56 The Jenkins Home  

This large white home on the south side of Big Piney burned early on.  P.W. Jenkins was a civil engineer who owned the Reservoir Ranch as well as one above Pinedale.  He had four daughters:  Lois, Helen (Kvenild/O'Neil), Ruth (Wilson) and Miriam (Barlow).  Lois died shortly before she was to marry.   The following is from the GRVM Brands project and is the partial interview with John Perry Barlow:      My grandfather, P. W. Jenkins, founded Sublette County in 1923.  He got elected to the legislature and he didn't like riding to the county seat all the way over in Lander.  And he also didn't like the fact that the county line went right through his house.  It went right down through the middle of his house, between Fremont and what was then Uinta Counties and so, then Lincoln County was created and that still wentdown through the middle of his house.  So he went down to the Legislature and got thiscounty put together on the basis of a watershed.       He was a mathematician and an astronomer and had been a college president and a number of things, and he was teaching and getting his doctorate at Columbia in I think it was 1902 - something like that - when he was told he had incurable nephritis.  They removed one kidney and didn't even send him a bill because they didn't think he would live to pay it.  He was about my age at the time, a little younger.  And his wife had an uncle who was A.W. Smith, who had come in here in the early days.  I mean he was the first white man to spend a winter up in this country.  And he put together the Mule Shoe and the 67 and just about all those big ranches down there in Big Piney at one time belonged to A.W. Smith.  And so he'd been established down there, and P.W. came out, I think basically he just came out West to die, but the mountain air was good for him or something - getting away from academia - I don't know what it was, but he sort of stuck around down on the Mule Shoe for a few years and then after it looked like he was going to live after all, then A.W. said, "Why don't you get a place of your own?" and grub staked him a little bit, and P. W.'s brother George had homesteaded - well, he didn't homestead it- Bear Face Dodge homesteaded it - but he had a place up on Willow Creek, which was Welborn's Place.  And he'd been living up there since the 1890's, and he knew about a place that was right north of Cora called the Westfall Place that was for sale.  That was a little homestead, not too big.  And P.W. came up and bought that and moved onto the Westfall Place, which is presently owned by - there's no house or anthing there anymore - but is presently owned by a combination of Dick and Jim Noble.  And he lived there until, I believe, 1912 or 1913.  And by then it was already called the Bar Cross - the Westfall Place was.  That was his brand, which he had gotten because he was a mathematician, and it was a mathematical symbol, and it was also a great brand.  It was a one-iron brand and it was easy to put on.        He bought the Wright place.  He still had the Westfall place.  He'd acquired the Johnson place, and then he started to accumulate stuff, and in the meantime A. W. (Smith) had died and he had left his property to P.W.'s (Jenkins) wife and her two sisters, both of whom were farm girls back in Missouri, and they just wanted to liquidate their portions right away, and they did.  And also P.W. was not a terribly great businessman and there'd been some reverses down there.  He had to sell most of that stuff out to the Mickelsons and whatnot.  He did keep the Reservoir Ranch.  And that was part of the Bar Cross.  And then when George (Jenkins) died, he got the Willow Creek Ranch, John Welborn's place.  So that was part of the Bar Cross.

  (Photo from GRVM courtesy of Paul Allen)    

Sources:

Dan Chapel  John Perry Barlow