Medicine Bow: Where Owen Wister Slept on a Counter

Medicine Bow is a small Carbon County town on the high Wyoming plains, and its main claim is a literary one. When Philadelphia writer Owen Wister arrived here in eighteen eighty-five to hunt and explore the West, the only place to sleep was the counter of the general store south of the railroad tracks. He took it.

Wister came back several times, keeping diaries through the eighteen nineties. In nineteen oh two he published The Virginian, a novel set in Medicine Bow that invented nearly every convention of the American Western genre. The town became famous.

In nineteen eleven residents built the three-story Virginian Hotel, then the largest hotel between Denver and Salt Lake City. A monument of petrified wood honoring Wister went up in nineteen thirty-nine. The old general store where he slept was designated a Literary Landmark in nineteen eighty-one.

Medicine Bow today has fewer than three hundred residents, but the hotel still stands.