December 14

1854   Edward Gillette was born in New Haven, Connecticut.  He graduated from the Yale Scientific School in 1876 and took a job with the U.S. Geological Survey.  He later became locating engineer and chief draftsman for the Rio Grande and Western Railway and later a surveyor and civil engineer for the Burlington and Missouri Railroad. He was married to the daughter of H.A. Coffeen, who at one time was Wyoming’s Congressman. He was elected Wyoming State Treasurer in 1907 and served until 1911. 1907-1911.   He also served as Wyoming Water Superintendent.

Gillette Wyoming is named after him.

1877  Cheyenne incorporated by the Territorial Legislature.

1911 Hiram S. Manville, after whom Manville in Niobrara County is named, died in Nebraska.  He was a rancher and worked for large ranches in the region, and was influential in the early development of the town.

1914  Grace Raymond Hebard became first woman admitted to state bar.

This was a remarkable achievement in and of itself, but it only one of a string of such accomplishments made by Hebard.  She was also the first woman to graduate from the Engineering Department of the University of Iowa, in an era when there engineering was an overwhelmingly male profession.  She followed this 1882 accomplishment by acquiring a 1885 MA from the same school, and then an 1893  PhD in political science from Wesleyan University.  She went to work for the State of Wyoming in 1882 and rose to the position of Deputy State Engineer under legendary State Engineer Elwood Mead.  She moved to Laramie in 1891 and was instrumental in the administration of the University of Wyoming.  She was a significant figure in the suffrage movement, and a proponent in Wyoming of Americanization, a view shared by such figures such as Theodore Roosevelt.

She was an amateur historian as well, which is what she is best remembered for today.  Unfortunately, her historical works were tinged with romanticism and have not been regarded as wholly reliable in later years.  Her history of Sacajawea, which followed 30 years of research, is particularly questioned and would seem to have made quite a few highly romantic erroneous conclusions.  On a more positive note, the same impulses lead her to be very active in the marking of historic Wyoming trails.

While she was the first woman to be admitted to the Wyoming State Bar, she never actually practiced law.  Her book collection is an important part of the University of Wyoming's American Heritage Center's collection today. 

1916  Former Governor John Osborne concludes his service as Assistant Secretary of State for the Wilson Administration.

John E. Osborne at the start of his service as Assistant Secretary of State.

It had been rumored for weeks that the former Democratic Governor would step down, with motivations being various cited as an intent to run for the U.S. Senate and a desire to return his Western holdings.   All of that may have been partial motivators.  He did retain agricultural and business holdings in Wyoming and a 1918 run for the Senate showed he had not lost interest in politics.  However, he also found himself in increasing disagreement with his employer on Wilson's policies in regards to the war in Europe.  So, at this point, prior to Wilson's second term commencing, he stepped down and returned to Wyoming with his wife Selina, who was twenty years his junior.

Osborne would live the rest of his life out in the Rawlins area, ranching and as a banker.  While twenty years older than his wife, he would out live her by a year, dying in 1943 at age 84.  She died the prior year at age 59.  Their only daughter would pass away in 1951.  In spite of a largely Wyoming life, he was buried with his wife in their family plot in Kentucky.
1916The Submarine H3 runs aground, leading to the ultimate loss of the USS Milwaukee.
 

The U.S. submarine the H3, operating off of Eureka California with the H1 and H2, and their tender the USS Cheyenne, went off course in heavy fog and ran aground on this date (although some sources say it was December 16, this seems the better date however).

The H3 during one of the recovery attempts.

She'd be recovered and put back in service, although it was a difficult effort and would not be accomplished until April 20, 1917.  In the process, the USS Milwaukee, a cruiser, was beached and wrecked on January 13, 1917, making the relaunching of the H3 somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory.

The wrecked USS Milwaukee.

USS Cheyenne, which had been original commissioned as the monitor USS Wyoming.

 The USS Cheyenne with the H1 and H2.  The Cheyenne had been decommissioned in 1905, after having served since only 1900, but she was recommissioned in 1908.  She was the first fuel oil burning ship in the U.S. Navy after having been refitted prior to recommissioning.  She was refitted as a U.S. Navy submarine tender, as a brief stint in the Washington Naval Militia, in 1913.

2006  Staff Sgt. Theodore A. Spatol,1041st Engineer Company, Wyoming Army National Guard, died of illness acquired while in Iraq.  He had returned to his home in Thermopolis prior to passing.

Elsewhere:  1916:  In strong contrast to the State of Wyoming,  Quebec bans women from entering the legal profession.

This was in contrast with progress in suffrage elsewhere in Canada that year, but it wasn't terribly unusual for the time.  Note that the first Woman admitted to the bar in Wyoming had only been admitted two years earlier in spite of suffrage dating back to the late 19th Century and in spite of women already having served as justices of the peace and jurors. Having said that, every US state would have admitted at least one woman to the bar by the early 20th Century and many in the late 19th Century

Clara Brett Martin, the first female lawyer in the British Empire.

In these regards the entire British Empire trailed somewhat behind as the first female lawyer in the Empire, Ontario's Clara Brett Martin, wasn't admitted until 1897 after a protracted struggle to obtain that goal.

December 4

256  St. Barbara martyred.  This date is her feast day on the Calendar of Saints, and for reasons that are obscure, she is the Patron Saint of Artillery.  A large portrait of her hangs in the museum at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, the headquarters for the artillery training in the U.S. Army (and also for the U.S. Marine Corps).

Wyoming has a long association with artillery, which may surprise many of its residents, which continues on to the present day.  The Wyoming National Guard became an artillery unit some time prior to World War One and served in that capacity during the Great War.  In the early 1920s, it was converted to cavalry, but artillery units were reintroduced after World War Two.  The Wyoming Army National Guard's 300th AFA served with distinction in the Korean War, winning both Congressional and Presidential  Unit Citations and the state retains artillery units to this day.

1873  William Ross born in Tennessee. Ross was Wyoming's twelfth Governor, but only served a year and a half, dying from complications following an appendectomy.  Ross was a lawyer in Cheyenne, having had a practice there since 1901.  He ran several political campaigns, but it was not until 1922 that he was successful, running on an assistance to farmers platform, and supporting stronger prohibition measures.  His successful campaign was hard on his finances, largely draining any surplus, which had an impact on his wife successive campaigns.  He was married to Nellie Tayloe Ross, who became the governor following his death.

1877  Rail line between Cheyenne and Denver completed.

1889  The first load of coal was shipped from Cambria

1890  Some legislators staying at a private home in Cheyenne were robbed during the night, while they slept.  Attribution.  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1917   December 4. Predictions and Predicaments old new.
 

I'm not putting this copy of The Wyoming Tribune up for the story about President Wilson's speech, although that was an important story.  No, rather I'm putting this one up because a story that appears here recalls one on the front page of this paper ran this weekend in the Casper Star Tribune, that being; "Says Oil In Backyard Of Cheyenne".  This weekend there was a story in the Tribune about people who live just north of Cheyenne and who are worried about oil production north of the town.

I'm not commenting on that specifically.  There is oil north of Cheyenne and that doesn't seem like a surprise to me.  It's a bit surprising that it took so long to start developing it, but then the technology has developed to where that is easier to do. Just south of Cheyenne the Denver Basin has been in production for decades.  Anyhow, I'm only noting it as L. D. Thompson proved to be absolutely right in his prediction, although he didn't live to see that prediction come true.

Russia's backing out of the war, which wouldn't really bring peace to Russia which went into a civil war, made the headlines.  People reading it had to be worried what that would mean for the war in the west.

Wilson's State of the Union address read as follows:

Gentlemen of the Congress:

Eight months have elapsed since I last had the honor of addressing you. They have been months crowded with events of immense and grave significance for us. I shall not undertake to retail or even to summarize those events. The practical particulars of the part we have played in them will be laid before you in the reports of the Executive Departments. I shall discuss only our present outlook upon these vast affairs, our present duties, and the immediate means of accomplishing the objects we shall hold always in view.

I shall not go back to debate the causes of the war. The intolerable wrongs done and planned against us by the sinister masters of Germany have long since become too grossly obvious and odious to every true American to need to be rehearsed. But I shall ask you to consider again and with a very grave scrutiny our objectives and the measures by which we mean to attain them; for the purpose of discussion here in this place is action, and our action must move straight towards definite ends. Our object is, of course, to win the war; and we shall not slacken or suffer ourselves to be diverted until it is won. But it is worth while asking and answering the question, When shall we consider the war won?

From one point of view it is not necessary to broach this fundamental matter. I do not doubt that the American people know what the war is about and what sort of an outcome they will regard as a realization of their purpose in it. As a nation we are united in spirit and intention. I pay little heed to those who tell me otherwise. I hear the voices of dissent; who does not? I hear the criticism and the clamor of the noisily thoughtless and troublesome. I also see men here and there fling themselves in impotent disloyalty against the calm, indomitable power of the nation. I hear men debate peace who understand neither its nature not the way in which we may attain it with uplifted eyes and unbroken spirits. But I know that none of these speaks for the nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut their uneasy hour and be forgotten.
But from another point of view I believe that it is necessary to say plainly what we here at the seat of action consider the war to be for and what part we mean to play in the settlement of its searching issues. We are the spokesmen of the American people and they have a right to know whether their purpose is ours. They desire peace by the overcoming of evil, by the defeat once for all of the sinister forces that interrupt peace and render it impossible, and they wish to know how closely our thought runs with theirs and what action we propose. They are impatient with those who desire peace by any sort of compromise--deeply and indignantly impatient--but they will be equally impatient with us if we do not make it plain to them what our objectives are and what we are planning for in seeking to make conquest of peace by arms.

I believe that I speak for them when I say two things: First, that this intolerable Thing of which the masters of Germany have shown us the ugly face, this menace of combined intrigue and force which we now see so clearly as the German power, a Thing without conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed and, if it be not utterly brought to an end, at least shut out from the friendly intercourse of the nations; and, second, that when this Thing and its power are indeed defeated and the time comes that we can discuss peace--when the German people have spokesmen whose word we can believe and when those spokesmen are ready in the name of their people to accept the common judgment of the nations as to what shall henceforth be the bases of law and of covenant for the life of the world--we shall be willing and glad to pay the full price for peace, and pay it ungrudgingly. We know what that price will be. It will be full, impartial justice--justice done at every point and to every nation that the final settlement must affect, our enemies as well as our friends.

You catch, with me, the voices of humanity that are in the air. They grow daily more audible, more articulate, more persuasive, and they come from the hearts of men everywhere. They insist that the war shall not end in vindictive action of any kind; that no nation or people shall be robbed or punished because the irresponsible rulers of a single country have themselves done deep and abominable wrong. It is this thought that has been expressed in the formula "No annexations, no contributions, no punitive indemnities." Just because this crude formula expresses the instinctive judgment as to right of plain men everywhere it has been made diligent use of by the masters of German intrigue to lead the people of Russia astray, and the people of every other country their agents could reach, in order that a premature peace might be brought about before autocracy has been taught its final and convincing lesson, and the people of the world put in control of their own destinies.

But the fact that a wrong use has been made of a just idea is no reason why a right use should not be made of it. It ought to be brought under the patronage of its real friends. Let it be said again that autocracy must first be shown the utter futility of its claims to power or leadership in the modern world. It is impossible to apply any standard of justice so long as such forces are unchecked and undefeated as the present masters of Germany command. Not until that has been done can Right be set up as arbiter and peace-maker among the nations. But when that has been done--as, God willing, it assuredly will be--we shall at last be free to do an unprecedented thing, and this is the time to avow our purpose to do it. We shall be free to base peace on generosity and justice, to the exclusion of all selfish claims to advantage even on the part of the victors.

Let there be no misunderstanding. Our present and immediate task is to win the war, and nothing shall turn us aside from it until it is accomplished. Every power and resource we possess, whether of men, of money, or of materials, is being devoted and will continue to be devoted to that purpose until it is achieved. Those who desire to bring peace about before that purpose is achieved I counsel to carry their advice elsewhere. We will not entertain it. We shall regard the war as won only when the German people say to us, through properly accredited representatives, that they are ready to agree to a settlement based upon justice and the reparation of the wrongs their rulers have done. They have done a wrong to Belgium which must be repaired. They have established a power over other lands and peoples than their own--over the great Empire of Austria-Hungary, over hitherto free Balkan states, over Turkey, and within Asia--which must be relinquished.

Germany's success by skill, by industry, by knowledge, by enterprise we did not grudge or oppose, but admired, rather. She had built up for herself a real empire of trade and influence, secured by the peace of the world. We were content to abide the rivalries of manufacture, science, and commerce that were involved for us in her success and stand or fall as we had or did not have the brains and the initiative to surpass her. But at the moment when she had conspicuously won her triumphs of peace she threw them away, to establish in their stead what the world will no longer permit to be established, military and political domination by arms, by which to oust where she could not excel the rivals she most feared and hated. The peace we make must remedy that wrong. It must deliver the once fair lands and happy peoples of Belgium and northern France from the Prussian conquest and the Prussian menace, but it must also deliver the peoples of Austria-Hungary, the peoples of the Balkans, and the peoples of Turkey, alike in Europe and in Asia, from the impudent and alien dominion of the Prussian military and commercial autocracy.

We owe it, however, to ourselves to say that we do not wish in any way to impair or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is no affair of ours what they do with their own life, either industrially or politically. We do not purpose or desire to dictate to them in any way. We only desire to see that their affairs are left in their own hands, in all matters, great or small. We shall hope to secure for the peoples of the Balkan peninsula and for the people of the Turkish Empire the right and opportunity to make their own lives safe, their own fortunes secure against oppression or injustice and from the dictation of foreign courts or parties.

And our attitude and purpose with regard to Germany herself are of a like kind. We intend no wrong against the German Empire, no interference with her internal affairs. We should deem either the one or the other absolutely unjustifiable, absolutely contrary to the principles we have professed to live by and to hold most sacred throughout our life as a nation.

The people of Germany are being told by the men whom they now permit to deceive them and to act as their masters that they are fighting for the very life and existence of their Empire, a war of desperate self-defense against deliberate aggression. Nothing could be more grossly or wantonly false, and we must seek by the utmost openness and candor as to our real aims to convince them of its falseness. We are in fact fighting for their emancipation from fear, along with our own--from the fear as well as from the fact of unjust attack by neighbors or rivals or schemers after world empire. No one is threatening the existence or the independence or the peaceful enterprise of the German Empire.

The worst that can happen to the detriment of the German people is this, that if they should still, after the war is over, continue to be obliged to live under ambitious and intriguing masters interested to disturb the peace of the world, men or classes of men whom the other peoples of the world could not trust, it might be impossible to admit them to the partnership of nations which must henceforth guarantee the world's peace. That partnership must be a partnership of peoples, not a mere partnership of governments. It might be impossible, also, in such untoward circumstances, to admit Germany to the free economic intercourse which must inevitably spring out of the other partnerships of a real peace. But there would be no aggression in that; and such a situation, inevitable because of distrust, would in the very nature of things sooner or later cure itself, by processes which would assuredly set in.

The wrongs, the very deep wrongs, committed in this war will have to be righted. That of course. But they cannot and must not be righted by the commission of similar wrongs against Germany and her allies. The world will not permit the commission of similar wrongs as a means of reparation and settlement. Statesmen must by this time have learned that the opinion of the world is everywhere wide awake and fully comprehends the issues involved. No representative of any self-governed nation will dare disregard it by attempting any such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna. The thought of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated standards of right and wrong, is the air all governments must henceforth breathe if they would live. It is in the full disclosing light of that thought that all policies must be conceived and executed in this midday hour of the world's life. German rulers have been able to upset the peace of the world only because the German people were not suffered under their tutelage to share the comradeship of the other peoples of the world either in thought or in purpose. They were allowed to have no opinion of their own which might be set up as a rule of conduct for those who exercised authority over them. But the congress that concludes this war will feel the full strength of the tides that run now in the hearts and consciences of free men everywhere. Its conclusions will run with those tides.
All these things have been true from the very beginning of this stupendous war; and I cannot help thinking that if they had been made plain at the very outset the sympathy and enthusiasm of the Russian people might have been once for all enlisted on the side of the Allies, suspicion and distrust swept away, and a real and lasting union of purpose effected. Had they believed these things at the very moment of their revolution and had they been confirmed in that belief since, the sad reverses which have recently marked the progress of their affairs towards an ordered and stable government of free men might have been avoided. The Russian people have been poisoned by the very same falsehoods that have kept the German people in the dark, and the poison has been administered by the very same hands. The only possible antidote is the truth. It cannot be uttered too plainly or too often.

From every point of view, therefore, it has seemed to be my duty to speak these declarations of purpose, to add these specific interpretations to what I took the liberty of saying to the Senate in January. Our entrance into the war has not altered our attitude towards the settlement that must come when it is over. When I said in January that the nations of the world were entitled not only to free pathways upon the sea but also to assured and unmolested access to those pathways I was thinking, and I am thinking now, not of the smaller and weaker nations alone, which need our countenance and support, but also of the great and powerful nations, and of our present enemies as well as our present associates in the war. I was thinking, and am thinking now, of Austria herself, among the rest, as well as of Serbia and of Poland. Justice and equality of rights can be had only at a great price. We are seeking permanent, not temporary, foundations for the peace of the world and must seek them candidly and fearlessly. As always, the right will prove to be the expedient.

What shall we do, then, to push this great war of freedom and justice to its righteous conclusion? We must clear away with a thorough hand all impediments to success and we must make every adjustment of law that will facilitate the full and free use of our whole capacity and force as a fighting unit.

One very embarrassing obstacle that stands in our way is that we are at war with Germany but not with her allies. I therefore very earnestly recommend that the Congress immediately declare the United States in a state of war with Austria-Hungary. Does it seem strange to you that this should be the conclusion of the argument I have just addressed to you? It is not. It is in fact the inevitable logic of what I have said. Austria-Hungary is for the time being not her own mistress but simply the vassal of the German Government. We must face the facts as they are and act upon them without sentiment in this stern business. The government of Austria-Hungary is not acting upon its own initiative or in response to the wishes and feelings of its own peoples but as the instrument of another nation. We must meet its force with our own and regard the Central Powers as but one. The war can be successfully conducted in no other way. The same logic would lead also to a declaration of war against Turkey and Bulgaria. They also are the tools of Germany. But they are mere tools and do not yet stand in the direct path of our necessary action. We shall go wherever the necessities of this war carry us, but it seems to me that we should go only where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others.

The financial and military measures which must be adopted will suggest themselves as the war and its undertakings develop, but I will take the liberty of proposing to you certain other acts of legislation which seem to me to be needed for the support of the war and for the release of our whole force and energy.

It will be necessary to extend in certain particulars the legislation of the last session with regard to alien enemies; and also necessary, I believe, to create a very definite and particular control over the entrance and departure of all persons into and from the United States.

Legislation should be enacted defining as a criminal offense every willful violation of the presidential proclamations relating to alien enemies promulgated under section 4067 of the Revised Statutes and providing appropriate punishments; and women as well as men should be included under the terms of the acts placing restraints upon alien enemies. It is likely that as time goes on many alien enemies will be willing to be fed and housed at the expense of the Government in the detention camps and it would be the purpose of the legislation I have suggested to confine offenders among them in penitentiaries and other similar institutions where they could be made to work as other criminals do.

Recent experience has convinced me that the Congress must go further in authorizing the Government to set limits to prices. The law of supply and demand, I am sorry to say, has been replaced by the law of unrestrained selfishness. While we have eliminated profiteering in several branches of industry it still runs impudently rampant in others. The farmers, for example, complain with a great deal of justice that, while the regulation of food prices restricts their incomes, no restraints are placed upon the prices of most of the things they must themselves purchase; and similar inequities obtain on all sides.

It is imperatively necessary that the consideration of the full use of the water power of the country and also the consideration of the systematic and yet economical development of such of the natural resources of the country as are still under the control of the federal government should be immediately resumed and affirmatively and constructively dealt with at the earliest possible moment. The pressing need of such legislation is daily becoming more obvious.

The legislation proposed at the last session with regard to regulated combinations among our exporters, in order to provide for our foreign trade a more effective organization and method of cooperation, ought by all means to be completed at this session.

And I beg that the members of the House of Representatives will permit me to express the opinion that it will be impossible to deal in any but a very wasteful and extravagant fashion with the enormous appropriations of the public moneys which must continue to be made, if the war is to be properly sustained, unless the House will consent to return to its former practice of initiating and preparing all appropriation bills through a single committee, in order that responsibility may be centered, expenditures standardized and made uniform, and waste and duplication as much as possible avoided.

Additional legislation may also become necessary before the present Congress again adjourns in order to effect the most efficient coordination and operation of the railway and other transportation systems of the country; but to that I shall, if circumstances should demand, call the attention of the Congress upon another occasion.

If I have overlooked anything that ought to be done for the more effective conduct of the war, your own counsels will supply the omission. What I am perfectly clear about is that in the present session of the Congress our whole attention and energy should be concentrated on the vigorous, rapid, and successful prosecution of the great task of winning the war.

We can do this with all the greater zeal and enthusiasm because we know that for us this is a war of high principle, debased by no selfish ambition of conquest or spoliation; because we know, and all the world knows, that we have been forced into it to save the very institutions we live under from corruption and destruction. The purposes of the Central Powers strike straight at the very heart of everything we believe in; their methods of warfare outrage every principle of humanity and of knightly honor; their intrigue has corrupted the very thought and spirit of many of our people; their sinister and secret diplomacy has sought to take our very territory away from us and disrupt the Union of the States. Our safety would be at an end, our honor forever sullied and brought into contempt were we to permit their triumph. They are striking at the very existence of democracy and liberty.

It is because it is for us a war of high, disinterested purpose, in which all the free peoples of the world are banded together for the vindication of right, a war for the preservation of our nation and of all that it has held dear of principle and of purpose, that we feel ourselves doubly constrained to propose for its outcome only that which is righteous and of irreproachable intention, for our foes as well as for our friends. The cause being just and holy, the settlement must be of like motive and quality. For this we can fight, but for nothing less noble or less worthy of our traditions. For this cause we entered the war and for this cause will we battle until the last gun is fired.

I have spoken plainly because this seems to me the time when it is most necessary to speak plainly, in order that all the world may know that even in the heat and ardor of the struggle and when our whole thought is of carrying the war through to its end we have not forgotten any ideal or principle for which the name of America has been held in honor among the nations and for which it has been our glory to contend in the great generations that went before us. A supreme moment of history has come. The eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of His own justice and mercy.

Those concerns probably motivated the large headline in the Cheyenne State Leader, but that is also not the reason I'm putting this one up.  Rather, even though it had happened a couple of days prior, the news of the border skirmish on the border with Mexico had finally made it to the front page. Again, with the nation engaged in sending men to Europe, renewed clashed on the Mexican border couldn't have been welcome news.

1918  December 4, 1918. Americans arrive, Wilson leaves, Flu returns.

American trucks arriving in Kylburg German, December 4, 1918.

The SS George Washington, with President Wilson on board, awaits departure for Europe.

1942  President Roosevelt issues a letter that abolishes the Works Project Administration effective June 30.

1942  Troops arrive at Scottsbluff Army Air Field, a satellite field of the Casper Army Air Field.

1948  This Union Pacific's City of San Francisco photographed near Cheyenne.

November 29

Today is Nellie Tayloe Ross Day

 Ross in 1938 at her Maryland tobacco farm.

Nellie Tayloe Ross Day is a state holiday in Wyoming, although it is little observed. 

1847   Missionaries Dr. Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and 15 others are killed by Cayuse and Umatilla Indians in what is today southeastern Washington, causing the Cayuse War.  The Whitmans conducted the first Protestant religious service in Wyoming.

1864         Sand Creek Massacre in which Colorado militia attack Black Kettle's Cheyenne band in Colorado.  Black Kettle was at peace, and the attack was unwarranted.  The unit would muster out shortly thereafter.  The attack would drive many Cheyenne north into Wyoming and western Nebraska, where they would link up with Sioux who were already trending towards hostility with the United States.  This would result in ongoing unbroken armed conflict between these tribes and the United States up through the conclusion of Red Cloud's War.

Today the Cheyenne trek north is memorialized in the Sand Creek Massacre Trail, a highway designation for the combination Interstate Highways and State highways that lead to the Wind River Indian Reservation. The Wind River is not a Cheyenne Reservation, but it is an Arapaho and Shoshone reservation, and the Arapahos were allied to the Cheyenne and Sioux in this period. 

Black Kettle had the added misfortune of having his camp attacked later by the 7th Cavalry, under Custer, at Washita, in 1868.  He was killed in that attack, which likewise was a surprise and found his band at peace with the US, although others in the area were not.

 Cheyenne prisoners, in artist's depiction, following Washita.

1873  Laramie County Stockgrowers Association forms in Cheyenne.The organization was one of the precursors of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.

1876  Nellie Tayloe Ross born in Missouri.

1888  Territorial Governor Moonlight proclaimed the day one of Thanksgiving, Prayer and Praise.

1901  Mildred Harris, movie actress, born in Cheyenne.  She was a significant actress in the silent film era, having gone from being a child actor to a major adult actress, but had difficulty making the transition to talking pictures.

Harris is also evidence that, in spite of my notation of changes in moral standards elsewhere, the lives of movie stars has often been as torrid as they are presently.  Harris married Charlie Chaplin in 1918, at which time she was 17 years old and the couple thought, incorrectly, that  she was pregnant.  She did later give birth during their brief marriage to a boy who was severely disabled, and who died only three days after being born.  The marriage was not a happy one.  They divorced after two years of marriage, and she would marry twice more and was married to former professional football player William P. Fleckenstein at the time of her death, a union that had lasted ten years.  Ironically, she appeared in three films in 1920, the year of her divorce, as Mildred Harris Chaplin, the only films in which she was billed under that name. While an actress probably mostly known to silent film buffs today, she lived in some ways a life that touched upon many remembered personalities of the era, and which was also somewhat stereotypically Hollywood.  She introduced Edward to Wallis Simpson.

She died in 1944 at age 42 of pneumonia following surgery.  She has a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  A significant number of her 134 films are lost or destroyed due to film deterioration.  Her appearances in the last eight years of her life were minor, and unaccredited, showing the decline of her star power in the talking era.

Stories like hers, however, demonstrate that the often held concept of great isolation of Wyomingites was never true.  Harris was one of at least three actors and actresses who were born in Wyoming and who had roles in the early silent screen era.  Of those, she was arguably the most famous having risen to the height of being a major actress by age 16.

1908   Major Harry Coupland Benson appointed acting Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park.

1916:   The Wyoming Tribune for November 29, 1916: Villa in the headlines
 

Scary headlines in the Tribune, which reported that Juarez, on the Mexican border, might be Villa's next target.

The Cheyenne State Leader for November 29, 1916: Chihuahua in Villa's hands = Carranza agreeing to Protocol?
 

The Leader made the curious assumption that Villa taking Chihuahua would cause Carranza to agree tot he draft protocol with the US that was designed to bring about an American withdrawal.

Now, why would that be the case? Carranza had been opposed to American intervention, but as it was, the American expeditionary force amounted to a large block of troops in Villas way if he really intended to move north.

A curious assumption.

And the US acting on behalf of besieged Belgium was also in the news.

1917   Thanksgiving 1917
 

Given the news of the day, it couldn't have been a cheery one.

President Wilson issued a proclamation, as was the custom:

 

By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation
 It has long been the honored custom of our people to turn in the fruitful autumn of the year in praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God for His many blessings and mercies to us as a nation. That custom we can follow now even in the midst of the tragedy of a world shaken by war and immeasurable disaster, in the midst of sorrow and great peril, because even amidst the darkness that has gathered about us we can see the great blessings God has bestowed upon us, blessings that are better than mere peace of mind and prosperity of enterprise.

We have been given the opportunity to serve mankind as we once served ourselves in the great day of our Declaration of Independence, by taking up arms against a tyranny that threatened to master and debase men everywhere and joining with other free peoples in demanding for all the nations of the world what we then demanded and obtained for ourselves. In this day of the revelation of our duty not only to defend our own rights as nation but to defend also the rights of free men throughout the world, there has been vouchsafed us in full and inspiring measure the resolution and spirit of united action. We have been brought to one mind and purpose. A new vigor of common counsel and common action has been revealed in us. We should especially thank God that in such circumstances, in the midst of the greatest enterprise the spirits of men have ever entered upon, we have, if we but observe a reasonable and practicable economy, abundance with which to supply the needs of those associated with us as well as our own. A new light shines about us. The great duties of a new day awaken a new and greater national spirit in us. We shall never again be divided or wonder what stuff we are made of.

And while we render thanks for these things let us pray Almighty God that in all humbleness of spirit we may look always to Him for guidance; that we may be kept constant in the spirit and purpose of service; that by His grace our minds may be directed and our hands strengthened; and that in His good time liberty and security and peace and the comradeship of a common justice may be vouchsafed all the nations of the earth.

Wherefore, I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America, do hereby designate Thursday, the twenty-ninth day of November next as a day of thanksgiving and prayer, and invite the people throughout the land to cease upon that day from their ordinary occupations and in their several homes and places of worship to render thanks to God, the great ruler of nations.
In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done in the District of Columbia this 7th day of November in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and seventeen and of the independence of the United States of America the one hundred and forty-second.

WOODROW WILSON

 The news, overall, was pretty grim:

The concern of what was going on with Russia, as can be seen, was mounting.

So what was Thanksgiving like in 1917 for average Americans?  This item from A Hundred Years Ago gives us a glimpse/  This ran on A Hundred Years Ago prior to the 2017 Thanksgiving.  I'm linking it in now, as the 1917 Thanksgiving was on this day, rather than the slightly earlier day in November we now celebrate it on.  An interesting look at earlier Thanksgivings:

Grandma’s 1914 Thanksgiving

Interesting that goose was the meat of choice.

1919  A four week coal strike causes as serious coal shortage in Cokeville, Wyoming. Attribution, Wyoming Historical Society.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1931  An Oregon Trail marker was dedicated at Torrington. The decade of the 1930s saw an increased interest in Wyoming in marking the state's early history which was coincident with the pioneer generation passing away.

1942   Coffee
 

Coffee rationing began in on this day in 1942.

Smiling soldier.  I think he's drinking coffee.  I may have had to volunteer for service (which I likely would have done anyway) just in order to get a cup of coffee.

I would not have liked that.  Coffee roasters were already restricted to 75% of their war time prior average.  This resulted not due to fewer beans being produced during the war.  Not hardly. Rather, it resulted from the fact that this import crop is shipped to the continental United States

I think that's something that we tend not to ponder much. Coffee is a huge American drink, just like tea is a huge British drink, but in neither case do these consuming nations produce the elemental crop locally.  Given that, it's really amazing that either drink has such a hold in the consuming nation.  Indeed, by and large, with some slight exception, its not even grown in the Norther Hemisphere.  Kona coffee, grown in Hawaii, is the only coffee actually grown in the United States, in so far as I'm aware.

Just consider it for a moment.  The bean that is roasted to produce the crop is grown thousands of miles from the continental United States, roasted (often) in the US, and then packaged for sale here.  It's pretty amazing that there's more than a couple of varieties of it, frankly, or that its even affordable.

The Coffee Bearer, by John Frederick Lewis, Orientalist painter.  The same figure was a figure in his painting The Armenian Lady, whose servant she is portrayed as being.

As an aside, the second biggest coffee bean producer in the world (the first is Brazil) is. . . . Vietnam.

One more reason that not having prevailed in the Vietnam War is unfortunate, to say the least.

Well, anyhow, it's not cheap, as any coffee drinker will tell you. But it's not terribly pricey either.

And somehow, it's gone from a few basic brands to a wide variety of specialty brands and brews of every imaginable type and variety.

Coffee varieties have of course always existed.  Interestingly, one of the contenders for oldest coffee brand sold in the United States is Lion Brand which is Kona coffee.  Lion was first sold in the United States, as green coffee beans, in 1864.  Pretty darned early.  Hawaii wasn't an American territory at the time.  Folgers has them beat, however, dating back to 1850.  Hills Brothers dates to 1878.  Maxwell House to 1892.

Arbuckle Coffee, for some reason, was a huge item in the West in the late 1800s, showing how brands come and go.  I've never seen Arbuckles sold today, although it apparently still exists.  The owners of the company, John and Charles Arbuckle, owned a ranch near Cheyenne, although I don't know if that explains the connection with the West, or if perhaps that connection worked the other way around.

Now there's a zillion brands of coffee, many of which I don't recognize, and many which have pretensions towards coffee greatness.  This seems to have come about due to the rise of coffee houses, lead in a major way by Starbucks.  There's a Starbucks on every street corner now, it seems.  I'll be frank that I don't like their coffee much at all.  Too strong, and I like strong coffee.  Anyhow, the many specialty brews that Starbucks makes has spawned many various specialty coffees, or at least different coffees, to the extent to which a person can hardly keep track of it.  Over the weekend I was in City Brew, one of the local coffee houses, as well as Albertsons, where a Starbucks is located, and they both had "Christmas Blends".  How can there be a Christmas blend of coffee?

Chock full o' Nuts, a brand that, as the can indicates, has been around since 1932.  That was the date the company founder changed his nut shops into lunch counters, figuring that they were a better bet during the Great Depression.  I used to drink Chock full o' Nuts when I was in college but stopped as it seemed to have way too much caffeine.

Not that I'm complaining.  I frankly like the vast variety in coffee. And while I'm not inclined to buy something like Starbucks Free Range Easter Island Coffee Licked Gently By Baby Yaks, I will buy peculiar roasts just because the sound interesting. And I tend towards those dark roasts even if I sometimes wish I'd gotten something milder.

And it is interesting to see how coffee houses, following in Starbuck's wake, have popped up everywhere.  Just the other day I bought a sack of Boyer's coffee in the grocery store.  I was aware of Boyers, as they're a Denver brand with a Denver coffee house, but I wasn't aware that you could buy it up here.  Quasi local, as it were.  A great Denver coffee, with some good coffee houses is Dazbog, which plays up the Russian origin of the founders.  One of the independent local coffee houses here sells Dazbog, and its good stuff.  City Brew has outlets here in town, and apparently they're originally from Montana, which they play up with some of their roasts, even though we all know coffee isn't grown in Montana.  I'm told that Blue Ridge Coffee, another local coffee house that sells sacked coffee, is purely local.

And that doesn't cover every coffee house in town.  Quite the evolution when just a decade or so ago you'd have had to go to a conventional cafe and just have ordered the house coffee, whatever that was.  No special roasts or blends.  Just a up of joe.

And I prefer to buy from the locals as well.  Subsidarity in action, I suppose.  Indeed, I'm not told that I can buy Mystic Monk sacked coffee at the Parish Office, and I likely will.

In the grocery store, for the most part, you bought the major brands.  Most of those are still around,  but now you can buy any number of major and minor brands.  I even have a coffee grinder, although that certainly isn't a new invention, although most of the time I buy pre ground coffee.  Indeed, I got the grinder as I bought whole bean coffee by mistake, which I've done from time to time, and I don't want to waste it.

Using coffee grinders, of course, is an odd return to the past. Everything old is new again, sort of.  But the huge variety, of course, is wholly new.

Industrial strength coffee grinder.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Related threads:

Coffee

The Science Behind Coffee and Why it's Actually Good for Your Health

Blog Mirror. A Hundred Years Ago: Keep Coffee Warm with a Thermos

National Coffee Day.

The Joy of Field Rations: Roasting Coffee in the Field

November 24

1835.  Texas authorizes the Texas Rangers.

1874.  Joseph F. Glidden received his patent for barbed wire.

Barbed wire changed the nature of ranching and farming in the West.  More than any other single physical item, barbed wire was responsible for the end of the open range and permanently established ranches with fenced pastures.  It even changed the nature of the cowboy's work and employment, as it caused the rise of multiple smaller ranches with a small number of year around employees who worked cattle more and rode less.

1890  Francis E. Warren resigns as Governor, a position he had held as State Governor for only a little over a month, but which as Territorial Governor he had held for about a year.  None the less, he holds the status of being Wyoming's first Governor.  He resigned in order to take up his duties as a newly elected Senator, which oddly he had assumed a few days prior to his resignation as Governor.

Warren in life.  He was in his late 40s when he became Senator.

1890  Amos W. Barber assumes office as Governor at age 29.  Barber had not been elected Governor, but assumed the acting position when Francis E. Warren resigned to assume the office of Senator.  Barber, who was a surgeon by training, and who come to Wyoming while serving in the Army, would find his term in office plagued by the Johnson County War, during which he was associated with the large stockmen side of the conflict.  He is not regarded as a strong Governor, and probably did not miss the office when he vacated it in 1893.  He returned first to the position of Secretary of State and then to private medical practice, and reentered military service during the Spanish American War.  He later moved to Minnesota, but he was buried in Cheyenne after his death in Minnesota in 1915.

Barber's time in office was marred by the Johnson County War, and his role in it suggests a potential weakness in his character.  On a more positive note, he detected the shenanigans that had occurred with the design of the state's seal, and would not tolerate that, although even there he kept his first corrective efforts a secret after the story became controversial.

Governor Barber's mustache belied his age, he was only 29 years old when he became the State's second governor.

1916   The Cheyennne Leader for November 24, 1916: Villa defated at Chihuahua, Carranza delegates to confer with Carranza
 

A lot going on in this November 24 edition of the Tribune.  But how much was accurate?

Things going badly for Villa?  A near agreement with Carranza?  And of course, the Great War.

1918  November 24, 1918. Cheyenne closes again, Horses being eaten in Russia, Revolution in Germany and Gasoline Alley

The papers were starting to report that the Spanish Flu Pandemic was easing, but in truth November was one of its peak years (and in other parts of the globe it'd rage on for the entire next year).  Reality hit as things were closed back up.

As bad as that was, the horrors of the Russian Civil War were pushing their way onto the front page of the local papers.  And there was legitimate reason to fear that the result of the Great War in Germany might be communist revolution throughout the defeated empires of Europe, a disaster that was being appreciated, if not perhaps in its full potential extent.

Elsewhere, in Chicago, the very first issue of Gasoline Alley made its appearance in the newspaper.

Gasoline Alley was, at first, only a Sunday paper in the black and white Sunday cartoons of the Chicago Tribune.  It soon became a daily.

The cartoon strip was one that appeared regularly, and maybe still does, in the Denver Post and occasionally in the Rocky Mountain News and I used to read it there.  It's a cartoon I like, but as it's a serial, its never one that I'm current on the story line so I was never up on what was going on in it.  The interesting thing about it for years and years, beside the content of the cartoon in general, is that it was a celebration of American garage culture.  In that context, it's pretty significant that it appeared in 1918 when automobiles, if not wholly new, were sill very much a new things.  They'd become common enough to be the subject of a cartoon at this point, which says something.

1921 A serious fire in Gillette, WY destroyed several of the towns' landmark buildings.

1922     The Colorado River Compact was entered into on this day in 1922.   The text of the agreement provided:

Colorado River Compact, 1922

The States of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, having resolved to enter into a compact under the Act of the Congress of the United States of America approved August 19, 1921 (42 Statutes at Large, page 171), and the Acts of the Legislatures of the said States, have through their Governors appointed as their Commissioners:

W.S. Norviel for the State of Arizona,

W.F. McClure for the State of California,

Delph E. Carpenter for the State of Colorado,

J.G. Scrugham for the State of Nevada,

Stephen B. Davis, Jr., for the State of New Mexico,

R.E. Caldwell for the State of Utah,

Frank C. Emerson for the State of Wyoming,

who, after negotiations participated in by Herbert Hoover appointed by The President as the representative of the United States of America, have agreed upon the following articles:

ARTICLE I

The major purposes of this compact are to provide for the equitable division and apportionment of the use of the waters of the Colorado River System; to establish the relative importance of different beneficial uses of water, to promote interstate comity; to remove causes of present and future controversies; and to secure the expeditious agricultural and industrial development of the Colorado River Basin, the storage of its waters, and the protection of life and property from floods. To these ends the Colorado River Basin is divided into two Basins, and an apportionment of the use of part of the water of the Colorado River System is made to each of them with the provision that further equitable apportionments may be made.

ARTICLE II

As used in this compact-

(a) The term “Colorado River System” means that portion of the Colorado River and its tributaries within the United States of America.

(b) the term “Colorado River Basin” means all of the drainage area of the Colorado River System and all other territory within the United States of America to which the waters of the Colorado River System shall be beneficially applied.

(c) The term “States of the Upper Division” means the States of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

(d) The term “States of the Lower Division” means the States of Arizona, California, and Nevada.

(e) The term “Lee Ferry” means a point in the main stream of the Colorado River one mile below the mouth of the Paria River.

(f) The term “Upper Basin” means those parts of the States of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming within and from which waters naturally drain into the Colorado River System above Lee Ferry, and also all parts of said States located without the drainage area of the Colorado River System which are now or shall hereafter be beneficially served by waters diverted from the System above Lee Ferry.

(g) The term “Lower Basin” means those parts of the States of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah within and from which waters naturally drain into the Colorado River System below Lee Ferry, and also all parts of said States located without the drainage area of the Colorado River System which are now or shall hereafter be beneficially served by waters diverted from the System below Lee Ferry.

(h) The term “domestic use” shall include the use of water for household, stock, municipal, mining, milling, industrial, and other like purposes, but shall exclude the generation of electrical power.

ARTICLE III

(a) There is hereby apportioned from the Colorado River System in perpetuity to the Upper Basin and to the Lower Basin, respectively, the exclusive beneficial consumptive use of 7,500,000 acre-feet of water per annum, which shall include all water necessary for the supply of any rights which may now exist. 

(b) In addition to the apportionment in paragraph (a), the Lower Basin is hereby given the right to increase its beneficial consumptive use of such waters by one million acre-feet per annum. 

(c) If, as a matter of international comity, the United States of America shall hereafter recognize in the United States of Mexico any right to the use of any waters of the Colorado River System, such waters shall be supplied first from the waters which are surplus over and above the aggregate of the quantities specified in paragraphs (a) and (b); and if such surplus shall prove insufficient for this purpose, then, the burden of such deficiency shall be equally borne by the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin, and whenever necessary the States of the Upper Division shall deliver at Lee Ferry water to supply one-half of the deficiency so recognized in addition to that provided in paragraph (d). 

(d) The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years reckoned in continuing progressive series beginning with the first day of October next succeeding the ratification of this compact. 

(e) The States of the Upper Division shall not withhold water, and the States of the Lower Division shall not require the delivery of water, which cannot reasonably be applied to domestic and agricultural uses. 

(f) Further equitable apportionment of the beneficial uses of the waters of the Colorado River System unapportioned by paragraphs (a), (b), and (c) may be made in the manner provided in paragraph (g) at any time after October first, 1963, if and when either Basin shall have reached its total beneficial consumptive use as set out in paragraphs (a) and (b). 

(g) In the event of a desire for a further apportionment as provided in paragraph (f) any two signatory States, acting through their Governors, may give joint notice of such desire to the Governors of the other signatory States and to The President of the United States of America, and it shall be the duty of the Governors of the signatory States and of The President of the United States of America forthwith to appoint representatives, whose duty it shall be to divide and apportion equitably between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin the beneficial use of the unapportioned water of the Colorado River System as mentioned in paragraph (f), subject to the legislative ratification of the signatory States and the Congress of the United States of America. 

ARTICLE IV 

(a) Inasmuch as the Colorado River has ceased to be navigable for commerce and the reservation of its waters for navigation would seriously limit the development of its Basin, the use of its waters for purposes of navigation shall be subservient to the uses of such waters for domestic, agricultural, and power purposes. If the Congress shall not consent to this paragraph, the other provisions of this compact shall nevertheless remain binding. 

(b) Subject to the provisions of this compact, water of the Colorado River System may be impounded and used for the generation of electrical power, but such impounding and use shall be subservient to the use and consumption of such water for agricultural and domestic purposes and shall not interfere with or prevent use for such dominant purposes. 

(c) The provisions of this article shall not apply to or interfere with the regulation and control by any State within its boundaries of the appropriation, use, and distribution of water. 

ARTICLE V 

The chief official of each signatory State charged with the administration of water rights, together with the Director of the United States Reclamation Service and the Director of the United States Geological Survey shall cooperate, ex-officio: 

(a) To promote the systematic determination and coordination of the facts as to flow, appropriation, consumption, and use of water in the Colorado River Basin, and the interchange of available information in such matters.

(b) To secure the ascertainment and publication of the annual flow of the Colorado River at Lee Ferry. 

(c) To perform such other duties as may be assigned by mutual consent of the signatories from time to time.

ARTICLE VI

Should any claim or controversy arise between any two or more of the signatory States: 

(a) with respect to the waters of the Colorado River System not covered by the terms of this compact; 

(b) over the meaning or performance of any of the terms of this compact; 

(c) as to the allocation of the burdens incident to the performance of any article of this compact or the delivery of waters as herein provided; 

(d) as to the construction or operation of works within the Colorado River Basin to be situated in two or more States, or to be constructed in one State for the benefit of another State; or 

(e) as to the diversion of water in one State for the benefit of another State; the Governors of the States affected, upon the request of one of them, shall forthwith appoint Commissioners with power to consider and adjust such claim or controversy, subject to ratification by the Legislatures of the States so affected. Nothing herein contained shall prevent the adjustment of any such claim or controversy by any present method or by direct future legislative action of the interested States. 

ARTICLE VII 

Nothing in this compact shall be construed as affecting the obligations of the United States of America to Indian tribes. 

ARTICLE VIII 

Present perfected rights to the beneficial use of waters of the Colorado River System are unimpaired by this compact. Whenever storage capacity of 5,000,000 acre-feet shall have been provided on the main Colorado River within or for the benefit of the Lower Basin, then claims of such rights, if any, by appropriators or users of water in the Lower Basin against appropriators or users of water in the Upper Basin shall attach to and be satisfied from water that may be stored not in conflict with Article III. All other rights to beneficial use of waters of the Colorado River System shall be satisfied solely from the water apportioned to that Basin in which they are situate. 

ARTICLE IX 

Nothing in this compact shall be construed to limit or prevent any State from instituting or maintaining any action or proceeding, legal or equitable, for the protection of any right under this compact or the enforcement of any of its provisions. 

ARTICLE X 

This compact may be terminated at any time by the unanimous agreement of the signatory States. In the event of such termination all rights established under it shall continue unimpaired. 

ARTICLE XI 

This compact shall become binding and obligatory when it shall have been approved by the Legislatures of each of the signatory States and by the Congress of the United States. Notice of approval by the Legislatures shall be given by the Governor of each signatory State to the Governors of the other signatory States and to the President of the United States, and the President of the United States is requested to give notice to the Governors of the signatory States of approval by the Congress of the United States. 

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the Commissioners have signed this compact in a single original, which shall be deposited in the archives of the Department of State of the United States of America and of which a duly certified copy shall be forwarded to the Governor of each of the signatory States.

DONE at the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico, this twenty-fourth day of November, A.D. One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-two. W. S. NORVIEL W. F. McCLURE DELPH E. CARPENTER J. G. SCRUGHAM STEPHEN G. DAVIS, JR. R. E. CALDWELL FRANK C. EMERSON 

Approved: HERBERT HOOVER

1929  Senator Francis E. Warren died.  At the time of his death, he had been a Senator longer than any other person in U.S. history.  He was also the last Union veteran to serve in the U.S. Senate, a distinction in his case which was amplified by the fact that he was a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, which perhaps explains his strong support of the Army while a Senator (which might also be explained by the fact that he was John J. Pershing's father-in-law).  He was also the first Senator to hire a female secretary.  His service was not without some blemishes, as a close association with the large stockmen side of the Johnson County War had given rise to questions about the extent of his association at that time, questions which nearly cost him his political career but which quickly passed.

1968  Expedition Island in the Green River was designated as a National Historic Landmark. The island is a park in Green River, WY and marks the location where Major John Wesley Powell began his expedition down the Green River and Colorado River in 1871.

1990  In one of Wyoming's most infamous murder cases, 15-year-old James "Jamie" Wiley shot and killed his stepmother Becky, brothers, Jesse (age 13), Willy (age 10), and Tyrone (age 5) and then set the house on fire.

2000   A magnitude 4.6 earthquake occurred about 82 miles from Cody, WY.

2011 Today is Thanksgiving Day for 2011.

November 21

1842  Alfred Packer, Colorado cannibal, born in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. 

1860  Tom Horn born in Scotland County Missouri.

1865  Platte Bridge Station renamed Ft. Caspar in honor of the late Caspar Collins, who had lost his life at the Battle of Platte Bridge Station earlier that year.

1877     Inventor Thomas A. Edison unveiled the phonograph.

1887  The Wyoming Central Railway opened its line between Douglas and Glenrock, thereby extending its rail service to the state line.

1895  The Federal District Court, sitting in Cheyenne, held that the Treaty of 1868 exempted Indians from the State's game laws.  The decision would later be reversed.

1910  August Malchow defeated by Peter Jensen of Omaha, the "Battling Dane", in a fight at the Kirby Opera House in Sheridan.  See September 25 for more on Malchow.

1913  Nathaniel Burt, author, born in Moose.

1919  Chasing Carlisle. November 21, 1919

The Hole In the Wall Country, November 2019.

On this day in 1919, the newspapers were reporting that Bill Carlisle was headed for a location that was the archtype of destination for regional bands. . . some twenty years prior.

The Hole In the Wall.

After all, where would a Wyoming train robber on the lam go, other than to the same place that Butch and Sundance had?

Scene from the Red Wall Country, November 2019.

Well, it was a romantic notion.  Wyoming in 1919 wasn't the Wyoming of 1899, or even 1909, no matter how much the thought of a wild flight to the Hole In The Wall might have been fancied the imagination of a people for whom that region had been an impenetrable criminal fortress only a couple of decades prior.

In 1919, the territory was still wild in many ways.  Indeed, the first decade of the 20th Century saw an ongoing range war in the form of a cattlemen v. sheepmen killings.  As late as the latter part of the first decade of the 20th Century a criminal escapee simply disappeared forever.

But by the same token, by 1919 the criminal sanctuary no longer was one. There was no more Hole In The Wall Gang.  Most of the former members of that group were dead, in prison, or reformed.  Following the Tipton train robbery by The Wild Bunch, the authorities were no longer willing to tolerate the lack of law enforcement that allowed it to continue to exist and were willing to expend the resources necessary to penetrate it.  Prior to that happening, the badmen dispersed. Some would return, and as late as the 00s, but they weren't hitting trains.

Carlisle was.

Buffalo Creek Canyon, December 2019.

Indeed, part of the appeal of the Carlisle story is that he was already an anachronism, in his own time.  In 1919, the year after the Great War had ended, a war which had featured aircraft and submarines and mass violence on a mass scale, Carlisle was out on his own, in the vast countryside, raiding trains, badly.

People were sort of rooting for him.

Even as they knew, he'd be caught.

1940  Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn were married in Cheyenne.  The wedding took place at the Union Pacific Depot dining room.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

1943  Goshen Vounty's harvest declared a success due to the efforts of immigrant Mexican laborers and Prisoners of War.  Attribution.  Wyoming Historical Society's history calendar.

1950  A DC3 (C-47) airplane crashed into Mount Moran, killing all 21 persons on board.  The plane was flying in poor weather.

1957  The Department of Defense announced that F.E. Warren AFB would be the nation's first ICBM base.

1975  Dick Cheney assumes the position of White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford.