February 12

1809     Abraham Lincoln born in present-day Larue County, Ky.

1870     Women in the Utah Territory gained the right to vote.

1873  Barnum Brown, paleontologist, born in Carbondale Kansas. See February 5.

1915  A fire in the downtown area of Powell caused resort to dynamite to blow out the flames.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1918   February 12, 1918. The bad news. Some good. And a Holiday.
 

The paper was expressing the worries that a lot of people no doubt had.

The King had addressed his nation.

It turned out that the recently sunk Tuscania did have some Wyoming men on board it, but they had survived.

Cheyenne was named as a future air hub for airborne travelers to Yellowstone, and interesting forward looking thought.

And it was Lincoln's Birthday, a holiday.

February 12, 1919. Lincoln's Birthday. Returning heroes, Women and radios, Highways in Wyoming, Worker's Compensation and Villa not dead.

Black soldiers of the 369th Infantry, New York National Guard, who had won the Croix de Guerre in France.  February 12, 1919.

Returning black soldiers were photographed returning to New York.  The link posted in above details their heroism and their later lives, something I always find interesting.

Women radio operators of the U.S. Army, February 12, 1919.

Women were brought into the service in the Great War in substantial numbers for the first time.  Among their roles was that of radio and telephone operators.  As with other soldiers, some stayed on in Europe after the war, where their services remained in need.

I'll have a post on something in the 2019 genre that is related to the above, but the winds of change were blowing in the state as evidence by the article that the State was getting into highway funding in a major way.  $6,600,000 was a huge amount of money in 1919, and it was going into highway construction.

The automobile era had arrived.

A renewed war scare was building as well as it appeared that Germany was about to rearm.  It would have had a really hard time doing so in 1919, but the fear was understandable.

And surprisingly, there was discussion in the legislature about adding agricultural workers to the Workers Compensation rolls.  They were exempted when the bill passed a few years earlier, and they still are.  Such a suggestion would get nowhere today, but then there was a higher percentage of the population employed in agriculture in 1919 than there is in 2019.

And Villa was reported dead again, but the paper was doubting the veracity of that report.

1919  February 12, 1919. Lincoln's Birthday. Returning heroes, Women and radios, Highways in Wyoming, Worker's Compensation and Villa not dead.

Black soldiers of the 369th Infantry, New York National Guard, who had won the Croix de Guerre in France.  February 12, 1919.

Returning black soldiers were photographed returning to New York.  The link posted in above details their heroism and their later lives, something I always find interesting.

Women radio operators of the U.S. Army, February 12, 1919.

Women were brought into the service in the Great War in substantial numbers for the first time.  Among their roles was that of radio and telephone operators.  As with other soldiers, some stayed on in Europe after the war, where their services remained in need.

I'll have a post on something in the 2019 genre that is related to the above, but the winds of change were blowing in the state as evidence by the article that the State was getting into highway funding in a major way.  $6,600,000 was a huge amount of money in 1919, and it was going into highway construction.

The automobile era had arrived.

A renewed war scare was building as well as it appeared that Germany was about to rearm.  It would have had a really hard time doing so in 1919, but the fear was understandable.

And surprisingly, there was discussion in the legislature about adding agricultural workers to the Workers Compensation rolls.  They were exempted when the bill passed a few years earlier, and they still are.  Such a suggestion would get nowhere today, but then there was a higher percentage of the population employed in agriculture in 1919 than there is in 2019.

And Villa was reported dead again, but the paper was doubting the veracity of that report.

1924 George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" premiered in New York City.

1941  Governor Smith designates the period of February 12 to 22 National Defense Week.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1971  James Cash Penney died in New York City. Penney, in partnership with Guy Johnson and Thomas Callahan, opened his first store in Kemmerer in 1902.  He had been working for Johnson and Callahan in Golden Rule stores in Utah, and they had been impressed with him as an employee.  Penny bought them out in 1917 and the franchise expanded rapidly thereafter.  The company did have its ups and downs and Penny himself had to fund the company by borrowing on his life insurance to keep it running during the Great Depression.

2018  The Legislature opened with Governor Mead's State of the State address.

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2018   Big Brown Closes
 

Big Brown in Fairfield Texas, a coal fired power plant that used Wyoming coal, has closed, the victim of natural gas.

We've been tracking this trend for some time.  It's this trend, the phasing out of coal for electrical power generation, that's causing the decline in demand for Wyoming coal. And this trend will continue.

It's worth noting, a day after Natrona County's Chuck Gray introduced a quixotic bill to sue Washington State over it's "no" to a coal terminal in its state, thereby proposing to bypass the Attorney General who no doubt know that such an effort is doomed to failure, that this is not only a national trend, but set to become a global one.  Indeed, it hit in Europe in some ways before here, and its in full swing here.  People who look to Asian markets to save coal are fooling themselves.  Sure, they might consume it at an increased rate briefly, but at the speed this conversion is occurring, it will be brief indeed.

As we have also noted, this is a trend line that is over a century old.  We always only live in our own times and therefore have a hard time appreciating that. But if we really want to sue somebody. . .sue the Royal Navy.  They really accelerated this change.

Me, third from right, when I thought I had a career in geology.

2024.  State of the State, and State of the Judiciary.