SUBLETTE COUNTY — The Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame (WCHF) selected 23 inductees for the Class of 2024. Among them are four cowboys from Sublette County — Gary Lozier, Big Piney; Kevin W. Campbell, Bondurant; John C. Budd, Big Piney; and Steven C. James, Daniel. See the Aug. A special thanks goes out to Jonita Sommers for her assistance with each cowboy’s profile. 

The WCHF State Board of Directors voted on the nominees from across the state during its annual meeting on April 27. The 11th Annual induction ceremony will be at the Ramkota Hotel in Casper on Oct. 11-12. It is open to the public.  

Regional committees in ten different areas of Wyoming researched and scored over 50 nominations and sent the top picks to the WCHF State Board of Directors. The State Board also selected several nominees.  

Formed for historical, cultural, literary, and educational purposes, WCHF’s chief goal is “To preserve, promote, perpetuate, publish and document Wyoming’s working cowboy and ranching history through researching, profiling and honoring individuals who broke the first trails and introduced that culture to this state. WCHF plans to collect, display and preserve the stories, photos and artifacts of such individuals and anything else that will honor and highlight their contributions to our history.” 

The WCHF Board is comprised of one member from each of the state’s ten regions. To learn more about the WCHF visit www.wyomingcowboyhalloffame.org.

Gary Steele Lozier, Big Piney
Gary Steele Lozier was born on July 13, 1946, in Jackson Hole, Wyo. He lived in Sublette County his entire life. Gary Lozier married Sharlene Potter in 1969, and they had three boys.  Raising their three sons, Tad, Bryon and Monte, on a ranch is what Gary and Sharlene wanted to do. All three sons learned how to ride, rope, feed the hay with a team and sled, doctor the cattle, hunt with horses and carry on the cowboy way of life. 

Gary’s first sitting in a saddle happened before he could walk, as he spent a good amount of his early days at his Grandpa and Grandma Steele’s ranch at New Fork outside Pinedale. At around 8 years old, Jack and Ellen and their four kids moved to the Rahm Place north of Cora, Wyo, and Gary began living his dream of horses, cowboys and ranching. Gary and two of his younger sisters rode horses five days a week to and from the Bar Cross Ranch School, a one-room.  Early in the dark, brittle winter mornings, Gary, his Dad (and one of two sisters or the other, alternating weeks), would walk the mile or so to Rob and Mum’s, harness the feed team, hitch the loaded sled and head home again leading three saddled horses for Gary and his sisters to ride to school. 

That first spring in 1955, he started learning to work cattle, helping his Dad and Rob Lozier, drive the cattle to summer pasture a horseback. It was Gary’s first summer of haying season on the Rahm Place that he learned to run a mower, to take responsibility for maintenance of the horse team, and learned to drive a team of horses.

When he was 12, the family now with five kids, moved to Boulder, Wyo., where Jack had bought his own ranch. Summers, Gary worked with his Dad, his Grandpa Steele, Uncle Bud Steele, and Rob Lozier on the family ranches in Boulder and Pinedale.

Gary worked with his Dad, his Grandpa Steele and Uncle Bud to gather their cattle on the desert and sort them off from the other ranchers’ stock.  Then they would drive them from the desert to Burnt Lake for the summer pasture. This was a 10-day drive on horseback.  

Gary would be up much before dawn in the winters, harness up the feed team, come back in for breakfast, go back out to feed, and be back in the house in time to catch the school bus 12 miles into Pinedale.  

In 1969, while working for the Murdock Ranches in Pinedale, he first worked moving cattle to the forest on the Green River Drift. He was immersed in and loved every minute of that cattle drive.  In 1971, he went to work for Gordon Mickelson on the 67 Ranch in Big Piney. The Mickelson Ranch would be home for the Lozier family for 20 years. This job was feeding the cattle in the winter with a team of horses, from calving cows in the spring to branding and cattle drives all horseback. The 67 Ranch had a grazing permit called the Taylor Allotment which was used when moving cattle to and from the main ranches to the forest grazing allotments. It usually took at least one day to gather the cattle and to search for run-backs before going on to the forest … a 25- to 30-mile, day-long cattle drive, in total two long, long days. The drive back home in the fall went faster since the cows knew they were coming home and came straight down the road passing the Taylor Allotment. 

In 1996, Gary went to work for the New Fork Ranch on the Green River, at that time owned by Don Kendall. It was there that he got to ride up the Green River Drift again. Moving cattle from the Sprout Wardell place on the Green River to the final forest pasture stretches 70 miles and takes two weeks of horseback riding. For Gary, riding up the Drift on the spring drive was, and will always be, the pinnacle of cattle drives. 

Gary had his 24-7 cowboy career interrupted in 2003 when he was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. He survived radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and a few years later, surgery. Gary continued to stay in the saddle, day riding for area ranchers. During the spring at the Miller Ranch branding in 2015, Gary was roping calves. This lifetime cowboy’s last cattle call was on June 28, 2016, following almost an exact year, the date of the death of his first-born son, Tad Lozier. He would have turned 70 years old fifteen days later.