How To Use This Site




How To Use This Site


This blog was updated on a daily basis for about two years, with those daily entries ceasing on December 31, 2013. The blog is still active, however, and we hope that people stopping in, who find something lacking, will add to the daily entries.

The blog still receives new posts as well, but now it receives them on items of Wyoming history. That has always been a feature of the blog, but Wyoming's history is rich and there are many items that are not fully covered here, if covered at all. Over time, we hope to remedy that.

You can obtain an entire month's listings by hitting on the appropriate month below, or an individual day by hitting on that calendar date.
Use 2013 for the search date, as that's the day regular dates were established and fixed.

Alternatively, the months are listed immediately below, with the individual days appearing backwards (oldest first).

We hope you enjoy this site.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

October 15

1887  Mail service discontinued between South Pass City and Lander.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1919  October 15, 1919. Airplane Mania
The 1919 Air Derby was still on and Lt. Maynard, who had one the transcontinental one way contest, was flying back across the United States to the east to hero's accolades.


And, as has been seen from other recent issues of these century old papers, the flying mania was spreading.  Just a few days ago a couple of papers were making deliveries to their outlying subscribers by airplane.  Today the Mrs. Mildred Chaplin, nee Harris, was in the news concerning an airborne event.

Harris in 1919

Harris was a Cheyenne native and at this point, one year into her marriage with Chaplin, was already separated from him or about to be, in spite of Harris' determination to save the marriage.

The marriage would end in 1920.  The whole affair provides an interesting insight into how certain news regarding celebrities varies from era to era, as the entire matter was really fairly scandalous.  Harris and Chaplin met when Harris was only 16 years old and at the time of their marriage she was just 17 and likely thought to be pregnant or she believed she was.  They would subsequently have a baby in 1919 who died after only three days of life and the marriage fell rapidly apart.  Harris had, overall, a tragic life, dying at age 42.

The entire event has the taint of scandal attached to it.  Chaplin was 35 yeas old, twenty years older than Harris, when the affair commenced with the teenage actress he'd met at a party.  The clearly involved a relationship that would have constituted statutory rape and which today would result in the end of Chaplin's career. At the time, and for decades thereafter, the marriage of couples in that situation precluded prosecution as married couples may not testify against each other, but perhaps the more significant aspect of the story to us in 2019 is that the marriage didn't result in an outcry, which it most definitely would now.  Instead it was celebrated and in Cheyenne it was certainly such.

The taint of scandal, or the presumption that there would have been one, is all the more the case as Chaplin's next wife, Lillita McMurry, was 16 years old when he started dating her at age 36.  That marriage would not last, and he'd next marry Paulette Goddard when he was in her early 20s. Goddard was the only one of Chaplin's four wives who was legally an adult at the time they started their relationship. That marriage didn't last, and he next met, romanced and married Oona O'Neil, who was 17 years old at the time. They married when she was 18 and he was 54, and remained married until his death at age 73.  With all that, Chaplin is still celebrated as a comedic genius (I really don't see it myself) and is widely admired, which would certainly note be the case today.

All of that, however, may simply be evidence how people are seemingly willing to allow teenage girls in particular to be exposed to creepy stuff on the presumption that it'll advance their careers.  In the 20th Century this continued on with actresses for ever, even featuring as a side story in the novel The Godfather (and briefly alluded to in the film).  It likely continued on until the modern "Me Too" movement, and can be argued to have spread into sports.


At the same time, hope that the Reds might fall in Russia was rising.



While in the US, fears over coal supplies, which were critical to industry and for that matter home heating, were rising.

1943  The Cheyenne chapter of American War Dads founded.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1962  Construction firm  Morrison-Knudsen won a contract to construct 200 Minuteman silos over an 8,300-square-mile area of Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado.

1966 Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area was established by Congress. Attribution:  On This Day.

1966  South Pass was added to the National Registry of Historic Places.  Attribution:  On This Day.

1984  Queen Elizabeth II visited her cousins, the Wallops, on their ranch in Sheridan.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1991  Verda James dies at the age of 90.  She was the first female Speaker of the House in Wyoming's legislature. James was born in Ontario and grew up in Iowa.  She was an educator by profession and served in the Legislature from 1954 to 1970.  An elementary school in Casper, where she resided, is named after her.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

2004   A Federal Court rejected President Clinton's 2001 ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.  Attribution:  On This Day.

2015:  Lois Layton, a well known Wyoming bird conservationist, passed away on October 15 at the age of 92.

Layton grew up on a ranch in Oklahoma and took a strong interest in nature. After moving to Casper in the 1950s, originally just a stop on her way to Alaska, she ultimately married and founded an institution dedicated to restoring injured birds, often raptors, to the wild.

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