Today In Wyoming's History: August 18

Today In Wyoming's History: August 18: 1813         Battle of the Medina River at which Royalist forces defeat Mexican-American Republican Guetierrez-Magee Expedition south of Sa...

Updated:

2015  Casper's city counsel votes to allow chickens to be kept in the city, by a vote of seven to one.

The New (upcoming) $10.00 Bill and Esther Hobart Morris. What about Nellie Tayloe Ross

The new $10.00 bill, design yet to be announced, will feature the image of a woman on it for the first time since 1896.  If you've seen this reported, you've probably seen it stated that this will be the first time a woman has been featured on U.S. paper money, or even "U.S. currency", but that's wholly incorrect.  Martha Washington was on the $1.00 silver certificate briefly in the early 1890s, and allegorical women have been on bank notes of various kinds as well, perhaps even after that.  Susan B. Anthony was on the unpopular $1.00 coin from 1979 to 1981, and Sacajawea  has been in the $1.00 coin since 2000, so putting a woman on the $10.00 bill is not quite as novel as some apparently believe.

At any rate, there's a move afoot to have Esther Hobart Morris appear on the $10.00 bill.  Hobart, of course, appears here on several different entries:

February 17

1870  Esther Hobart Morris officially appointed Justice of the Peace. As noted, she was approved for this position several days prior.

 Ester Hobart Morris statute on the Wyoming State Capitol Grounds.

Putting Mrs. Morris on the $10.00 bill would certainly given a serious sober look to our $10.00 bill, given her stern visage, but it's not going to happen.  Not that her 1870 territorial appointment as the first female Justice of the Peace in the United States wasn't a significant event, it was, but her eight difficult months in that role (she wasn't universally accepted by any means) just don't measure up enough in terms of a national presence to merit that sort of memorial, and it won't be happening.  Indeed, it's a bit odd that Wyoming would back this when we consider that the appointment was a very local one, and a Territorial one, as opposed to one that we did as a state.  For a Territorial figure to merit a presence on a $10.00 bill, she'd have to have real national renown.

Which Sacajawea does.  

I've always been a fan of the Sacagawea coin and, heck, maybe I'm just a fan of Sacajawea. But the Shoshone teenager was as tough as nails and representative, I think, of a lot of the things Wyomingites admire. She basically overcame kidnapping, involuntary servitude and the natural environment to rise to a a known figure in our nation.  And she undoubtedly has living relatives in the state to this day. She'd be my choice.

But the best choice would be Nellie Tayloe Ross.

For one thing, Ross has a real chance.  Morris doesn't have a ghost of a chance.

But moreover, Ross is the more significant figure, and we should be proud of her.

Morris is a real figure, and an admirable one, but as noted she was a Territorial figure.  She became Justice of the Peace in Sweetwater County when she applied for it, a Territorial District Court judge approved her application, and it was further approved by the Sweetwater County Commission by the vote of 2 to 1.  All good stuff, to be sure.

But Ross became Governor in 1925 when we elected her to that position. That is, the voters of the state did so.  That's a bigger deal.

And after her term in office was over (she was not re-elected, but then she supported Prohibition and she didn't campaign in either of her Gubernatorial races, and shoot Morris was only JP for eight months at that), she became Director of the United States Mint from 1933 to 1953.  Twenty years.  In other worlds she occupied that position, which is of course associated with currency, throughout the entire Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations.  Her being on the $10.00 bill would not only honor the state, but makes sense.

So, while a shout out to Morris is no doubt merited, how about backing somebody who makes more sense?  Nellie Tayloe Ross

Clearing scandal, eh?

In the news today was that DNA confirms that President Warren G. Harding had an illegitimate child by Nan Britton, with whom he apparently had a long running affair. The rumor had long existed, in no small part because Ms. Britton, after his death (and likely in need of income) wrote a book about their affair, which various Harding adherents discredited.  Now it seems to be proven that she was telling the truth.

Harding has long been at best forgotten and at worst not viewed as a particularly good President.  Knowledge of at least one other infidelity seems established, so how much this changes our view of Harding I don't know.  In Wyoming, Harding might be best remembered for the Teapot Dome Scandal.

Harding was actually a really popular President while he was President, but his reputation sank thereafter, with Teapot Dome playing a prominent part in that.  News of his infidelity, of course, came after his death, and was ultimately widely contested.  Up until the news of the DNA test results, it still was contested.

Anyhow, it's not so much this news that causes me to post this item about Harding, as this odd statement that appeared in one of the news reports on this item:

And, secondly, he hopes the discovery will begin to clear the air around Harding’s scandalized reputation in history.

“This book really ruined Warren Harding’s reputation, and as a result the important lessons of his presidency have been lost,” Robenalt said, who points out that Harding argued for non-interventionist policies before World War I that continue to be relevant following the lessons of the war in Iraq.

Hmmm. . . .

It's true that Harding had some things to his credit, but it's hard to see how confirmation of his marital infidelity in this instance will serve to "clear the air around" his "scandalized reputation in history".

This is not to say that this wasn't worth investigating for the family, or worth reporting in the news.  Just the concept of this repairing a "scandalized reputation" is odd.

Painted Bricks: What is it? Granger Wyoming

Painted Bricks: What is it? Granger Wyoming: This is a fairly substantial structure in the small town of Granger, Wyoming. Granger is an old locality for Wyoming.  It was a P...

Railhead: Retired steam engine, Rawlins Wyoming

Railhead: Retired steam engine, Rawlins Wyoming

Dressed for Battle

Dressed for Battle

C-SPAN Cities Tour - Casper: John Davis "Wyoming Range War"

After Appomattox. The Civil War's impact on Wyoming.

 

 Grand Army of the Republic memorial, Casper Wyoming.

We recently posted this item on the Civil War in Wyoming:

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming in the Civil War: I posted this item on our other blog, Lex Anteinternet, very recently for a variety of reasons: Lex Anteinternet: The Stars and Bars as ...

That's not where Wyoming's story with the Civil War ends, however.  When the guns fell silent at Appomattox (which of course didn't really end the war everywhere), changes kept on coming.  And indeed it was inevitable that they would, given the operation of Holscher's Fourth Law of History, War Changes Everything.  So here we'll look at that part of the history of our state, which again is a very significant one we've heretofore overlooked.

To a degree, with our earlier thread on the Civil War in Wyoming, we've already started to look at that to a degree.  We concluded our examination there with noting three (actually two) battles that occurred in Wyoming in the summer of 1865, just after the war ended with the last battle of that war, ironically in the west, at Palmito Ranch in May 1865.  Just two months later cavalrymen from Ohio, Kansas, and infantrymen from southern states serving as paroled Confederates, fought in central Wyoming at Platte Bridge Station. Soon thereafter Patrick Connor's troops fought in northern Wyoming at the Battle of Tongue River.  Starting shortly after that, however, these state troops were sent home and the Regular Army started coming back in.

 Aggressive campaigner in the West during the Civil War, Patrick E. Connor.

They didn't come back in to peace, however.  What began, in some ways, as a Cheyenne uprising in 1864 in reaction to Col. Chivington's attack on peaceful Black Kettle in Colorado spread to a Sioux campaign in 1865 under the leadership of Red Cloud.  But why was Red Cloud fighting the Army in 1865?  European American expansion into the Powder River Basis was the reason why.

And this came about in part as part of the increased immigration west that started with the Civil War.  In popular memory, when the Civil War broke out men left their homes to join the fight for four years.  But that's not really true.  Many men did, of course (often for shorter terms of service, however) but some men, and some families, indeed quite a few, simply picked up and moved west to remove themselves from the strife.  Men and women from all over the country found themselves on immigrant trails leading west, hoping for a new, and more peaceful life, somewhere else.  And, with men again, some just yielded to a seeming American migratory instinct and placed themselves in the west, looking for something, with that something often being gold and silver. Given all of this, just as Indian tribes were becoming increasingly militant, an increase in European Americans in the west was being experienced as well.  This was, in part, a direct result of the war.

It didn't stop with the end of the war, however.  The war had put thousands of people in motion, some through military service, and some as refugees.  Following the war most people just went home, but some had no homes to return to, or didn't wish to, and a minority of servicemen just couldn't.  So following the war war they joined the immigrant trail.  The passage of the Homestead Act in 1862 further in creased this, as people made newly mobile found the inducement of land more than amply balanced against the difficulties of travel, particularly when they'd become accustomed to that, or had their backs forced up against the wall in any event.  This yielding to a migratory impulse would impact Wyoming and the entire country for years, with in Wyoming people moving to, or more often across, the state going on for a very long time.

It's easy to disregard the war in this context, but it shouldn't be.  Contrary to what Americans generally think about their history, Americans did move prior to the Civil War, but not usually very far. Seven miles per generation is the general figure for the pre Civil War advancement of the Frontier. But the war changed that, by force in part, and in part by acclimation.  It can be argued that the United States, as a mobile society, began with the war.

Tombstone of Illinois Civil War veteran, in Casper's Highland Cemetary. Such markers are not uncommon in the cemetery, an indicator of the many men who chose not to return to their homes after the Civil War or who ultimately left them.

All of this increased European American presence in the state (aided by the advancing Union Pacific Railroad, ran right into an increased Indian militancy, as already noted, and the Army found itself confronting a more difficult situation in 1865 than it had in 1860.  Added to this, the war ended up changing over the rank and file, and the officer corps, of what had been a fairly stable career Army.  Many men who would have continued on as career enlisted men in the tiny pre war Army either left it after years of intense combat, or were casualties of the war.  The post war Army therefore had many new men in it, including oddly enough even quite a few who had not served in the Civil War, having barely missed it.  The officer corps, for its part, was now heavily dominated by men who had cut their teeth in the Civil War and had risen up to high ranks, only to be reduced in rank in many instances to fill slots in the post war Army.  Added to their numbers were officers who had not come though West Point but rather who'd been wartime commission holders who were now accepted into Regular Federal service at the insistence of Congress, which required the Army to make room for a certain number of them.

The Army had gone into the Civil War as a very small institution, but one that had quite a bit of Frontier experience and which was very rough and ready.  After half a decade of modern war in the East, the Army that emerged in the 1865 to 1866 time frame quickly evolved from a Frontier force with experience into one that was almost entirely new and somewhat green.  The battles of the immediate post war period sometimes demonstrate this.  The Fetterman Fight in December 1866 epitomized this.  Troops from Ft. Phil Kearney, which was commanded by a pre war lawyer turned wartime officer, Col. Carrington, found themselves badly lead by former Lt. Colonel, now Captain, William J. Fetterman who failed to appreciate that fighting the Sioux was going to be different than fighting Confederates.  This lead, of course, to the destruction of his command in the worst Frontier Army disaster of the immediate post war period, which wouldn't be eclipsed until former General, now Lt. Colonel, George A. Custer lead his troops into a worst disaster in 1876 in Montana.

Monument to the troops of William J. Fetterman's detail.

The Army, practically a new Army, did learn how to engage in its new role, but it wasn't as quick or proficient as it as might generally be believed.  Red Cloud actually managed to win his war in 1868, giving us the only example of a Plains Indian War in which the native combatants emerged with a wartime victory.  A war weary and distracted United States yielded to the Sioux in this singular example in Wyoming, making this Wyoming experience unique, albeit temporary.  Hardly noticed is that the 1868 victory came only a few years before the campaigns of the 1876, which would see a spectacular Sioux battlefield victory but which would result in the ultimate Sioux and Cheyenne defeat.

 Red Cloud

Part of this story, of course, is that Col. Chivington's attack on the Cheyenne in 1864 caused a war with the Cheyenne that was fought in Wyoming and Nebraska.  The Cheyenne were Sioux allies and would fight with the Sioux into the 1870s before they experienced the same results.  In some ways, the Wyoming Indian Wars of the late Civil War period were more dominated by the Cheyenne than the Sioux, while the larger Sioux wold dominate the wars from 1866 on.

The collapse of the Indian effort was a feature of Wyoming's history and Wyoming featured prominently in the campaigns on the Northern Plains.  And of course a result of that collapse was a vast expansion of the reservation system in the West.  That expansion would see the Cheyenne and Sioux, who had entered Wyoming in the first half of the 19th Century taken back out and removed as a demographic in Wyoming.  The Crow, who had ranged into and contested for Wyoming as well would also find themselves outside of the state, although only barely given their reservation in southern Montana (the Cheyenne also have one of their reservations in southern Montana near the Wyoming border).  The Wind River Reservation was established at the request of the Shoshone in 1868 (again, a unique Wyoming fact, given that it was unusual for an Indian tribe to ask for a Reservation).  The Arapaho's, a small tribe allied to the Sioux and  Cheyenne (and who had members of their tribe at Sand Creek at the time of Chivington's attack) came on to the reservation in 1878 as a result of the increasingly desperate straits the collapse of Indian efforts following 1876 entailed.

It would be a stretch, of course, to say that the Indian Wars of the 1866 to 1890 time frame are all the result of Civil War, but not much of a stretch.  Some of this strife would have happened anyhow, but it cannot be denied that the tribes were activated and made militant by the events of the Civil War and that the increase of European American immigration into the West which the war fueled played a major part in making that strife what it was.  Likewise, the Army effort was heavily impacted by the loss of the pre war soldiers who knew Frontier campaigning.

Part of the influx of immigration into Wyoming which hasn't been addressed, and which has to be addressed as a separate topic, is that of post war cattlemen. This was, in fact, a direct result of the Civil War.

Wyoming had seen very little in the way of agriculture prior to the Civil War.  Small agricultural units did pop up around the advancing Union Pacific to serve it, but they weren't much.  Prior to that, farming had been introduced by Mexican immigrant labor around Ft. Laramie, when the "Mexican Hills" were farmed by families that had come up after the Mexican War to work on the new buildings at the fort.  The war changed all of this.

During the Civil War enormous herds of feral cattle had grown up in Texas, as those cattle were simply abandoned by those who owned them as they went away to Confederate service.  After the war, these wild cattle were basically free for the taking, or rather for the taking for those who would expend the effort.  Without a market however, they were of very low value.

 Branding cattle in Texas, approximately in the 1860s.

The East provided that market, and it was a market for beef. Prior to the 1865, the United States was really a pork eating nation, not a beef eating one.  Cattle in Texas were raised in the Mexican market fashion, for their hides.  Meat was only a locally consumed byproduct.  The expansion of rail into the West, however, which had commenced before the war and which continued on during it, brought railhead within long distance trailing of Texas herds, and that meant that they could now be driving, as difficult as that was, to railheads for shipment to the hungry East.

It's already been addressed here, but nearly as soon as it became evident that money could be made driving cattle to railheads in Kansas, it became evident that the cattle industry could expand into the plains regions of the West profitably.  This took off rapidly and Wyoming the cattle industry was reaching far up into Wyoming by the mid 1870s, although with difficulty.  Following the collapse of Indian resistance in the late 1870s, the door was open and it really took off in the 1880s.

The story of the early cattle industry is a complicated one, but one of the prominent but lesser noted aspects of it is the extent to which it reflected Southern livestock raising practice.  In the Antebellum South, and indeed well after it, cattle had been turned out into the woods, which while owned were largely unexploited.  This meant that cattle were effectively grazed in "commons" by men who necessarily had to be mounted.  Following the Southern defeat in the war, the use of the wooded commons became increasingly restricted as the timber lands owners, often of the planter class, actively acted to deprive Southern yeomen of the use of them.  Already having suffered the impacts of defeat, some of these men simply took off and went where cattle were otherwise raised, such as in Texas or ultimately elsewhere in the West, taking their mounted lives and practices with them.  This reflected itself in the practices of the cattle industry, even though it is difficult to find the stories of individual cowboys who reflect this. But, for that matter, the stories of individual Mexican cowboys, or black cowboys, who made up 1/3d of that class, is also difficult to find.

Which brings us to another aspect of this story, the addition of African Americans to the Wyoming demographic.  They did not come in huge numbers, but they did come, and even ended up being incorporated into Wyoming's civic life very quickly.  At least one black juror served in a capitol murder jury early in the 20th Century, a remarkable fact for the United States that time, and Casper elected a black Civil War veteran as its mayor during the 1890s.

Something often omitted, oddly, in the popular recollection of the early cattle industry is that this is an economic story. That is, the cattle industry was and is an industry, not some sort of exotic hobby.  The cattle industry in the West differed markedly from cattle raising efforts east of the Mississippi as those efforts, prior to the Civil War, had been much less market oriented for practical reasons.  Most meat was butchered and consumed locally, as there there was no practical means of preservation other than salting or corning (and hence the widespread consumption of bacon, ham, corned beef, and sausages in that era).

I note this as one of the hugely significant aspect of the Civil War is that it accelerated, partially through political actions, the industrialization of the United States, and that had a big impact on the early history of Wyoming.  Indeed, while very poorly understood, that impact still lives on today, although its ironically contested by the same forces that brought it about.

The Civil War did not cause the Industrial Revolution in the United States. That had been ongoing for quite some time.  However, the Industrial Revolution had not come to all o the United States prior to the war, and that impacted the war and its results.  Industrialization had occurred much more significantly in the North.  The South provided 25% of the nation's exports prior to the war, but nearly 100% of that 25% were agricultural products.  The South, famously, had no arms industry at all when it chose to take on the North, which had a significant one.

This is not to say, as is sometimes implied, that everyone in the North was working in a factory.  That view was somewhat popular in the South at the time, which is one of the things that gave Southerners false comport, feeling as they did that a bunch of pasty faced factory workers would not be able to take on the hardy yeoman of the South.  In fact, most Northerners were from farms as well and many were also Yeoman.  One of the rude shocks of the war that the South experienced was to learn that, as they did for example taking on the Michigan Brigade early in the war where they were stunned to find that Michigan's troops weren't bothered by the rain.

The industrialization of the North, however, is important to this story as industry had widely developed and was supported politically in the North. While a majority of Northerners were yeomen, as in the South, Yeoman in the North had not retained a huge cultural identity as they did in the South.  Southerners were not only mostly yeomen, in outlook they were hostile to industry.  This wasn't the case in the North.  Because the Democratic Party identified with the  South, and the political class in the South was Democratic, and because the Whigs had folded into the Republican Party in the North, this impacted politics.

The GOP of this period, and all the way through World War One, is an interesting mix of views that are sometimes difficult to reconcile. Basically, however, the GOP inherited the pro industry view of northern Whigs, while also having what we'd regard today as strong pro civil rights platform. The party was simultaneously radical and conservative, depending upon which aspect  of its politics you are looking at.  What this meant in practical terms, however, is that the party tended towards strongly supporting government support of business, while also being strongly supportive of individual rights.

The Civil War caused the fortunes of the Democratic Party to fall enormously, and the early history of Wyoming as well as most of the rest of the West was marked by the Republican Party being the dominant political party.  That party favored industry and it favored government support of industry, which directly impacted Wyoming.  The GOP favored retention of the public domain by the Federal government for direct claim by homesteaders and mineral entrants, something that the states had not done so generously. The GOP sponsored railroad through the granting land to them.  The GOP backed land grant universities. The GOP dominated the early political history of Wyoming, and it was both pro civil rights and pro business.  Wyoming, by extension, reflected those values, being remarkably progressive at least as to black residents and through also being a backer of women's rights in the context of the 19th Century. That latter movement, notably, had grown directly out of the the abolition movement.

The acceleration of the fortunes of industry during the war, and the decline of the Democratic party which had backed a more agrarian view of the economy, also meant that the entire country progressed into a more industrial era at a more rapid pace than it otherwise would have.  The region of the United States that remained resistant to that evolution remained the South, and as late as the 1930s the Southern Agrarians would push back against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal with their manifesto I'll Take My Stand. That was well after the era we are discussing, of course, but it is the case that the fortunes of industry advanced remarkably for at least a couple of decades after the Civil War, during that same period of time during which the  Wyoming Territory was created, and Wyoming became a state.  Wyoming itself did not participate in heavy industry, but almost from its onset as a territory, in spite of it being primarily agricultural, it looked towards mineral development very favorably, and that mineral development could only have taken place in the context of a large national industrial economy.

Also in the context of politics, Wyoming's early political history featured many individuals who had been Union soldiers during the Civil War.  Francis E. Warren provides a prominent example, as he not only had been a Civil War era solider, he had been  a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Not too surprisingly, almost all of the Wyoming's early politicians were immigrants to the state, and a fair number of those men had served in the Union's forces during the war.  Confederates were notably absent in this category.

 

Francis E. Warren wearing his Congressional Medal of Honor.

All this goes, in part, to the fact that the settlement of Wyoming and its obtaining of statehood in 1890 is itself a direct byproduct of the war.  Without the cattle industry's expansion in the 1880s, which really started in Texas in the late 1860s, it just wouldn't have happened in the same manner or nearly so quickly.  If pre war trends had continued, its hard to see the same event taking place in 1890, and foreseeing a different future in which statehood came about in the 20th Century is more likely.  Indeed, Wyoming itself wasn't recognized as a territory until 1868, and its doubtful that would have occurred at the same pace, if at all.  The Indian Wars of the 1860s and 1870s probably wouldn't have occurred as well, and it's possible that Indian fortunes would have played out more favorably than they did.

 

Ft. Caspar Cemetery.

Wyoming in the Civil War

I posted this item on our other blog, Lex Anteinternet, very recently for a variety of reasons:

Lex Anteinternet: The Stars and Bars as viewed from outside the Sout...: As everyone is well aware, there's been a controversy over the Confederate battle flag, the Stars and Bars, brought about by the recent ...

In doing this, it occurred to me to link this item over here, as I mentioned Wyoming's role in the Civil War in the post. 

Now, given that I've started this sidebar in this fashion, this will be a bit of an odd one, in that it has commentary inserted in it.  Nonetheless, this is an important story that I've omitted, and should not have.  As this blog isn't updated daily, like it once was, omitting a story like this is a defect that is easy to carry forward, but I really should remedy it, particularly as we're coming up on one of the seminal events of that story, the Battle of Platte Bridge Station.

But, before we do, some added commentary.

In recent years I've seen something around here that I never saw when I was young, which is the flying of the Stars and Bars by some people here locally.  People who do this are, as a rule, people who have moved in, and I think the battle jack of the Confederacy has some relevance to them, that it does not to those of us who are from here.  Indeed, for Wyomingites, the Confederate battle jack can be offensive.  We don't associate it with regional pride the way some people do, but rather with a foreign otherness of which we were not part. This, in no small part, has to do with our regional history, which is not Confederate.

So to that story.

Wyoming didn't exist as political entity until 1868, but the land which became Wyoming certainly did.  Residents of what became the state wouldn't have conceived of it a geopolitical entity during the war, but the region that became the state definitely participated in it. Wyoming was active during the war.

When the Civil War broke out a large part of the Army was located in the American West engaged in guarding the frontier, principally against Native Americans but also against border incursions and threats from the south and potentially from the north. The big exception would have been coast artillery, which was the glamour branch of the Army, concentrated as it was in ports, which typically featured major cities.

 Ft. Laramie in 1858, by which time it had been a U.S. Army post for nine years.  Almost all of the structures seen in this photographs were built by the Army, even though the post was purchased as an existing establishment.  The large building in the center of this photo, Old Bedlam, is the oldest structure in Wyoming.

The Army entered Wyoming for the first time in a series of exploratory expeditions, but for our purposes, it's first significant presence came when it purchased in June of 1849.  Purchasing the long existing fur trading post served the purpose of guarding the Oregon Trail (by whatever name a person might choose to call it).  While we'd consider it today perhaps the easternmost of the classic frontier era Wyoming posts, it was a major post on the trail for those who had struggled across the Nebraska plains, and it served to allow pioneers to restock for the long trail ahead.  Heading out from Ft. Laramie there were basically no more Army installations until pioneers reached what is now southeastern Wyoming.  All posts on the trail were, which were exceedingly few in number, were garrisoned by regulars of the U.S. Army.

Ft. Bridger in 1858, the year the Army first occupied what had been a civilian trading establishment in southwestern Wyoming.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861 the Federal government largely withdrew the Regular Army from the Frontier, although contrary to what is sometimes asserted a few troops remained.  Added to this massive change was the fact that not only did the Army leave, for the most part, the West, but the officer corps of the Army suffered a partial breakdown as officers with Southern sympathies were allowed to depart their Federal service without hindrance, an act that may have been gentlemanly, but which did not serve the interest of the country well.  This left policing the Frontier, or protecting immigrants and other interests, or however a person might conceive of it, to the Western states, where they existed, or to other means where they did not.

Wyoming, of course, was not a state. But to the south Colorado was, and Colorado immediately set out raising state troops who in turn actually did do some fighting, in New Mexico, against Confederate forces.  Nebraska was a territory and raised some troops to contribute to the war effort, and Utah, which had an existing military history of service in the Mexican War, but also of rebellion in the Mormon War, also did.  Wyoming, with virtually no European population to speak of, did not and could not have, and of course it wasn't a political entity. But the long Oregon trail needed protection.

This fell to state and territorial troops from other regions, and these forces dramatically altered the military presence in the state. Whereas the U.S. Army had been content to police the Oregon Trail with very few troops who covered massive distances, the forces that came in from the states with state troops, or territorial troops, during the Civil War did not take this approach at all.  Soon an entire chain of posts were constructed every few miles along the Oregon Trail so that small bodies of men were basically always a half day or perhaps a full days ride from each other.  On much of the Oregon Trail these posts came to be manned by the 11th Ohio and the 11th Kansas Cavalry, troops raised to fight in the Civil War against Confederate forces but sent instead to Frontier West.

Platte Bridge Station.  The location of a private trading post and toll bridge prior to the war, it became one of a collection of closely linked Army "stations" during the Civil War.  The reconstructed fort is on the edge of Casper Wyoming today.

Added to these were posts under the command of the Department of Utah under Gen. Patrick Connor, who commanded a force made up of troops as far away as California but as close as Utah and Idaho. 

Connor was a very active campaigner during the Civil War and constructed a post in the Powder River Basin, along the Bozeman Trail, a very early effort of that type.  He was aggressive, but not always discerning, and at least a couple of his battles, that at Bear River and the one in Wyoming at Tongue River are pretty questionable.  They prefigured the battles of the later Indian Wars, perhaps, so they are significant for that, amongst other reasons.

 

Where Ft. Reno once was.

The Battle of Tongue River, part of the Powder River Expedition, is also an immediate post Civil WAr battle (Bear River, in Idaho, was fought in 1863).  And in this fashion it is also signficant.

 

A flooded Tongue River battleground, as photographed several years ago.

For almost all of the Civil War state forces patrolled long lonely stretches of trails, and telegraph wires, far from the battlegrounds in the bloody east.  The duty was lonely, alien, extremely dangerous, and often done on very meager rations.  Troops feared stepping outside their isolated posts as it could easily mean death, and during the long Wyoming winters this was all the more the case.  Very few significant battles were fought, but quite a few lonely small actions were.  The state troops on the Oregon Trail were supplemented with Galvanized Yankees, Confederates who opted for Federal service rather than stay in prisoner of war camps, as the war went on, and interestingly there seems to have been little strain between the men as they all endured this duty.

Late in the war, for whatever reason, the commanders of some of these state forces started taking their troops to the field. Connor certainly did, launching the Powder River Expedition against the Cheyenne in the summer of 1865.  Prior to that, however, in November 1864, Colorado and New Mexico troops under the command of Colorado's John M. Chivington, who had previously performed admirably at the Battle of Glorietta Pass,  brutally and without cause attacked a Cheyenne band at Sand Creek outside of Denver Colorado.  A true massacre, Black Kettle's band was at peace with the United States and wholly unwarranted. The attack set the Plains aflame as the Cheyenne fled north, and at war, with the result being that what is now Wyoming was everywhere at war.  They were soon joined by Cheyennes who had remained in the north, and the late Army campaigns of 1865 resulted. They were not successful.

Indeed, in July 1865 the Cheyenne would succeed in defeating the 11th Kansas in what was regarded as two battles but which are really just one, the Battles of Platte Bridge Station and Red Buttes.  The battle, which was caused when a small wagon detail commanded by a solder of the Regular Army refused to head warnings given by troopers of the 11th Kansas, was pretty much a complete route, leading to the destruction of the wagon detail and the force sent to relieve it.  Only the native reluctance to storm an Army post, together with the expeditious deployment of a mountain howitzer, kept Platte Bridge Station from being overrun.  Connor's Powder River Expedition, in turn, would fail to determine the contest.  By that time, of course, the Civil War was over, and the duties that Galvanized Yankees, Kansas and Ohio Cavalrymen, and volunteers from California, Utah and Idaho had taken up during the war were turned back over to the Regular Army. 

The Regular Army, in turn, would find the task of dealing with the Frontier after the Civil War more difficult than it had been before.  In many of the immediate post Civil War battles the returned U.S. Army would do no better than state militiamen had.  During the war, the native population had learned that European American troops were not invincible.

That should as a conclusion to this story, that of Wyoming during the Civil War, but to leave off where we started, what we also learn from that is that the Confederate battle jack, which we see occasionally flying here now by folks who are no doubt from somewhere else, doesn't really have a place in our history directly.  The sons of the South who had started off fighting under it, or under one of the numerous other Confederate flags, ended up here in service to Old Glory, no matter how reluctant their service may have been. Other troops who served here during the war had patriotically enlisted to fight the South, or to serve on the Frontier.  And of course to the native combatants no distinction between North and South would have been recognized at all.

A Bicentennial: Waterloo

Okay, it's not Wyoming history.

"Scotland Forever". The Charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo.

Or maybe it sort of is.

On this date, two hundred years ago, a coalition of European nations, lead by the parliamentary democracy of the United Kingdom, defeated the dictatorship of the revived forces of Napoleonic France.  Napoleon, who marched in the name of revolutionary ideals early on, but who ruled as a dictator and then an emperor, gave a reformed system of law to France and Spain, and war and death to all of Europe.  He sold Louisiana to the United States to raise cash for his endeavors, and by doing that gave Wyoming to the United States (although a person has to wonder if Louisiana would have been taken by the country eventually anyhow).  The US would eventually join the the late stages of the Napoleonic Wars, although we fail to see it that way, on France's side and we'd suffer defeat, although we fail to see it that way as well, to the British, who were pretty charitable in the peace.

Some Gave All: World War One Service Memorial, Hanna Wyoming

Linked in given the just posted comment:

Some Gave All: World War One Service Memorial, Hanna Wyoming: This is a memorial in Hanna Wyoming dedicated to all from the region who served in World War One.  Hanna is a very small town today, a...

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Milton Sublette--The Lost Mountain Man.

Milton Sublette--The Lost Mountain Man.

Camp Douglas Prisoner of War Camp

Lex Anteinternet: Visiting the battlefield

Lex Anteinternet: Visiting the battlefield:    "Last Stand Hill", Little Big Horn. You can't understand a battlefield, really, unless you've visited it. You cer...

The Casper Star Tribune decides to put out a book on Casper's history.

The Casper Star Tribune is collection pre 1940s photographs for a book on Casper's history up through 1939 that it's putting out.  I'll be looking forward to the book.

It's interesting that they chose to run it up through 1939.  I'm not sure what the basis of their decision is, but that means they're cutting it off the year before the country mobilized for World War Two.  Perhaps that's the basis of it. 

It's also interesting that this will be the third such book in recent years. The first was A View From Center Street, which cataloged the works of a well known local photographer through his career and the second was a photo book that's part of a nationwide series.  Now the Tribune is taking on the same topic.  Apparently there must be a lot of interest in this topic, which is a good thing.  The Tribune, with statewide readership, stands a pretty good chance of having their book be the widest circulated although I suspect a lot of us locals will have all three.

Blog Mirror: Wyoming Postscripts: Wyoming's Engineer Governor-Frank Emerson

 Wyoming Postscripts:  Wyoming's Engineer Governor-Frank Emerson.

Blog Mirror: Wyoming Fact and Fiction; 150 Years Ago--Texas not Wyoming

150 Years Ago-Texas not Wyoming.

Blog Mirror: Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Guernsey Dam

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Guernsey Dam

Amos W. Barber: An Army Surgeon as Governor | Wyoming Postscripts

Amos W. Barber: An Army Surgeon as Governor | Wyoming Postscripts

April 19, 1865: “The Most Solemnly Grand Imposing Display “ | Wyoming Postscripts

April 19, 1865: “The Most Solemnly Grand Imposing Display “ | Wyoming Postscripts

Writing inspirations – imagining life for settlers in days gone by « M J Wright

Writing inspirations – imagining life for settlers in days gone by « M J Wright

This Day in US History… 1865: Good Friday | Wyoming Postscripts

This Day in US History… 1865: Good Friday | Wyoming Postscripts

This Day in US History… 1865: A Grand Illumination in Washington Celebrates the End of the Civil War | Wyoming Postscripts

This Day in US History… 1865: A Grand Illumination in Washington Celebrates the End of the Civil War | Wyoming Postscripts

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: A Trip Back In Time

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: A Trip Back In Time

This Day in US History… 1865: A Drizzly Day in DC | Wyoming Postscripts

This Day in US History… 1865: A Drizzly Day in DC | Wyoming Postscripts

This Day in US History… 1865: General Robert E. Lee Surrenders, ending the Civil War | Wyoming Postscripts

This Day in US History… 1865: General Robert E. Lee Surrenders, ending the Civil War | Wyoming Postscripts

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Protesting Too Much: Lex Antein...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Protesting Too Much: Lex Antein...: There's clearly something going on in conservative circles in which a general animosity towards the Federal government has started to tr...

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Bill Barlow and his Sagebrush Philosophy

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Bill Barlow and his Sagebrush Philosophy

Holscher's Hub: A note about the photographs on this blog.

Holscher's Hub: A note about the photographs on this blog.: When this blog first started, almost all the photos were by me, the fellow identified occasionally as "PTH".  I didn't even bo...

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: The Cattle Drive

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: The Cattle Drive