Vern Wolstenhulme’s father bought a 1952 D8 Caterpillar dozer brand new and used it to haul an old schoolhouse from Victor to the family ranch a few miles north. Wolstenhulme said the piece of heavy machinery still runs and he fires it up a few times a year for work around the ranch. “This cat and I are the same age,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ve aged as well as it has.”
Vern Wolstenhulme’s father bought a 1952 D8 Caterpillar dozer brand new and used it to haul an old schoolhouse from Victor to the family ranch a few miles north. Wolstenhulme said the piece of heavy machinery still runs and he fires it up a few times a year for work around the ranch. “This cat and I are the same age,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ve aged as well as it has.”
The snow climbed nearly to Vern Woolstenhulme’s knees as he stood smack in the middle of Teton Valley, guarded from the morning chill beneath a worn trapper’s hat and a layering of thick jackets. Turning in place he pointed all around to the landmarks that have at once shaped his life and the region’s history.
There’s the old wooden schoolhouse, just down the road, that his father moved to the property in the 1950s. There’s Grand Targhee Resort, which opened in his senior year of high school (“we christened it pretty well”). There’s the massive yellow bulldozer, the horse-drawn road grader and other heavy machinery with which his family built much of the community over the past 100 years.
And then he gestured in the direction of the cabin where, in 1888, his grandmother Lizzie became the first non-native child born in the vicinity. Almost exactly a century later, after her funeral in 1989, Woolstenhulme recalled how a fierce March blizzard engulfed the valley, forcing the relatives to hole up together.
“We blamed it on her,” he said. “She was a feisty old girl — you had to be out here.”
To some extent, you still do. Life wasn’t easy for his forebears in this unforgiving mountain domain, and although the residents now have electricity and gasoline-powered automobiles and internet access, it’s a severe landscape through and through.
All his life Woolstenhulme has grown horse hay for clients in Jackson. It’s been a steady source of income, and he’d “love just to farm.” He’s been milking cows and bucking bales since his age was a single digit. With muscles built on farm-boy chores, he broke the western states deadlift record in college. Just two years ago, at 65, he could still raise 300 pounds off the ground.
But farming alone doesn’t make ends meet, so he’s strung together countless enterprises over the years, from building homes to plowing subdivisions to excavating all around the West. For a few years during the recession he hauled crude oil in North Dakota. He’s even trucked a few houses, some enormous, around the area and over Teton Pass.
“I don’t think anybody in this valley does just one job,” he said, laughing.
In a sense, he’s simply taking advantage of the entrepreneurial gumption that seems to run through his veins. His siblings all have it too: real estate developers, a computer code writer, an artist who creates handbags of exotic leather with concealed-carry pockets.
But of seven children, only Woolstenhulme stayed in Teton Valley, and not for lack of opportunity. Soon after he graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in agricultural economics, he was asked to assess properties for a West Coast real estate investment trust.
“I almost went,” he said. “I was just teetering. Do I want to go to California and raise my family there, or do I want to come back to the ranch?”
The “nostalgia and emotion” won out, and Woolstenhulme resettled his family’s land, rejecting more chances to move over the years. He married his wife, Bonnie, and the two raised six children in the tradition of the generations that preceded them.
The lifestyle obviously suits Woolstenhulme. But Bonnie, sitting beside Vern in the gorgeous wood-and-stone home they built for themselves, suggested there might be more to it than that.
“I think the history is a big part of why you stayed here, too,” she said.
“Undoubtedly,” he agreed. “It’s the heritage. Gotta keep that going and intact. If somebody wouldn’t have stayed here, it would have fallen apart.”
Not only has it held together, it’s flourishing. He said one of his sisters is chronicling the family history, in hundreds of pages. Besides her own research and remembrances, other relatives have contributed their accounts of the hereditary saga.
There’s no shortage of tales to tell, and Woolstenhulme tells them brilliantly, even when he knows them only secondhand. Among them is the story of how his surname arrived in eastern Idaho.
When his grandfather, Samuel Woolstenhulme, first took off for the valley to graze a few dozen head of cattle, he had to drive them through the Fort Hall Indian Reservation on the way. As he passed through, Samuel noticed a group of Native Americans trailing him.
“He was really nervous,” he said. “There were six or eight of them, and he’s by himself.”
They approached him as he set up camp for the night and asked him to trade his horse for one of theirs. Unsure of the horse’s value, Samuel declined, and the men left. But later, as the sky grew dim, he saw another fire burning just down the trail.
“Darkness settled in,” Vern said, “and I don’t think he slept much that night.” When Samuel awoke, though, the Native Americans were gone, and he continued toward his future with Lizzie.
The family has exploded in the century since that origin. When they get together now, with scores of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews, they number well over 100. And despite such a rich heritage, the youngest of them — at least the ones growing up thousands of miles away — “have no connection here at all.”
That doesn’t sit right with Woolstenhulme. So he and his siblings have a vision: a sort of family museum, to be built on the property, where they can honor their legacy. They’ll line the walls with murals and narratives, portraits of Lizzie and Samuel and the other ancestors.
Then, he said, “literally hundreds of descendants” will have the chance to trace their lineage to its roots. Perhaps they’ll learn something of the lives that gave rise to their own, and of the life that Woolstenhulme still leads today.
“All these distant kids, they can come here to where it was homesteaded and started,” he said. “They’ll be able to read the stories and the history, and have a connection that very few people can ever have.”
Contact Cody Cottier at 732-5911 or town@jhnewsandguide.com.
Cody Cottier covers town and state government. He grew up with a view of the Olympic Mountains, and after graduating Washington State University he traded it for a view of the Tetons. Odds are the mountains are where you’ll find him when not on deadline.
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