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 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
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.
