Of all the difficult ways there were to make a living in the scrub land around Jackson hole in the mid 1860’s Thistle farming had to be the hardest. Hardy homesteaders from Scotland moved into the territory and with dreams of establishing a thistle empire began dozens of small farms in the arid land north and east of Jackson hole Wyoming. It was subsistence farming at its heart and depended primarily on a lack of snow in the winter to keep the land at its most unproductive state.

A late snowstorm could wipe out an entire crop of thistles leaving the farmer and his family destitute but broke after a year of backbreaking labor in the thistle fields which happened more often than not. Ignoring the advice of local hunters and trappers and refusing even to talk to the ranchers in the area who had long years of getting through the winters here and were a fount of knowledge regarding snow and other moisture-laden events, they steadfastly planted their thistle seeds, hoed away the nuisance plants like alfalfa and its companion plants hay and silage and constantly fought to keep the scourge of pasture from forming. Determined but misguided they fought on year after year until eventually even the most die-hard thistle farmer saw it was a futile but lost cause.

Sadly all we have left is the occasional deteriorating building with its chinking of mud and dried thistle stalks, often with a forlorn thistle plant growing nearby in a futile attempt to reestablish its prominence. Now its once proud purple head faded to a dull listless straw color, still hoping against hope to drop its seeds into the wind one more time. It remains a sign of the herculean effort by these early dedicated but clearly unintelligent emigrant agriculturists. Still today, if you look closely at some of these abandoned homesteads you will see a small cluster of thistle bravely making a stand against the elements, their purple heads still nodding defiantly in the wind in apparent acknowledgement of their futile battle with the elements, a testament if you will to determined but misguided efforts on a huge scale. There are other failures written in the book of lost causes here in the west but none quite measure up to this one, the thistle farmers of the high plains.