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| Photo of the Month April 2024 |
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| Courtesy Linda O'Donnell |
The peaceful setting of Angeline Sue "Angie" (Potter) Kilgore reclining in the hammock pales in comparison to the horrific way she died, frozen in an early autumn blizzard in 1944.
The daughter of George Perry Potter and stepdaughter of Mary (Leonard) Potter of Ohiopyle, PA, Angeline made her way to Wyoming in young adulthood, where her brother Horace Greeley Potter had settled. There, circa 1927, she entered into marriage with 52-year-old Thomas P. Jefferson Kilgore and put down roots in Fremont County, WY.
Tragedy struck on the fateful late afternoon of Sept. 30, 1944. While helping her husband to move sheep to her brother's ranch, on Squaw Creek, six miles from Lander, a heavy snow began to fall. Thomas told her to wait in their wagon while he finished the job of delivering the herd. "When Kilgore returned to the wagon about midnight, his wife was gone," reported the Casper Star-Tribune, "and a foot of snow had obliterated all tracks. A fire was burning in the sheep wagon stove." The next morning, Sheriff Clayton Danks led a posse of 16 men on horseback on an all-day search. By the end of the day, three feet of snow were on the ground.
The search party continued the next day on the eastern slopes of the Wind River Mountains, "spurring their horses into canyons and ravines on the theory that Mrs. Kilgore in attempting to reach lower ground from the sheep wagon, located on the edge of timber, became confused and went higher up the mountain slop which many miles in and up from the search scene rises to Gannett peak, 13,785 feet, the highest point in Wyoming." Her corpse was not found for several days. Reported the Star-Tribune:
Her brother, H.G. Potter, said her body was found about a mile and a half from his ranch. The 70-year-old woman, gone when her husband returned to their sheep wagon after driving sheep to the Potter ranch in a snowstorm, apparently was not lost, Potter said, because her body was found beside a trail to the ranch. Potter said his sister, doggedly sought by mounted searchers operating in deep snow on the east slope of the Wind River mountains, may have died from a heart attack and not from exposure. He voiced that possibility because of the proximity of Mrs. Kilgore's body to his ranch and its position on the trail, the warm clothing found on Mrs. Kilgore and the fact that a lunch was found nearby.
Angeline is one of more than 360 cousin-casualties of water, fire, shock, freezing and vehicle/aircraft accidents who are remembered on this website.
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Copyright © 2024 Mark A. Miner |
