Barbara Lee Bragg, descended from five generations of Wyoming pioneers, is a writer, actor, and producer who spent ten years in New York doing off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions before moving to Los Angeles in 1995 to work in film, TV, and commercials. She is the executive producer and creator of the independent TV series The Yale Project and has written four successful solo shows, including True West Girl, based on her father’s stories. She has adapted her father’s stories for the stage in the Autry production of Tales of the Old West, playing April 3–6.
By Barbara Lee Bragg
When I was sixteen years old, going down to my dad’s basement office felt like moving back in a time machine to the nineteenth century. Although we lived in a suburban house in Casper, Wyoming, that basement was filled with antiques from our family’s turn-of-century ranch in No Wood, a few miles away. (Just like so many names of towns in Wyoming, No Wood was near a river with no woods on it—just like Ten Sleep is a town where ten people slept.) Among the lines of pictures of five generations of our family’s Wyoming pioneers on the wall, a painting of Silver Jack Steele hung over the television where we all watched Star Trek and I Dream of Jeannie on Sunday evenings.
Barbara Lee Bragg, creator of Tales of the Old West
Even while my Dad, William F. Bragg, Jr., served a term as Wyoming state legislator and worked as a history professor at Casper College, he wrote every day, no matter what. All hell might be breaking loose in the world or in our family—but he would disappear down the stairs into his lair and write. It was his life.
His characters were colorful. Whether he was talking about Big Nose George Parrott, the Cannibal—with whom my mother was not so pleased—or Cantaloupe Jones, a cowboy who could unhinge his jaw, I was always in awe of his imagination. I have no idea whether he was telling the truth, but isn’t that why they call them tall tales? I’d listen to the tap-tapping of the old hulking typewriter filtering up through the heating grates. His characters were so vivid that I swear I could hear them talking to him down there. Lying in bed at night, I’d see a stagecoach rushing by me or Silver Jack Steele come to life.
One night, he marched up the stairs, out of the darkness of his office, and woke me at 3:00 a.m., throwing the manuscript of “Ten Sleep Mail” on my bed. He demanded I read it then and there—and bristled at my high-school analysis of his punctuation and spelling. As for my critique of his storytelling, he couldn’t bear it.
I remember being incredibly embarrassed because he would hold court for hours at family gatherings with his stories. How my eyes would roll! But my attitude changed suddenly on July 4, 1976, at a bicentennial celebration at Independence Rock, 60 miles outside of Casper. This huge granite outcrop in middle of the prairie is right on the Oregon Trail. Folks coming west in the 1800s would have to arrive there by the Fourth of July in order to be sure they could cross the Sierra Nevada before the snows set in. The pioneers carved their names in the rock as a reminder for future generations that they had made it that far.
Anyway, I had recently graduated from Natrona County High School, and the last thing I wanted to do was hang out with my Dad and listen to his stories—again. I felt humiliated because, at the wheel of the blue station wagon, with all of us piled inside, he had driven off the road right in front of my friends and rattled across the prairie to park the cruiser at the base of the rock. There was a natural amphitheater there.
Mom insisted we have a picnic—fried chicken, green grapes, and iced tea—while we waited for God knows who to arrive. All I wanted to do was hang out with my friends, so I went up on the rock and pretended I wasn’t related to those people in the car. Before long, a steady stream of traffic appeared on the highway coming from town. People, old and young, started to . . . show up. Five hundred men, women, and Boy Scouts all came out from Casper, driving 60 miles to listen to my dad. I was dumbfounded.
Mr. Bragg waited until everyone had eaten and watched the spectacular sunset. Then, when the stars started to twinkle and the Milky Way appeared like a theatrical backdrop in a wild Wyoming sky, he stood up and everyone got quiet. He took a small lectern out of the back of the station wagon, put it on top of the hood, flicked on a pen-light and read “The Ghost of Ft. Laramie” to a rapt audience. And then he read another story, and another. We were completely silent in the hands of a master storyteller for two hours. I finally got it. My dad was awesome.
In the seventies, my Dad, a proud Republican for many years, was deeply affected by national scandals such Watergate and the secret war in Cambodia. A man of conviction and loyalty who was the former executive secretary of Wyoming’s Republican Party, he felt bitterly betrayed when Nixon had to resign in dishonor. He openly wept about it. I told him to get the hell out of politics and write his cowboy stories, full time. He walked away from politics, saying, “I wash my hands of it.”
Because of this, his last ten years were fruitful and joyful, and we have his stories to share. He published three novels and two short story collections, along with a history of Wyoming. Unfortunately, he was taken from us far too early, by cancer, with five novels and many stories still percolating in his head. On his deathbed, I promised him I would continue to share his work with the world.
For many years, William F. Bragg, Jr., charged nothing for his lectures at schools and in the community, and many of my friends who have contributed to our show remember him vividly from when they were children. One still reads the stories from Wyoming, Wild and Wooly to his kids at bedtime.
What a tribute to my Dad. He would be so pleased to know that his legacy lives on.
