In the annals of license plate collecting, this story has to be a classic….while on a recent hunting trip to Wyoming, 70-somethings Doug Waterman and Ralph Walker found a rusty old plate sticking up out of a gopher mound…they saw that it was stamped ‘Colorado” with plenty of slots for tabs (which were missing), raised soldered numbers/letters, and plenty of rust!…they contacted Great American Plates to help with the identification, sending the picture you see here…clearly, a 1919 Colorado base plate (compare to sample)…as emails continued to be exchanged, it was revealed that the plate was found about a mile south of the historic Oregon Trail near Glendo, WY, a fair distance from Colorado, as Hank Walker relates…in addition, Hank’s son’s ashes had been buried the year before within sight of the plate-find!!…the men also found a brass cartridge from a Savage hi-powered rifle, popular ammo for those rifles in the teens and twenties!!
…as the two friends reported, finding the plate and learning a little bit about it will make for good memories, and as Hank says, “Doug and I are in about the same condition as the plate and it looks pretty damned good to us!”
…Hank also speculates a couple of young gunners may well have been out frolicking in their car shooting up some pronghorn sheep and had the plate ripped off by the ubiquitous sagebrush, just like they had left some plastic parts of rental cars on the trail doing the same thing…we thank them for confessing and sharing!!