Cunningham Cabin

Pierce Cunningham came into Jackson Hole from New York in the 1880s, and in 1888 he and his wife, Margaret, built the low log cabin that still stands on what became their Bar Flying U ranch. It is a dog-trot, two rooms under one sod roof with an open passage between them, a plan settlers carried west from the Appalachians. When the family built a proper house in 1895, the cabin became a barn and smithy. It is the only building left.

In the spring of 1893, while Cunningham was working land near the new town of Jackson, two men wintering at the ranch, George Spencer and Mike Burnett, came under suspicion as horse thieves. Two strangers arrived from Idaho saying they had trailed the pair through Montana, a posse rode out from Jackson and surrounded the cabin by night, and at daylight both men were shot dead when they would not give up. They were buried near the corral. Apparently no stolen horses were found, and the valley grew uneasy about who the strangers really were and whether the dead men had been thieves at all. For years almost no one would talk about it.

The ranch grew to 560 acres before the family sold out and moved to Idaho in 1928, as land was being bought up for the park. The cabin was listed on the National Register in 1973. It sits off US-191 about twelve miles north of Moose Junction, with a short path around the site.