After living in Wyoming for what seemed forever, two of our oldest folks are dead.
In recent weeks, two of our pioneer Cowboy State women, both of whom were 108 years old, passed away over a two-week period.
What They Have Seen
It is stunning to think of all the events and changes of modern life both Vera Brown of Recluse (near Gillette) and Virginia Bryant of Hat Creek (near Lusk) experienced throughout their long lives.
Both grew up in extreme, rural areas. Both grew up on their parents’ homesteads.
Perhaps that is what gave them the grit to live such long lives. They had it rough. They experienced all kinds of hardships.
Born in 1915, both traveled in the early years of their lives by horse-drawn wagon. Vera later became well known for breaking horses. Virginia left her area and got a teaching degree and returned to teach in one-room schoolhouses.
They were both well-known cooks with Vera making spectacular fried chicken and Virginia serving up her famous homemade cookies.
Vera Brown Of Recluse
Brown had held the crown as the state’s oldest person for several years until she died March 29 in Gillette. By all accounts, she was an amazing person and led an amazing life.
Her last driver’s license expired when she was 101. She lived on her own until she was 104. She moved to Wyoming when she was 2, traveling here with her family, with dad driving a Model T Ford.
Near her childhood home was one of the most apt-named places in the Big Empty, the town of Recluse. She spent much of her life in that area.
She’s been around so long that she was alive when her father staked out that homestead 45 miles north of Gillette at that isolated place.
Wendy Corr of Cowboy State Daily wrote an excellent article about Vera a year ago when she turned 108.
Vera’s father, a paper hanger and painter, found work in northeast Wyoming. Shortly after moving to Gillette, the family — which included Vera’s two brothers and one sister — took over a homestead on Elk Creek.
Life on the Wyoming prairie was difficult.
The family didn’t have a well, so Vera would take a team of horses and a wagon with five 50-gallon barrels to a neighbor's place to get water to haul back to their homestead.
The isolation of rural life for Vera, her husband Don and the children meant they were prepared for most anything, from spring floods that stranded families until the water receded to winter storms that could trap them in their homes.
“They went to town maybe once every two months,” said her daughter Joyce. “Mom would buy 100 pounds of sugar, 100 pounds of flour and whatever they didn't grow, because she canned everything. I think she even canned chicken.”
In 1957, the couple bought the Weston Store at the junction of Highway 59 and a rural road that crossed the empty plains west of Devils Tower. She became the postmistress at Weston.
Vera retired from the post office in 1987, but that didn’t slow her down. She continued to bowl in the Friday night leagues, an activity she and her husband started in the early 1960s — and which she continued until she was in her late 70s — even after her husband’s death in the mid-1990s.
Virginia Bryant Was From Hat Creek
When Vera died, that meant that Virginia Bryant was the oldest person in Wyoming, but she didn’t hold the crown long. She died April 13, just two weeks after Vera died.
Virginia's birth was a dramatic beginning, as she was born in the old Hat Creek Stage Station where her parents had stopped while driving their horse-drawn wagon to the nearest doctor in Lusk about 35 miles away from their home. That is near present-day Highway 85.
As a young girl, she loved roaming the hills near their home, dipping some honey out of the honey separator and playing with her siblings along the creek in the shade of the cottonwood trees. After attending one-room country schools, she boarded with families in Lusk to attend Lusk High School, graduating with the class of 1933.
Receiving her teaching certificate from the Nebraska State Normal School (now Chadron State College), she returned to the Hat Creek area in 1934 to teach K-8 at three one-room country schools over the next four years.
In 1938, Virginia made the big trip to Laramie to attend the University of Wyoming and obtain her BA in Education, which she received in December 1940. Shortly afterward, she married her high school and college sweetheart, Ed Bryant, in June 1941.
During the early years of World War II, Ed and Virginia worked in Washington, D.C., and began their family with the birth of their son, Edward “Eddie” Bryant in 1943. Later, she had a daughter, Bonnie.
Virginia then spent the remaining war years both at the ranch in Hat Creek and later in Hawaii, where Ed was stationed at the end of the war.
After the tragic death of her daughter-in-law Lydia Bryant in 1974, Virginia stepped in to help raise her three young grandchildren while her son, Eddie, adjusted to a new life without his wife.
This was a new unexpected, but welcome, phase of her life caring directly for those she loved. After the three grandchildren had grown, Virginia spent more than a year caring for her beloved Bonnie throughout her battle with brain cancer, and helped care for her baby daughter, Katie, during this difficult time and after Bonnie's death.
Virginia's drive to care for those she loved was unstoppable throughout her life and she was always concerned with the well-being and happiness of others.
What These Women Experienced
From 1915 to 2024, these two pioneer Wyoming women saw incredible changes.
They lived through world wars, a depression, two pandemics, outlasted 16 presidents, saw the first televisions, computers, the internet and social media.
They saw men land on the moon, the Civil Rights Movement and the fall of communism.
Truly amazing medical breakthroughs occurred during their lifetimes. And yet, you have to believe that a hardy disposition that came from growing up in the Wyoming wind in two of our state’s most desolate places perhaps gave each of them an indomitable constitution allowing them to live for 108 years.
At this point, we are not sure who is the oldest person living in Wyoming. I hope people will let me know at bill@cowboystatedaily.com.
