April 8

1832  John "Portugee" Phillips (Manual Felipe Cardoso) born in the Azores.

1889  William F. Cody donated three elk to the proposed National Zoological Park.  Attribution: Wyoming State Historical Society.

1890  An election for the county seat of Natrona County pitted Casper against Bessemer.  Bessemer received more votes, but had only 24 residents, so the commissioners ruled the vote fraudulent and chose Casper as the county seat.  Bessemer now no longer exists.

1890  The Episcopal Church in Douglas bought the Congregational church.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

 
1892 On the afternoon of this day, Stock Detective and Invader informed the invasion party at the Tisdalde Ranch that "rustlers" were located at the the KC Ranch, and that the party included Nate Champion, a well known and somewhat controversial small stockman.  Stockmen Irvine and Wolcott urged an immediate march on the location, which perhaps was not surprising as Champion was a witness against stockmen enforcer Joe Elliot.  Canton, Ford, Campbell and Hesse, however urged the party to march on to Buffalo, which was regarded as the headquarters of the opposition (and which demonstrates how bold the stockmen's plan really was).  After drinking and arguing, a vote was taken and the party elected to march on the KC.  The Johnson County Invaders reached the KC Ranch in Johnson County, Wyoming, at midnight.. Since disembarking in Casper on April 6, they had ridden east and then north, cutting telegraph lines in the process.

In  modern highway miles, the trip is only about 70 miles.  Granted, in the context of the era that would be fairly long distance to cover by horse, so perhaps the amount of time that the invading party took to cover this distance is not too surprising.  A typical cavalry unit at the time covered about 30 miles in a day, although they could cover 60 or more, while severely stressing their mounts, if necessary.  Here, as the invading party was entering clearly hostile terrain, depleting their mounts unnecessary would have been unwise.

Having said that, the amount of time that this advance took was significant in that it showed the extraordinarily ill advised nature of the expedition.  It the party nearly two days to reach their first target and they had yet to deeply penetrate into Johnson County.  The presence of the party was already known, and counter insurgents, if you will, were already at work preventing the telegraph lines that the invaders had taken down from being repaired.  While their location had not yet been discovered, a better military mind would have regarded them as already in a poor tactical posture.  Worse yet for their endeavor, new articles had been published in Cheyenne, Denver and New York to the effect that an action was afoot.  Cheyenne's newspaper even correctly noted that their specially chartered train had gone through Douglas and Casper, and then discharged its passengers for a trip to Johnson County.

1892  Remains of soldiers buried at Ft. Steele relocated to Fort McPherson National Cemetery.

1899  Edward D. Crippa, Wyoming's Senator for the balance of Lester Hunt's term in office for 1954, born in Rock Springs.  Crippa did not run for reelection.

1903  President Theodore Roosevelt commences his 1903 visit of Wyoming, starting with sixteen days in Yellowstone National Park.  His total time in Wyoming for the trip would be nineteen days.  Much of that time was spent on horseback.

1913 The US Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, requiring direct election of senators. Almost an historical footnote for the most part today, this really effected a radical restructuring of the American Constitutional system which has gone remarkably un-commented upon since 1913. The original Constitutional system contemplated the seat of Senatorial power really being in State legislatures, not in a direct election, so to a certain extent the change, which was meant to convey power to the citizenry, really only did so in the context of national citizenship while as the same time power was effectively conveyed from the states to the national government.

1916:   The Punitive Expedition, Railroads, and the Presidential Election of 1916: The Casper Daily Press of April 8, 1916
 

Lots of big news in this evening edition.

Theodore Roosevelt announced that he was throwing his hat in the ring, rather late, for the 1916 Presidential election.  Sort of.  He would not really end up being a candidate, and in fact, he was wearing down physically at this time, having never recovered from earlier serious health bouts and injuries.

Locally, the Northwestern Railroad story was indeed big news.  And apparently Frederick Funston was talking about railroads in connection with the expedition in Mexico.

1917  The Sunday State Leader for April 8, 1917: Join the Guard, but not the Navy?
 

The shape of a national Army was beginning to take place in the first days of the wary.  The US would conscript, although there was opposition to it, and the Army was going to be huge.

Americans were joining the National Guard, lining up, as they had in prior wars, to go with their state units rather than the Federal Army.  With conscription that would soon change, but here we see the evolution of the Army.  Joining state units had long been the wartime norm.  It still was, but that was going to change in short order, although conscription had been a feature of the Civil War as well.

Men (and of course now women as well) weren't joining the Navy in the same numbers.  But, as it'd turn out, the role of the U.S. Navy would not be as vast as some had thought.

And Ft. D. A. Russell was going to be busy. 

 

1918.  Lex Anteinternet: Big Horn Hot Springs, Thermopolis, Wyoming. April8, 1918

This photographs was taken a century ago, today.

If it looks familiar, perhaps that's because we use it as the flagship photograph for our Railhead blog, dedicated to railroad themes.

1922  United States Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals Justice James E. Barrett born in Lusk.  He was appointed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1971.

1935 The Works Progress Administration was approved by Congress.

1943 President Franklin D. Roosevelt freezes wages and prices, prohibits workers from changing jobs unless the war effort would be aided thereby, and bars rate increases by common carriers and public utilities.

From last year:

1963  The Wyoming League of Women Voters held its seventh convention.

Today is Easter for 2012.

The date Easter falls on shifts significantly from year to year, and does not occur on a specific date of the calendar every year.  The United States Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command provides the following discussion regarding the date:

Easter is an annual festival observed throughout the Christian world. The date for Easter shifts every year within the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar is the standard international calendar for civil use. In addition, it regulates the ceremonial cycle of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. The current Gregorian ecclesiastical rules that determine the date of Easter trace back to 325 CE at the First Council of Nicaea convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine. At that time the Roman world used the Julian Calendar (put in place by Julius Caesar).
The Council decided to keep Easter on a Sunday, the same Sunday throughout the world. To fix incontrovertibly the date for Easter, and to make it determinable indefinitely in advance, the Council constructed special tables to compute the date. These tables were revised in the following few centuries resulting eventually in the tables constructed by the 6th century Abbot of Scythia, Dionysis Exiguus. Nonetheless, different means of calculations continued in use throughout the Christian world.
In 1582 Gregory XIII (Pope of the Roman Catholic Church) completed a reconstruction of the Julian calendar and produced new Easter tables. One major difference between the Julian and Gregorian Calendar is the "leap year rule". See our FAQ on Calendars for a description of the difference. Universal adoption of this Gregorian calendar occurred slowly. By the 1700's, though, most of western Europe had adopted the Gregorian Calendar. The Eastern Christian churches still determine the Easter dates using the older Julian Calendar method.
The usual statement, that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs next after the vernal equinox, is not a precise statement of the actual ecclesiastical rules. The full moon involved is not the astronomical Full Moon but an ecclesiastical moon (determined from tables) that keeps, more or less, in step with the astronomical Moon.
The ecclesiastical rules are:

• Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox;
• this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and
• the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21.

resulting in that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25. The Gregorian dates for the ecclesiastical full moon come from the Gregorian tables. Therefore, the civil date of Easter depends upon which tables - Gregorian or pre-Gregorian - are used. The western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) Christian churches use the Gregorian tables; many eastern (Orthodox) Christian churches use the older tables based on the Julian Calendar.
In a congress held in 1923, the eastern churches adopted a modified Gregorian Calendar and decided to set the date of Easter according to the astronomical Full Moon for the meridian of Jerusalem. However, a variety of practices remain among the eastern churches.
There are three major differences between the ecclesiastical system and the astronomical system.

• The times of the ecclesiastical full moons are not necessarily identical to the times of astronomical Full Moons. The ecclesiastical tables did not account for the full complexity of the lunar motion.
• The vernal equinox has a precise astronomical definition determined by the actual apparent motion of the Sun as seen from the Earth. It is the precise time at which the apparent ecliptic longitude of the Sun is zero. (Yes, the Sun's ecliptic longitude, not its declination, is used for the astronomical definition.) This precise time shifts within the civil calendar very slightly from year to year. In the ecclesiastical system the vernal equinox does not shift; it is fixed at March 21 regardless of the actual motion of the Sun.
• The date of Easter is a specific calendar date. Easter starts when that date starts for your local time zone. The vernal equinox occurs at a specific date and time all over the Earth at once.

Inevitably, then, the date of Easter occasionally differs from a date that depends on the astronomical Full Moon and vernal equinox. In some cases this difference may occur in some parts of the world and not in others because two dates separated by the International Date Line are always simultaneously in progress on the Earth.
For example, take the year 1962. In 1962, the astronomical Full Moon occurred on March 21, UT=7h 55m - about six hours after astronomical equinox. The ecclesiastical full moon (taken from the tables), however, occurred on March 20, before the fixed ecclesiastical equinox at March 21. In the astronomical case, the Full Moon followed its equinox; in the ecclesiastical case, it preceded its equinox. Following the rules, Easter, therefore, was not until the Sunday that followed the next ecclesiastical full moon (Wednesday, April 18) making Easter Sunday, April 22.
Similarly, in 1954 the first ecclesiastical full moon after March 21 fell on Saturday, April 17. Thus, Easter was Sunday, April 18. The astronomical equinox also occurred on March 21. The next astronomical Full Moon occurred on April 18 at UT=5h. So in some places in the world Easter was on the same Sunday as the astronomical Full Moon.
The following are dates of Easter from 1980 to 2024:

1980  April 6        1995  April 16         2010  April 4

1981  April 19       1996  April 7          2011  April 24

1982  April 11       1997  March 30         2012  April 8

1983  April 3        1998  April 12         2013  March 31

1984  April 22       1999  April 4          2014  April 20

1985  April 7        2000  April 23         2015  April 5

1986  March 30       2001  April 15         2016  March 27

1987  April 19       2002  March 31         2017  April 16

1988  April 3        2003  April 20         2018  April 1

1989  March 26       2004  April 11         2019  April 21

1990  April 15       2005  March 27         2020  April 12

1991  March 31       2006  April 16         2021  April 4

1992  April 19       2007  April 8          2022  April 17

1993  April 11       2008  March 23         2023  April 9

1994  April 3        2009  April 12         2024  March 31

2013  A major blizzard hits most of Wyoming.

Late day in Casper Wyoming, April 8, 2012.

2021  Fast pitch girls high school soft ball started came to Casper for the first time with NCHS playing KWHS.  Kelly Walsh won 6 to 0

March 31

Today is Easter Sunday for 2013.

The April 8 entry on this blog has a discussion of how the date for Easter is determined.

1888  Elwood Mead, the predominate force in Wyoming's water law, took office as State Engineer. 

 Elwood Mead

1917   The Cheyenne State Leader for March 31, 1917: Zimmerman defends his note
 

Well, at least you have to give Zimmerman credit for not denying the plot.

The Wyoming Tribune for March 31, 1917: Colorado Guardsmen entrain for home.

 

The Laramie Boomerang for March 31, 1917: Mexican Situation Causing War Department Much Worry
 

And again, Mexico hit the front pages with concerns on the part of the War Department about Mexican and war.

1918 Daylight Savings Time went into effect throughout the U.S. for the first time.

1918   So its Easter Sunday, March 31, 1918.

 Church of the Ascension in Hudson Wyoming.  I don't live in Hudson, but this Catholic Church in the small town is just about the same size as the original St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church where I would have attended, everything else being equal, in 1918.  Because of the huge boom that occurred in my home town during World War One, that original church was taken down and the current church built during the late teens with the new church being completed in 1920.

Which, if you read this on a timely basis, means that you are reading it on Holy Saturday, 2018.

Let's look back on your Easter Sunday of that year, assuming of course that you are somebody situated like me, not assuming by extension that you are a young man in an Army camp somewhere that's being ravaged by the flu, or in France fighting against the German onslaught.

One thing you'd have to endure is the very first occurance of Daylight Savings Time, on this day in 1918.

So the US endured the ravages of false time for the first time on this day in 1918.

 

Oh, the humanity.

 

A sleepy nation "sprang forward".  And on Easter Sunday, no less.

So let's assume that you are in fact somebody like me living in the region I do.

If that were the case, you'd be living in what was still a small town, but an enormously expanding one due to a tremendous oil boom (something I've experienced at least twice, in fact, in my own life).  You  have an office job, but maybe you have an interest in cattle too, or perhaps farming, somehow, although mixing professions would have been much, much, more difficult in 1918 than in 2018, although it did actually occur.  If you had a military age son, as I do, you'd almost certainly have seen him off at the local train station, or in our case one of the two local train stations, last year.

And you'd be worried.

So how would the day go?

Well then, like now, most people would have attended a Church service on this Easter morning.  There's a really common widespread belief that religious adherence was universal in the first part of the 20th Century and has sadly declined markedly now but  that is in fact mostly a myth on both scores.  And part of that is based upon the region of the country you live in, and it was then as well.  But Easter Sunday, like Christmas, is always a big event and many people who don't attend a service otherwise, do on those days.  Others, like me, go every Sunday and of course adherent Catholics and Orthodox go every Sunday and Holy Day.

Now, one feature of the times that has changed is that by and large people tended to marry outside of their faith much less often and people's adherence to a certain faith was notably greater.  Currently, we often tend to hear of "Protestants and Catholics", but at the time not only would you have heard that, but people were much more likely to be distinctly aware of the difference between the various Protestant faiths.  And this often tended to follow a strongly economic and demographic base as well.  People of Scottish background, for example, tended to be Presbyterians.  The richest church at the time was the Episcopal Church and if people moved within Protestant denominations it tended to be in that direction.  I know to people here in town, for example, who made a move in that direction in their pre World War Two marriages, although one of those individuals, who married prior to World War One, went from the Catholic Church to the Episcopal Church, which was quite unusual.  In the other the individual went from the Presbyterian Church to the Episcopal Church, which was not unusual.  In both of the instances I'm aware of the men adopted the faiths of their brides to be in order to marry them.

People of "mixed marriages", i.e., where the couple were of different faiths, did of course exist so this can be taken much too far.  Even then it wasn't terribly uncommon for Catholics to be married to Protestants, although it was much less common than it is now, with the couple attending the Catholic Church.  Marriages involving Christians and Jews were much less common but also did occur, with at least the anecdotal evidence being that this also tended to be something in which the Jewish person married (it seems) a Catholic and they attended the Catholic Church.  I'm sure that this also occurred between Protestants and Jews but it's harder to find immediate examples.  In the area we're talking about, however, the Jewish demographic was so small that it would have been practically unnoticeable, although it was sufficiently large in Cheyenne such that a synagogue had gone in there in 1915 and it was about to be absorbed, in 1919, by a new Orthodox Jewish community.  I don't know if Jewish people even had a place that they could attend services of their own in this era, here in this town.  I doubt it. But I don't doubt that there were Jewish residents of the town by 1918.

What was hugely uncommon at the time were "mixed marriages" in terms of two different "races".  As I've noted here before, however, the concept of "race" is a purely human construct and what this means is not the same in any one era.  Because of the oil boom in Casper, Casper was starting to have a black and Hispanic community, and both of those groups have "race" status in the United States today, and then did then as well.  Mix marriages between blacks and whites, while not illegal in Wyoming as they were in some areas of the country, would have been completely socially unacceptable at that time.

Marriages between Hispanics and "whites" were certainly uncommon at that time, but that barrier was never as stout.  For one thing Hispanics were co-religious with various other groups that had "race" status earlier and that caused the boundaries to break down pretty quickly in some regions.  The Irish, Italians, Slavs and Greeks all had "race" status at the start of the 20th Century but by even World War One that had basically disappeared in the case of the Irish and it was disappearing for the other groups as well.  It had not, and still has not, for Hispanics but the "no mixed marriages" social taboo was not as strong.  It was oddly not as strong in regards to men marrying Indian women either.

All of which is only introductory to noting that on this Easter Sunday, March 31, 1918, you'd likely have gone to church with your family in the morning, assuming all of your family was in town, which if you had a young male in your household, wouldn't have been true.

Before you did that, however, you likely would have picked up a newspaper from your front step.

Now, I've been running newspapers here really regularly for a couple of years and that may have created a bit of a mis-impression.  Quite frequently, when I run newspapers, I run the Cheyenne paper or the Laramie paper.  I don't run the Casper paper nearly as often although I do occasionally.  I hardly ever run a paper like the Douglas paper, and Douglas is just fifty miles from Casper and much closer to Casper than Cheyenne.

Why do I do that?

Well, because there was a huge difference in Wyoming newspapers at the time.

Cheyenne and Laramie had excellent newspapers.  I think the Laramie Boomerang, which still exists, was a better paper then than it is now, which is not to say it's bad now.  But a feature of those papers is that they were all on the Union Pacific rail line and they were Associated Press papers.

Casper's newspapers had never been really bad, but they were much more isolated going into the early teens.  They only became contenders, sort of, in terms of quality in 1917 when the big oil boom caused buyouts in the local newspaper market and the quality really started to improve.  Immediate global news became more common in the papers.  Unfortunately, at the same time, a sort of massive economic myopic boosterism also set in and on some days, many days, there was nothing but oil news in them.

Some other local papers, like Sheridan's, were pretty good, but others were strictly local news.  So if you got the Douglas paper in Douglas, it was just all local happenings. Hardly any global news at all.

And that really matters.

There was no other source of news, other than letters, in 1918.

In the entire United States there were just a handful of commercial radio stations. In fact, those stations were;  KQW in San Jose California, WGY in Schenectady New York, KGFX in Pierre South Dakota, and KDKA in Pittsburgh, absent some university experimental stations and a couple that did Morse Code transmissions only.  Early radio, moreover, until the 1920s, was practically a hobby type of deal and a person depending upon radio, where there was radio, for the news would have been a rather optimistic person.

So, no radio, not television, no Internet.  The newspaper was it.

So if you relied upon a paper like the early ones in Douglas, you'd know that the State Fair was doing well, how local events were going, and that Miss. Barbara Jean Romperoom visited her aunt Tille for three days before returning to Chicago.

You wouldn't have been aware that the Germans were knocking on the door of Paris.

You'd be doing better if you read the Casper paper, after wading through the Oil!, Oil! Oil! hysteria, but not as well as you would have been if you were reading the Cheyenne paper.

Which maybe you were.

 No really cheerful news on the cover of this Easter addition of the Cheyenne State Leader.

Newspapers being so important at the time, traveled. Indeed they did well into the 1980s.  When I was a kid you could buy the Cheyenne Tribune Eagle, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, every day, from newsstands, in Casper.  Now you sure can't.  Indeed the Rocky Mountain News doesn't even exist, having been bought out by the less impressive Denver Post.

Now, in 1918, they couldn't have trucked the paper up from Denver and Cheyenne every day early in the morning, but they could have put them on the train and I suspect they did, at least with the Cheyenne paper. That is, I suspect that sometime that day, or the next day, a reader in Casper was able to pick up the Cheyenne papers.  I didn't know that for sure, but that was the general practice of the day.  It's no accident that the really major newspapers in Wyoming were all on the Union Pacific.  So I'd guess that perhaps the Cheyenne papers, if they didn't come overnight (and they may have) arrived late that day or the next and were available at newsstands, which did exist at the time.  Indeed, one such stand existed in the "lobby" of my office building, which had gone up in 1917, at a stand that also sold cigars. Don't they all?

  The office.  It had a newsstand and cigar shop in the small lobby originally.  Another cigar shop that sold papers for many years was just on the corner.

So my guess is that if you lived on a rail line, you were probably able to pick up the Cheyenne papers, and maybe the Denver papers, if perhaps on a day late basis.

So, let's get back to the day.

Chances are that you picked up the daily paper (there were two different ones, maybe you picked up both) from your front step about 5:00 a.m., assuming the local paper published on Sunday, which not all of them did.   You likely read it as you waited to go to Church.  If you are Catholic or Orthodox, you didn't eat anything as you couldn't break the Sunday morning fast.  Indeed, if you were Orthodox, and there were some Greek Orthodox in this region at the time, you were in an interesting situation as your faith had no church and, at that time, no pastor.  As a rule, you went to the Catholic Church instead, although perhaps a traveling Priest would come up next weekend for Orthodox Easter, which was a week behind that year.  If so, he'd use the Catholic Church for his Easter service.

Of course if you were Catholic or Orthodox, and you had a resident pastor, you could have gone the night prior to the Easter Vigil and you may have well done so. Given as that's the preference for my family, I'll assume that would have also been the case in 1918.  If that was the case, I'd be firing up the cook stove for coffee.  If you are a President, and had no pre service fast, you likely would have done that anyhow.

So, I'd fire up the cook stove and boil coffee, probably before anyone was up, put out the dog, and wait for other people to get up. I know that I'd have to wake my wife up, as she has a long standing tradition of Easter morning minor gifts that have replaced hidden eggs as the kids have grown older.  This year, that is 1918, it'd be sad and worrisome of course, as it'd be unlikely that our son would be here.

If I felt energetic, maybe I'd start breakfast.  I don't see us going out for breakfast in 1918, although that was just as much of an option in most places as it is in 2018. Frankly, I've never liked eating out after Church on Sunday mornings as I feel that it sort of occupies a lot of time involving sitting around eating a lot more then I normally would.  I'd have likely felt that way then.  My wife and my late mother, I'd note, feel very much differently so who knows.

So, at some point, I'd have read the local news.  Me being who I am, if the Cheyenne papers came in by train in the morning, at some point in the morning I'd have likely fired up the Model T, which would likely have acquired, and driven downtown to the station to buy one.

 A 1910 manufacture Ford Model T in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Model Ts had been out for fifteen years by this time and were becoming quite common.

And so, as a newspaper reading person, what would we have learned and have known that Easter of 1918?

Well, what we would have known is that the Allies were in serious trouble.  We'd have been constantly reading this pat week of a massive German offensive that was throwing the British, against whom it seemed primarily aimed, back.   We'd have also know that the Germans had resorted to the shocking measure of shelling Parish with some new huge long range artillery.  Every recent issue of the newspapers would have asserted that the Germans were slowing down and would soon be thrown back, but it sure hadn't happened yet.

We would have also seen it claimed (and not terribly accurately, we'll note) that the Americans were taking a role in the fighting, although we would also have seen that just a couple of days ago Pershing volunteered to deploy US troops to the fighting, which wouldn't have made a lot of sense if they were actually fighting already.

And that might have caused us a lot of concern if we had a relative in the Army, let alone if we had a son in the Army.

And if we were in that position, we might know more about the status of the Army in March 1918 than the average paper reader who was reading about our "Sammies", as the press oddly called them.

If you were in that position, your son (or other relatives) would have ended up in the Army one of three ways.  They could have been 1) drafted; or 2) joined the Army prior to the draft taking over everything; or 3) they could have been in the National Guard.

Indeed, they could have been in the National Guard even if they hadn't been until after war was declared.

That's actually an oddity that can still occur, and it was quite common in 1917.  For that matter, while a little different, quite a few men joined the National Guard in 1940 after it had been mobilized for the emergency.  There were strong incentives to do so as it allowed you to serve with people you knew, where you were from.  And in 1917, when the Guard was called back up, after having been demobilized from the Punitive Expedition's border service, the tradition that carried over from the Civil War of mustering state units was still sufficient strong that the states were raising Guard units as state units that were larger than their peacetime establishment.  Indeed, Wyoming not only called back up the infantrymen who had recently been on the Mexican border, but added new infantrymen to them, and planned on trying to raise an entire regiment of cavalry.  It didn't get that far with the cavalry, however.

Men who had been drafted after war was declared and also men who had volunteered were still in training all over the United States. But many prewar regulars and some National Guardsmen were already in France, undergoing training there.  Those infantrymen had gone to Camp Greene, North Carolina as the 3d Infantry Regiment, Wyoming National Guard.  At Camp Greene, however, they were soon converted into part of the 148th Field Artillery, as artillery, and the 116th Ammunition Train of the 41st Division.  The 41st had been established just five days before the declaration of war and it as an all National Guard division.  The 148th Field Artillery was an artillery unit made up of National Guardsmen from the Rocky Mountain region, only some of whom had been artillerymen before the war.  Conversion of the Wyoming infantrymen into artillerymen spoke highly of them, as artillery was a considerably more complicated role than infantry.  Conversion of the remainder into the 116th Ammunition Train spoke to their experience with horses and freighting, both of which were a necessary element of that role.

The 41st had already gone to France and it had been one of the five U.S. Divisions sent over by this time.  However, it met with bad luck when the SS Tuscania was sunk on February 5, as the men on it were of the 41st.  We earlier dealt with that disaster here:

SS Tuscania Sunk, February 5, 1918.

SS Tuscania

The first US troops ship to be sunk during World War One, the SS Tuscania, went down due to German torpedos launched by the UB-77.  210 lives were lost.

It was only briefly dealt with in the local papers, and no doubt not much was known at the time, but some of the passengers on the Tuscania were Wyoming Guardsmen.  I don't know if any of them went down with her.  By March 31, anyone with relatives who died when the ship sank knew it.  Wyoming Guardsmen definitely witnessed the sinking from a nearby vantage.

Gen. Pershing only had five divisions of men in France, all trained, but he needed a source of immediate replacements.  The 41st Division became that source.  Units of unique value, like artillery, were taken out of it wholesale.  The 148th was equipped there with French 155mm guns, large artillery pieces, and also equipped with French artillery tractors.  They thereby became highly mobile, highly modern, heavy field artillery and were soon to be split out of the 41st in that role, if they hadn't been already.  The 116th Ammunition Train, however, went to Tours with the rest of the 41st and waited there to be pieced out as replacements, a sad end to the division.

French 155 GPF gun. This is the same type of artillery piece used by the Wyoming National Guard during World War One. They had not yet fired their first shot in anger.  A version of this gun would serve alongside a more modern 155 all the way through 1945.

You'd be unlikely to know much about that, however, unless you had letters home that might raise the question.  And they might.  If your son or loved one was an artilleryman, you might have had a hint about the fate of the Tuscania and that the unit was training with French artillery pieces.  If your son was in the 116th Ammunition train you might have received a disappointing letter from Tours.

You'd be worried either way as the papers were full of reports about Americans going into action, which wasn't happening much yet.

Well all that would be pretty grim to think about for Easter, wouldn't have it been?

Well, sometime mid day we'd likely gather for an Easter Dinner with relatives. Chances are really good that it'd feature ham, but that ham would likely be boiled ham.

You've likely never had boiled ham.  I never have.  But I recall my father speaking about it and he wasn't a huge fan. Boiling drove off the salt that was part of the curative brine and it took quite awhile.  Of course there's be other good foods as well, including likely pie.

My guess is that there's be beer too.  Maybe wine. And perhaps some whiskey.

The day would likely wrap up about 5:00 p.m. or so, and then back home. Back home would probably entail some reading, and some worrying as well.  If you are like me, that would entail worrying about the next days work, but it surely would have entailed worrying about what was going on over in France.

1933 Congress authorized the Civilian Conservation Corps.

1942  Tim McCoy, Western actor and Wyoming, announced his candidacy for the U. S. Senate.  His campaign would not be a successful one and he entered the Army for the second time after losing in the primary.

1961  Detroit Transits Wyoming Terminal reopened as a bus terminal.

2004  Financial considerations caused the Wyoming Territorial Prison Corporation to cease operations.  The old State Prison would be transferred to the State's parks department the following day.

2016   Coal layoffs and Northwest Wyoming
 

Peabody Coal Company, the world's largest coal producer, and Arch Coal have announced layoffs in the Gillette area which amount to a combined 450 jobs lost.  And the losses won't stop there.  With that many jobs lost the local economy in Campbell County will be undoubtedly impacted.  Additionally, a loss of that many jobs clearly indicates big changes in operations at the mines themselves, and the energy infrastructure in Campbell County, which is what the economy of the county is based on, will be hit.  It's unlikely, therefore that the job losses will stop there.

This is a rim news for the area economy.  And for the state.  School funding is principally based on the coal severance tax.  Without ongoing major coal production, the schools are in big trouble.

Moreover, this may reflect such a major shift in the economics of coal that there may never be a return to its former position in the economy, either nationally or locally.  Wyomingites have been quick, in some quarters, to blame regulation and the current Administration for coal's demise.  One of the interviewed miners blamed the event on regulation and expressed the thought that things wold turn around under a new Presidential administration.  Our Superintendent of Public Instruction mentioned budget problems, in a recent op-ed, as being due to "the war on coal".  But people shouldn't fool themselves.  This likely represents a shift so deep in the economics and culture of coal that current events show an existential change much deeper than merely a current White House discontent with it. 

Indeed, even twenty years ago I was told by an energy company executive that "coal is dead".  I was surprised by his view at the time, but he was quite definite in his views.  But he was expressing an energy sector long term view, at that time, that coal wouldn't survive a switch to other forms of power generation.  Ironically natural gas, of which North America has a vast abundance, has really eaten into the coal market and that's not going to change.  Power plants take years to build and years to permit.  Coal fired plants are being built, they're being retired.  This not only won't change overnight, it won't change at all.  The coal industry itself pinned its hopes on the Chinese market, which uses a lot of coal, but China also has a lot of coal.  The Chinese economy is in the doldrums right now, and that will likely change, but when it does the question is whether China will enter an economic period mirroring Japan's long endured slow economy, or change to a more growth oriented but volatile economy like North America's and Europe's.  And a bigger question is whether China, which is under pressure from much of the rest of the world on emissions, will itself move away from coal.  It hasn't so far, but there's no guaranty that it will not.  Coal, to the extent it retains any popularity (and that's little outside of the coal producing states), is popular only in the US and China.  Indeed, in some areas of the US it is now so unpopular that efforts to ship coal by sea to China were opposed in Pacific maritime states, something that had not been worked out at the time the local coal producers went into this slump.

So chances are high that this is a sea change, not a downturn.  And if it is, it's one that has huge implications for the state.  The state didn't deal with them in the last Legislature, or even really discuss dealing with them. By the next one it will have no choice.

Elsewhere:

1879  Governor Lew Wallace asks for the Federal Government to declare martial law in Lincoln County, New Mexico.

1916  Battle of Aqua Caliente.

1924   Monday, March 31, 1924. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (actually III) and the Teapot Dome Affair, Making Working Girls Homeless, and the Start of the Fishing Season.

Democrats were attacking Theodore Roosevelt, Jr's supposed role in Teapot Dome.  This Theodore Roosevelt was serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, that position now effectively being a Roosevelt one, with he being the third Roosevelt to occupy it.

Too many "girls" were occupying boarding houses on West A, B, and 1st Streets, which was causing the Casper Police Chief to counsel against allowing more boarding houses and to close the existing ones.

Without really detailing the article, what the Chief meant was that there were too many working girls in the Sandbar District for effective policing.

Dr. Morad was robbed at gunpoint.

The houses were closed, Casper's other paper noted:

Casper was not a nice town.

The police effort against the working girls in the 20s would fail.  It would take at least into the 1950s to really make a dent in the trade they occupied in the Sandbar, and it was finally shut down when an urban renewal project in the 1970s.

The Herald carried advertisements noting the opening of fishing season.

Wyoming doesn't have a fishing season per se now.  You can fish all year around.  Apparently, at the time, fishing opened on April 1.

A big difference between then and now is the extensive Wyoming Game and Fish hatchery system.  It existed in 1924, but it's been much expanded.

Money for a fish hatchery was first appropriated by the legislature in 1895.  I don't know if one was built at the time, but the oldest continually operating one in the state is the Story Fish Hatchery, which was built in 1909.

1939  Britain and France issue guarantees that they will declare war if Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany.