Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Daddy Was an Outlaw (with Jackie Dorothy) | Episode 47

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Daddy Was an Outlaw (with Jackie Dorothy) | Episode 47 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:02
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, I named my podcast Pioneers of Outlaw Country because it dawned on me one day is that we were.
• 0:09
  Jackie Dorothy: This is outlaw country.
• 0:11
  Jackie Dorothy: That's what Wyoming was.
• 0:12
  Jackie Dorothy: It's where people went to escape.
• 0:14
  Jackie Dorothy: They changed their names.
• 0:16
  Jackie Dorothy: They changed who they were, their whole identities.
• 0:19
  Jackie Dorothy: So there are people here in Wyoming that cannot trace their ancestries back because they don't know who their great grandfather really was.
• 0:30
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:38
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:42
  Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:52
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Jackie Dorothy.
• 0:55
  Crista Cowan: She is an award-winning historian and journalist out of Wyoming.
• 1:00
  Crista Cowan: She is also a member of the Northern Arapaho tribe and a descendant of the Eastern Shoshone tribe of the Wind River Indian Reservation, and she has taken the family stories that have been passed down to her through her family and turned them into a full career as a historian in the state of Wyoming, who is creating educational curriculum for the state and also has a new podcast called Pioneers of Outlaw Country that is just dramatic retellings of characters in that part of the world.
• 1:38
  Crista Cowan: I'm excited for you to hear from Jackie about her family history and the stories that she finds important to tell.
• 1:46
  Crista Cowan: So tell me a little bit about kind of your background, like how you got into education, and I'd love to hear a little bit about that.
• 1:52
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, I'm actually a historian, but I worked in marketing for years and, let's see, I guess I could go back to start at the beginning when I started this trajectory.
• 2:03
  Jackie Dorothy: I've always been loving journalism.
• 2:06
  Jackie Dorothy: I was a DJ, showed up in Wyoming and I was ready to start all over when I was 28.
• 2:12
  Jackie Dorothy: And I told my mom I was like I'm going to work there and two weeks later I got a job at the radio station and from there it just kind of snowballed.
• 2:21
  Jackie Dorothy: I worked at Wyoming PBS, met my husband there, I was his intern I like to tease about that and then I just continued on.
• 2:34
  Jackie Dorothy: I've always loved history, always loved genealogy that was definitely where it got started and just digging in and finding the actual stories.
• 2:43
  Jackie Dorothy: And I think what I really liked is when I discovered that someone tells me a story and then I can do the research and verify it for them.
• 2:52
  Jackie Dorothy: I brought people to tears and that makes me emotional because it's so cool.
• 2:56
  Jackie Dorothy: It's like I had this one elder tell me this story.
• 2:59
  Jackie Dorothy: He says my grandfather said that we gave horses to a president I don't know which president, I don't know why we did this and I found the pictures.
• 3:07
  Jackie Dorothy: I found the pictures of the Arapaho tribe presenting these horses to the president of the United States.
• 3:15
  Jackie Dorothy: Wow it was just, he just sat there stunned.
• 3:18
  Jackie Dorothy: He's like it's true, it really happened.
• 3:21
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's so interesting because so many people live in families where there's lots of oral traditions and some of those stories, like a game of telephone, get morphed over time and change into something else.
• 3:33
  Crista Cowan: But when you can find the thread of truth through the documentation it is.
• 3:37
  Crista Cowan: It's such a thrill to be able to make those connections for people.
• 3:42
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, it's just like I shared with you through just saw my text is like the outlaw connection.
• 3:46
  Jackie Dorothy: My dad assumed that it was Jesse and Frank James that his grandfather ran around with, but then when I started doing because his name is Jesse and he thought, well, I was named after Jesse James it's like actually no, dad, this is kind of cool.
• 4:00
  Jackie Dorothy: The dates didn't align, nothing worked and the timeframe nothing, nothing.
• 4:05
  Jackie Dorothy: But then when I started doing the research, it's like actually, your grandfather and my dad's grandfather that's what gets me.
• 4:11
  Jackie Dorothy: It's this grandpa ran around with Butch Cassidy.
• 4:14
  Jackie Dorothy: They were the same age, same area that they were in and my my, what would he be?
• 4:21
  Jackie Dorothy: My uncle, great great uncle, was known in historical records to been friends with Butch Cassidy, and so the story started to make sense.
• 4:32
  Jackie Dorothy: They were real, and to be able to tell my grandma that before she died is like, okay, I connected the dots.
• 4:37
  Jackie Dorothy: Here you are.
• 4:38
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 4:39
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 4:40
  Crista Cowan: Well, let's go back a little bit to kind of your interest in family history.
• 4:45
  Crista Cowan: Like you know, as a historian sometimes we clue in on specific times or places in history that we're drawn to.
• 4:53
  Crista Cowan: But at what point did your history interest and your family history interest kind of cross, or were they all?
• 4:59
  Crista Cowan: Did they kind of grow up together?
• 5:01
  Jackie Dorothy: No, they crossed.
• 5:02
  Jackie Dorothy: Because I grew up between Alaska and Wyoming.
• 5:06
  Jackie Dorothy: My mom's parents homestead in Alaska so I was always kind of interested in that history.
• 5:10
  Jackie Dorothy: But when we moved here permanently to Wyoming and I started working with Wyoming PBS and seeing how close our history was actually to us and that my family was like merged into that, so I'd start going down rabbit holes and I had the privilege of visiting with people that actually knew my great grandparents and were able to connect that history.
• 5:33
  Jackie Dorothy: And so that is where the genealogy aligned with the history and it just kept connecting the dots, you know, growing that tree and seeing where it would lead the dogs, you know growing that tree and seeing where it would lead.
• 5:49
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 5:50
  Crista Cowan: I love that and I love that you had that accessibility.
• 5:51
  Crista Cowan: Not everybody does, and so to be able to talk to people who knew things and to be in the place where they lived, that's, I think, a great privilege.
• 5:56
  Crista Cowan: So, as you think about that, like, is there from your you know, from your earliest days of being involved in your family history?
• 6:03
  Crista Cowan: Is there a particular story or discovery that lit you up?
• 6:09
  Jackie Dorothy: I think I would have to go right back to when I first discovered genealogy, and that was at my grandma's table, because my grandma is Northern Arapaho but she's also Eastern Shoshone and when you look at the blood quantum and we do do that in tribal history is because in both our tribes you have to prove your enrollment by how much blood you have.
• 6:31
  Jackie Dorothy: So she was looking at it and proved that even though we claim to be Arapaho, we are really Eastern Shoshone, tinier tribe, more money and so she was going through, trying to prove to the courts and to the tribes that we should actually be enrolled in Shoshone.
• 6:49
  Jackie Dorothy: And so that was.
• 6:51
  Jackie Dorothy: She would have the papers all laid out on the kitchen table and she would be going down and saying, all right, here is my grandfather was actually considered full-blooded Shoshone.
• 7:04
  Jackie Dorothy: Turned out later he was half-blood.
• 7:06
  Jackie Dorothy: I mean, it really gets complicated when you go into it, but it was really fun to watch her trace it back.
• 7:13
  Jackie Dorothy: And then, of course, being tribal, you had fun names Like she finally admitted that yes, I do have an Indian name and my grandmother's Indian name was she who Talks Too Fast, and that was given to her by her grandparents because she would rush in, and she'd be so excited that she just talked too fast.
• 7:31
  Jackie Dorothy: That's what they called her, and her mother, though, was called bear woman or bad woman, and I was like, well, how did she earn that name?
• 7:39
  Jackie Dorothy: And then another one was like bad looking woman, and it's like what it was, because they had tempers and they were known.
• 7:45
  Jackie Dorothy: You don't cross those women, and that was the name they wore with pride, and so that was part of our genealogy is seeing those names and then being able to go back and figure out how they earned them.
• 7:58
  Jackie Dorothy: That has been fun.
• 8:00
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, wow, that is such a unique part, I think, of Indigenous culture that so many other cultures miss out on, which is that the names have such a significant meaning.
• 8:09
  Crista Cowan: And then correct me if I'm wrong, but did those names ever change?
• 8:13
  Jackie Dorothy: through a person'sogy, I've been really blessed because there was a historian that came and wrote a book about my family, and so he had all the stories and all these little pieces he put together, and one of them was you go back to almost the.
• 8:36
  Jackie Dorothy: It was the late, early 1800s and this guy's name was Owl, but before that he was known as Good Looking man, and they explained the tradition of how he gave that name up is that they were at a ceremony and he was admired and this lady asked him to give that name to her son, and so he discarded that name and she ran out and she physically grabbed the name and brought it back and give it to her son.
• 9:05
  Jackie Dorothy: And so there was not just a mere dropping of your name, there was a reason.
• 9:10
  Jackie Dorothy: Something would happen, something significant, and you would earn a name.
• 9:14
  Jackie Dorothy: And that name, that old, discarded name, was quickly grabbed up by whoever could grab it.
• 9:21
  Crista Cowan: And that then becomes part of the story too, right.
• 9:27
  Jackie Dorothy: Yes, it does, and that's what has been fun.
• 9:28
  Jackie Dorothy: And again, I find that out as you're tracing, you're not just tracing a tree, you're actually start to explore well, how did this happen?
• 9:36
  Jackie Dorothy: Wait, they were here at this particular time.
• 9:39
  Jackie Dorothy: Another of our family legends was that my I can't even remember how many great grandmothers, but her name was Matilda.
• 9:47
  Jackie Dorothy: She became a Matilda spoon hunter, but they said that she was a survivor of Sand Creek Massacre.
• 9:53
  Jackie Dorothy: So through the dates and through everything that happened, I was able to figure out that what had happened is in Colorado.
• 10:01
  Jackie Dorothy: The militia had come through.
• 10:02
  Jackie Dorothy: Unfortunately, they were drunk.
• 10:04
  Jackie Dorothy: It was a horrific massacre of men, of mostly women and children, and the person that defended them was another white soldier and he came through.
• 10:15
  Jackie Dorothy: And it's just this part of history that we know happened.
• 10:20
  Jackie Dorothy: And to know that my great-great-grandmother survived it and that's why we are here it just it puts you in place into that history, but it also makes you look at it and say this is significant not just to the country but to our particular family, and I was able to prove that yes, she was there.
• 10:42
  Jackie Dorothy: Every.
• 10:42
  Jackie Dorothy: All the dates aligned, the year aligns everything that our family said, because the historical story was that she was in a riverbank and she dug a hole and hid, and that was how she survived.
• 10:56
  Crista Cowan: Wow, I can't even imagine how old was she at the time.
• 10:59
  Jackie Dorothy: I believe she was like 13.
• 11:02
  Jackie Dorothy: So a young teenager.
• 11:04
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, so if she hadn't, you really wouldn't be here.
• 11:08
  Jackie Dorothy: Exactly.
• 11:08
  Jackie Dorothy: You look at those little things, it's like the ones that died in the first family lineage that ceased to exist.
• 11:16
  Crista Cowan: This grandmother is your dad's mom.
• 11:18
  Crista Cowan: Is that the connection?
• 11:19
  Jackie Dorothy: Yes, and what's really unique about our family is that we actually go through the female lineage for our tribal ancestry.
• 11:29
  Jackie Dorothy: Oh, okay, and it's something that I discovered again as I'm going through genealogy.
• 11:35
  Jackie Dorothy: It's like it was my grandmother and her mother.
• 11:39
  Jackie Dorothy: All of them were the Arapaho.
• 11:41
  Jackie Dorothy: The men were from different tribes, starting with Spoon Hunter, and that was another interesting story, because we've I'm sure you've heard of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and so Spoon Hunter was over in that battle and there was a group of Arapaho there and he, instead of going back to the Pine Ridge Reservation in the Dakotas, he went with the Arapaho to the Wind River Indian Reservation.
• 12:06
  Jackie Dorothy: Enrollment started and he's Indian, looking right, and so they tell the Calvary there like, oh no, this guy, he's a Arapaho, he's one of us.
• 12:15
  Jackie Dorothy: And so, instead of being enrolled full-blooded Sioux, he was enrolled full-blooded Arapaho.
• 12:21
  Jackie Dorothy: Even though that wasn't even his tribe, he was adopted into it, and that's how it worked back in those days.
• 12:27
  Jackie Dorothy: It was who you identified as, not what you really were so to speak, and so he married this Arapaho and then her daughter married a different tribe and so on and so forth.
• 12:43
  Jackie Dorothy: But we always kind of went down that female lineage until my dad, and he still identifies as an Arapaho Interesting.
• 12:51
  Crista Cowan: That's so fascinating and so typically in the culture, then is it because the men come from elsewhere?
• 12:58
  Crista Cowan: Is that why you think that that is done that way and the women aren't going to like live with their husbands' families?
• 13:05
  Jackie Dorothy: It just happened that way in our particular family.
• 13:07
  Jackie Dorothy: Oh, okay, Because there are other families that like the Fridays.
• 13:11
  Jackie Dorothy: They all come from Chief Friday and most of the spoon hunters, their family comes through the male lineage.
• 13:19
  Crista Cowan: Okay, and so it's just so happened with.
• 13:22
  Jackie Dorothy: The uniqueness of us was that it just was the women, and particularly like with my grandmother, my great grandmother, pearl Isoness.
• 13:31
  Jackie Dorothy: Her dad and mom were married to the Indian way, but there was so much strife between the Shoshone and the Arapaho at that time that their union did not work and they separated.
• 13:43
  Jackie Dorothy: Each one took a child and she took so Pearl.
• 13:47
  Jackie Dorothy: My great grandmother ended up with her mom and her sister ended up with her dad, ray Shoshone, and that was just how that family line worked.
• 13:56
  Jackie Dorothy: And we had to go back and search for her too, the missing Shoshone child, because it was like grandma knew that there was an aunt out there but she didn't know anything about her.
• 14:05
  Jackie Dorothy: And actually it kind of upset my grandma for quite a few years that that was how the separation happened and she was in denial until she really started looking at the line and saying OK, and towards the end she says yes, that was my aunt.
• 14:20
  Crista Cowan: So you've gotten involved in this and you have this really rich heritage, which I think is beautiful, and thank you for sharing a view into that.
• 14:27
  Crista Cowan: I think that that's something that a lot of us don't have a lot of exposure to.
• 14:30
  Crista Cowan: It's interesting because there's a lot of myth around Native American ancestry, particularly in the United States.
• 14:39
  Crista Cowan: I work for Ancestry as my day job and one of the like very top complaints that we get from people after they've taken an ancestry DNA test is that we must have done something wrong, because where's their Native American you know little slice of the pie chart that they get back.
• 14:57
  Crista Cowan: And the reality is is that most of those stories in most families here in the United States is total myth.
• 15:03
  Crista Cowan: It's the game of telephone that got morphed In my family it was because they lived in Indian Territory in Oklahoma and Arkansas and that got passed down and somebody then just interpreted that to mean, oh well, we must have indigenous you know blood in our family and we don't at all.
• 15:21
  Crista Cowan: But I know how those stories get started and so for you to come from that culture and have a rich history of that culture that you can prove those connections that the tribes are very well kept track of and even back, you said, into the 1800s.
• 15:46
  Crista Cowan: I think it's amazing that there's those kinds of records For your part of it in the history, particularly in the Wyoming area.
• 15:54
  Crista Cowan: What records are you using?
• 15:56
  Crista Cowan: How are you?
• 15:58
  Crista Cowan: Where are you finding that information other than just through family story?
• 16:02
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, definitely ancestrycom.
• 16:04
  Jackie Dorothy: I use that as a research tool and knowing our family names as well helps.
• 16:09
  Jackie Dorothy: And we did do the DNA test and it did come back where we had that slice of Native American history.
• 16:16
  Jackie Dorothy: And what was really cool and here's a really fun story that Ancestry actually proved is that in our genealogy because we do have to keep that really tight record in order to keep our enrollment there was somebody named Seminole and I was like what in the world?
• 16:34
  Jackie Dorothy: And from 18, it was the 1840s Isn't the Seminole tribe from like Florida?
• 16:39
  Jackie Dorothy: Yes, yeah, yes, it turns out.
• 16:43
  Jackie Dorothy: Basil Lysanus on our Shoshone side was a Seminole from Florida, but he was also, I thought, french because of his last name, but French doesn't even show up.
• 16:55
  Jackie Dorothy: But he was a trapper and an explorer that was with Kit Carson and came this direction, was very well respected in the tribe.
• 17:04
  Jackie Dorothy: Everyone knew he was a Seminole and that was his Indian name.
• 17:08
  Jackie Dorothy: His American name however you want to call it European name was Basil Lysanus, but he was also known as Seminole.
• 17:15
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 17:16
  Jackie Dorothy: And so that was how I did the research.
• 17:18
  Jackie Dorothy: Is that going in the back of books and looking at indexes and looking for the family name?
• 17:23
  Jackie Dorothy: I mean, that was how I did it when I was a teenager and then it just expanded.
• 17:27
  Jackie Dorothy: I love to search out newspapers and put in the name and just see if a tidbit comes up, because that was the gossip columns, right, that was the early Facebook.
• 17:36
  Crista Cowan: And then using Ancestry to kind of look for those other future records and finding marriage license connected to the land, to the place when you find someone in a place, you at least have some clue of the connection, which I think is incredible to be able to recognize that because you know.
• 18:11
  Crista Cowan: You know where the tribes were located.
• 18:15
  Jackie Dorothy: And another story that we were talking about earlier too was on my white side.
• 18:19
  Jackie Dorothy: So Pearl Lismas, who was?
• 18:21
  Jackie Dorothy: You know, she was the Shoshone girl raised Arapaho by her Arapaho mother.
• 18:26
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, the dates aligned again where her husband she married when she was 18 and he was 43.
• 18:33
  Jackie Dorothy: He was a member of the hole in the wall game and Butch Cassidy was one of his friends and when he retired he went to the reservation, where it was kind of safe, and married this young girl and they had 10 kids and they all stayed on the reservation and it was just, it was following his lineage then and saying, well, how did he end up here?
• 18:59
  Jackie Dorothy: And my aunt actually discovered that he was a Quaker, raised in Iowa, and ran away and came to Wyoming where he cowboyed.
• 19:10
  Jackie Dorothy: And how it worked with the hole in the wall gang in Wyoming is that they would have their day job, just like you're saying, ancestrycom is your day job.
• 19:18
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, his day job was as a cowboy on these ranches and then once in a while they go out and do a job somewhere and it was just a very loose 100 people part of this game with a core group.
• 19:33
  Jackie Dorothy: And again we were able to connect the dots and say, oh, he was part of this.
• 19:38
  Jackie Dorothy: The dates align, the stories align, because the story my grandma told and this is the one that I really love is that she said when she was growing up she was eight years old when her dad died, but before he passed away she remembers this old man coming, named Curly.
• 19:54
  Jackie Dorothy: He would show up in the spring with his donkey and her dad and him would go into the Wind River Mountains for about two weeks, come back with enough money to take care of the family for the rest of the year.
• 20:08
  Jackie Dorothy: And the records also clearly state that Butch Cassidy, one of his catches, one of the places he had money, was in the Wind River Mountains.
• 20:17
  Jackie Dorothy: So here was my great-grandfather going and getting enough so that they stayed under the radar and didn't make anyone suspicious about why they had all this money.
• 20:30
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 20:30
  Crista Cowan: And so, as an eight-year-old girl, how do you think it is that your grandmother interpreted that?
• 20:36
  Crista Cowan: To pass that story to your father?
• 20:39
  Crista Cowan: Like, how does that story get passed from one generation to the next?
• 20:44
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, you know, it's funny because she never shared that story, oh okay, I started bugging her about it.
• 20:51
  Jackie Dorothy: I wanted to know about her dad and I was like tell me stories that you know.
• 20:54
  Jackie Dorothy: And so she didn't have that many memories of her father.
• 20:58
  Jackie Dorothy: He was strict, she said.
• 21:00
  Jackie Dorothy: When she found out about the Quaker connection she goes well, that explains the these and those and why he was as strict as he was.
• 21:06
  Jackie Dorothy: But this was just one of those stories that she had and she's like I don't know, I never thought about it.
• 21:13
  Jackie Dorothy: And so then we started exploring it together.
• 21:15
  Jackie Dorothy: It's like, well, grandma, you can't just go up into the mountains for two weeks and come back with money and she goes.
• 21:21
  Jackie Dorothy: I didn't think about it, it was just.
• 21:24
  Crista Cowan: That was how it was kind of cement in our brains come from our perspectives as a child and the things we overheard or the things we observed and how we interpreted those things with our completely undeveloped brains.
• 21:47
  Crista Cowan: And yet those then become the foundation for the stories that we tell ourselves and others our whole lives.
• 21:54
  Crista Cowan: And to take that pause and have to like rethink that, I think, is something that family history and exploration of our family stories allows us to do and realize that maybe our perception wasn't entirely accurate.
• 22:10
  Jackie Dorothy: I love that, because the other thing that I remember from my childhood which really had an impact on me was learning that my great-grandfather was an outlaw and how I learned it.
• 22:21
  Jackie Dorothy: It was because my grandmother and my great-aunt Grace were sitting at the kitchen table discussing their father and how he made his money and Grandma Olson said Daddy was an outlaw and Aunt Grace said no, he wasn't, and my Aunt Grace was the oldest child, so she remembered all this stuff and my grandma's like got on the kitchen table and they're in their 50s and they're arguing back and forth to the point where us kids were ushered out of the room.
• 22:50
  Jackie Dorothy: But all I could remember is my grandma taunting her older sister and said Daddy was an outlaw, and Aunt Grace was like no, he wasn't, because it wasn't a point of pride during that time.
• 23:03
  Jackie Dorothy: Now it's like people embrace it.
• 23:04
  Jackie Dorothy: Oh, my great grandpa was an outlaw, but back in those days you did not admit to it.
• 23:11
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, and it's so interesting that the things that we find you know were shameful now not only are not shameful, in some cases they're kind of celebrated.
• 23:20
  Crista Cowan: So you have taken this celebration to a whole different level with a podcast and a career that revolve around telling not just your family stories but the stories of all kinds of outlaws and colorful characters, particularly as it relates to Wyoming history, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about why you decided to head that direction with your career.
• 23:44
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, I named my podcast Pioneers of Outlaw Country because it dawned on me one day is that we were.
• 23:51
  Jackie Dorothy: This is outlaw country.
• 23:53
  Jackie Dorothy: That's what Wyoming was.
• 23:54
  Jackie Dorothy: It's where people went to escape.
• 23:56
  Jackie Dorothy: They changed their names.
• 23:58
  Jackie Dorothy: They changed who they were, their whole identities.
• 24:02
  Jackie Dorothy: So there are people here in Wyoming that cannot trace their ancestries back because they don't know who their great grandfather really was.
• 24:10
  Jackie Dorothy: And as I dived into that and discovered all the colorful characters that there were here, it just got to be so much fun and to build a family tree and to say this is how this person ended up here.
• 24:24
  Jackie Dorothy: I'll take an example.
• 24:25
  Jackie Dorothy: On my podcast there's one called Walt Putney, a Lesser Light of the Hole-in-the-Wall Game, and so what Walt was is he came here when he was 14 years old.
• 24:37
  Jackie Dorothy: Actually, his brother came here at 14.
• 24:39
  Jackie Dorothy: He was 16.
• 24:40
  Jackie Dorothy: And his family back east just told everybody he's in the cattle business and he was for the first few years.
• 24:48
  Jackie Dorothy: But it was interesting to trace back that he came from a good family.
• 24:53
  Jackie Dorothy: It wasn't like he was a runaway, he wasn't anything.
• 24:55
  Jackie Dorothy: He just went off to become a cowboy and through a series of events he ended up being an outlaw and he felt forced into it because he was.
• 25:07
  Jackie Dorothy: There is a guy named Jay Torrey, and you can go into that whole story, and that's what I think I find so fascinating is how intertwined everything is.
• 25:15
  Jackie Dorothy: And so I explore Walt Putney, figure out why he became an outlaw, figure out what happened to him in his later years.
• 25:22
  Jackie Dorothy: He became a respected businessman here in Wyoming after spending a couple of years in his youth as a wild outlaw, jay Torrey, who forced all these guys.
• 25:33
  Jackie Dorothy: He was a big cattle baron.
• 25:35
  Jackie Dorothy: He had these guys working for him and would get mad when they wanted to start their own ranch, and so he would use the courts, use his money to go against these young cowboys, take their land, take their property, and they had no choice in their eyes than fleeing and becoming an outlaw to sustain themselves.
• 25:57
  Jackie Dorothy: And so then you're like who's this Jay Torrey?
• 26:00
  Jackie Dorothy: And that's how it kind of expands beyond just my family history and into all of these interesting stories that nobody knows about.
• 26:08
  Jackie Dorothy: And that's what really gets me is because one of the reasons I even started this is I was in the schools talking to the teachers about history and they said, well, our history isn't that interesting.
• 26:20
  Jackie Dorothy: And I'm thinking we're right here in the middle of the hole in the wall.
• 26:24
  Jackie Dorothy: This is their territory and you guys don't know it.
• 26:28
  Jackie Dorothy: And they're like well, look at our resources.
• 26:30
  Jackie Dorothy: And they showed me the books, the stories that they had to share with their kids and it's like boring.
• 26:36
  Jackie Dorothy: You know, it's those textbooks that people write and they just write the facts and they don't tell the stories.
• 26:43
  Jackie Dorothy: And so that's what has led me in the direction.
• 26:47
  Jackie Dorothy: Where I'm at is I'm a storyteller and I want to make sure that the stories I tell are factual but interesting as well.
• 26:54
  Jackie Dorothy: And that is kind of where my journey has taken me.
• 26:58
  Jackie Dorothy: And now I'm working with the teachers.
• 27:00
  Jackie Dorothy: I'm working to build curriculum to try to make it so that we have that viable history to give our teachers, because by Wyoming legislature we have to teach Wyoming history.
• 27:12
  Jackie Dorothy: We have to teach our area history, but we also have to teach our tribal history, and what's being taught is about the Pueblos or the Aztecs.
• 27:21
  Jackie Dorothy: And I told my son I was like that's not our tribes, you're not learning about their Arapaho, the Shoshone, the Blackfeet, the Crow.
• 27:28
  Jackie Dorothy: And he's like who are they?
• 27:29
  Jackie Dorothy: And I was like this is not good.
• 27:31
  Jackie Dorothy: You need to know who these people are.
• 27:34
  Jackie Dorothy: And that's what it is.
• 27:35
  Jackie Dorothy: It's filling that void and letting our children and our teachers know our rich history.
• 27:42
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and that's so important because it's you know we become connected not just to our family but again to that concept of place and understanding.
• 27:52
  Crista Cowan: You know what we're surrounded by, because the environment that we are raised in, the environment we raise our children in, that's the environment that forms that foundation of the perceptions that we then move forward with in life.
• 28:04
  Crista Cowan: So how do you decide what stories to tell?
• 28:09
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, right now I've been working on a series about the Yellowstone Highway.
• 28:13
  Jackie Dorothy: It is this Wind River scenic byway that cuts through the canyon, a beautiful stretch of land, but it's celebrating its 100th anniversary and no one in the state knew this and I think I've been like advocating for it and this is embarrassing but for 10 years saying this important anniversary is coming up, and so it got the awareness, it got the excitement.
• 28:35
  Jackie Dorothy: But it was like this isn't just about a road, it's about the stories.
• 28:39
  Jackie Dorothy: So I've been searching for the stories along the highway and just recently finished one on about our fairies of all things.
• 28:48
  Jackie Dorothy: But who realizes that when you drive over a bridge, that back in the day of our ancestors that crossing that water was a task?
• 28:59
  Jackie Dorothy: It could be dangerous, it could claim your life.
• 29:01
  Jackie Dorothy: We've had drownings and near catastrophes occur as people try to cross the Bighorn River, and so the ferry came in and supplied that safe passage.
• 29:12
  Jackie Dorothy: But now the bridges replace that and we don't think about that part of our history.
• 29:18
  Jackie Dorothy: So those are the things that teachers are looking for, because that's where my mindset is.
• 29:22
  Jackie Dorothy: It's like OK, you were required to teach this, how can we make it interesting?
• 29:27
  Jackie Dorothy: And so you tell the story of the ferryman and you make it alive.
• 29:31
  Jackie Dorothy: You bring it like OK, let's dig through the newspapers, let's find the stories.
• 29:36
  Jackie Dorothy: What was it like to cross the river in a ferry?
• 29:39
  Jackie Dorothy: How dangerous was it?
• 29:40
  Jackie Dorothy: And that's how I kind of dig up the story.
• 29:42
  Jackie Dorothy: So we're doing a whole series, we're ending it this year and then I'm looking forward to what the new year will bring.
• 29:49
  Jackie Dorothy: But interesting stories.
• 29:50
  Jackie Dorothy: That's the hook.
• 29:51
  Jackie Dorothy: You got to take something boring and make it exciting.
• 29:55
  Crista Cowan: Well, and it doesn't.
• 29:56
  Crista Cowan: I mean it takes a lot of intention to do that, but I think that it's it's worth the efforts.
• 30:04
  Crista Cowan: And I think sometimes people think, even with their own family history, like it's just names and dates and places, and how exciting is that really?
• 30:11
  Crista Cowan: But the way that you framed that like the bridges and the ferries, like that's it's something so simple that if you just again shift your perception a little bit, you can see that there's a story there and so then going after that story becomes that much easier because you've got a hook or an idea of how to approach that.
• 30:31
  Crista Cowan: I love the framework that you kind of set up for that.
• 30:33
  Crista Cowan: I think that's really beautiful.
• 30:36
  Jackie Dorothy: And I will admit it does take a lot of work.
• 30:38
  Jackie Dorothy: Yeah, a lot of digging, a lot of reading, Family history, history, history, yeah it all.
• 30:44
  Crista Cowan: It all requires work, but the resources that we have available to us now right.
• 30:48
  Crista Cowan: When I started family history 40 years ago, it required me, you know, coming to Salt Lake City for a week every summer with my dad and scrolling through reels of microfilm or writing letters away to archivists and librarians and hoping they responded and had the one little nugget of information that I was looking for.
• 31:05
  Crista Cowan: Now I can sit down and in two or three hours, on Ancestry or on newspaperscom or, you know, on the website of the State Archive, there's so much that's been digitized whether it's the actual records themselves or the finding aids to those records that I can find a treasure trove of information in just a few hours.
• 31:25
  Crista Cowan: I sometimes feel a little guilty about how much more accessible it's become compared to how we used to do it years ago.
• 31:33
  Jackie Dorothy: I share the same thing because I'm sitting here.
• 31:35
  Jackie Dorothy: When you said 40 years, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's how long I've been also doing it and where does the time go.
• 31:42
  Jackie Dorothy: But, and it was the same thing, Remembering my grandma it was paper, it was tracing it down.
• 31:49
  Jackie Dorothy: It was her going to the tribal offices and sitting there and going through all of these files, looking for that physical evidence to prove who we were, where we came from, what our ancestry really was.
• 32:04
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, absolutely so.
• 32:06
  Crista Cowan: I love the connections that you've made.
• 32:09
  Crista Cowan: I love the path that you've taken.
• 32:10
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much for sharing that with us.
• 32:13
  Crista Cowan: I think there's so many things that people can learn if they want to engage in this for themselves, where they are in, you know, maybe not at a state level like you're doing it, which I think is magnificent but even just within their own family kind of the future.
• 32:30
  Crista Cowan: As you think about your path and your family stories and the state of Wyoming and what you're trying to accomplish there, what is it that you hope for the future?
• 32:40
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, I have been asked by the state of Wyoming to expand beyond Thermopolis, beyond Hot Springs County and the reservation, and to bring stories from all corners of Wyoming.
• 32:51
  Jackie Dorothy: So I've been reaching out to the historical societies and saying what stories do you want told?
• 32:56
  Jackie Dorothy: What is it that you want people to know about your area?
• 33:01
  Jackie Dorothy: Because my goal for the future is to make our kids excited for history, and not just our kids, but our, and that's what's fun about doing this podcast.
• 33:11
  Jackie Dorothy: Is that, yes, my goal?
• 33:13
  Jackie Dorothy: My thought, the person that I'm working for is that eighth grade social studies teacher that has to make history fun.
• 33:19
  Jackie Dorothy: But it's a podcast for everyone.
• 33:22
  Jackie Dorothy: It's a podcast for that history buff, it's a podcast for my 13-year-old son to listen to, to have that history come alive.
• 33:30
  Jackie Dorothy: So I really just want to make Wyoming history in particular, accessible to everyone.
• 33:36
  Jackie Dorothy: And what's really been fun is when I do look at the podcast and who my audience is.
• 33:41
  Jackie Dorothy: My number one audience is Denver, followed by Michigan, followed by Australia.
• 33:47
  Jackie Dorothy: I mean, what does that tell you?
• 33:50
  Crista Cowan: That tells me that history is interesting.
• 33:52
  Jackie Dorothy: That tells me that history is interesting.
• 34:16
  Crista Cowan: Yes, no matter where you are you're coming from an indigenous tribe in Wyoming or sitting in suburban Salt Lake City, like I am, or maybe even in Australia there are some universal themes in stories of people and the choices that they make.
• 34:24
  Crista Cowan: Sometimes those choices feel impossible, Sometimes those choices feel like they're forced upon us, and sometimes it's a wide, open field of choices and opportunities that we have to make our lives what we want them to be.
• 34:37
  Crista Cowan: But there are themes that are universal in the stories of people and those stories are universal across time and space, I think so it was no surprise to me at all that you have have a wider audience to me at all that you have have a wider audience.
• 34:58
  Jackie Dorothy: Well, I've always preached that everyone has a story and some of their stories are extraordinary and it's just like it's easy to see what their story is.
• 35:03
  Jackie Dorothy: But others you have to dig and find that little nugget, find that incident that they don't think they're special but you know they are.
• 35:11
  Jackie Dorothy: And to be able to share that with others has been just.
• 35:15
  Jackie Dorothy: It's been a fun challenge and I think that what I end up doing is I find the boring, the so-called boring people, and I dig until I find that exciting story, like the fairies.
• 35:25
  Jackie Dorothy: I mean to make fairies exciting and I think I was able to achieve that by digging up some stories, some dramatic stories of near drownings and unfortunately, some drownings that happen and it's the same way with people is that if you listen long enough, you'll suddenly have the story.
• 35:44
  Crista Cowan: That was beautifully said, I think, a perfect way to end our time together.
• 35:48
  Crista Cowan: Jackie, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.
• 35:51
  Crista Cowan: I've listened to several episodes of your podcast.
• 35:54
  Crista Cowan: I'm excited to listen to more and to continue to follow your career.
• 35:58
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me.
• 35:59
  Jackie Dorothy: I've listened to several episodes of your podcast.
• 36:00
  Jackie Dorothy: I'm excited to listen to more and to continue to follow your career.
• 36:02
  Jackie Dorothy: Thank you, the same here.
• 36:02
  Jackie Dorothy: Thank you for what you do for genealogy.