Casper College's Western History Center Eliminates Its Archivist Position.

 

The Western History Center is now without a full-time archivist. Local historians aren't happy about it.

So reads a headline in the Tribune from the Sunday, May 30, edition.

The Casper College Western History Center is an excellent resource with a fine collection of materials.  The college emphasizes that it is not closing it, but rather combining the position with another one in its library, so that two positions will be held by one employee, more or less.  Or, put another way, the positions are merged and the archivist loses his job.

That archivist has done an excellent job, to the extent that I know him, which isn't well.  Others in the local history community do know him well, however, and rallied to back an effort to try to save his position.  The college said it just couldn't afford it.

And so one history position lost.

I wish I could comment more intelligently on this, but I can't.  I understand the need to balance budgets, to be sure, but this is a real treasure that I fear will now suffer.  And on a more personal note, the archivist has a Juris Doctorate, as do I, and therefore fits into that category of history loving lawyers, although unlike me, he was employed in the field.  I feel badly for him.

Indeed, even now, I hope this can be reversed, even though I know that it won't be, at least in the near term.

Lex Anteinternet: Sportsmen, Market Hunters & Game Hogs: Early Years of Wildlife Conservation in Park County by Brian Beauvais

Lex Anteinternet: Sportsmen, Market Hunters & Game Hogs: Early Year...: 

Sportsmen, Market Hunters & Game Hogs: Early Years of Wildlife Conservation in Park County by Brian Beauvais.

An extremely interesting article appears in the Autumn/Winter issue of the Annals of Wyoming (which I just received) on the history of wildlife conservation and hunting in Wyoming.  The articles is by Brian Beauvais, and is entitled Sportsmen, Market Hunters & Game Hogs:  Early Years of Wildlife Conservation in Park County.

As the title indicates, the article focuses on one Wyoming county, but in a fairly broad manner, and it does something I've never seen any other article do, which is to take into account the story of subsistence and quasi market hunters in the state during the period of time when wildlife conservation was really coming in.

Los of articles and books deal with the conservationist campaign against market hunting that came about at the turn of the prior century.  I've never read one, however, that dealt with the views of the local yeomanry in any fashion, to whom conservation efforts didn't come easily as it directly impacted their table.  The role of the wealthy in the effort, and the role of the more or less poor in opposition to it, and how they respectively viewed things, is fresh to the story, at least for me.  

Added to that, the role of private pay game wardens, and the role of other agencies in enforcing Wyoming's game laws, which came in early but which had nobody to enforce them, is something I was also unaware of.  And even some of the early history of the Wyoming Game & Fish is included.  Here too, for example, I was unaware that the hunting area concept wasn't brought into Wyoming's laws until 1947.

While by and large Wyoming's hunters came around to really supporting the Wyoming system, which is sometimes regarded as the crown jewel of wildlife conservation, some of these fights never fully went away and some of the stresses remain.  You can see the views of those whose pocketbooks depend on out of state sportsmen vs. the locals reflected back over a century ago.  This work is a really valuable look into the history of wildlife conservation in general and is very much worth reading.