In 1918 the Buck Creek Dome oil strike briefly boosted Lusk's population to ten thousand.  Today, only three thousand people live in the entire county.  The Stagecoach Museum in Lusk is a wonderful place to explore another piece of Wyoming's history -- the glory days of the Cheyenne-Deadwood stagecoach route during the Black Hills gold rush.

A local character who epitomizes that era was Mother Featherlegs, an auburn-haired woman who wore red pantalets, ruffled drawers that tied at the ankle and flapped in the wind when she rode.  An admirer said she looked just like a feather-legged chicken, and so she was christened.  She and her cohort, Dangerous Dick Davis, ran a saloon and brothel out of their cabin southwest of Lusk.  It was a favorite gathering place for those on the wrong side of the law.  Her local fame soared in 1879 when she was discovered shot dead at her spring, with the missing Dangerous Dick's footprints all around.  She was rumored to have had a lot of money hidden away.  Whether it was stolen by her murderer or still waits to be found depends on whose story you believe.  Either way, she is remembered fondly by local residents.  A marker stands at the site of her cabin, and her famous pantalets have had adventures of their own.  Stolen from the historic site in 1964, they graced a Deadwood saloon until 1990, when a determined posse of Lusk residents raided the saloon and got the pantalets back.

If you take Highway 85 north out of Lusk, you'll pass through the most dangerous and desolate section of the Cheyenne-Deadwood stage route.  Horse thefts, stage coach robberies, and other misfortunes were fairly normal, starring westerners with colorful names like Persimmons Bill Chambers, a famous outlaw, and Stuttering Brown, the man sent by the stagecoach company to stop outlaw depredations.  Although many of these stories are tragic, some are triumphant, others are simply funny.  In 1876 Persimmons Bill held up the stage and murdered the Metz family.  Either plucky or foolish, Mrs. Thomas Durbin road the next stage north from Cheyenne with $10,000 in her handbag.  She arrived safely in Deadwood and delivered the money to her brother-in-law who started up a bank, and hopefully treated his sister-in-law well the rest of her life.

Phatty Thompson's initiative was on a different scale.  In 1877 he decided that Deadwood's population of shady women needed pets, so he purchased a number of cats at twenty-five cents each from enterprising Cheyenne youngsters, packed them in a huge crate, loaded them on his wagon, and set out for Deadwood.  En route the wagon tipped over, the crate broke open, and Phatty's investment escaped.  Fortunately, Phatty had some "tasty morsels" with him that eventually convinced most of the cats to return to the crate.  Upon arrival in Deadwood, Phatty's business instincts proved sound -- his feline companions for lonely ladies sold for ten to twenty-five dollars each.