Geraldine Lucas left a marriage behind, put herself through Oberlin as a single mother, and retired to a homestead under the Grand Teton. When the land buyers arrived, she had an answer ready. Boone tells how that went, and who had the last word.
Say you've got a fortune, and a quiet little company buying up a whole valley, and one retired schoolteacher won't sell. Go ahead. Make her an offer. Geraldine Lucas came out of Iowa, born in eighteen sixty-six. She walked out of an unhappy marriage with a little boy, took her own name back for the both of them, and got herself through Oberlin College as a single mother, class of eighteen eighty-nine. She taught in New York until nineteen twelve, then settled in Jackson Hole, at the foot of these mountains. She didn't need much. Her son's dog team and sled. A Buick. A clarinet, a piano, two violins. And thirteen hundred and fifty-three books, for the long winters she called her hibernation. In nineteen twenty-four a sixteen-year-old named Paul Petzoldt came by, headed for the Grand Teton, and she talked that boy into taking her up. Not yet sixty, whichever records you trust, she stood on top, only the second woman who ever had. So you can guess how it went when the Snake River Land Company turned up. "You stack up those silver dollars as high as the Grand Teton," she told them, "and I might talk to you!" She never did sell. When she passed in nineteen thirty-eight the ranch went to her son, and he promptly sold it to a man named Kimmel, who meant to cut it into lots. All those years holding the line, and here it came anyway. Harold Fabian was the company's vice president, and she'd been one of what he called the tough nuts. In nineteen forty-four Kimmel took him and his wife, Josephine, for a drive. "Fabian," he said, "I can ruin your whole damn project." He meant Geraldine's land. "I know you can, Uncle Kimmel," Fabian said. The road went by a while. "But I ain't a goin' to," said Kimmel. He sold for what he'd paid. So Fabian wound up spending his summers in her house. He and Josephine gave dinners there for politicians and dignitaries, and every guest found a plain wooden clothespin at the plate, with the dates of the visit on it. If that table had been mine, I'd have set one more place, at the head of it. A clothespin with no dates, and beside it, one silver dollar. Let them start stacking.
Photo: Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress, HABS WYO,20-MOOS.V,7A--3 (cropped) · Public domain