November 9

1849  William "Red" Angus born in Zanesville Ohio.  Angus would be employed as a teamster, drover and bar owner before ending up the Sheriff of Johnson County in 1888.  He was Sheriff during the Johnson County War.  He lost the election in 1893 and later went on to be the Johnson County Treasurer.  He died in 1920 and is buried in Buffalo.

1856  Warming weather allowed the Martin Handcart Company to resume traveling on the Oregon Trail.

1867  John Hardy and John Shaughnessy fought a prize fight in Cheyenne

1883  The Wyoming Stock Growers Association met in Cheyenne to discuss problems with branding iron usage and roundup irregularities.  The meeting would result in a black list of disapproved brands and operators.

1894  Ft. McKinney  abandoned by the Army.

1902  Two women Justices of the Peace were elected in Laramie County.

1910  The Union Pacific rolling mills in Laramie were destroyed by a fire that was started by a passing train.

1916   The Wyoming Tribune for November 9, 1916: Hughes leading.
 

Cheyenne Leader for November 9, 1916: Wilson leads
 

1918  Countdown on the Great War, November 9, 1918: The End of the German Empire.

1.  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicates as Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, facing the reality of the revolution in Germany.  The abdication is announced by Chancellor Maximilian of Baden who resigns later that day in favor of Social Democrat Freidrich Ebert.  Germany is then declared a republic.  This made the impending end of the war inevitable and obvious to all.

The Casper Daily Tribune was not subtle in its views on the Kaiser.

The German empire, which came into being in 1870, with the King of Prussia perpetually as its Emperor, was at an end.  Monarchy in Germany, which saw many royal titles lessor than Emperor including various kings, was also at an end.  Wilhelm went into exile in the Netherlands where he would live to see the beginning of World War Two, passing away in June 1941.

The Casper Daily Press was more subdued in its reporting and correctly noted that things weren't over yet.  It was incorrect in the establishment of a German regency. . . and in the spelling of cavalry.  It noted, however, the ongoing disaster of the Spanish Flu, which the other Casper paper managed to miss.

In a lot of ways, he was the worst possible German monarch for his times, taking his imperial role seriously even until his death, and remaining a German chauvinist in spite of the disaster that he had lead his nation into.  Ironically, his parents had very much sympathized with republican ideals and likely would have moved the country in that direction if they'd been allowed to. Wilhelm, however, idolized imperial military ideals since his childhood.

This Cheyenne paper correctly predicted the probable remaining length of the war.

His resignation paved the way to an end of the war in very short order, but it also permanently tainted the new Socialist German republic with the legacy of defeat and would help doom the democratic order in Germany.

The Laramie Boomerang was most subdued of all, but had the interesting headline of about the war solving the "social problem", demonstrating how war changes everything.  Also, a tragic community loss due to the war was reported.

Also complicit in the end of Imperial Germany, in all sorts of ways, was its Army.  And directly implicit in the final act of the German Empire was the Army's abandonment of the monarchy, something it would forget in short order as it began to reconstruct a false narrative of the war's end.

2.  The battleship HMS Britannia was sunk by the German submarine UB-50 with the loss of 50 hands.

The HMS Britannia sinking.

3.  The American Navy's cargo ship the USS Saetia was sunk by a mine laid by the U-117.

USS Saetia.

4.  Pieter Jelles Troelstra declared that a socialist revolution was possible in Denmark, leading to the arming of Dutch police officers.

5.  The Mexican government issues orders to discharge soldiers younger than 18 years of age.

1919  November 9, 1919. Edgar S. Paxson died.

On this date in 1919, Edgar S. Paxson, Montana based Western painter, died at age 67.

Paxson was born and grew up in New York, but moved to Montana shortly after marrying.  He remained in Montana the rest of his life and worked as a self taught painter, painting Western themes.  He's best remembered today for his spectacular Custer's Last Stand which is held by the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming.

Paxson volunteered to serve with the Montana National Guard during the Spanish American War. His son Harry had also volunteered to serve.  Paxson was 47 years old at the time.  He jointed as a private but left as a lieutenant, serving in the Philippines.  His wartime service likely shortened his life as he contracted malaria while serving.  It was while convalescing in Butte that he started work on Custer's Last Stand.  During this period of time he designed the triumphal arch that Butte built for its returning veterans of the war.  It was not until this period that Paxson was able to work full time as an artist.

While he is best remembered for Custer's Last Stand, which took a long time to create, he also created a substantial body of work on the Corps of Discovery.  His wife outlived him by twenty years, although Harry, whom he served within the Philippines, did not, having died in a mine electrocution accident some time prior.  He left three other adult children at the time of his death.

While in his 60s at the time, he'd attempted to join the Army again, unsuccessfully, during World War One.

He's less well known today than his contemporaries Russell and Remington, and indeed that was also true during his lifetime.  But he was a major Western artists of his day, and a friend to fellow Montana artist, Charles Russell.

1926  Queen Marie of Romania visited Casper.

The Queen's trip was part of her trip to Canada and the United States of that year.  The trip was very wide ranging and covered a huge number of stops.  The stop in Casper was specifically made in order that she might see the facilities belonging to Standard Oil.  Standard Oil was a major economic player in Romania, where the refineries at Polesti existed, and where the company had significant oil production.  This was later to figure significantly in World War Two.

Perhaps emblematic of royalty of the period, which was rapidly becoming an anachronism, the queen was not Romanian by birth. Her father was one of the sons of Queen Victoria and her mother a Russian princess.  In truth, royalty of this period was nearly stateless in origin.  As was also somewhat typical of this period, she worked hard to make a Romanian presentation and dressed in a stylized Romanian fashion.

She would have been queen of England had her mother approved of the English royal family, which she did not, as the Prince of Wales, who would be come King George V of England proposed marriage to her, in spite of her being his first cousin.  The fathers of the prospective union approved, but the mothers did not.  She instead married Prince Ferdinand of Romania, whom ultimately she came to dislike.  Showing, perhaps, the much smaller extent of media attention to such matters at the time, it's believed that she actually gave birth to a child in 1897 due to an affair, in addition to the six other children she bore in the royal household.  That child disappeared soon after birth, and the pregnancy itself was basically kept secret.  The whereabouts of that infant member of the Romanian royal family are unknown, and the child may have been stillborn.   The paternity of three of the other six children of the royal household is disputed.  Her husband, the King, would die the year after this 1926 visit and she would die in 1938, when Romania was still a kingdom.  The monarchy fell early in World War Two to a fascistic dictatorship.

1927  Walter Urbigkit born in Burris Wyoming.  Urbigkit grew up in a sheep ranching family but entered the pracrtice of law in 1951, becoming a member of the legislature, and then a somewhat controversial Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court.  He was not retained by the voters in the 1993.  He died on October 31, 2011, in Cheyenne Wyoming, where he was practicing law after leaving the Wyoming Supreme Court.

1978  Grumman American N28406 crashes at 43 59N 109 29W

2016   The 2016 Election
 

I didn't see that coming. . . like all of the rest of the pundits.

It's been a wild election year.

Yesterday, Donald Trump won the Presidency.  I frankly thought that impossible.

As I noted here yesterday, I figured that the coronation of Hillary Clinton meant that her enthronement as President would merely need to be ratified yesterday.  I was sure off the mark, and badly so.

So was about 100% of the national press, Id' note ,which was discussing the inevitable Clinton victor as late ago as early last night.  What happened?

Well, a massive working class revolt against both parties happened.  After well over a decade of being lied to, they poked both parties in the eye. 

When this became inevitable or even probable is hard to say, but the Democrats deserve a lot of the blame or credit, depending upon your view, for trying to coronate a 1970s throwback that was widely despised.  Frankly, had Bernie Sanders been nominated by the Democrats he'd likely be yesterday's victor. But rather than do that, they went solidly with a candidate that nobody loved and who was consumed her entire life with politics.  Most people aren't consumed with politics and are disgusted with it right now. So the disgust flowed over onto her.

And on to the entire system, quite frankly.

 Bea Arthur in an advertisement for Maud.  Arthur played the brash, loud, pants suit wearing feminist in two 1970s era television series.  For those who recalled it, Clinton tended to come across rather unfortunately as a character from Maud or at least from the era. Younger women never warmed up to her at all, and indeed people who weren't voting by the 1970s were left fairly cold.

Additionally, the late Democratic administration and things associated with it combined with things that have been brewing for a long time overwhelmed both parties.  It turns out that you cannot take in 1,000,000 immigrants a year and tell rust belt voters that they just need to adjust to the new economy, you can't tolerate shipping endless employers overseas and tell those voters that new better jobs will come, you can't tell people who can tell what gender they are actually in that people can determine their "own gender identify", and you can't threaten to reverse course on firearms possession when people have pretty much determined how they feel about that.

The voters who revolted are, no doubt, going to be accused of being racist.  But to desire the America they grew up in, which was more Christian, more employed, and more rural, doesn't make them that way.  The Democrats have been offering them Greenwich Village, the Republicans the Houston suburbs.  It turns out they like the old Port Arthur, Kansas City or Lincoln Nebraska better, and want to go back. That's not irrational.

 

Port Arthur Texas.  I listed to people discuss the upcoming election two weeks ago at the Port Arthur Starbucks and thought they'd really be surprised when Clinton was elected. Turns out, they were much more on the mark than I was.  And it turns out that people in Port Arthur like Port Arthur the way it was twenty or thirty years ago, and they don't like a lot of big, hip trendy urban areas that they're supposed to.

Will Trump be able to do that?

Well, any way you look at it, it's going to be an interesting four years.

Locally, 818 Natrona County voters went for write in candidates, myself included, for President and Vice President.  That has to be a record.

Locally, Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney's barely repatriated Virginia daughter beat out Greene and has probably taken Wyoming's House seat in Congress for life, or at least until she wedges that into something else, which she almost certainly will.  The seat is the gift of two other candidates who were really from Wyoming and who destroyed each other, but who jointly took more votes in the primary than she did.  Hopefully she'll grow into her position and learn the lesson that the Democratic and Republican establishments did not on the national stage, that people love their local lives more than they do the big issues of any kind.

More locally, Gerald Gay went down in defeat, a victim of statements he could not explain about women.  Dan Neal, whose campaign literature arrived in my mailbox every day for awhile, lost to Republican Jerry Obermuller.  In some ways, I think Neal may have been a victim of his supporters as his own mailings concentrated on public lands while his recent backers mailings urged support of him because of his support of abortion, homosexual rights and "reproductive health", which probably served to turn votes away from him. Being hugged enthusiastically by somebody who people doubt doesn't engender their support of you but Neal probably couldn't, maybe, have told them to shut up and go away, he was doing fine on his own.  Maybe he didn't know that.  Chuck Gray, young radio mouthpiece of the far libertarian right did get in.  Todd Murphy, whose facebook ravings brought attention to him in the press, did survive the sort of attention that Gay did not and ended up on the city council, to my enormous surprise.

The county commission was less surprising, with incumbents generally doing well.  A stable race, it seems.