Watch Gerry Spence Turn a War Hero into a Sheep Herder

Pete Peters and I always waved when we met on the highway. He would be in uniform at the wheel of his Wyoming Highway Patrol cruiser.

Barnes Truck Company, c. 1950.
Oil field trucking was the family business. 

I would be pulling a trailer behind a semi belonging to the barnes truck co., the family business. The minimum age for a license to drive commercial vehicles was 18. I was 16. Pete knew that. People in Fremont County got along together in those days. They believed in keeping things in perspective.

Consider prostitution for example, a business model Wyoming State Law frowned upon. One morning I pulled off the highway and parked my truck next to a big rig with Casper plates, intent on committing an act of teenage curiosity and bravado. I had never been in a whore house. Known as the Blue Goose, the blocky two story building stood alone outside Shoshoni and conveniently announced itself as a cafe. I ordered pie and coffee.

Lawbreakers

I was surprised, first of all, by the demur attractiveness of the woman who filled my cup. She’d be a strong candidate for Miss Fremont County. Wearing light makeup and shower fresh, her shapeliness implied under a crisp waitress uniform, she was the girl next door. I was also unprepared for the ease with which business was conducted. When the Casper truck driver finished his ham and eggs and drained his coffee cup she asked in a quiet voice, “Do you want to go upstairs?” He nodded. They went upstairs. Another woman, older and plainer, appeared from the kitchen and refilled my cup. Just some folks making a living, others having a good time.

State Law didn’t approve of gambling either. My father, after spending three years in the army training for WW2, then fighting from the Belgium border to the Elbe in a recon squadron, returned to Wyoming with a marketable skill. Although he had big, clumsy looking hands, he could make a blackjack deck do just about anything he wanted.

We saw each other occasionally during my early teens, though he moved around. Someone told me he was running a table in the basement of a club in Shoshoni. (Yes, Shoshoni again, that small town den of iniquity.) The person also gave me directions for finding him. A more dramatic narration might report that a secret entrance opened onto the stairs to the basement; I’ll make do with an inconspicuous door in the service area between the bar and the dining room.

Playing with loaded dice

A blackjack table and a craps table crowded the windowless room. My father, his partner and I weren’t alone for long. It was Friday evening, payday. A tall young cowboy came down the stairs. As I hoped, he headed for the craps table. I already knew how my dad would fleece him. I wanted to watch a croupier in action.

The cowboy won a couple of rolls, then lost. He won a couple more, then lost. After awhile he was losing roughly four times for every three wins. Eventually he held up his hands, said good naturedly, “I’m cleaned out,” and climbed the stairs. The croupier complained. “I’ve got to stop wearing these damn tight saddle pants.” Reaching into both pockets, he pulled out two hands full of matches, keys, coins, and dice. “I had a hell of a time changing dice on him.” I had watched closely. Nothing touched the dice on the table except the croupier’s stick and the cowboy’s hand. It’s been sixty years now and I still haven’t figured out how a crooked craps table works. But again, just a couple of guys working the weekend so other people could enjoy leisure activities.

Spence wore string ties 

after he became famous

The Making of a Country Lawyer

Then one day Gerry Spence was seen tacking flyers to utility poles: Spence for County Attorney. Today Spence is well known in Wyoming and across the nation. He is the lawyer who, almost single handedly, created the multi-million $ judgments routinely awarded in civil litigation cases. The little guys can finally get a fair shake against the big guys. Or, litigation is now so costly that juries have to award big bucks to make sure plaintiffs have something left after the lawyers get paid. Depends on a person’s point of view.

Law comes to the Wild West

But that is now. In his autobiography, The Making of a Country Lawyer, Spence acknowledged he wasn't much interested in being a county attorney. But the job paid regularly. A recent graduate of the University of Wyoming Law School, brash by local standards, his new practice was not thriving. Unlike others in this story, he was still learning his trade.

Spence promised that, if elected, he would clean up gambling and prostitution. That’s what candidates had been saying for years. Fremont County didn’t have any real issues a local politician could hang a campaign on. Then Spence did something unprecedented and considered politically outrageous. He went onto the Wind River Indian Reservation and asked the people of the Shoshoni and Arapaho tribes for their vote. He won the election.

Spence campaigns for County Attorney
                The Making of a Country Lawyer

Good order prevails

Spence set about cleaning up gambling and prostitution. Those who ran the county would have none of it. They believed people like themselves, community leaders in business and politics, should not meddle in each other’s leisure activities. The sheriff let him know that anyone charged would not be arrested. The judges assured him that anyone arrested would not be convicted. Others objected too. For instance, the person who passed him on the highway one night and put a bullet through his car window.

Someone tries to shoot Spence
                The Making of a County Lawyer

Nevertheless, Spence cleaned up gambling and prostitution, in short order and quietly. He said he paid someone to stake out the Blue Goose for a weekend and record license plates. He privately showed the list to those in power and told them that, unless they started enforcing the laws, the license plate numbers would be published in the Riverton and Lander newspapers. The gamblers and the prostitutes disappeared from Fremont County.

The next time I got together with my father, some twenty years later, he was managing a sheep ranch near Ten Sleep.

Spence campaigns

The Making of a Country Lawyer

Different Writers Remember Differently

I wasn't the only person to stop at the Blue Goose with innocent intent. Gerry Spence did too, as he reported in The Making of a Country Lawyer (pp. 299-301). He said that after being elected county attorney he went there to warn the madam he was going to close down her operation. He suggested that she and her staff leave the county voluntarily and avoid the unpleasantness of facing charges.

He remembered the Blue Goose as a far grimmer place than I do. He recalled seeing several rough women who looked and dressed like proper whores. They behaved coarsely as whores in a story ought to behave.

Gerry Spence today:  www.triallawyerscollege.org

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Bad Day at Shoshoni Siding