On a dry September morning, a caravan of cars will leave the Riverton Museum and head east into the sagebrush hills of central Wyoming, bound for a place that time seems to have forgotten. Their destination: Lost Cabin, a hamlet founded by a man who arrived in the territory as a teenager with a single set of clothes and a loan from his mother, and who left behind a mansion so grand and so out of place that it still draws the curious more than a century later.
The occasion is the annual Okie Manor Trek, the Riverton Museum's most popular Adventure Trek and part of the Wind River Visitors Council series. On September 5, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., participants will gather at the Riverton Museum, then drive as a group to the J.B. Okie mansion, built in 1901 in Lost Cabin, about three and a half miles northeast of Lysite. The tour itself lasts roughly three hours, and guests are asked to bring their own sack lunch and water. Reservations are required, and the $15 admission buys entry to a place that is otherwise closed to the public.
The mansion is the centerpiece of a story that reads like a Western novel. John B. Okie was born into a comfortable Washington, D.C., family—his father a well-to-do doctor, his mother a real-estate businesswoman—but at seventeen he struck out for Wyoming Territory on his own. He spent the summer of 1882 working as a cowboy near Rawlins, then returned east to persuade his mother to lend him $4,500. With that money he bought 1,000 ewes, 16 rams, two teams of horses, and a wagon, and returned to Wyoming to make his fortune in sheep.
His first winter was a brutal education. Herding his flock along Beaver Creek in Fremont County, Okie made the mistakes of a novice: he let the sheep overgraze each pasture, weakening them, and when a bad storm hit, nearly half his herd died. He learned from the loss, working as a hired herder for $40 a month to study better methods, and slowly rebuilt. By 1891, the Wyoming Derrick in Casper was calling him the "sheep king," reporting that his herds had grown to 12,000 head. He had survived the catastrophic winter of 1886-87, which killed three-quarters of his sheep but also devastated the cattle industry, and he had watched sheep prices climb while cattle prices fell.
Okie's empire was not just wool and mutton. In 1893 he bought a mercantile in Casper, and two years later he opened a store near his ranch on Badwater Creek to serve the growing number of employees who lived nearby. The store made the place feel like a town, and legend has it that when someone remarked, "Looks like that store will be a gold mine," Okie named the settlement Lost Cabin—after the fabled Lost Cabin Mine, a gold strike supposedly discovered in 1864 by Swedish miners who were killed before they could reveal its location. The mine was never found again, but the name stuck. Within a few years, Okie had opened stores in Lysite, Arminto, Moneta, Shoshoni, and Kaycee, selling tack, tools, sewing machines, patent medicines, and ready-made dresses to ranchers and sheepmen who otherwise faced days-long trips to bigger towns. He extended credit generously, and before long it seemed that everyone in central Wyoming either worked for J.B. Okie, shopped at his stores, borrowed his money, or all three.
By the turn of the century, Okie was wealthy enough to build a home that would have been impressive in Cheyenne, let alone in the remote Badwater Creek country. The mansion, constructed of local sandstone and pine, rose multiple stories above the dry plains, crowned with a turret and a cupola that offered sweeping views of the surrounding hills. It was, by any measure, an architectural marvel in a landscape of dugouts and rough cabins. The Riverton Ranger describes it as "an enduring symbol of Wyoming ingenuity."
But the mansion was only part of the spectacle. In 1910, Okie added an aviary to the fenced yard—a birdcage big as a house, filled with tropical plants and exotic birds. Cockatoos, macaws, and birds of paradise flapped and shrieked among the greenery, and children who grew up near Lost Cabin remembered the aviary all their lives: its wild sounds, strange smells, and scary, bright-colored birds. Okie boasted that it was the largest collection of exotic birds in the territory.
His ambitions did not stop there. Okie built a roller rink and dance floor for his employees, a golf course, and even an airstrip. He pioneered the first steam-powered sheep-shearing plant in the region, mechanizing a process that had always been done by hand. He threw parties, drove fancy cars, and lived in a style that seemed to belong to another world. Yet his personal life was complicated. His first wife, Jeannette Anderson, a Swedish immigrant he married in 1887, bore him eight children over fifteen years, one of whom died at age four. She worked alongside him, learning to shear sheep and tend injured men. But as Okie's wealth grew, he imagined a new life with a younger, more glamorous wife—and, as historian Tom Rea writes, "he made that happen, too."
Okie died in 1930, but his legend only grew. Decades later, people in central Wyoming still told stories about his airstrip, his parties, his business methods, and his birds. They asked that only the good things be remembered, but they also passed on tales of his flaws. The mansion itself, however, fell into private hands and has remained closed to the public—except for these rare treks organized by the Riverton Museum.
The Okie Manor Trek offers visitors a chance to step inside a piece of Wyoming history that most people will never see. The tour covers the history of J.B. Okie, his family, the manor itself, and the details of the home—from the sandstone walls to the cupola views. It is a journey not just across miles of sagebrush, but back to an era when a teenage boy with a loan from his mother could become the Sheep King of central Wyoming, and build a mansion in the middle of nowhere that still stands as a monument to his ambition.
For those who want to go, the museum advises arriving at 9 a.m. sharp. The group drives together to Lost Cabin, and carpooling is encouraged. The tour begins at 10 a.m. and concludes at 2 p.m., with a sack lunch break along the way. The cost is $15 per person, and reservations are required—call 307-856-2665 or visit fremontcountymuseums.com. The event fills up quickly, as it does every year, because there are few experiences quite like standing in the shadow of J.B. Okie's improbable castle on the plains, listening to the wind and imagining the shriek of macaws in the aviary a century ago.