Tom Bell thinks he was about six when he created a makeshift bridge across a ditch for a sage grouse hen and her brood. “I’d seen the babies drown trying to follow their mother and I wanted to help. I guess that was the beginning of my ‘do-gooder’ tendencies.”

A ranch kid raised outside of Lander, Tom always had a deep connection to the land and to Wyoming. This connection was strengthened upon his return from World War II, when, emotionally scarred and missing an eye, he found sanctuary in Wyoming’s wide-open spaces. After the war, Tom went back to school. He worked as a wildlife biologist, and later as a schoolteacher and a journalist, but by the mid- 1960s Tom could not ignore the threats facing his beloved homeland. In 1967 the Wyoming Outdoor Coordinating Council was born.

The vision behind the council was to bring together various organizations in the state to speak as one voice on conservation issues. “The first meeting was held in Casper,” Tom says. “I remember a sense of excitement. Maybe we could all pull together to work on some of these issues and get something accomplished. And we did.”

The early cast of characters represented a true cross-section of Wyoming. Leslie Petersen was just a girl when she was first dragged to council meetings by her parents, Dubois ranchers Les and Alice Shoemaker, two of the earliest board members.

“I think what was critically important,” Leslie says, “was the fact that the Wyoming Outdoor Council has always been made up of the people of Wyoming. Nobody could claim that it was Washington, limousine liberals. It’s the real heart of Wyoming conservationists acting in unison, struggling for the protection of the things we all value about Wyoming, in particular the air and the water and the wildlife and the open spaces.”

The bond unifying this nascent team of conservationists began with this shared commitment to the land, but quickly developed into a sense of solidarity and camaraderie. Wyoming was then, as it is now, a lonely place to be an environmentalist. “We stayed with the volunteering and the traveling all those years mainly because of the marvelous friendships we made and the lovely people we met,” Glenda Borzea recalls in Ahead of Their Time: Wyoming Voices for the Wilderness.

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