THE BOY WHO SIGNED THE CLIFF

Field Notes: Tracing Back a Tagging Homesteader.

This research began as part of ALCES's residency partnership with Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site, developed through the Wyoming Arts Council's Artists in State Parks program. As the residency turned its attention to the cliff's long record of visitor and resident graffiti, one name stood out: Jinks Burgess, carved sometime in the early twentieth century. Rather than treat it as an anonymous mark, ALCES partnered with the park to ask a more specific question — who was this person, and what was their relationship to this land?

The answer came through genealogical research, federal census records, a 1940 WWII draft registration card, and a remarkable trail of small-town newspaper notices that tracked a young Lucien "Jinx" Burgess through a childhood illness, a winter away at school, and a homestead his family called home directly above the Medicine Lodge cliffs. What emerged wasn't just a name matched to a date, but a fuller picture of an "art-making homesteader" — a boy who left his mark on the same rock face that generations of Indigenous peoples had used for millennia to record their own histories, layering one more chapter onto a landscape already dense with meaning.

This work is ongoing. ALCES continues to research surviving descendants of the Burgess family, with the goal of connecting living relatives to this history and, where possible, inviting their voices directly into the park's interpretation of the site.

Partners: Medicine Lodge Archaeological Site State Park, Wyoming Arts Council