Movie celebrates last known trip up the Big Horn River before building of Yellowtail dam

The movie, “Montana and Wyoming’s Lost Country” will be shown Friday night. 

As part of the open house at the Greybull Museum, they are showing a movie by William D. Greene. The movie is about traveling up the Big Horn River before the Yellowtail dam was built. The dam created Yellowtail Reservoir, now known as Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. Warning: the movie does include the men on the boat trip skinny dipping. Grandpa, Mikie Bond, Dale Nobel and Eddie Lou Johnson were some of the last men to travel the river before the dam. 

We used to go out to sites with Grandpa. People from the Smithsonian and various universities would come out in the summer months to go on excursions. Grandpa was very protective of what was here. When a new “Eastern so-called expert” would come, he didn’t take them to the prime spots until they passed his test. A few days before they arrived, he would go to one of the so-so sites and plant an item that didn’t belong. If the experts didn’t figure out that the item was not consistent with the rest of the site, they never got to the premiere locations. 

As children, we didn’t really understand how cool what we were doing was. We spent time in a cave in Sheep Mountain and caves that were accessible only by boat. Sadly, the caves along the Bighorn are under water. He passed away before he could take us to the Natural Trap Cave. He wanted us to be teenagers. 

We also didn’t realize that some of the people that were on the sites with us were tops in the field. For example, George Frison. Holy cow! They were just a bunch of “old” men to us.  They were very tolerant and would send us on “hunts” to find something specific. Most importantly, it got us out of their way. Grandpa was also known to hide a 50-cent coin somewhere outside of the dig area. 

My favorite find as a child was coprolite — aka dino poop. It is on loan to the museum and included in the William D. Greene memorial collection at the museum. More of his collection is on display across from Crazy Woman Territory in Greybull. It is a work in progress as we are still going through boxes and boxes of his personal collection. 

The museum board members, Shaylah Spragg and others have done such an amazing job revamping the museum and showcasing the collections. If you haven’t been in the museum for a while, you will be amazed at the changes. 

There are four scrapbooks on loan to the museum that were Grandma Eva Greene’s.  Many of the early discoveries of dino bones, artifacts, etc., are in them. The books also have old newspaper stories and photos of historical events in Greybull. 

The open house is a two-day event. Friday is the night that the movie will be shown. The event starts at 6 p.m.