Star Valley

Star Valley is a temporary refuge in Del Delaney’s flight, but not a lasting escape from it: there he finds paid work after running out of money, only to leave within a month with the idea of robbing a bank as a possible first step onto The Owlhoot Trail.

Setting and Arrival

After crossing into Wyoming, Del Delaney avoids larger towns, especially county seats, and makes his way south by hunting for food or buying supplies at country stores. When he reaches Star Valley, on the Wyoming-Idaho line, his money has run out. He takes work with a Mormon outfit, a mixed operation that is more farm than ranch.

The location marks a pause in his flight rather than a return to settled life. The work gives him a place to stay and a way to earn money, but his legal danger remains unresolved. He has not found a route home or a clear future; he has only stopped moving long enough to take a job.

Farm Work and a Growing Outlaw Identity

The situation is pleasant enough, but it requires Del to learn unfamiliar tasks. Plowing, in particular, becomes a point of friction: as he struggles to hold the plow’s plunging handles, he grows angry at being branded an outlaw and begins to wonder why he should not live up to the label. The thought is not yet a settled decision, but it makes the distance between his reputation and his possible conduct newly difficult to ignore.

His time in Star Valley lasts a month. When the boss’s wife asks him to hoe her garden, he decides the arrangement has become too much, draws his time, and leaves. The small domestic chore is the immediate cause of his departure; the larger direction is already taking shape. Still heading south, he considers a bank robbery the best way to begin on The Owlhoot Trail, while recognizing that robbing a bank would leave no easy way back.

Narrative Significance

Star Valley stands between flight and deliberate outlawry. Before arriving, Del has experienced the cold, hunger, fatigue, and constant wariness of life on the run, but he has not concluded that he must become an outlaw. In Star Valley, ordinary wage work briefly interrupts that existence; its farm labor instead sharpens his resentment at the identity imposed on him and brings the question of what to do next into focus.

The episode preserves a distinction between being pursued as an outlaw and choosing criminal action. Del leaves Star Valley contemplating a bank robbery, not having carried one out there. The valley is thus a turning point in his thinking and a temporary stopping place in his southward journey, rather than the scene of the robbery he is considering.