Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
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I’ve been preparing for a talk I’ll give at the National Historic Trails Center in Casper on July 21. I was contacted by a representative from the museum and asked to speak about how I came to write “Wyoming Range War,” my book about the Johnson County War, and I agreed to do that. To tell the truth, I get a kick out of all the continuing attention over “Wyoming Range War,” mostly because the normal span of interest in a book is very short. As a fellow from the University of Oklahoma Press told me, “You’ve got six months of glory, and then it’s...
As I indicated in an earlier column back in 2016, I entered the first grade in Worland on Sept. 2, 1949, and, except for six weeks in the fall of 1960, attended Worland schools for the next 11 1/2 years. During that time I think I attended every school in Worland. My first grade school was the Watson school, located at Ninth Street and Pulliam. I believe it was built right after World War II, and I know it was named after Frank Watson, the Worland superintendent of schools after the war. Frank Watson was an important figure in Worland back...
I’ve been suffering from a nasty cold/flu bug the last week or so. It’s not terribly serious, but enough to make life relatively miserable and to stop me from some of my normal routines. Of course, my medical situation is not life threatening, whereas during the 19th century and 20th century (in which I lived for 57 years), the American population was subject to a number of killer diseases. Medical science made great strides, however, savings thousands of lives. Some examples: Infection: Infection killed a vast number of wounded soldiers, but a...
I had a brief career as a basketball coach. Back in 1964, when I drove to New Hampshire to teach algebra II in the New Hampton School, I had no idea I’d be assigned coaching duties. But it turned out that New Hampton (a private, college preparatory school) had no coach for its reserve team, because the previous year’s coach had been kicked upstairs, to coach the varsity. At New Hampton, the reserve team was the lowest level on the basketball totem pole, after the varsity squad and then the junior varsity squad. I’d never coached a baske...
I had a brief career as a basketball coach. Back in 1964, when I drove to New Hampshire to teach algebra II in the New Hampton School, I had no idea I’d be assigned coaching duties. But it turned out that New Hampton (a private, college preparatory school) had no coach for its reserve team, because the previous year’s coach had been kicked upstairs, to coach the varsity. At New Hampton, the reserve team was the lowest level on the basketball totem pole, after the varsity squad and then the junior varsity squad. I’d never coached a baske...
When I grew up in Worland, we had no squirrels in the town. I know there were squirrels in Thermopolis, as we’d see them when we went to the state park. I also think there were squirrels in Basin and Greybull, I believe because I saw them, but my memory is fuzzy about this. Well, they’re in Worland now, and they’re interesting little animals. As I think any of you who have observed squirrels could attest, they are active, clever, and incredibly athletic creatures. Three or four years ago, I started noting a squirrel here and there around our ho...
I caught an article in the Daily News this past Saturday (Feb. 17), addressing school financing. It stated that Affie Ellis, a state senator from Cheyenne, had filed a Joint Resolution that would amend Wyoming’s constitution “to specify that the Legislature has the right to determine how much money it gives to school finance based on revenue.” The Senator assures Wyoming citizens that, “I don’t think the Legislature necessarily wants to do whatever it wants.” I don’t see Senator Ellis’ Joint Resolution in the benevolent light she wishes to p...
Last week I wrote about the “Washakie Day” celebrations first had in 1913, when Washakie County began operation, and I stated that after four years of exuberant celebration, the event was not held in 1917. The reason for this decision was that the nation had gone to war in April 1917, and Worland’s citizens felt that it was not appropriate to celebrate Washakie Day this year, though they were clearly disappointed. In 1918, however, Washakie County citizens decided that the war might go on indefinitely, and they needed to get on with life....
The Wyoming State Legislature enacted a statute in 1911 authorizing the establishment of Washakie County as a new county in the State of Wyoming. This news was greeted with enormous enthusiasm and approval by the citizens of this new county to be. These people were ambitious, excited about their great quest to make the desert bloom, and the establishment of a county seemed to validate the risk they had taken just a few years earlier to come to the remote Big Horn Basin of Wyoming. During 1911, however, nothing changed in the Worland area regard...
I’m still reading a lot of books, some of which are very good. I checked out two books from our library which impressed me. “Eyewitness to Power” was written by David Gergen and it’s a first-rate memoir by a man who worked directly for presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. You still see Gergen commenting on TV periodically and his observations are always fair and full of insight. In his book, Gergen invariably provides new information and his opinions are enhanced by his objectivity. Gergen’s comments about Ronald Reagan surprised me. I...
It’s a long story how I came to research January, 1950, but, generally, it came about because I wanted to learn in detail about the big move of the Lower Hanover Canal in the 1940s or 1950s. That resulted in a wild goose chase that had, as an indirect effect, a review of the interesting world of January, 1950 seen through the lens of the Northern Wyoming Daily News. 1950 was full of big news, ranging from disputes with the Soviet Union (Russia), to national labor unrest, to the construction of Boysen dam. In January 1950, President Truman s...
I’ve been reading a lot of odds and ends in the last month or so, I suppose because Celia and I have been so busy that I just grab what reading I can fit in. That trend is unlikely to change soon: We plan to go to Jackson Hole at the end of the week to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary and then a week after that to another big occasion (I won’t reveal the details, because I want to write about this event in next week’s column). My daughter gave me some short books when I was in Seattle and I found a couple of them to be quite inter...
I’ve mentioned in earlier columns that I delivered the Northern Wyoming Daily News for four years. That period began on June 1, 1956 (when I was 12 and headed into the eighth grade) and ended on June 1, 1960. For some reason I recently started thinking about June 1, 1956, and trying to remember how things were different back then. Then I realized that the best record of that difference was the paper I delivered the morning of the initial day of June, 1956. So, I went to the local library and reviewed in detail the microfilm version of the p...
After the great eclipse trip, my next trip (only four days later) was considerably longer, to Seattle, to visit my daughter and her family. Celia and I have five children between us and they are scattered all over the country. The closest one is in Sheridan, then in Logan, Utah. There’s a big jump to the next furthest away, to Seattle (almost a thousand miles), followed by Murray, Kentucky, and New York City. I suppose we’re typical of most American families, in that most of our kids have moved a long ways away and some not so far. When I han...
When we first thought about the coming eclipse, my wife and I felt that the experience of an eclipse was over-hyped and that we could enjoy it as much on TV as seeing it live. And we sure didn’t want to drive through areas that promised to be chaotic. As the time grew near, however, we became more interested and tried to figure out if we could get to the total eclipse area without fighting brutal traffic. We came up with a plan: We’d go to Ten Sleep and then south on Highway 434 (the Upper Nowood Road) toward Lost Cabin and Moneta. But we were...
I usually send in my column on Friday, for publication on the following Tuesday morning. From the moment I hit “Send” on my computer, I’ve got one week to submit another column. That one week limit is usually not onerous, but it is a persistent responsibility that can become onerous, when, as with the coming column, I don’t have a full week. I sent a column in on Friday, July 21, knowing that the following Tuesday (July 25) I would be starting a Wyoming Humanities tour to Lander, Centennial and Encampment, meaning that I only had three days to...
This last Saturday (July 15) the Washakie Museum held its annual Washakie Museum Paleontology and Archaeology Symposium. I’ve attended these through the years, and they’ve been wonderful sessions. I learned that the Big Horn Basin is considered to be a kind of heaven for geologists, and what remarkable, cutting edge work has been done here. Some 144 people attended. The usual suspects (museum aficionados) were there, plus a lot of people I didn’t know. I guessed that this last category consisted mostly of people involved with archa...
I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the last few weeks, and most of the books I’ve read are about the World War II era, especially the Battle of Britain. There are times in history when events are so chaotic and momentous that fate teeters precariously, so that the future could abruptly change from a bad situation to a massive tragedy for vast numbers of people. One of those periods was May 1940. May 1940 was when the European war between Germany and the western European countries – France, Britain, and Belgium, primarily – went from a “phony...
As I’ve stated in early columns, I’m not what you would call a birder, but I still watch for birds whenever I’m out. A few days ago, I took a walk over the old bridge and then came back to Worland via the new bridge. While crossing the new bridge, I noticed a small flock of strange birds on the island, the one that’s supposed to be the culprit behind this spring’s winter ice jam. I was quite a distance away when I first saw them, maybe a hundred yards, and at first I thought they were crows. But when I got a little closer, I saw that these bir...
Three weeks ago I wrote about all the rain we’ve been getting in Worland. Most of the rain fell in March, and I assumed that the unusually rainy March meant a drier April. It seemed that the season was just getting ahead of itself, that we were having April (normally our rainiest month) in March. Recent events, however, have shown that despite all the rain in March, April is going to be as it usually is, very wet. From this weekend’s storm, Worland received .76 of an inch of precipitation. A very good rainstorm, indeed, representing a siz...
As I’m writing this column (on Tuesday, April 4), we seem to be in the middle of our monsoon season. By my count, using figures set out in newspaper weather reports, we’ve received over 1.4 inches of precipitation since the middle of March. Somewhere around 4 a. m., on Monday, April 3, that moisture, to my surprise, turned to a heavy wet snow. If weather proceeded in an orderly manner, the snow would have started the moisture parade back in March, and then turned completely to rain going into April. But, as I’ve said before, the weather is not...
I’m not what you would call a “birder”; that is, a person with a deep fascination with birds, who invests a lot in seeds and binoculars, but I do notice birds, especially in the spring. And what I’m seeing recently are creatures that migrate; something like half of all bird species migrate. This week I spotted in our yard a robin, that wonderful harbinger of spring; I think it was the first robin of this year. My wife and I had been discussing robins and she noted that we had not seen any over the winter. I think she was right and I presumed th...
The other day one of my readers stopped me, said he’d enjoyed my columns about gas stations, and suggested that I write about the history of Worland’s downtown. I was immediately intrigued, although knowing that a discussion about property owned over the last 110 years in downtown Worland represented a bigger project than my columns about gas stations. For such an undertaking, the first thing you have to find is a good source of information. The Worland newspapers, starting with the Worland Grit (which began publishing in December, 1906), and t...
As all of you know who read the Daily News, Roger Youtz died on Feb. 24 in Billings. Roger was one of my favorite people and I was distressed that he’d passed on, even though he was 93. I first met Roger in the fall of 1958, when starting my sophomore year at Worland High School. Roger had been teaching and coaching at the Greybull High School. The word on the street was that Roger was brought to Worland primarily because he was a good basketball coach, but I learned, as well, that he was a very good history teacher. I also learned that he w...
The beauty of living in Worland is that you’re so far from major population centers. So, we can enjoy the advantages of small town living, such as knowing your neighbors and having their friendly support, a lower cost of living, and avoiding the crime and congestion so often found in large urban areas. For me as an outdoorsman, it has meant the ability to easily travel to unspoiled, unpopulated and beautiful places where I can hunt, fish and hike. The problem with living in Worland is that you’re so far from major population centers. Much as...