Buffalo, Wyoming could have been a fine spot for Leon Trotsky.
If Leon had wound up exiled in Wyoming rather than Mexico City, the man who more or less engineered the 1917 Russian Revolution may have tacked a few more years on to his convoluted life.
Trotsky was exiled from Russia in 1929. Four years in Turkey. Then he drifted through France and Norway before Mexico offered him asylum in 1936.
You can’t help but think things could have worked out for him in Wyoming.
The hitch is he would have had to make a few behavioral adjustments. His arrogant and dismissive ways wouldn’t have cut it with the locals.
Leon was not the gracious type. Barely civil most of the time. As aloof as they come. Brutal beyond all belief, eclipsed only by his rival Stalin.
Instead of lying low in a walled compound in the fashionable Coyoacán district of Mexico City, Trotsky should have made a beeline for Buffalo, Wyoming.
He could have lived out his once riotous life in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, reading and writing. Absorbed, as always, in the baffling intricacies of Marxist theory.
He could have been quite comfortable in the Occidental Hotel or outside town at a spread like the Paradise Guest Ranch.
Granted, Leon would have been persona non grata in America in the 1930s. But just because a fellow calls for endless world revolution doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have appreciated the splendors of Wyoming.
Maybe if Leon Trotsky had cleaned up his act, shed the arrogance and demonstrated some respect for the folks around Buffalo, Wyoming, things would have turned out better.
Maybe that assassin Stalin sent after him wouldn’t have done his job.
A few of the guys in town would have noticed the stranger who showed up on a sunny day with a raincoat draped over his arm. They may have considered that raincoat a bit strange. Perhaps they would have taken a closer look and discovered the pickaxe he had hidden under the raincoat.
The Mexicans guarding Trotsky down in Coyoacán weren’t so perceptive.
Down in Coyoacán, Stalin’s assassin strolled right on in. Passed himself off as a friend of the family. Sank that pickaxe right into Trotsky’s skull.
