Wyoming: The Paradox of Plenty: The Allure and Risk of a Mineral Economy, by David Freudenthal. WordsWorth Publishing, Cody, Wyo., 2022, 237 pages. $20.00 paperback.

The author’s blunt, tell-it-like-it-is style permeates this engaging history of Wyoming’s mineral economy and its associated politics. Drawing on his experience as Wyoming’s governor from 2003-2011 plus substantial personal research, Freudenthal paints a compelling picture of our long dependence on the extractive industries.

The Chinese spy balloon that lingered over Montana for a while last week reminded us of reports of an earlier, more hostile balloon that bombed Wyoming during World War II. What? Wyoming was bombed? Well, yes, apparently.

Members of the public first spotted last week’s balloon on Wednesday, Feb. 1, about 60,000 feet above Montana. For a few hours, authorities closed the Billings airport. By Saturday, the balloon had drifted across the continental U.S. That afternoon the U.S. Air Force shot it down over coastal waters off South Carolina. Sunday, the Navy recovered parts of the balloon.

The incident brought on a lot of finger-pointing between Republicans and Democrats. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken canceled a long-planned trip to China to confer with his counterpart, Wang Yi, on current tensions between the two nations. The National Security Agency has since revealed that other Chinese spy-balloon flyovers happened three times during the Trump administration and at least once, before this, during the Biden years.

Late in 1944, however, events seem to have been more haphazard, more dangerous and much more secret. Tom Mast’s wide-ranging WyoHistory.org article, Wyoming and World War II, tells how the Japanese armed high-altitude balloons with explosive devices and allowed them to float toward the U.S. to at least damage American morale, if not kill people.

By Dick Blust, Jr.
Geography, of course, is fundamental to all aspects of history, and in few cases is this more profoundly true than in the American West. Arguably, the most significant—in an emblematic sense, at least—is the Tri-Territory Historic Site in Sweetwater County, Wyo., where the Louisiana Purchase, the Oregon Country and the Mexican Cession all joined at a single spot along the Continental Divide. Those three acquisitions, with the last coming in 1848, became the overwhelming bulk of the western United States outside of Texas.

Lighted candles warmed what may well have been Wyoming’s first decorated Christmas—before there was a Wyoming. The candles are a German tradition—they’re part of the winter warmth and light that the carol “O Tannenbaum” recalls. At Christmas 1859, a lighted tree filled most of a small log building on Deer Creek, about two miles upstream from creek’s mouth at present Glenrock, Wyo. 

Packed closely around were some army officers, a Native family and a few German Lutheran missionaries. Missionary Moritz Braeuninger read from the scriptures. Capt. W.F. Raynolds, his officers and the Indians, at least as shown in a sketch by one of the missionaries, all listened closely. The Oregon Trail ran nearby. Downstream at the mouth of Deer Creek on the North Platte was a busy stage station and trading post.

Government exploration, Indian business and high hopes had brought these people together. Raynolds was leading a small, two-year expedition of soldiers and civilian scientists from the U.S. Topographical Engineers to explore regions drained by the Yellowstone River, and had come down to the North Platte from the Yellowstone as winter was closing in. In 1857, a group of Mormons had begun building a stage and freight depot on the site for a planned West-wide operation to be owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Later that year, as the U.S. Army marched toward Utah to re-establish federal control there, the Mormons abandoned the place.

By James H. Nottage
The Lowery Music Studio in Laramie during the late 1950s and early 1960s was actually our living room on 15th street. There, our mom offered player pianos and organs for sale and gave music lessons on piano and accordion. I remember stacks and stacks of sheet music hidden under the hinged lids of piano benches. The music and its colorful covers represented all kinds of styles and tastes from the greater American song book. As a child, I was fascinated.

If we could explore the layers of sheet music in any piano bench of the past, what could we find? They’d surely tell something of the pianist’s household. What composers, styles of music and performers are present? What tastes are here? Does some of the music appear well-worn and is some seemingly untouched? Are there clues to who promoted the music or maybe where it was bought? Does any of the music come from other cultures? Can we imagine someone playing the music for recitals, family gatherings or just plain fun?

Weather can kill: Anyone living in tornado or hurricane country knows this. Blizzards, too, can kill, as ranchers know well from Wyoming’s spring snowstorms. But when city people drive reliable cars on the highway in the wintertime, perhaps we are somewhat less attuned to the dangers of cold and snow.

By Rebecca Hein
Impractical decisions, made by men thousands of miles away from the relevant location, are a feature of the history of the American West. So it was with surveying the land in a grid. Government surveyor Billy Owen, working in the 1880s, found the country in central Wyoming “generally rolling with some hilly and mountainous land.”

Not the simplest job to survey, perhaps, and an issue I didn’t think about for many decades. In the 1980s, flying between Chicago and Denver, I saw a mostly flat grid below, stretching for miles, and thought vaguely about an orderly network of county roads. The consequences of laying a grid over the rugged mountains of the West didn’t occur to me.

By Rebecca Hein
Why would a man portrayed as respectable participate in a lynching? For years I didn’t think about this, although the question had been floating in front of me since childhood, when I read and re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series.

In 2014, at age 58, I read lawyer/historian John Davis’ WyoHistory.org article on the 1909 Spring Creek Raid, a bloody episode in which seven cattlemen killed three sheep ranchers, kidnapped two others and slaughtered sheep and sheep dogs near Spring Creek south of Ten Sleep, Wyo. This led me to Davis’ book, Goodbye, Judge Lynch. In this book I learned that White-on-White lynchings were common on the American frontier, sometimes even after a criminal justice system had been established.

By Rebecca Hein
Big Nose George: His Troublesome Trail, by Mark E. Miller, with a foreword by former WyoHistory.org Assistant Editor Lori Van Pelt. High Plains Press, 2022, 136 pages. $19.95 paperback.

Possibly the most tantalizing sentence in this tale of murder, lynching and postmortem gruesomeness is, “If only each murderer had kept his mouth shut” nobody would have connected the outlaws with their crimes. Outlaw groups were, in the late 19th century West, “[A] fluid and dynamic mix of miscreants and evildoers, never staying together very long, and certainly not holding powerful allegiances among group members.”

Nonetheless, in 1878 George Parott recruited his Powder River gang to rob the eastbound Union Pacific train in Carbon County, Wyoming Territory. Outlaws had learned from a recent issue of the Laramie Daily Sentinel that pickings were much better on the eastbound train than the westbound.

From this fast-paced, well-written narrative, we learn things that never cross our minds in the age of the automobile.

News this week of the pope’s visit to Canada caught us off guard. We hadn’t known he was coming. When he spoke, he offered an apology the size of a continent: “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” he said, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter. “I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.” Applause and shouts of approval from a largely Native audience greeted his remarks, the New York Times reported.

Beginning in the late 19th and running through most of the 20th century, the Canadian government subsidized Indian boarding schools. Nearly all were run by religious denominations, about 70 percent of them by Roman Catholics and the rest by Protestants. The former Ermineskin Residential Indian School, now demolished, was one of the largest and was run by Catholics on Cree land south of Edmonton, Alberta. There, last Monday in a powwow ring, the pope offered his apology.

By Rebecca Hein
​Have you ever experienced a moment when the person you’re talking to doesn’t get it? For me, such an event was connected to a long, preparatory journey of awareness. It started in the early 1980s, when I was living in Wisconsin, a farming state that depends on summer rainfall. Being from Wyoming, I didn’t think much about rain, only about what pleasant weather we were having. But I gradually understood, hearing my Wisconsin neighbors talk about the drought and understanding an economic disaster was in progress.

A few years later, when regularly visiting our cabin in the Black Hills of South Dakota, I became acutely aware of the danger of forest fire and realized we could easily lose our beloved cabin.

On moving back to Wyoming in 1992, and a decade later moving to the base of Casper Mountain, I began to notice the weather patterns more than I had while living in town.

By Tom Rea

Some books tell their stories in blunt chronology: First this happened, then this, this and this, and finally this. Others work differently, blending events from different periods that rhyme, resonate, advance or recircle in ways they would not do if told in order. Last fall at the approach of November, Native American Heritage Month, we heard from a writer wondering if we’d like a piece on the diarist John Hunton’s experiences of the Indian Wars. We answered that we already had several articles on major events of those times, but we had next to nothing about Hunton, and would like to learn more.

By Rebecca Hein

One fine summer day in 1925, Floyd Bard was riding to his camp in the Bighorn Mountains when he saw “ten young ladies standing there on the edge of the East Fork of Big Goose Creek. All they had on was their bathing suits that Mother Nature had given them, probably eighteen or twenty years back.” These young women could have been part of a group Bard guided during his 22 years as an outfitter in the Bighorns, but they were actually staying at a nearby dude ranch.

Bard, born in 1879, spent much of his life on horseback. When he was 3 years old, his parents settled on a homestead south of Sheridan, Wyo., and at age 10 he took his first of many horse wrangler jobs. In late fall 1891, three Bard family neighbors were murdered just a few months before the invasion of Johnson County in April 1892, when Bard was 13.

For many roundup seasons, Bard herded and grazed cowboys’ horses, fencing or hobbling them and in other ways managing and looking after them. In 1900, he began breaking horses for use in the Boer War and, starting in 1915, was breaking and also purchasing more horses for World War I. In both cases, the Malcolm and William Moncreiffe ranch had contracted to supply horses to the British government.

By Rebecca Hein

Early in my cello career in performance and teaching, I got a glimpse into the mind of a cellist far above me in ability and position. Two of my students, both cello performance majors at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, were also there to see.

It was the mid-1980s and we were attending the Third International Cello Congress at Indiana University in Bloomington—home to one of the best and largest schools of music in the world.

Many world-class cellists were there, plus professionals and students like our little group. The featured guest that afternoon was Ronald Leonard, principal cello of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Everyone in the auditorium knew he was the equal of any international soloist because the principal chairs of major orchestras are among the best musicians in the business.

The topic was orchestral auditions. At some point, an audience member asked Leonard to demonstrate the notoriously difficult opening of the Offertorio section of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass.

We were interested to learn this week that the surviving members of the Black 14 and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are again teaming up to deliver free food to hungry people. In October 1969, University of Wyoming football coach Lloyd Eaton kicked 14 Black players off the team for asking, ahead of time, to wear black armbands when they suited up to play BYU, in protest against the Mormon Church’s racist policies. Eaton’s action deprived the athletes of their scholarships, sending them down far different paths in their lives than they would otherwise have followed. It also caused deep divisions in Wyoming, and decimated the football program for years.

By Rebecca Hein

I was rolling around in bed, flipping my pillow and rearranging the blankets every few minutes. Finally, my husband turned over and put his arms around me.

“Becky. Settle down.” In Ellis’s tone and touch I recognized the calm authority that soothed our two preschool children when they became agitated.

“That’s easy for you to say,” I retorted. “You’re not facing potential humiliation in front of hundreds of people.”

“True; that’s a decision I made years ago … and so did you. Now go to sleep.”

For the past few days, I’d been waking up in the morning wondering why I felt like I was going to soon face a firing squad. Then I’d remember. The last Wyoming Symphony Orchestra concert of the 1996-1997 season was coming up in about two weeks, and I was going to be playing a duo with our guest artist, Mark O’Connor. A Grammy award-winning country fiddle player, he was ascending rapidly, and was already collaborating with many world-famous classical artists such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

My principal cello job required me to perform whatever solo parts that were required, and when I first ran through my part for “Limerock,” an old country tune in an arrangement by O’Connor and others, it seemed playable enough. Next, I listened to the recording he had provided, but I didn’t recognize the piece I’d just sight-read because the tempo was insanely fast. When I discovered this, I saw the magnitude of my task.

Major news outlets announced this week that in passing 675,000 Covid deaths, the nation has now surpassed the death total from the 1918-1919 flu. That makes the current pandemic, still going strong, the deadliest the nation has ever seen. Wyoming Covid deaths passed the state’s 1918-1919 total, 780, during the first week of August this year.

By Nate Martin, WyoFile

Lora Webb Nichols was a hard-working woman. Over the course of 50 years between the 1890s and the 1940s, she created a body of photography 24,000 images strong, most of which feature the life and times of her hometown, Encampment, Wyo. 

These images—which capture the town and its people with arresting grace—languished in obscurity for decades.

After the Indian Wars, White people in the West seem to have found a number of ways to harass and kill Native people. In 1895, a posse of non-Indians, mostly outfitters, attacked a peaceful band of Bannocks hunting elk south of Jackson Hole; two native people died. 

In 1906, a large band of Utes left their reservation in Utah and crossed Wyoming, hunting and drying meat as they went—and causing great alarm among civil officials, the general public and especially in the newspapers. Eventually the Utes were met in southern Montana by 1,000 U.S. troops, persuaded to go to South Dakota for a while and after 18 months to return home.

Three years earlier, on Lightning Creek northeast of Douglas, Wyo., in 1903, a sheriff’s posse attacked a peaceful group of Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; two posse members and five Sioux were killed. The Oglalas had come to Wyoming to  gather herbs, roots and berries, and may have been hunting antelope as well.

In about 1936, a group of Oglala men from the Pine Ridge Reservation performed the astonishing feat of finding the graves of their dead on the site, going by an account dating from the time of the burials. But by the late 1920s, White ranchers had already moved the skull and bones of Black Kettle, a member of the band, to the Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum on the grounds of the Wyoming State Fair in Douglas.

By Rebecca Hein

At the beginning of John McPhee’s fascinating 1986 book, Rising from the Plains, the author introduces geologist David Love, a great talker and thinker who spent a long, Laramie-based career with the U.S. Geological Survey. McPhee also introduces us to Love’s mother, Ethel Waxham Love and to Wyoming geology in general. Ethel Waxham was still single in October 1905 when she traveled from Denver by train and stagecoach to teach a winter term of school in Fremont County, about 30 miles south of Lander. McPhee weaves in background on David’s childhood and early education after Ethel married sheep rancher John Love, a Scot, in June 1910 and they made a home on Muskrat Creek, near the bone-dry center of the state.

Early in the narrative—geared for the lay reader—the author and David Love, about 70 at the time, are driving around in a Bronco and camping out a lot. Stopping near Rawlins, they get out to look at the rocks. Love says, “The rock that outcrop[s] around Rawlins …  contain[s] a greater spread of time than any other suite of exposed rocks along Interstate 80 between New York and San Francisco.”

In Wyoming, with our small minority populations, it’s easy to feel morally distant from events like the Asian-spa shootings in Atlanta last week. Whatever mix of religion, armament, opportunity and virulent misogyny motivated the shooter, race hatred was in there, too.

Surely something like that wouldn’t happen here, right?  

Maybe. Still, this seems a good time to remember two events from Wyoming’s past.

By Rebecca Hein

Living on a ranch before ranches had electricity or mechanized equipment is not something people often think about now. But these on-the-spot records from just a century ago remind us how much things have changed—how hard, especially, these people had to work—and what we can learn from the past.

Two ranchwomen writers have left clear descriptions of their lives and daily routines, including the hardships they and their families endured. Both also wrote about people and events in the area, going beyond their own home lives.

By Robert and Elizabeth Rosenberg
(Editors’ note: The Rosenbergs are authors of “Let Us Ramble: Exploring the Black and Yellow Trail in Wyoming,” recently published on WyoHistory.org.)

For almost 40 years, we have made our living as historical consultants in Wyoming. Because the state is rich in trail history, we have recorded many segments of routes from the earliest emigrant roads to the first auto roads. Historic trails generally bring to mind prairie schooners bound for Oregon and California; in addition to the famous Oregon Trail, emigrants crossed the state by way of the Overland Trail, the Bozeman Trail and the Bridger Trail. Today, one can still find remnants of these trails -- wagon ruts, rock inscriptions, and emigrant graves. 

The earliest interstate roads also crossed Wyoming: the Lincoln Highway (the first east-west interstate highway), the Yellowstone Highway (connecting Denver to Yellowstone and other National Parks) and the lesser known Black and Yellow Trail. This road was developed in the 1910s so that tourists could jump in their new cars and follow a good road from Chicago to Yellowstone National Park, enjoying the Black Hills, Devils Tower and the Bighorn Mountains along the way. The name of the new road reflected the major attractions as well as the black and yellow-banded posts that would mark the route.  

In the fall of 1918, Wyoming, like the rest of the United States, experienced the deadliest two months yet of the influenza pandemic then sweeping the world. From October 1918 through January 1919, 780 people in Wyoming died either of the flu or a combination of the flu and pneumonia. For weeks, newspapers across the state ran front-page obituaries of local people. The peak came during the first two weeks of November; by Thanksgiving, the onslaught of new cases and deaths seemed to be tapering off slightly—in some towns at least.

“Thanksgiving Day in Buffalo this year was observed,” the Buffalo Bulletin reported, “but in a very quiet manner, prevalence of the flu making it entirely out of the question to hold any public gatherings. A number of small dinner parties among friends and neighbors were given, so that a spirit of thanksgiving prevailed in the city to a certain extent.” That caution, the wariness in the tone of “to a certain extent,” seems particularly familiar now. It runs through all the Wyoming papers we browsed recently to find out what was up during Thanksgiving week, 1918.

For a few days in December 1892, armed men of opposing political parties filled different rooms in the Wyoming State Capitol, deep in “earnest consultation,” one newspaper reported, over whether the man in the governor’s office had any right to be there. Matters were extremely tense.

John Osborne, a Rawlins physician and a Democrat, had won the governor’s race the previous month by a comfortable margin—9,290 to 7,509. For two years, since the brand-new governor, Francis E. Warren, had resigned the governorship on being elected to the U.S. senate, the former secretary of state, Amos Barber, had been serving as an unelected acting governor. All the heat was coming now from the burning question of when it was legal for the new governor-elect to take office. 

By Phil White Jr.
(Editor’s note: The author’s article, “1968: Wyoming Reacts to the King Assassination,” was published last week on WyoHistory.org.)

When I agreed to provide WyoHistory.org with some notes introducing my recent article about Wyoming reactions to the death of Martin Luther King, it occurred to me to look again at the University of Wyoming student newspaper, the Branding Iron. In the April 19, 1968, issue, from two weeks after the assassination, I found a letter to the editor and poem, both by student Ken Cooper.

This paean about Dr. King joining “the ranks of fallen men of peace” seemed so heartfelt, coming from such deep sorrow and pain, that I wondered whether the author was one of UW’s few African-American students in the late sixties. My name also appears in the Branding Iron masthead on that page, listing me as sports editor. I knew the names of many of UW’s Black athletes at the time, but I didn’t recognize this name then or now, 52 years later.

So I took a shot at finding something about this Ken Cooper. I checked the UW alumni directories without success. Then I searched for his name on Facebook and turned up a 72-year-old person with that name living in Laughlin, Nev. who ran track at the University of Wyoming. Truepeoplesearch.com gave me some possible phone numbers. I left messages on two of them, and within an hour I was talking to this remarkable man and he was mentioning the names of many sixties students and athletes I knew or recognized.

By John Clayton
(Editors’ note: John Clayton’s article, Who gets to hunt Wyoming's elk? Tribal Hunting Rights, U.S. Law and the Bannock 'War' of 1895, was published recently on WyoHistory.org.)

One reason I enjoy writing for WyoHistory.org is that I like to imagine Wyoming high school history teachers using these stories in class. Too often history is about memorizing dates, when it could be a springboard for discussions about values. To my mind, one of the best stories for these purposes is the history behind the Herrera Supreme Court decision, published last week.

By Rebecca Hein
(Editor’s note: The author’s article, The Sticking Power of Ethel Waxham Love, was published last week on WyoHistory.org.)

In January 1924, Ethel Waxham Love’s sister, Faith, wrote to her from Denver to express her concern for Ethel’s welfare. Fourteen years before, Ethel had married John Love, a sheep rancher in central Wyoming.

“I could not see you leave the ranch soon enough,” wrote Faith. “What would you think of a man who would take me off to a desert where I saw few people, who promised I should never work & who made me his slave body & soul. … You have never complained.”

They could agree on the last part, at least; Ethel never said or wrote to anyone about wanting to leave the ranch or her marriage. Before marrying John Love, Ethel had known about some of the hardships of sheep and cattle ranching in Wyoming. When Love wrote to her during the five years he courted her by correspondence, he never withheld news about how many sheep the latest blizzard had killed.

Faith continued,  “It is John’s duty to realize his responsibility [to support Ethel and their two young sons], and … he should be made to feel that responsibility. … What does John do? How does he earn a livelihood for his family?”

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, when women across America—white women, at least—won the right to vote. In the Tennessee Legislature, Rep. Harry Burn put the nation over the top on August 18, 1920, when he followed his mother’s good advice and voted Aye. But women in Wyoming, we are always proud to remember, had already been voting for 50 years. 

By Paul Krza
(Editor’s note: The author’s article, “Ed Cantrell, Rock Springs and Boom-time Crime” has just been published on WyoHistory.org.) 

Amazingly, it was on my birthday — July 15, in 1978 — when Ed Cantrell, who I knew from my teaching days in Cody, and who had Rock Springs connections, would shoot and kill Michael Rosa, his undercover drug detective, in front of the Silver Dollar Bar. As I often say, you just can’t make this stuff up. Other Wyoming cities suffered the same fate — Gillette, in the coal-rich Powder River Basin, birthing the unwelcome tag, “Gillette Syndrome,” a catchall for boomtown woes, and Wheatland, with its power-plant construction. But it was the Rock Springs experience that spurred the concept that energy giants should pay up front for social upheaval, through industrial siting payments and with a pioneering severance tax.

After an argument at the state Republican convention in Gillette last month, the chairman of the Albany County delegation, Michael Pearce, and the chairman of the Carbon County delegation, Joey Correnti, headed for a side room in the Cam-Plex. There, witnesses agree, Pearce threw the first punch, after which Correnti “took him to the ground.” Pearce ended up in the hospital with injuries including a broken ankle. He later admitted he’d been drinking “tall” gin and tonics. Authorities the following Monday charged him with assault and battery.

The dispute seems to have been largely personal, but politically charged. For more details on the fight, click here for Pearce’s version, click here for Correnti’s lawyer’s version, click here for a briefer overview, click here for more on tensions within the Wyoming Republican Party this summer as the primary season heats up and click here for details on an alleged assault of Wyoming GOP Executive Director Kristi Wallin by GOP Secretary Charles Curley at a party fundraising dinner in February 2018.

These troubles reminded us of a notorious fight that broke out Jan. 20, 1913 between Democrats and Republicans on the floor of the Wyoming House of Representatives. The conflict was over which party would ultimately control the majority, and with that majority the power to elect Wyoming’s U.S. senator.

Emma Mitchell, wife of railroader and mountaineer Finis Mitchell, who devoted his spare time to exploring the Wind River Mountains beginning in the 1930s, was probably crucial to his effort. The Mitchells’ granddaughter, Sandra Snow, remembers Emma as “a tiny little dynamo. I still miss her and all the things she said and did.

If you’ve ever raised leafy greens such as kale, chard or collards, you’ve probably eaten at least one aphid. This idea is not so revolting because aphids are tiny, and we usually don’t know when we’re eating one. But eating an insect on purpose? For us, it’s not a cultural norm, although it has been for lots of other people in the world, past and present.

We all know what it’s like to be caught in a white-out on the highway. The roadside markers disappear into whirling snow. We can’t see the center line, other cars nor even the hood of our own. This, minus the warm, enclosed vehicle with food and water aboard if we’ve planned well, is what early travelers in Wyoming faced in fall, winter and spring. Sometimes they were horseback, or in a wagon or even on foot. One such hardy settler was Minnie Fenwick, a Congregational circuit rider serving the small town of Burns and surrounding communities in Wyoming’s southeast corner, in the early 1900s.