1878 - At the age of five, Cal enters the United States, apparently in the custody of Swedish Mormon Missionaries bound for Utah

1880s - Cal grows up as an orphan in a cow camp in Arizona. When he is about ten, he is taken in by a couple running a small ranch in Idaho. He picked up the name Cal from a cowboy he respected and his last name from a prominent elder of the Mormon church.

1889- Cal can't stand his Idaho foster father. "When I was sixteen, and big enough, I beat the hell out of the sonovabitch and ran away," Cal once said.

Around 1898 - Now a lanky cowpoke, Cal rides into Jackson Hole for the first time.

1890 - Wyoming becomes a state.

Around 1900 - In tough times, Cal joins a band of six rustlers known for wearing red bandannas. They specialize in stealing horses anywhere from Montana to Mexico.

March 1901 - Riding around Jackson, Cal finds a hidden valley just 15 miles above town that is populated only by moose, elk, mountain sheep and beavers. Tucked away on upper Flat Creek, it is the perfect spot for hiding rustled horses. "I could see the sheriff a'coming either way," he would explain. He moved into an abandoned trapper's cabin at what would become Flat Creek Ranch.

About 1905 - Despite his shady past, Cal gets on the federal payroll as an assistant forest ranger of the National Forest Service in Wyoming.

February 10, 1905 - Cal goes into court in Idaho and becomes a naturalized American citizen with the name Enoch Carrington. He swears before a court clerk that "I have behaved as a man of good moral character."

1906 - The U.S. Congress passes an expansion of the Homestead Act allowing homestead claims on National Forest land. But local Forest Service employees impose many obstacles.

Around 1912 - Cal goes to work as "head guide in charge of pack outfits" at the new Bar BC Ranch, which would become Jackson Hole's most celebrated dude ranch. "I decided it was time to get respectable and go into dudin'," he would allow.

Summer of 1917 - A Chicago newspaper heiress and social celebrity, Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson, pulls into Jackson Hole on a horse-drawn wagon with her daughter Felicia and her French maid. An accomplished horsewoman and a big game hunter, Cissy settles in for a stay. Cissy is introduced as Countess Gizycka, a title she retains even though she is on the rebound from a disastrous marriage to philandering Russian count, Josef Gizycki. Her internationally publicized divorce from Gizycki is finalized a few months before her trip to Wyoming.

Summer and Fall of 1917 -- Cissy and Cal soon find themselves attracted to each other. Romantic evenings and long hunting trips ensue. Cissy is 38, Cal is 44.

Summer of 1918 - Cissy returns to Jackson Hole, rents the White Grass Ranch, and hires Cal to be her ranch manager. One day Cal and Cissy ride up to see Cal's secret place on upper Flat Creek. "Cissy thought it the most perfect place she had ever seen," writes her biographer.

October 1918 - Cal has the place surveyed, all 141 acres of it. His aim is to make the ranch his homestead and thus gain title to own the land. The ranch is surrounded on all sides by the Teton National Forest.

March 3, 1920 - Cal officially establishes residence at the ranch and starts clearing stumps and cutting logs. Within two years he is running 25 cattle and horses.

1920 - Cissy writes her first newspaper story celebrating the election victory an all-women slate of candidates in Jackson, which made Jackson among the first municipalities in America with an all-women government. By some accounts, it was Cissy who inspired the six Jackson women to run for office. Cissy's article appeared in the Omaha World-Herald, which was not part of the Chicago Tribune's empire.

1920 - Cissy's newspaper career takes off when she is hired by a competitor of The Tribune, the Hearst-owned Chicago Herald-Examiner, to cover the 1920 Republican Convention and to report on her big-game hunting adventures.

Around February 1922 - Cissy brings Cal along on a romantic grand tour of Europe.

March 10, 1922 - While staying at Claridge's Hotel in London, Cissy writes a letter of introduction for Cal to one of her Washington social acquaintances, the powerful Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming, who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. The letter asks Senator Warren to help Cal find his way through the Washington bureaucratic thicket so he can get Flat Creek Ranch as his homestead.

March 11, 1922 - Cal sails from Le Havre for New York aboard the Rochambeau. Judging from the ship's passenger list, Cissy must have stayed on in Europe a while longer.

Late March 1922 - En route back home from Europe, Cal spends several days in Washington lobbying. He delivers Cissy's letter to Senator Warren and visits the headquarters of the Forest Service.

March 29, 1922 - Senator Warren writes to Cissy that Cal's Washington foray has gone well.

June 1922 - Having settled at the Flat Creek Ranch long enough to satisfy the federal residency requirement, Cal swears out a homestead claim. He says he's occupied the place under "squatters' rights" since 1901.

Summer 1922 - The paperwork moves from desk to desk in the bureaucracy. A local forest ranger writes that he's not against the homestead, even though Cal's cultivation "has consisted almost entirely of harvesting wild hay."

November 15, 1922 - Senator Warren writes to the head of the Interior Department's General Land Office asking the office to "expedite this matter."

November 20, 1922 - Senator Warren writes to Cissy at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, saying "Carrington case has been approved for patent."

December 1922 - Carrington gets the homestead patent.

February 1923 - Cal sells Cissy the ranch for $5,000 (estimated to be about $63,000 at today's prices, after adjusting for inflation). He would remain her close friend and hunting guide for some years.

Winter of 1923-24 - Cissy asks her closest friend in Jackson, Rose Crabtree, to keep an eye on her interests at Flat Creek while Cal is away during the winter. Rose, an innkeeper in Jackson, is one of the celebrated slate of a half-dozen tough-minded Jackson Hole women elected in the early 1920s to run the town.

1923 - Cissy directs the ranch to be expanded from Cal's original cabin into her own private guest ranch of seven cabins, a barn and a lodge.

1924 - Elmer Schlesinger, a young Harvard-educated lawyer and tennis champion whose father owned a Chicago department store, comes out to Flat Creek with Cissy. The following year, Cissy marries Elmer. But she becomes bored with him. Five years later, he dies on a golf course in South Carolina. Throughout it all, Cissy remains close to Cal.

1928 - The U.S. Forest Service cuts a rocky dirt road up along Flat Creek from Jackson -- the same road we use today.

About 1929 - Cissy has a piano shipped from Chicago for Saturday night dances in the Lodge, where the piano is still in use. It is hauled up the road on an ox cart.

Fall of 1930 - The 1930 U.S. Census shows that Cal has gone to Cape Nome, Alaska, to work as a gold miner at a placer mine. How long he stayed in Alaska is unknown, but he never struck it rich.

1930s and 1940s - Caught up in the tumult of publishing the Washington Times-Herald, Cissy ends her long summers in Jackson. "The Countess's Place" on Flat Creek is seldom seen by anyone except Cissy's ranch hands.

1944 - Farney Cole, Cissy's longtime caretaker, is attacked by a large bear while he is walking near a beaver pond on the ranch. Farney is mauled but manages to pick up a log from the beaver dam and club the bear senseless. Bleeding, Farney staggers several miles down the hill to a neighbor's cabin and survives. Farney's exploits are celebrated in a full-page spread in a national newspaper supplement. The bear is never found, but a half-century later Farney's famous club would adorn the wall of Dornan's tavern in Moose, Wyoming.

1948 - Cissy dies, leaving the ranch to her niece Josephine Patterson Albright, who finds it too remote to use. For the next four decades, she leases it out to a succession of trout fishing devotees, keeping an eye on things from her own ranch in nearby Dubois, Wyoming.

1981 - Dick Cheney, then Wyoming's congressman, is invited up to the ranch with his family to go fishing. His wife Lynne Cheney becomes so intrigued with the history of the ranch that she later publishes an article called "The Countess of Flat Creek" in the "Annals of Wyoming," a scholarly periodical. "As soon as we got to the ranch, my husband and daughters busied themselves with fishing -- and excellent fishing it was," Lynne Cheney explained in her introduction. "I contented myself with wandering around the ranch and trying to understand how it had come into being."

1986 - To guarantee permanent protection, Josephine Albright donates Flat Creek Ranch to the Jackson Hole Land Trust. She puts a permanent conservation easement on the land and includes a proviso that her heirs will have first option to buy back the ranch at an appraised price following her death.