A living rendezvous with history

The archaeologist in me is continually amazed at how many people currently living in this Valley have ties to the earliest families, ranches and named places in the Platte River Valley and surrounding mountains.

Even before I began working with the paper, I made friends with Judy Bellamy who’s father-in-law was the surveyor who named Lake Marie and many other spots up in the Snowy Range.

Having worked on hundreds of historic archaeological sites in Wyoming, I have always had an interest in who had the cojones to homestead up here and be the first people to map and name places, apart from the A...