Wildfire Burns Harriet Hageman’s Family Homestead, More Evacuations…

UPDATE: Fire 30% Contained, Plans In The Works To Lift Evacuation Orders

U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming, was teary-eyed and fought back her emotions talking about her family’s loss this week of her childhood home, which went up in flames when Wyoming’s largest wildfire roared through the Haystack Range.

The Hageman homestead, a rustic cabin-like structure with plastered walls and built into the side of a hill near McGinnis Pass, Wyoming, was destroyed by an uncontained wildfire in rough terrain littered with huge granite boulders and tinder fueled with juniper pinions woodland and sagebrush.

“It’s been pretty devastating,” Hageman told Cowboy State Daily.

Back in Washington, D.C., doing what she does there, Wyoming’s lone U.S. House member was preoccupied with upsetting late-night telephone conversations with her brother Hugh and older sister Julia in Torrington, who lives closest to their 100-year-old mother, Marion, in a local nursing home.

Matriarch of the family, Marion Hageman, hasn’t fully grasped the family’s devastation.

“I just saw her a couple of days ago when I was home. I’m not even sure she even knows about this fire yet,” said Hageman of her mother.

“It was a very old log house, with very thick walls because they didn’t split the wood. It was very cold in the wintertime,” she recalled. “We had one woodburning stove, and we would take Montgomery Ward catalogs when we were younger and put them on the stove and heat them through, and then wrap them in fabric and take them to bed to stay warm.”

Wind Shifts, More Evacuations

Meanwhile, by Friday evening the wind had shifted, prompting an urgent notice from Platte County officials for residents in the tiny town of Hartville and nearby Whalen Canyon to evacuate, their second in less than a week.

“Attention!!! Residents of Hartville and Whalen Canyon Evacuate Now!” reads a Platte County Sheriff’s Office Facebook post. “The winds have changed and the fire is advancing west. Pleasant Valley residents begin evacuation process.”

The evacuation notice also came with the announcement of local road closures, specifically for Highway 270, Whalen Canyon Road and Pleasant Valley Road.

As of 9:06 p.m. Friday, “Fire crews have been able to regain control of the fire at this time,” the sheriff’s office reported.

Among those who were quickly evacuated were the staff, volunteers and animals at the Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary.

“This evening we had to make the difficult decision to evacuate Kindness Ranch,” the sanctuary posted to its Facebook page. “The fire was picked up by the wind and headed our direction.”

All the people and animals were hustled out safely, and the “large animals (are) houses safely in metal buildings with lots of food, water and a dedicated small number of staff staying back and caring for them,” the ranch says. “We are all safe, the animals and humans.”

The wildfire as of late Friday was also upgraded from a little over 23,000 acres to 25,000 acres burned in a huge swath of flatland and hills leading into the Haystack Range.

The fire is stuck to the north of U.S. Highway 26 in the Haystacks with no containment, according to a statement issued Friday afternoon by Tyson Finnicum, a spokesman for the Wyoming State Forestry Division.

Family Roots

It’s an area Hageman knows well.

It’s where her roots are.

Hagemans are everywhere in this part of Wyoming.

One brother lives by the historic Fort Laramie near the North Platte River. Another brother lives out along U.S. Highway 26 about 4 miles west of Fort Laramie where the fire roared along the main thoroughfare on Wednesday.

Nephews, nieces and sons-in-law live everywhere around the Cowboy State.

Harriet Hageman played in the Haystacks and grew up there on the family homestead until she was 7 years old, after which time her family moved closer to Fort Laramie so that she and her siblings could participate in sports and other school activities.

“We grew up in an area we referred to as ‘The Hills,’” Hageman said. “We grew up in the Haystacks, and in a house that was on the Cheyenne to Deadwood stage trail. It was an old, old home, you know, 100-plus years old.”

For sure, the former stage route has a colorful past.

According to the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, the stage route was in operation from 1876 to 1887 between Cheyenne and Deadwood, South Dakota. Thousands of passengers, tons of freight and express and millions of dollars in gold passed over this trail until the railroad came.

During the years the trail was in use, it was the scene of numerous Indian and outlaw plunderings.

The home, said an emotional Hageman, was “very special to all of us.”

“That’s where we were all raised,” she added. “It burned.”

‘It’s Devastating’

Hageman grew up with five other siblings, including brother Hugh whose ranch has smoldering fields that wrap around the home where the family moved later in life after their earlier times at the homestead in McGinnis Pass.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, firefighters, planes and helicopters dropping water and slurry halted the fire’s march to Fort Laramie near the canal 2 miles on the western edge of town.

About 8,000 acres of Hugh Hageman’s 25,000-to-30,000-acre spread burned, taking away some of the pasture needed for his 1,000 head of cattle.

“It’s devastating,” said Hugh Hageman when reached by Cowboy State Daily late Friday.

“I’m out here fighting the fire right now,” he said, adding he was working with brothers and other family members, plus 15 forestry service volunteers trying to keep the fire from spreading on the southern and eastern front of the Haystacks. “I can’t tell on the west side.”

Hugh Hageman couldn’t confirm if any of the fire was contained, but he did believe it was more “controlled” as firefighters have encircled the fire with backburning to halt its spread on the eastern and southern fronts.

“We’re running a sprayer right now. We’re in the fire right now, doing some backburning,” he said. “We’ve got the fire surrounded now to keep it from coming back down from the hills.”

Hageman didn’t have a firetruck, but he did have his farm truck.

“We’ve got a little sprayer built just for this with a 500-gallon tank on the back. It’s putting out a lot of fire,” he said.

Late Friday, the congresswoman’s brother reflected on the family’s loss of their historic homestead.

“It burned to the ground. There’s nothing left,” he said. “It’s kind of sad. It was a place where we all went back to. It was in pretty bad shape before the fire. No one lived there since the early 1970s.”

Never Forget

The home may have been in bad shape, but the Hagemans have not forgotten their origins.

Harriet Hageman said that her parents had $200,000 in debt and had scraped together the money to buy the ranch land with the homestead back in 1962.

They had $35 left in their savings account.

“They just had nothing, but they built a very successful ranching operation over the years,” she said.

Her father, Jim Hageman, passed away in 2006 and is buried in a gravesite on “a little hill” probably about a half mile-away from her childhood home.

Jim Hageman was a member of the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1983 until his death in 2006.

A Wonderful Life

“We had two bedrooms and six kids,” she said. “The baby always slept in mom and dad’s room, and my three sisters and I slept in one bedroom and my brother slept in the dining room.

“It was a wonderful place to grow up. We had rattlesnakes, we had chickens, we had a garden, we had cattle, we had sheep, we had horses. It was an incredible place to grow up.”

The homestead life didn’t offer many of today’s comforts.

“We didn’t have a telephone, we didn’t have a television,” she said. “We rode ponies all the time. It was a great place to grow up.”

The simple life brought them close together.

“We were all very, very close with each other. We lived a kind of life almost straight out of the late 1800s. My parents were bound and determined to be ranchers,” she said. “You just really risk everything when you do it.”

Besides the Hageman children, her parents also helped raise more than 40 foster kids.

“They sent us all to college,” Hageman said of she and her siblings. “I think we’ve all been quite successful as a result of having that kind of an upbringing.”

Gunnysack Times

The Pleasant Valley Fire isn’t Hageman’s first rodeo with wildfire.

“I grew up fighting fire in those hills. It’s not easy fighting fire in the Haystack hills,” she said. “You take a wet gunnysack in one hand and a shovel in the other, and you just basically try to beat it out before it gets out on the prairie. It’s incredibly hard work.”

A gunnysack is a large sack made of a course fabric that can be used as a sandbag for erosion control or to hold grain, potatoes or some other agricultural product. The sacks are soaked with water to help fight grass fires in rural areas, like where the Hagemans lived.

The exact time of day that the Hageman homestead went up in flames isn’t known.

However, it is likely that it happened sometime Wednesday afternoon after the Haystack Fire and Pleasant Valley fires combined to form one big inferno now known as the Pleasant Valley Fire, which is what Hugh Hageman is fighting.

Since Wednesday, the fire has pulled back from U.S. Highway 26 and headed deep into the Haystack Range.

The burn area in the Haystack range is between the McGinnis Pass and McCann Pass in Goshen County at about 5,000 feet in elevation. The range passes are located east of Whalen Canyon Road in the county and are located about 6 miles apart.

The southern end of the fire is about 8 miles to the northeast of Guernsey, the area where the Pleasant Valley fire first started.

Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.