Burt C. Buffum, Part Two

Post contributed by AHC Archives Aide Patty Kessler

Buffum’s Second Term at the University of Wyoming

Buffum left Wyoming in 1900 to serve as the director of the Colorado Agricultural College’s experiment station in Fort Collins. Prior to his departure, the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees adopted a Resolution acknowledging his contributions to the University, particularly noting that “as the result of his efforts” during the nine years he was in residence, “this station [Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station] has reached its national prominence.”¹ His time leading the Colorado Experiment Station was short but productive. While there, he worked with the newly established veterinary department to clean “up the college herd of tuberculosis . . . [conducted] farmers’ institute tours  . . . added new breeds of stock . . . judged agricultural exhibits at the State fair in Pueblo . . . grain breeding was begun . . . [and he] started a magazine under the title of Agricuola Aridu . . . [about which he noted that] when I resigned and its was discontinued it had a circulation of about seventeen hundred.”² In addition: “A considerable additional area of the College Farm was brought under cultivation and golf course established in the back pasture where I spent a delightful month while quarateened [sic] for small-pox, working up a fairly good amateur game.”³

Buffum returned to Wyoming in 1903 to work as the director of the University’s experiment farms.  From 1903 to 1907 he served as “Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Stations (WAES) director . . . Wyoming range researcher, UW classroom professor, student and faculty mentor, and outreach agent.”⁴

One of his many accomplishments with the Wyoming Agricultural Extension Service as WAES director was to develop a wool department. Buffum mentored and later hired one of his student protégés, John Arthur Hill, as “a professor of wool—the first in the history of WAES.”⁵ He also designed and implemented an educational program for ranching and farming communities through “farmers’ institutes” that were conducted in towns throughout Wyoming.  He was frequently accompanied by Professors Aven Nelson and George Morton. Buffum’s institutes were so popular “that one man living seven miles out of town walked all the way into Sheridan just to catch Buffum’s evening session.”⁶ Buffum and his contemporaries’ dedication to outreach was unparalleled at the time. They traveled:

…more than four hundred miles by stage and wagon, and a thousand miles by rail in bad weather conditions to conduct a number of institutes requested by various groups. . . enduring four-horse runaways, narrow escapes from wrecks and tipover [sic], occasional but real hostile people, travel through a vast unsettled territory in an unusual blizzard, mountain passes filled snow drifts, frozen faces and chilled feet, forty mile rides with the temperature below zero in wind and snow and of some meals absent and other grateful one of Indian cookery and horse meat.⁷

In addition to the farmers’ institutes, Buffum and his colleagues established a series of short courses.⁸ They were billed to be “a meeting in which practical men will lecture and discuss topics of interest and value to every man interested in Wyoming land, water or livestock.”⁹ The meetings were held during the off-season in March in the Science Hall on the University of Wyoming’s campus and highlighted lectures by professionals on a variety of topics including irrigation, stock judging, stock feeding, and management. The presenters in 1904 included Professor Elwood Mead, who was then employed by the United States Department of Agriculture as Chief of Irrigation Investigations. Other notable presenters were Wyoming Supreme Court Justice C. N. Potter, who lectured on “The Sources of the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation and Some of Its Consequences as Applied by Judicial Decision in Wyoming.”¹⁰ The final attendance tally was 131.  It was noted that in addition to students, “seventy-three . . . were ranchmen . . . who represented eight of the thirteen counties and two ranchmen from Northern Colorado.”¹¹

Buffum was also instrumental in putting in motion the transfer of the UW Stock Farm to the former territorial penitentiary. The area where the original stock farm had been located became “increasingly residential” since the founding of the University and there were no opportunities to expand its operation at the initial site. By 1907, the Stock Farm began transitioning to its new home. However, Buffum left his post to manage the “Wyoming Plant and Seed  Breeding Company” in Worland before the final relocation was finished.¹² His connection with Wyoming and high plains agriculture did not end there. He went on to publish two books. The first, circulated in 1909, Arid Agriculture: A Hand-Book for the Western Farmer and Stockman, was a compilation of the research that he was doing at the Worland Plant and was disseminated for use by statewide producers.¹³ Alan Beetle claimed that it was “one of the first books to deal with the western type of agriculture. . . [H]e treated nearly all phases of the early dryland and irrigated farming, as well as ranching [and] objected to the term ‘dry farming’ because ‘no crop can be produced without moisture.”¹⁴ He continued to research and publish his findings to the benefit of Wyoming farmers and ranchers. 

He maintained his relationships with his colleagues. Most notable is his friendship with Aven Nelson.¹⁵ On the event of Nelson’s 83^rd birthday, Buffum wrote: 

It seems that you and I walked along a pathway of rather close association.  Remember the whiskers we wore in 1891-93, the luxuriance of which demonstrated the salubrious Wyoming climate? . . .

As a further evidence of close association in our work, do you remember that you, Senator Joseph M. Carey, Ed. Young and I were the Wyoming State Horticultural Society, which met each year at the State Fair at Douglas?  Some years a quorum consisting of you and me made up the entire attendance.

I must here express my deep appreciation of your monumental work on the flora of the Rocky Mountain region.  None can more thoroughly understand it than I.  My command of language is insufficient to express my feeling in the matter.¹⁶

Buffum in Private Industry

After working for the majority of his career in academia, Buffum moved his family to Worland in 1907 to pursue a career in the private sector. Buffum founded the “Wyoming Plant and Seed Breeding Company” at Worland, where after having “made several trips into the Big Horn Basin . . .  I was convinced that wonderful things came out of the Basin Country. For example, I had seen alfalfa with stems eleven feet long, and crab apples which had hung under a pollenization [sic] branch grow as large as standard fruits. I had seen a whole bushel of ripe tomatoes on one plant.¹⁷

Buffum noted in an interview with the Historical Review of Worland that he believed the Worland area would produce the results that he wanted in breeding exceptional grains for use in cereals. He was proud of the results that he achieved while there, “which drew attention to the Worland Valley from all over the World.”¹⁸ Buffum was well established as a noted breeder of grains. By 1904, the Experiment Stations in Wyoming had produced “three varieties of the heaviest wheat in the world, weighing 66 pounds per bushel.¹⁹ These grains won gold medals at the St. Louis Exhibition (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) in 1904 and “took 80 medals in Portland” in 1905 (Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition).²⁰

Buffum started his company with seed that had been given to him by “professors and farmers who were interested in the work he was doing. Mark Carlton, the Cerealist of the United States Department of Agriculture gave him “two small bags of black winter emmer.”²¹ Buffum saw a great deal of possibility for this Middle Eastern grain and set about finding ways to improve upon it. His efforts led to the founding of his seed company and, eventually, transitioned into a breakfast food company. The demand for his products grew and he moved his family and business to Denver. World War I resulted in an exhaustion of the company’s supply which led to Buffum’s retirement. Eduma Buffum Boyne noted that “frustration, worry and disappointment gradually wore my father down. He was compelled to retire not only from the business but from the experimental work.” After Buffum’s retirement the company gradually went into bankruptcy and emmer faded into “oblivion.”²²

Buffum as a Photographer

Early in his career, Buffum’s interest in technology and the arts also led him to master the art of photography. Kruger referred to him as “an unusual early adapter of instructional technology—and clearly ahead of his time and peers when it came to presenting research in multimedia formats.”²³ He projected images of his photographs during his traveling institutes and published them in research bulletins and the Ranchman’s Reminder. The University of Wyoming American Heritage Center maintains a digital collection of over 2000 images taken by Buffum throughout his career. However, it isn’t just the photos directly related to his profession as an agriculturist that have gained him notoriety.  In 1903 he attended the Albany County Fair in Laramie.  It was here that he captured “Guy Holt Pulling Leather on Steamboat.  It continues to be widely viewed and was used “in various publications of the University.²⁴

Another of his widely known photographs is of Theodore Roosevelt on the campaign trail in 1903. Roosevelt had visited Laramie on his campaign tour. He was to travel from Laramie to Cheyenne on horseback up the canyon accompanied by individuals from Laramie. Buffum was asked to photograph the party as they emerged from the canyon.  Enduma Buffum Boyne describes the event:

[M]y tall Papa, with Mother, my little brother and me in the buggy, drove old Puss to a point on the road where the party of horseback riders would emerge from the canyon.  It worked out perfectly, and Daddy, with camera on tripod, the dark cloth around his neck, some extra plates under his arm, strode off into the low sage to get several pictures of this historic occasion.²⁵

Boyne had written in another article that her father had attended a convention in Washington D. C. sometime later and had an opportunity to meet and shake hands with the President. To Buffum’s “delight,” Roosevelt “recognized him instantly, called him by name, and said, ‘You are the culprit who took my picture in Cheyenne Canyon.’”²⁶

Conclusion

B.C. Buffum’s life is testament to the “initiative, enthusiasm, and imagination” that he brought to it—striving to bring order out of the chaos of the times. This is evident, from his commitment to documenting each day of his family’s travels to Yellowstone Park in 1885 to his continuing desire that his business endeavors benefit not only his investors and his family, but hardworking farmers and ranchers as well. His publication of his first book in 1809, Arid Agriculture: A Hand-Book for the Western Farmer and Stockman, which was a compilation of the research he was doing at his plant in Worland, stood in testament of that. Buffum’s initiative earned him a supervisory position at the 1893 World’s Fair and praise from the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees for the role he played in putting the Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Stations on the World map. In concert with the times in which he lived and in the spirit of the Populists and the Farmer’s Alliances, Buffum committed himself to educating farmers and ranchers about cutting edge practices and technology in agriculture believing that education was the key to bringing about a more equitable distribution of wealth. As Alan Beetle had mentioned in his posthumous tribute to Buffum, his initiative, enthusiasm and imagination were central to drawing the world’s attention to agriculture on the high plains and to the eventual development of the discipline of range management. But what stands out most of all is his commitment to the industrious agriculturalists on the high plains and to his family. His daughter, Eduma, spoke often of the times that the family accompanied Buffum on trips related to his work and how each Christmas he would write a poem. These phrases from a poem he wrote in 1911 in which he refers to his travels around the world, summarizes where his heart lay most of all:

. . . It’s me back to the sagebrush where there’s friendship, love, and truth,
And breadth of mental vision with no sordidness or uncouth,
Where nature puts new life in air that quicks the human clod,
Where man reflects his Maker and can reach the hand of God.
Back to old Wyoming where in the shack upon the farm
I feel that wife and babies are all safe from worldly harm,
Where in home reunion with our Christmas joys unfurled
I know I am the richest man since Adam owned the world.²⁷

Finally, on the Yellowstone trip, Buffum wrote about a stay on the Newcomer’s ranch outside of Buffalo. After almost a month on the trail, the Newcomer’s hospitality was most welcome. Buffum wrote, “What a bonanaza that was! And a “hogkilling time”! What fun! I believe that this sentiment exemplified his entire life and career. He had a “hogkilling time.”²⁸

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1. Resolution Board of Trustees University of Wyoming, May 10, 1900, Box 1, Folder 2, B. C. Buffum, 400055, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. ↩︎
2. Summary of Buffum’s accomplishments while director of Colorado Agricultural College’s experiment stations, nd., Box 1, Folder 2, B. C. Buffum, 400055, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Kruger, 22. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 23. ↩︎
7. Johanna Nel and Johannes E. Nel, “University of Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station: 100 Years of Service to the State”, Annals of Wyoming, Winter, Vol. 64, No. 1 (1992), 14. ↩︎
8. Farmer’s Alliances. ↩︎
9. The Ranchman’s Reminder, Vol. 1, No. 1 (January, 1904), 3. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. The Ranchman’s Reminder, Vol. 1, No. 3 (March, 1904), 23. ↩︎
12. Kruger, 24. ↩︎
13. Ibid. ↩︎
14. Beetle, 82-83. ↩︎
15. Aven Nelson was universally known as an expert on the botany of the Rocky Mountain Region. He wrote and published extensively about native plant life and was responsible for the growth and ascendency of the Rocky Mountain Herbarium located at the University of Wyoming. It is the “largest facility of its kind between Saint Louis and the West Coast . . . [and] the largest collection of Wyoming and Rocky Mountain plants in the world (University of Wyoming, Rocky Mountain Herbarium, “Welcome to the Rocky Mountain Herbarium,” rockymountainherbarium.org, accessed 7/4/26). The data acquired in the study of these plants are critical in helping individuals from a broad spectrum of professions understand our natural environment (Lyn Loveless, The University of Arizona, “Why Herbaria?”, herbarium.arizona.edu/why-herbaria). In Wyoming, in the late 1800s and turn of the 20^th century, they proved valuable in helping to educate farmers and ranchers about best practices in managing the rangelands of the high plains and Rocky Mountain Region. ↩︎
16. Summary of documents donated to the American Heritage Center by Eduma Buffum Boyne, Box 1, Folder 2, B. C. Buffum, 400055, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.  ↩︎
17. Interview with Buffum, Historical Review, Development of the Worland Valley, Washakie County, Wyoming, by C. F. Robertson, nd, Box 1, Folder 2, B. C. Buffum, 400055, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. ↩︎
18. Ibid., 53. ↩︎
19. The College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Ohio State University reported that today one bushel of wheat weighs in at 60 pounds. Ohio State University, College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, “Bushels, Test Weights, and Calculations, https://cfaes.osu.edu/fact-sheet/bushels-test-weights-and-calculations, accessed, July 2, 2026. ↩︎
20. Interview with Buffum, Historical Review, Development of the Worland Valley, Washakie County, Wyoming, by C. F. Robertson, nd, Box 1, Folder 2, B. C. Buffum, 400055, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. ↩︎
21. The Long Way to Yellowstone Park in 1885, 35. ↩︎
22. Ibid. ↩︎
23. Kruger, 23. ↩︎
24. The Long Way to Yellowstone Park in 1885, 34. ↩︎
25. Ibid. 35. ↩︎
26. “The Day Papa Took the President’s Picture,” Family Features, Science Monitor, Boston, February 28, 1958, Box 1, Folder 2, B. C. Buffum, 400055, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. ↩︎
27. The Long Way to Yellowstone Park in 1885, 29-30. ↩︎
28. Ibid., 12. ↩︎