone, to the location.  He was very nice on that occasion, and that's how things should be.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, November 4, 1945. Goose Hunters on the Cover of Parade.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, November 4, 1945. Independent Smallholde...: The Independent Smallholders Party won the Hungarian parliamentary elections. Contrary to what is commonly assumed, Eastern Europe didn'...

The Sunday Parade magazine installment to newspapers across the country had a man and woman on the cover, goose hunting.  This cover, posted under the fair use exception, shows how widely hunting remained part of the culture before the post war relentless advance of urbanization cut into it.

The man is carrying a Browning Auto 5 or the Remington equivalent of it.    The device on the barrel of the shotgun on the right is a Cutts Compensator, which was designed to reduce recoil and in later versions allowed for changeable chokes.