The Sage Grouse

Mixed McGuire Metaphors

What ever happened to Pat McGuire’s massively productive water well in the upper Laramie Plains?  He got a Farm Loan Board irrigation loan to plant barley fields at 7000+ feet with this well.  People said he tapped an underground river.  He tore up my favorite spot for watching sage grouse strut while I was in law school, plowed it, planted barley and installed center pivot sprinklers.  I took people up there at 4:00 am every spring from 1979 to 1981  to watch the birds, but the last year the whole place was plowed up.

Pat, who later ran for Governor, drilled an amazing water well where aliens told him to drill for irrigation water and then plant barley, and put in sprinklers.  Ed Herschler’s buddies at DEPAD (Dept. of Economic Planning and Development, invented by Stan Hathaway) loaned him the low-interest money.  Talk about sub-prime lending.

Many people would think the foregoing paragraphs are so fantastic that they reveal terrible lapses in The Sage Grouse’s perception and reason.  However, the facts save me: in the early 1980s Leo Sprinkle, on the psychology faculty at the University of Wyoming, and Pat McGuire, a quirky articulate rancher of unusual talents, pooled their energies to contact intelligent beings from another planet or solar system or galaxy.  The alien beings instructed Pat to plow up the prairie, drill the big well, plant barley, and sell it to the Israelis.

How could I make this up?  Pat plowed, planted and irrigated, courtesy of state subsidies, and went bankrupt.  7,000 feet is too cold and high to provide a successful growing season for barley in Wyoming.  The state foreclosed on his farm.  Too bad for the sage-grouse.  Too bad for the state treasury.

I still have a Pat McGuire for Governor poster.

I wonder what ever happened to that monster water well?

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4 Comments

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  1. Reply

  2. Pat mcguire was a relative of mine, he was so ostracized after the alien claim. It was terrible. His kids were ridiculed,?as was he. I’m actually named after pay! I’d love to see a copy of the poster. Thanks b btw,!it didn’t help that we were all raised Catholics they just tore him up. “It had to be the devil, he’s possessed now”.

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  3. Can anyone please provide me the location of this well? I’m doing a Google Satellite search. Thank You, A.E.S.

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  4. They were using it for a stock-pond and highway construction, but last time I was out there, they’d hooked up to it, for something else. They separated the 5100 acres from the well. It’s all back to sagebrush, so the sage grouse shouldn’t have any problem taking back what was theirs.

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