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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.
We hope you enjoy this site.
Saturday, June 20, 2020
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Wyoming's Frontier Outlaws
When I posted my recent item here on the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid I looked for my entry here on Butch and Sundance.
With those massive caveats, we dive in.
The Wild Bunch
Harry Longabaugh was born in Pennsylvania in 1867 and came west at age 15 with a cousin. He turned to crime by age 20 when he robbed a horse, saddle and rifle from a ranch outside of Sundance, Wyoming. That resulted in an 18 month jail sentence in Sundance itself, which is why he adopted the Sundance Kid moniker. After his release he worked as a cowboy in Alberta, showing the fluid nature of the border in the period. By 1892 he returned to crime and is suspected of having participated in a train robbery. In 1897 he participated in a bank robbery. Shortly after that he was in the Wild Bunch.
Longabaugh was fast with a gun, but he is unknown to have killed anyone until his final gun battle in Bolivia. Parker is unknown to have every killed anyone. This is in part why the two remain celebrated. They were violent men who traveled in very violent company, but they didn't actually take anyone lives themselves except, in Longabaugh's case, the very end. Of course traveling in violent company abets violence, something that is routinely forgotten. Just because they weren't the killers doesn't mean that people weren't killed in association with their criminal enterprises.
As already noted, Longabaugh and Parker were regional criminals, not just Wyoming ones, and in the end they fled to South America, first to Argentina, and then to Bolivia, where they resumed the life that had put them on the run. Given as their criminal activities in the West gave them the spending power of millionaires today, you have to wonder what happened to the money, but then generally people of this character aren't really good at financial sustainability. In the end they were both gunned down in Bolivia, which seems to be the end point for ne'er do wells from elsewhere who make their living from the gun.
Or were they?
Ever since 1908 there's been persistent rumors that both men survived. How they evaded death in a hail of Bolivian bullets is rarely discussed with these theories, but it'd have to fall to something like mistaken identity for those who met their end in 1908.
Parker's rumored return is the most circulated story, at least in Wyoming. At least as early as the 1930s Dr. Francis Smith, who treated Cassidy for a bullet wound and who had treated Etta Place as a patient as well, claimed to have talked to Cassidy after his claimed death and that he'd had his face surgically altered in France, something that given the state of plastic surgery at the time seems rather absurd. Josie Bassett, one of the infamous Bassett sisters that we'll discuss below, claimed in the 1960s that Cassidy visited her in the 1920s and ultimately died in Nevada. Residents of his hometown in Utah likewise claimed that he returned and lived in Nevada. One of his female siblings claimed that he returned home and visited the family homestead in 1925 and then lived out his life in Washington, a story circulated by some other family members in later years, who claimed that he lived under the name Philips. Some claim his family buried him after his death on the family ranch and have kept his burial place a secret. The better stories all have a mid 1920s element to them.
In Wyoming there were and remain persistent rumors of his return. He's claimed to have visited Baggs in 1925, prior to returning to Circleville Utah in 1925. I personally heard a rumor related to me from Fremont County of his having more than once visited a female friend of his in that county. That story came to me second hand, of course, but he person who heard it first hand had it related to him by an old resident of the county.
There are many fewer rumors regarding Harry Longabaugh, but one is that he returned and lived out his life in Utah. A person claimed to be him in these rumors was actually exhumed recently and his DNA did not relate to Longabaugh's family's.
They're almost certainly in a busy grave in some Bolivian cemetery having met a fate they deserved.
They were, of course, the two most famous of a prolific criminal enterprise. We should at least list the other more notable members of the same gang.
William Ellsworth (Elzy) Lay was a member from Mount Pleasant, Ohio who was taken to Colorado with his family as an infant. He left home at age 18 and was running with Cassidy by the time he was 20. He dated Josie Basset at the same time that Cassidy was dating Ann Bassett. . . those girls again.
Lay actually married and had a child, although his wife was not one of the Bassett's, and he refused her demands that he give up being an outlaw. Lay was also a killer, being responsible for the deaths of several lawmen. In 1899 he was captured, convicted of his crimes, and surprisingly sentenced to life in prison, showing that Western law was more lenient than supposed. His wife divorced him. In 1906 he was paroled. He worked in Baggs for awhile, remarried and then moved to California where he lived out the rest of his life, dying in 1934 at age 65.
Ben Kilpatrick was known as the "Tall Texan". He was from Texas and participated in the gang, but not that much is really known about him. He was captured and sentenced to prison in St. Louis Missouri in 1901 and received a fifteen year sentence for his crimes there.
He returned to crime upon his early release in 1912 and attempted a train robbery soon thereafter. During the robbery an express messenger beat his brains out, literally, with an ice mallet. He was 38 years old at the time.
William "News" Carver was a member who acquired his nickname as he liked to read his name in the paper. Carver was part of the infamous Wild Bunch 1900 train robbery of a train near Tipton Wyoming in which they famously ended up accidentally blowing up a rail car. The gang split up to make their arrest by law enforcement more difficult after that. Carver robbed a train in Montana the following year and then fled to Texas. He was shot in a bakery in Sonora Texas the following year when they were arresting him on suspicion of a murder he didn't commit. A companion appeared to be going for a gun. Carver's didn't clear his holster before he was shot six time.
Carver had been in various other gangs before he took up with The Wild Bunch. He's also been married early in his life but his wife had died shortly after their marriage. He's yet another member of this gang associated with the Bassett sisters, dating Josie Bassett, although not surprisingly his relationship with her would not prove to be permanent.
Orlando Camillia ("O.C" or "Deaf Charlie") Hanks was a barely known member. He was arrested for his part in a bank robbery in Texas in 1894 and released in 1901. He robbed a train in Texas the following year and was shot upon being run down while resisting arrest.
George "Flat Nose" Curry (Currie) is a well known member of the gang. He was a Canadian by birth who relocated with his family to Nebraska when he was a child. He was killed in 1900 by a Sheriff in Utah when being pursued for rustling.
Harvey Logan was perhaps the most violent member of the gang and was responsible for the revenge killing of the Utah sheriff who killed George Curry. He'd earlier committed another revenge killing upon a rancher who had killed his brother. He may have killed up to nine men in his criminal career before killing himself in 1904 when he was run down by a posse in Colorado.
Logan was a prolific and early criminal. He was, as noted, violent, but he was none the less popular. Oddly, his popularity was such that it was common at one time, while he lived, for prostitutes to claim him as the father of their children, irrespective of their actual parentage.
Three women, including one associated strongly with Logan, were members of the gang at various times. The one associated with Logan was Laura Bullion.
We should note before moving on that Matilda Maude Davis enters the story here in some fashion as she was uniquely one of a handful of women who were allowed into The Wild Bunch's criminal sanctuaries. Photos show here to be a petite attractive woman. Little is really known about her but she did marry Elzy Lay and was obviously aware of his profession, if we wish to call it that. After she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, she unsuccessfully insisted that Lay give up a life of crime and ultimately she divorced him. She later remarried and lived in Utah. She passed away in 1958 at age 83. Their daughter, Marvel, also lived out her life in Utah and died in Vernal at age 86 in 1983.
As a side note, this may make the extended story of Lay and his family the happiest one here, although its not happy. None of them died at the end of a rope or gun and they all lived out natural lives.
The Bassett girls were well educated for the time. Their mother sent them to high school in Craig, Colorado and then to a Catholic boarding school in Salt Lake. Ann was asked not to return to the boarding school and was subsequently sent to a boarding school on the East Coast. Their formal educations ended when their mother, who was twenty years younger than their father, died in 1892.
Like Ann, her association wit the Wild Bunch dropped off after 1897, although she'd engage in bootlegging during the Depression. She lived an entire life as an outdoorsman and lived frugally in a cabin after loosing her ranch in her later years. She married five times as noted. She had three children, all by her first husband.
Place is by far the best known of the Wild Bunch damsels, but she's also the one that the least is known about. Even her real name is not known. Nor is her ultimate fate.
Place appears out of nowhere in this story right at about 1900, at which time she was somewhere in her 20s (like Ann Bassett at the time). She was uniformly regarded as a pretty woman, and indeed bore a remarkable resemblance to Bassett. When she appeared, she appeared as Longabaugh's girlfriend/paramour/common law wife. Indeed, under the common law, they would have been married, assuming no impediments to marriage, as she would hold herself out as his wife.
The Pinkerton Agency listed her origin as being in Texas but she claimed to be from the East. Interestingly, Ann Bassett was adept at affecting a New England accent due to her stint in the East as as student. She went with Longabaugh and Parker to Argentina, and indeed she went back and forth from Argentina to the United States apparently with Longabaugh on at least two occasions, once in 1902 and once in 1904, showing the depth of the resources they had. She participated in a robbery in Argentina in 1905 and fled into Chile with the gang thereafter.
She was apparently much effected by the loss of their ranch in Argentina and is believed to have grown weary of leading a criminal life. In 1905, after their fleeting to Chile, she returned to the United States, this time to San Francisco, that year. Longabaugh came with her. They are not known to have seen each other again, although she was believed to be in San Francisco as late as 1907. A woman matching her description inquired after Longabaugh's, death of the U.S. Envoy to Chile about obtaining a death certificate for him, a curios thing to do in 1909 if she was not in fact his common law widow.
After that last 1909 appearance she simply disappeared. She's subject to numerous intriguing rumors, but none of them have any kind of adequate factual support to back them up, particularly given the nature of the evidence at the time. She was a striking beauty, but that alone was not a sufficiently unique distinguisher to lead to any real knowledge of her later whereabouts.
We should wrap up the Wild Bunch in some fashion as they really are the most unique and well known of Wyoming's criminal gangs, and perhaps they're the only one that oddly reflects Wyoming's status as "the Equality State", given female participation in it. It was a highly effective criminal gang until it overstepped itself with the Tipton train robbery which really lead to its end. The money it took in robberies, in the context of the time, was frankly vast, which is perhaps best demonstrated by the amount of post Tipton travelling Parker and Longabaugh did. The members were much more violent, however, than people like to imagine, and indeed quite a few members of the gang ultimately met violent deaths. Very few managed to disassociate themselves with crime later on.
The female members are a real oddity and individually can't be neatly summed up. At least Bullion appears to be a sad character who had fallen into a low state in life but who was attractive to the male members of the gang who consorted with that element. Maude Davis is a mystery as to how she ended up in its orbit but she clearly saw the defects in their existence and pulled out for a more conventional life early on, with her ex husband ultimately being one of the few male members of the gang who also did so later. The Bassett's are recognizable to those who spend a lot of time on ranches today as fitting the sometimes free spirited female rural personalities that aren't uncommon today, and they likely never saw themselves as aiding and abetting criminals. While not to draw excessively feminist analogies, they are unique early on for rejecting conventional female roles, but then that was true of nearly every woman allowed into the Wild Bunch except for Davis.
Etta Place is simply a mystery, having arrived from somewhere and disappeared into somewhere as well. Perhaps she can be summed up by her photos, in which she's pretty, but looks profoundly sad. We don't really know what caused her to take up with Longabaugh and her early origins are all speculative. What we can say is that due to their crimes, Longabaugh and Parker were quite rich and spent freely, and that is always attractive to some.
The Hole In The Wall Gang
What? Didn't we just cover that?
Well yes and no. The problem here is that sometimes in referring to the Wild Bunch, people call them The Hole In The Wall Gang, not realizing that they actually weren't the same thing.
The Hole In The Wall Gang were those criminals who hung out at the Hole In The Wall, which included the Wild Bunch. It included others who didn't run with the Wild Bunch however. Basically, the Hole In The Wall Gang wasn't a gang at all, but a loose association of criminals who took refuge in the Hole In The Wall Country of Johnson County. Given that the Wild Bunch was a pretty loose group in and of itself, that makes the Hole In The Wall Gang really loose.
Given as we've covered the Wild Bunch, we've covered most of the more famous members of the Hole In The Wall Gang. There were, however, others. The unifying factor however was the Hole In The Wall itself, which featured protection from all sides and facilities within in it in the form of cabins and a corral.
Indeed, that alone is part of the story that's very hard for moderns to grasp. Refuge to the Hole In The Wall and Outlaw Canyon started early on in Wyoming after the Powder River country opened up and it continued on all the way into the very early 20th Century. Today the region is easily accessible to people living in Buffalo, Sheridan and Casper and lots of fisherman venture down the canyon every summer. But at the time, before automobiles, the country was so vast that this region was essentially ceded to criminals. It remained a criminal refuge even after statehood and the entire Johnson County War was fought around it without penetrating it or ending its status. As a natural fortress it was impenetrable, keeping in mind that law enforcement in Wyoming was extremely thinly manned. No Sheriff could possibly mount a sufficient expedition to even think of entering it. It was only time and the narrowing of the world that the technology of the early 20th Century introduced that ended that.
The gangs that operated out of the Hole In The Wall formed a sort of alliance and traveled in each others company, sometimes according to a loose set of rules that had been formed in order to keep the alliance active. In the 1880s and 1890s they were highly active. The Tipton raid however operated to put the focus on the Wild Bunch and caused it to disperse. That event in and of itself changed the nature of the toleration for crime in the state. The 1909 Spring Creek Raid would show that the support for it had evaporated.
The use of the hideout declined steadily after the Tipton Raid and was basically over by 1910.
Tom Horn
The next individual we'll mention here has already been mentioned, and some wouldn't consider him an outlaw at all. Once again, this demonstrates the blurred lines that existed between the law and the outlaw at the time.
Tom Horn was just about the same age as Longabaugh and Parker, having been born in 1860. He'd been born in Missouri and was already working as a scout and packer for the U.S. Army by 1876, the same year that the Battle of the Little Big Horn was fought. He served in the Southwest under the legendary scout Al Sieber and was himself a Chief of Scouts by 1885. He served with distinction in the wars against the Apaches. During this period he became acclimated to violence and had already killed in a man in what amounted to a type of duel, that being with a Mexican Army lieutenant over a prostitute.
After the Apache wars he became a rancher briefly but was cleaned out by thieves, an event that left a lasting impact on him. He wondered into being a stock detective by title, but in reality was an assassin for large livestock interests, a position that tended to have the cover of law. He reentered the Army during the Spanish American War but upon coming back out went to work as a killer for the the large livestock interests during the Wyoming stock wars period.
Horn was distinctly different than figures like Parker and Longabaugh as he did operate, albeit barely, under the cover of law. That ran out for him with the murder of Willie Nickell, which is still disputed as to who did it. No matter who did the killing, it was likely a mistake as Nickell was a teenage boy and likely not the intended target of the killing. Horn was none the less convicted of the murder and executed for it. In some ways, given Horn's undoubted role in many other extra judicial killings, it hardly even matters if he was guilty of the Nickell murder or not.
Horn was active in Wyoming in the 1890s and early 1900s, and had various employers, some of whom are only suspected. He is rumored to have been at significant Johnson County War events although his presence can't really be established. He was a Pinkerton agent for a time, although they ultimately asked him to resign. His execution fell in 1903 meaning that he died an earlier death than some of his outright criminal adversaries.
His 1903 execution also demonstrated that the era of lawlessness was really ending. We've already noted that above, but prior to his killing Nickell there'd been no effort to arrest Horn even though he was complicit in a lot of killings for hire. Much of that was because powerful parties sanctioned the killings and thought them justified, even if fully illegal. Nickell's killing was shocking, but prior murders had also been shocking. The arrest of Horn for the Albany County murder showed what the Spring Creek arrests would demonstrate in Big Horn County shortly thereafter. Toleration for criminal violence for any cause had ended.
The Red Sash Gang
This entry will be a brief one as nobody is certain if a Red Sash Gang really existed or what it consisted of.
Rumors and stories of a violent Red Sash Gang circulated following the Johnson County War and are somewhat tied up in its aftermath.
Stories of a group of violent rustlers who stole cattle, threatened people, and committed murder, while wearing red sashes, a popular cowboy affectation at the time, circulated in the early 1890s. The murder of Marshal George Wellman in May, 1892, while he was out in prairie to investigate the events of the prior month's raid into Johnson County, was attributed to them.
The existence of the gang was widely held to be true at the time, but the lack of any real definition to them, other than some sinister activities at the time, has caused people to wonder if they really existed. If they did, it was only briefly. And the sashes may have meant nothing at all. At this particularity period in time it was very common for cowboys for some reason, including those on the Northern Plains. Frontier artist Charlie Russell, for example, routinely wore one.
William L. Carlisle
Bill Carlisle started his criminal career, brief though it was, the decade following the end of Longabaugh, Parker and Horn's, making him arguably the last of Wyoming's frontier criminals.
Carlisle robbed a series of trains in 1916 after reaching a state of absolute destitution. Twenty six years old at the time, he'd lived a hard life prior to those events, but was none the less noted to be a polite robber who eschewed taking money from women and children.
Sentenced to a long prison sentence, he escaped from prison in 1919 and took up train robbery one more time. However, his attempt failed as the train he targeted was full of servicemen he could not bring himself to rob, and instead it merely ended up in his flight. He was shot when a posse caught up with him near Glendo and returned to prison. In prison for the second time he underwent a profound religious conversion and converted to Catholicism and became a model prisoner. He was released from prison in 1936. He lived for many years in Laramie before returning to his native Pennsylvania in his old age.
Carlisle is a unique criminal in that he seems to have been poorly constituted for it from the very first. His early life as a near orphan had seemingly left him without a really strong moral compass, but it wasn't completely absent. He proved to be more willing to die committing a crime than he was willing to kill committing one. He couldn't bring himself to rob anyone except men, and he exempted servicemen. Even in his arrest and trial photos he's smiling and his captors appeared to have no concern that he'd flee once caught. Once he found some guidance, he permanently corrected his direction.
Earl Durand
If Carlisle is not the last of Wyoming's frontier era outlaws, assuming that even he is, than Earl Durand has to be. Or at least he wanted to be.
Durand was born three years prior to Carlisle's first train robberies and was active as an odd criminal in a brief 1930s episode.
From a Mormon family in Park County, Durand lived an outdoor life seemingly calculated to ignore the law, including poaching. He had a strangely willful streak in which he refused to comport his lifestyle to the realities of the modern world, seemingly believing that he personally could live more as if it was 1839, rather than 1939. Arrested in 1939 for poaching, as he refused to buy a license, he escaped from jail and killed several law enforcement officers in his flight. This lead in turn to a man hunt which became absurdly overblown.
Escaping first to the hills, he came down into Powell and died from a self inflicted gunshot wound during a failed attempted bank robbery. Durand, in fairness, likely fits into the violent 1930s more than the frontier era, however. I note it here as he seems to have wished to act as if he lived in a much earlier frontier era at a time at which it wasn't completely impossible to imagine doing so.
What about Frank and Jesse James?
I'm going to call bull on this one.
Frank and Jesse James are so famous that it seems there's no region of the West in which it isn't claimed that they were there. The oddity of that is that they were Southern criminals, not Western ones, and there's simply no evidence of it.
Jesse James, the leader of the James Gang, was a generation older than the youngest of the criminals we've been writing about here. So was his brother Frank. Both men had been acclimated to a blistering level of violence by the Civil War and they fit into a unique category of American criminal that came out of that war and whose era lasted into the 1930s. They were regional criminals and as their raid into Northfield Minnesota demonstrated, they were inept out of it.
They're so famous, and they were active in the immediate post Civil War period we associate with the West, that people adopt them into any scenario. I've heard it claimed that they took refuge in The Hole In The Wall at one point, that they had a cabin in the Big Horns, and that a high point I know of in the foothills of the Big Horns was used as a lookout spot by Jesse to evade pursuers.
It's all myth.
The James Gang was broken by the 1876 Northfield Minnesota Raid and it never really returned to any sort of significant activity after that, although they did attempt to. Frank James sundered to authorities in 1882 with a promise that he would not be extradited to Minnesota. Jesse James met with a bullet to the back of a head fired by a cousin that same year.
Most of Wyoming's criminals of the era weren't even active at the time that Jesse died and Frank surrendered. The Big Horn Basin where they took refuge had barely been opened up at the time and use of the Hole In The Wall was just about to start. The James weren't frontiersmen and they were cowboys. They were Missouri smallholding farmers who were introduced to horrific violence during the Civil War and kept it up, where they lived, and where there was sympathy for them, after it.
So What Can We Say?
Well, perhaps we have already said it. But what is clear is that, in looking at it, Wyoming never really had any criminals who were really Wyomingites per se in the frontier era. The territory and state were too new for it. The vastness of the country attracted some by the 1880s to a life of crime, but it also wan't really until then that the state had anything to steal. With a widely dispersed population, the West was ideal for criminals hiding from the law, but at the same time that same condition meant that dedicated criminals had to act over a vast swath of territory. Most criminals operating out of Wyoming also hit targets in other Western states. The Wild Bunch ranged north to Montana and south to Texas, and operated out of Utah as much as Wyoming.
Those criminals are romantic only in the romanticized portrayals of the. Even the Wild Bunch, with its attractive young men and women, included members who were outright killers. All of the more notorious criminals risked death at the hands of lawmen who were not shy about using firearms and who were free to do so almost without question, and many met their end that way. At the same time, societal tolerance for criminals was remarkably high during the 1880s and 1890s and only started to end in the 1900s. Those caught in the 19th Century were actually quite unlikely to meet with the severest of penalties upon being tried and often severed very light sentences even for really horrific crimes. Again, starting in the 20th Century this began to change and those caught risked severe sentences after that.
Much of the wilder era of crime in Wyoming overlapped with the stress of the cattle conflicts and the cattle/sheep conflict which seemingly operated to support it being ongoing. The Johnson County War amazingly managed to take place in and around the Hole In The Wall without impacting its status at all. Men and women loosely associated with the small livestock side of the conflict had interaction with some criminals that tainted that side of the conflict in reputation but which also created a seeming high degree of tolerance for those living outside of the law.
By 1900 almost all of the underlying conditions that gave rise to the era of criminal ranging were coming to an end. The railroads had penetrated everywhere in the state by that time. The cattle war ended and the small rancher was established. The sheep war was ongoing but winding down. Frontier towns had yielded to being small towns and residents didn't want their banks and trains robbed. The first automobiles came in during that decade in numbers allowing people to cover distances in hours that had once taken days, and which rendered a place like the Hole In The Wall to a fishing hole, rather than a thieve's fortress.
Or perhaps we should say returning it, thankfully, to that former status.
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*The comparisons that tend to be made in this area tend to run only one way, but in reality there are plenty of things that are illegal now which those in the 19th Century would regard as flat out bizarre in legal terms while there are a lot of social topics in which the law was much different than now and our ancestors would find the evolution of the law to be disappointing in its results at best.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Arland, Wyoming.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Como Bluffs: Dinosaur Graveyard and Train Robberies
The first marker is for the fossil fields nearby. The sign tells the story. I'd only note as an aside that my father told me that back in the 1940s he stopped at the fossil cabin with his father and the owner of hit gave him a fossilized dinosaur egg from the nearby fossil beds. Unfortunately, it's long since been lost.
Structures at this site are depicted in these two photographs, including the famous "fossil cabin". A nearby sign notes that it was featured in "Ripley's Believe It Or Not".
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
December 31
1871 The Territorial Legislature authorized the formation of militia companies, the birth of the Wyoming National Guard.
1890 A New Year's Ball was held in the Casper Town Hall to benefit the Casper Cornet Band. Attribution. Wyoming State Historical Society.
1912 USS Wyoming made the President' flagship.
1916 The Cheyenne State Leader for December 31, 1916. Going out on a belligerent note.
And so 1916 would not go out on a peaceful note.
Carranza was unhappy that the protocol did not require a UW withdraw, the Allies were not tempted by peace. The Army was taking a position contrary to what supposedly the Administration was taking, if reports were accurate, in that it wanted to withdraw the expedition in Mexico.
A bizarre headline was featured on the front page indicating that "churchmen" were opposing "premature peace" in Europe, with the promise that details would be provided the following day.
It was a dry New Years Eve. . . at least officially for Americans and most Canadians who, if they were following the law, had to ring in the arrival of 1922 with some non-besotted beverage. I'm sure many did.
And there was a lot to celebrate that year. For Americans, the Great War had officially ended, although the fighting had obviously stopped quite some time prior. For the many Americans with Irish ancestry, it appeared that Irish independence was about to become a de jure, rather than a de facto, matter. Americans were moving definitively past World War One, and in a lot of ways definitively past a prior, much more rural, era and country.
Not all was well, however, as the economy was doing quite poorly. There was hope that would soon change, with that hope being expressed in a regional fashion on the cover of the Casper Daily Tribune.
Also, on the cover of the paper was the news that the County had taken over ownership of the hospital. It'd run the hospital until 2020, when Banner Health took over it, converting it back into a private hospital after almost a century of public ownership.
1941 Big Piney, Pinedale, Nowood, and Star Valley became the first Wyoming Conservation Districts when their Certifications of Organization were signed by Wyoming's Secretary of State Lester Hunt.
1950 Frank Barrett resigned from the US House of Representatives, where he had been Wyoming's Congressman, in order that he could take office as Governor.
1952 The 187th Fighter Bomber Squadron, Wyoming Air National Guard (F-51s) released from active service. During their service in Korea nine 187th pilots were lost.
1974 Private U.S. citizens were allowed to buy and own gold for the first time in more than 40 years.
1976 Wyoming hit by a statewide blizzard.
1978 Clifford Hanson, who was leaving his office as U.S. Senator, resigned, thereby allowing his successor, Alan K. Simpson to have Hanson's seniority by virtue of short appointment to replace him.
2011 The year departs with a Central Wyoming blizzard.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
December 29
1879 Wyoming's Territorial Governor John Hoyt plans Wyoming's first official New Year's party by a governor at Interocean Hotel, Cheyenne, Wyoming.
1879 J. S. Nason takes office as Territorial Auditor.
1890. The Battle Wounded Knee occurs in South Dakota.
The battle followed a period of rising tensions on Western reservations during which various tribes began to become adherents of a spiritual movement which held that participation in a Ghost Dance would cause departed ancestors to return along with the buffalo, and the European Americans to depart. Ghost Dance movements created great nervousness amongst the American administration of the Reservations upon which they were occurring, including the Pine Ridge Reservation, where Wounded Knee took place. Tensions increased when Sitting Bull was killed in a gun fight with Indian Police on December 15 and troops were sent to the reservation thereafter after tensions increased amongst Sitting Bull's tribe, the Hunkpapa Sioux. When troops arrived, 200 Hunkpapa-Miniconjou Sioux fled the reservation towards the Cheyenne River. They were joined by a further 400 Sioux, who then reconsidered and turned themselves in at Ft. Bennett South Dakota.
The remaining 400 or so Sioux were set to surrender themselves at Wounded Knee but were delayed in doing so as their leader, Big Foot, was sick with pneumonia. When the Army arrived at Wounded Knee, it commenced to disarm the tribesmen on December 28, which was an unwelcome action on their part, and greatly increased tensions in the camp, which were made further tense by the upsetting of the camp by the soldiers, which included women and children. A militant medicine man further agitated the matter by reminding the tribesmen that their Ghost shirts were regarded as making them invulnerable to bullets. During this event, the rifle of Black Coyote, regarded by some of his tribesmen as crazy, went off accidentally while he was struggling to retain it. The medicine man gave the sign for retaliation and some Sioux leveled their rifles at the soldiers, and some may have fired them. In any event, the soldiers were soon firing at the Sioux, and Hotckiss cannons fired into the village. Of 230 Indian women and children and 120 men at the camp, 153 were known to be killed and 44 known to be wounded with many probable wounded likely escaping and relatives quickly removing many of the dead. Army casualties were 25 dead and 39 wounded Six Congressional Medals of Honor were issued for the action, which was a two day action by military calculations, which is typically a surprise to those not familiar with the battle. An inaccurate myth holds that the Army retracted the Medals of Honor in recent years, but this is not true. The battle aroused the ardor of the Brules and Oglalas on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations with some leaving those reservations as a result, but by January 16, 1891, the Army had rounded up the last of them who had come to acknowledge the hopelessness of the situation.
The tragic event is often noted as the closing battle of the Indian Wars, which it really is not. Various other actions would continue on throughout the 1890s, although they were always minor. At least one military pursuit occurred in the first decade of the 20th Century. Actions by Bronco Apaches, essentially renegades, would occur in northern Mexico, and spill over the border, as late as 1936. Perhaps it has this status, however as the presence of the 7th Cavalry at the action, and the location, make it a bit of a bookend to the Indian Wars in the popular imagination, contrasting with Little Big Horn, which is generally regarded as the largest Army defeat of the post Civil War, Indian Wars, period. Even that, of course, came well into the period of the Plains Indian Wars, so just as Wounded Knee was not the end of the actual conflict, Little Big Horn was not that near to the beginning.
Nonetheless, being such a singular defeat, it has come to stand for the end of the era for Native Americans, which probably is a generally correct view in some ways. After Wounded Knee, no Indian action would ever be regarded as seriously challenging US authority.
1916 The Casper Weekly Tribune for December 29, 1916: Carranza official arrives in Washington, land for St. Anthony's purchased, and the Ohio Oil Co. increases its capital.
The news about the Ohio Oil Company, at one time part of the Standard family but a stand alone entity after Standard was busted up in 1911, was not small news. Ohio Oil was a major player in the Natrona County oilfields at the time and would be for decades. It would contribute a major office building to Casper in later years which is still in use. At one time it was the largest oil company in the United States. In the 1960s it changed its name to Marathon and in the 1980s moved its headquarters from Casper to Cody Wyoming. At some point it began to have a major presence in the Houston area and in recent years it sold its Wyoming assets, including the Cody headquarters, and it now no longer has a presence of the same type in the state.
The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 recognized the reality of Western homesteading which was that smaller parcels of property were not sufficient for Western agricultural conditions. It was not the only such homestead act, however, and other acts likewise provided larger parcels than the original act, whose anniversary is rapidly coming up. The act also recognized that homesteading not only remained popular, but the 1916 act came in the decade that would see the greatest number of homesteads filed nationally.
Perhaps most significant, in some ways, was that the 1916 act also recognized the split estate, which showed that the United States was interested in being the mineral interest owner henceforth, a change from prior policies. 1916 was also a boom year in oil and gas production, due to World War One, and the US was effectively keeping an interest in that production. The split estate remains a major feature of western mineral law today.
1921 Thursday December 29, 1921. The Raid hits the news.
We reported on this item yesterday. It hit the news across the state today, receiving front page treatment in both Casper and Cheyenne.
Cheyenne's paper also noted that Governor Short of Illinois was going to appear in front of a grand jury, but the way the headline was written must have caused Gov. Carey in Wyoming to gasp. Early example of "click bait"?
Mackenzie King became the Prime Minister of Canada. He'd serve in that role off and on, mostly on, until 1948. An intellectual with good writing but poor oral skills, he'd become a dominant Canadian political figure for a generation.
1941 All German, Italian and Japanese aliens in California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington and are ordered to surrender contraband. (WWII List).
1941 Sunge Yoshimoto, age nineteen, killed in the Lincoln-Star Coal Company tipple south of Kemmerer. He was a Japanese American war worker.
1943 Wartime quotas of new adult bicycles for January cut in half with 40 being allotted to Wyoming.Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.
1944 USS Lincoln County, a landing ship tank, commissioned.
2008 Third day of Yellowstone earthquake swarm.
2014 The Special Master issues his report on Tongue River allocations in Montana v. Wyoming. Wyoming newspapers report this as a victory for Wyoming, but Montana papers report that both states won some points in the decision, which now goes to the Supreme Court for approval or rejection.