Reprint of this story from the July 12, 1888 issue of the Platte Valley Lyre brought to you courtesy of Grandma’s Cabin, Encampment, Wyoming. Preserving History - Serving the Community.
A few miles above Saratoga there enters the Platte from the east Cedar Creek. This stream is generous in its gift of water supply to its valley, comprising in fact three creeks, all of great and rushing volume, via: Cedar creek proper, and the North and the South Fork. Cedar creek proper being nine miles in length, and each of the forks about seven, making a total water traverse of twenty-three miles.
Lying immediately in the mouth of Cedar creek, on the banks of the Platte, is the fine ranch of W.E. Meason. This ranch is hay producing, and is most prolific and extensive in yield. Just above the ranch of Meason senior, George Meason has many and valuable hay acres, and immediately adjoining is the ferlie 160 acre hay and grain ranch of Arthur Couzens. From the boundary line of the Couzens’ place there stretches away through and up the broad Cedar creek valley the extensive holding of E. E. Bernard. This gentleman is applying an industry and energy almost phenomenal to the development of his rich and many acres. He has between thirty and forty acres under the plow, and they produce grain and vegetable in prolific yield and variety.
Mr. Bernard has been making experiments with winter rye, and is enthusiastic over the result, and is confident that winter rye has a great future in the Platte Valley, both as a grain producers and as a source of winter pasturage. On the 15th of last August Mr. Bernard sowed his experimental rye. The grain came up in the most satisfactory manner, and stooled finely. Last winter it was kept eaten to the ground by stock; this spring it ran up vigorously, and at the present writing has attained a height of four feet, with ears six inches in length and stools numbering as high as forty two stalks each.
Mr. Bernard has a fine garden in which grow in profusion and maturity peas, radishes, turnips, etc., and the Fourth of July saw new potatoes on the ranch table. Mr. Bernard is a successful grower of timothy, and is making flattering experiments with alfalfa.
Above the Bernard place are the broad and rich uplands belonging to J. B. Hassett. This ranch, new and fresh at present, will in the course of a few years be one of the most valuable in the Platte region. Mr. Hassett has already built a good dwelling house on the ranch, done considerable fencing, and taken out a quarter of a mile of a ditch. From the upper line of the Hassett place it is four miles to the foothills, and these four miles traverse hundreds of fertile upland acres as yet awaiting owners and great grain future.
Once in the foothills and the magnificent dairy promise of Cedar creek is visible on all sides. Long, swelling upland slopes, clothed with the most succulent of range grasses, and beautiful parks spread deep with natural hay and graced with dancing waters are met at every turn, while groves of pine and spruce of sturdy and thick-set growth offer to stock shelter in winter and shade in summer. Amid the foot hills of Cedar creek one moves in a vision of rich cream, golden butter, cool buttermilk and palate tickling cheese.
Passing upward and through the foot hill region there is beheld close at hand the dark green of a mighty timber growth. Here the gift of Nature is indeed munificent, and the dense and far-spreading pine and spruce forests of the mountain sources of Cedar creek will long and bountifully supply the rapidly growing lumber want of the great valley of the Platte.
But magnificent and extensive as is the timber growth of the sources of Cedar creek it is but an episode in Platte Valley timber capacity – an incident in the Platte Valley lumber supply. The pine and spruce forest of Cedar creek are relatively but a small portion of that mighty timber belt which, stretching from Elk Mountain far into Colorado, environs the head waters of countless tributaries of the Platte, and gives the Platte Valley a solid timber area hundreds of miles in length and from thirty to forty miles in width. Here grows timber in sufficient quantity to build the cities of a universe-to launch the navies of a world.
It is amid the giant and clustering pine and spruce of the South Fork of Cedar creek that the saw mill of B.T. Ryan is soon to be in action, and lumber will be produced from its machinery as grain from the thresher.
The Cedar creek forests are alive with big game and the hunter who establishes his summer camp in their cool recesses and beneath their fragrant shade will find the noble deer, the princely elk, and even the royal grizzly (if perchance, such are his hankerings) for the shooting.
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