The Fossil Hunter’s Cabin: Discovery, Death, and a Family Secret in Wyoming

Hidden beneath a protective structure at Fossil Butte National Monument near Kemmerer stands a small A-frame cabin. Built in 1918 by fossil miner David Charles Haddenham, the 12-foot-long hut is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But the building’s weathered wood holds more than memories of prehistoric fish. It is tied to a shooting, a poisoning, and Wyoming’s only convicted female cattle rustler.

Haddenham, born in England in 1881, came to Wyoming as a child. He made his name selling exquisite fossil fish to museums in Paris, Germany, and the Smithsonian. But his legacy began with violence. At 19, he shot and killed Thomas Palin, his mother’s ex-husband, after Palin allegedly assaulted the boy’s mother. A coroner’s inquest ruled the death “his own violence.” Haddenham was exonerated.

For decades, Haddenham quarried fossils from the butte, perfecting techniques to extract ancient gar and stingray specimens. He sold a single gar fossil for $500 during the Depression. Tourists stopped at his homemade museum and gas station. But his darker side emerged in the early 1920s.

His sister-in-law, Anne Richey, was the only woman ever convicted of cattle rustling in Wyoming. After her conviction, she was out on bond awaiting appeal. In May 1922, she collapsed and died on her ranch. Her hired hand also fell ill but survived. Strychnine was suspected. Suspicion immediately fell on Haddenham, who had feuded with Richey. He surrendered to authorities but was never charged. The exact poison was never determined.

Decades later, Haddenham’s own grandson, Robert Haddenham, told a different story. In a 1989 interview recorded for the National Register nomination, Robert claimed that his grandfather had mixed the poison in a bathtub at the A-frame cabin. That bathtub is long gone. No other evidence has ever emerged.

David Haddenham continued mining fossils and selling to museums around the world until he moved to Lander in the 1960s. He died in Minnesota in 1968 at age 87 and is buried in Kemmerer. His great-grandson, Mike Haddenham of Colorado Springs, remembers him as “an awesome guy” who loved to dig fossils and shared tiny fish with his great-grandchildren. But the family never talked about the poisoning. “He was kind of a pioneer,” Mike Haddenham says. “A man who loved to go dig up fossils.” And, if his grandson is to be believed, a man who may have taken a deadly secret to his grave.