The roads are ruler-straight around here, the wind constant, the sky a painting, and on the radio there is God, country music and talk radio that curls your hair.
On one show, a preacher proclaimed his crusade to defeat Barack Obama to be “a fight with the Devil.”
Jef Rice, a local gunsmith, doesn't go quite that far, but believes the Democratic presidential nominee is “as close to a socialist as anyone who's tried to get elected president.”
This Wyoming town of 3,548 souls, according to the sign, with two stop lights and two Baptist churches, nestles in the heartland of Republican conservative populism.
But Wheatland may be about to lose its voice.
Wyoming is Vice-President Dick Cheney's state, a state that gave George W. Bush some of his largest majorities in 2000 and 2004, that reliably sends two Republican senators and one Republican Representative to Washington, whenever given the opportunity.
And Wyoming believes what Mr. Bush claims to believe, and what Republican governments have celebrated for more than 40 years: America is a Christian nation; Americans cherish their right to own a gun; It is up to each citizen to make the most of his life, and the far-distant government in Washington should keep its nose out of her business and its hands out of his pocket.
“Rugged individualism is strong out here,” says Bill Windmeier, who owned a local construction company before he retired. “We're born that way.”
But if Mr. Obama is elected, the United States will have a Democratic Congress and a northern liberal president for the first time since John F. Kennedy was in the White House.
Mr. Obama has “ties that are kept secret, and a hidden agenda to go far, far left,” believes Martin Woods, a retired aerospace worker who came to Wyoming because of its “dry climate and low state taxes.”
An Obama America, he is convinced, would be “of the government, by the government and for the government.”
And Wyoming's cries for a return to conservative values will be ignored.
Or, as Mr. Rice puts it: “We'll be screwed.”
The Republican Party is at war with itself. For 44 years, its fiscally and socially moderate wing, based mostly in the North, has been losing ground to a surging fiscally and socially conservative populism based in the South and central West.
It began with Barry Goldwater, accelerated with Ronald Reagan and crested with the election of George W. Bush.
But America itself is less and less the Republican Party. The abuses and failures of anti-terrorist efforts and the mismanagement of the economy in the name of a now-discredited ideology have left the middle class fearful and distrustful.
You find this even in Wheatland. While men in the town continue to support the party and its candidate, John McCain, women, especially, are more tentative, more attuned to the turbulence of the times.
“You'd be surprised by the number of Republican supporters for Barack Obama around here, myself included,” says Amber Ningen, the editor of the Platte County Record Times, the local newspaper. “They think Barack Obama is the best for Wyoming.”
Wheatland is sadly typical of Small Town U.S.A. There are too many empty stores on the main street, too few young faces in the restaurants. And now there's word the nursing home might close.
“Like so many other people, people around here are saying they're ready for change,” Ms. Ningen reports.
From her vantage point as manager of a discount store, one of the few businesses on the main street that actually has customers, Delores Cheville agrees.
“People are just concerned about where this economy is going to take us,” she observes. “We are hurting so bad.”
