Tales of Gourds and Gold

“Do you know why they’re called the “Pumpkin Buttes?’” asks Bob Christensen as he rumbles up the side of a ridge near one of Campbell County’s famous flat-topped buttes in his 1980 Dodge pickup. The Sioux had named the Buttes “Wa-ga-ma Pa-ha,” meaning Gourd Hills, which most people think refers to a tribal ceremony using gourds. But the answer can be found on a ridge at the foot of the North Butte. In the bottom of a sandy wash lie hundreds of orange-tinted, cylindrical rocks identical to pumpkins. “These were created from wind eroding the sand,” he says. “The whole ridge is full of these things. They’ve been here thousands of years.” In fact, it would be hard to find a century-old ranch in Campbell County richer in landmarks than the adjacent Christensen Ranches, owned by cousins Bob and John Christensen 35 and 51 miles south on Highway 50. Situated just three miles east of the Powder River as the crow flies and almost completely surrounding the northernmost Pumpkin Butte, they are a historian’s – and geologist’s – dream. One of the first to herd sheep over this land was Fred Christensen, born in Michigan to European immigrant parents. Determined not to milk cows at the family dairy the rest of his life, he left Michigan to go West and got a job at the Two Bar Ranch. Cowboying at the Two Bar near Chugwater was every Easterner’s dream job. It was headquarters for Swan Land and Cattle Co., which in its 1880s heyday controlled 3.25 million acres and ran 50,000 to 90,000 head of cattle. It had switched to sheep, however, by the time Christensen happened by. In 1905, Christensen hired on with the Young Brothers, a Scotch sheep outfit in Johnson County. Two years later, he homesteaded on Pumpkin Creek near the north Pumpkin Butte, partnering on sheep first with Charles Hall and later with Hugh Auld...more