Sheep Industry News November 2023

wife Clarice went on a six-month world tour to places like China, Paris and Japan. When they returned to Lost Cabin, they had bought a home in Denver and another in Pasa dena, Calif. They also built California-style bungalows, and the giant glass birdhouse. It was a glass wonderland with more than 140 exotic birds, including cockatoos, macaws and birds of paradise, and the exotic plant life to match, in what resembled a lush jungle oasis. It must have been quite a contrast to the brown sandy dirt and dried grass that’s more usual for this area. It’s possible the aviary was just the beginning of Okie’s dreams for the place with his second wife. Years ago, Fross found a set of blueprints while he was working for the Spratt family as a ranch hand, helping them with maintenance of the mansion. They outline a much bigger footprint for Okie’s mansion. “I kind of hid them,” Fross admits. “I kind of brought them over and I hid them here in the big house. We weren’t living here at the time. I was just a ranch hand, right, and never dreamed I’d ever live here. But so, I stored them in a closet here, out of the sun.” The Spratts eventually sold the mansion to ConocoPhil lips, which in 2009 asked Fross if he wanted to live in the mansion. Fross said he has been working through a process with the oil and gas company since then to eventually own the mansion. The blueprints Fross found show a massive addition that would have come 80 feet out from the mansion. On one side of that addition, a wing of rooms 20 feet wide. On the other side, a wing 18 feet wide. Together, the two wings helped define an indoor court yard with a mosaic fountain. “The addition was two stories high on both sides,” Fross said. “And the blueprints show that one side would have a master bedroom, which would be Okie’s.” There were also bedrooms for each of his children in these wings, with their own private bathrooms. An indoor swimming pool was part of the layout, as well. “These are old, old blueprints,” Fross said. “They can’t be copied easily.” HUMBLER BEGINNINGS J.B. Okie didn’t spend his first years in Lost Cabin in anything at all like a mansion, however. His first home was quite humble – a big trench with a lean-to for shelter. He lived a hardscrabble life of wildcat speculation and almost unimaginable hardship. Not at all the life his well-off parents had planned for their son. At 16, Okie had been appointed as a cadet in the school

of the U.S. Revenue Marine, the forerunner of the U.S. Coast Guard. They felt his future would be assured upon successful graduation from the program – and with much less hard ship. But, while on a surveying trip to the West, Okie heard an instructor casually remark, “A man could get rich out here.” That stirred Okie’s imagination, and, within a year, the 17-year-old had resigned as a cadet and set off to seek his fortune in Wyoming. He rode in on a Union Pacific train with not much more than the clothes on his back. In fact, after landing in Rawlins, he had only his cadet uniform for attire, which soon earned the would-be cowboy a nickname – “the cadet.” There’s still a draw near Lander that is referred to by some as Cadet Draw. Okie, as it happened, wasn’t great at being a cowboy. He would even later joke he made a “damn poor one.” Ultimately, he talked his mother into loaning him $4,500 to buy a sheep flock instead. She had a few conditions. The sheep were to remain hers, and they would divide any prof its equally. ALMOST DISASTER Okie, as it turned out, wasn’t a great sheepherder either. He kept his sheep too long in each camp, and he was herd ing them along the creek when they should have been up in the hills. There was a terrible snowstorm in 1883, and his sheep were already in such poor condition they couldn’t withstand the record minus 57-degree temperatures. He lost all of his bucks, and his ewes were in no shape for

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