My formative years were spent in Wyoming. I was a little cowboy from the beginning of my life, and I am still very proud of those early years.
I learned to ride before I fully understood what I was doing. I competed in 4-H. I helped round up cattle on the JH Ranch — the same ranch my grandfather Carl E. Steiger had bought in 1940, set against a landscape where Devil's Tower rose up just ten miles away. In winter, my Dad would load me into his Dodge Power Wagon and we would drive the property opening gates and dropping hay bales to the cattle through the deep snow.
Those were simple tasks. But they were not small ones. They taught me that the work in front of you is always worth doing well. That you do not wait for someone else to open the gate. That you show up when conditions are hard, not just when they are convenient.
My older brother Carl became my best friend in those years. He remains one of my closest friends today. There is something about shared hardship — shared cold, shared work, shared wonder at a landscape that humbles you — that builds a bond nothing else quite replicates.
My parents were married on July 4, 1954. My father built our family on a foundation of faith from the very beginning. He also made sure we knew how to be useful in the kitchen. He was a man of many expectations, and he held to all of them.
I left Wyoming eventually. But Wyoming never quite left me. The way I approach work, the way I think about land and legacy, the way I understand what it means to be an American — all of it was formed in that cold, wide, beautiful country.
If you want to understand the person writing this book, start there. Start with a boy on a horse, ten miles from Devil's Tower, learning what it means to do the job in front of you.