Powder River Let 'er Buck

(Maxwell), Struthers Burt who grew up in Philadelphia and was a graduate of Princeton seems an unlikely person to have brought attention to Wyoming with his writings of the west. In his book, Powder River, Let ‘er Buck, Burt explains how grass made Wyoming.  First by feeding the Bison which brought native peoples. Later it brought the cowboy and cattle along with the sheepherder and his flocks.

He calls the Powder River, ugly, and unproductive and laments the fact that it runs the wrong way. Yet it was along this river that Wyoming history was made. It was here where the Indian was forced to give up the last of their open hunting area to the influx of whites from the east. It was here that the cattlemen fought the nester- homesteaders, and it was the scene of countless fights between the sheep and cattle people.

Burt said the well-known Wyoming phrase, and now a football and basketball cheer for the University of Wyoming Cowboys and Cowgirls, Powder River, Let ‘er Buck, refers to a secret. Something great – so great, in fact, that only the initiated, those who live there would understand, at its essence it refers to everything Wyoming.

Wyoming people get it, we live in a wonderful area of fast moving streams, breathtaking mountain beauty and an abundance of wildlife seen nowhere else on earth. It is indeed, to the initiated – Wyoming.

Powder River Let ‘er Buck!