Ross Rhodes selected for WCHF

The Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame (WCHF) has selected 25 inductees for the Class of 2023. The WCHF State Board of Directors voted on the nominees from across the state during its annual meeting April 29.

The 10th annual induction ceremony will be at the Ramkota Hotel in Casper, Sept. 15 and 16. It is open to the public. The event is part of the annual Wyoming Cowboy & Cowgirl Legacy Week, which was established by the Wyoming State Legislature in 2019.  

Ross Rhodes will be inducted this year and is the only Hot Springs County name on the list. Rhodes was born in 1945 and passed away in January of 2018. Information on Rhodes selection will be available after the ceremony.

Last year’s inductees from Hot Springs County were Ramul Dvarishkis and Larry Bentley .

Ramul Dvarishkis was born February 7, 1910, in Scranton, North Dakota. At age seven he and his family moved to Wyoming to start sheep ranching with his uncle Nick Wishwell.

In his early teens and into his 20s Ramul supplied the sheep camps with whatever they required. In the summertime this meant taking a pack string into Dubois for supplies when the sheep were on their mountain ranges.

In 1933, Ramul bought his first Morgan stallion from the Army Remount Station in Miles City, Montana and began his almost 70-year career of horse breeding. That same year he married Jessie Moore. He and Jessie bought half of the ranch that his mother and stepdad had put together and switched from sheep to raising Hereford cattle, the Morgan horses that he had started raising earlier, and a family. The ranch was spread out for 35 miles on the Cottonwood Creek drainage and covered almost 30,000 acres.

His horses, in his eyes, better be able to go from one end to the other and then go to work. Not just his horses but all horses were his passion. His horses became well known across the US and Canada and many of his breeding lines are still prominent today.

Larry Bentley was born and raised in South Texas where he lived on his family’s small cattle outfit. He served in the US Army after graduating from high school.

Larry covered a lot of the West, working on numerous ranches in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming in his younger years. He landed in Wyoming in 1979 and he’s been involved in Wyoming ranching and agriculture ever since. Some of the highlights of his cowboying career include trailing a herd of loose horses on horseback for 450 miles from Hamilton Dome, to Carbondale, Colorado in 1984.

Throughout the years he has managed several ranches in Wyoming and contracted with the Wyoming Department of Agriculture, as a facilitator of the Coordinated Resource Management Program and mediator between federal agencies and private landowners. In 2009, he and his wife, Chris, took the opportunity to start running their own cattle operation in Hot Springs and Fremont counties, which they continue to manage.