Four Corners, Wyo.
It rises east of lonely and remote Wyoming 585 in this wide-open and wind-thumped land: a pine-covered mountain that leaps from the drab, jackrabbit prairie and gives travelers in these parts something to look at.
Which is not to imply that viewing mile after mile after brown, grassy mile of vegetation dotted by nibbling cows doesn’t steal your breath away, too.
But Inyan Kara Mountain just north of this tiny town really catches your eye. It caught someone else’s eye, too. For at its top, on a flat granite shelf , a man chiseled his name. The first letter, a C, is cut deep into the stone. There’s a T and an R, too.
The Denver Broncos fans among you are thinking: “Why the heck would Jay Cutler stamp his name into a remote Wyoming mountaintop?”
It wasn’t Cutler, of course.
It was Custer. That Custer.
As in Gen. George Armstrong “Oh, relax, how many of them could there be?” Custer.
The general chiseled his name – as did many of the men who were traveling with him – into the mountain in 1874. Two years later, he was killed in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In hindsight, of course, he and his troops should’ve lingered in Four Corners.
Ruth Borgialli gazes north toward Inyan Kara from the window of a small house that sits in the town of Four Corners. Actually, the house more or less is the town of Four Corners. Custer and his troops passed by on what then was a wagon trail and is now a paved road just a few feet from the front door.
Obviously, Ruth didn’t actually see Custer and his men. But she didn’t miss them by much.
Ruth is 92. She was born in Missouri in 1914 and has lived here since 1924.
OK, she missed Custer by 50 years.
Her daughter, Hazel Johnson, 71, was a teenager when her father bought the land. “My dad bought 320 acres of land out here, and then bought another 320 acres a year later,” she said. “He paid 25 cents an acre. The guy who sold it laughed. He said the only thing this land was good for was rattlesnakes.”
Hazel’s dad and Ruth’s husband, Charlie Borgialli, had come from Italy. He settled first in South America, where he worked for several years. He’d been was a baker in Italy. In America he became a miner and a rancher.
And he spent much of the time after the purchase of the 640 Wyoming acres doing something else, too: smiling.
Seems the land had other things besides rattlesnakes. It had tens of thousands of trees, for example. He recovered the entire cost of the land by selling just a small fraction of the trees to a timber company.
And it had oil.
Hazel owns the house and the adjoining Four Corners Country Inn, Bed and Breakfast and RV Park. There used to be a store and diner, too, but the work was too much and when you’re 71 and your mother is 92, well, it seems like as good a time as any to throttle back a bit.
“The same land dad bought for 25 cents an acre he turned around and leased to the oil drilling companies for $10 an acre,” Hazel said. “And he kept the mineral rights, meaning he got a check every year for a share of the oil, too.”
Hazel’s father died last year. He was 95. He took care of the land around the town of Four Corners. And the land took care of him.
Which brings us to the obvious question: Four Corners of what?
“It’s the intersection of two highways, that’s about it,” said Hazel, looking out the window at the intersection of U.S. 85 and Wyoming 585. “The funniest part is, we get a few people every year, mostly from New York as I recall, who stop in and actually ask if these are the four corners of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. I have to tell them ‘No, no. You’re in Wyoming.”‘
These days, the traffic is light. The tourists who flock to the Black Hills of South Dakota just 5 miles to the east are gone. There are some pheasant and turkey hunters who linger, and soon the snowmobile crowd will come and many of Hazel’s rooms at the inn will be filled.
“Until then there’s just a lot of peace and quiet,” she said. “It’s a nice place to settle down.”
If only someone had told the general.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
