A similar article had appeared in one of the Cheyenne papers a few days prior. This points out that, at that time, and frankly because I've focused on the Cheyenne papers this has tended to be ignored, only Cheyenne had real "breaking news". The other papers tended to catch up a couple of days later, including the Casper papers.
Casper, as we'll see, was undergoing a huge boom, but that hadn't caught up with its papers yet. They were much less advanced than the two Cheyenne papers, even though Casper, amazingly enough for a then much smaller town, had several papers.
Anyhow, there was legitimate concern for the employment fate of National Guardsmen. No statute protected their status at the time, and earlier in the Punitive Expedition Guardsmen from other states had returned home to unemployment, sometimes desperate unemployment.
Of course, in Wyoming, particularly in oil regions like Casper, but also in agricultural regions, indeed everywhere, there was a really heated economy, so that was much less likely. That may explain why the Guard had such a hard time actually filling up several months prior. And, as a practical matter, but probably not obvious to these men and the state, most of the Wyoming National Guardsmen would be right back in uniform in very short order.
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