The journal has run an interesting column on the now nearly forgotten plight of Fremont County in the 1980s. One of Bill Sniffin's articles, which are always good, it recalls a Lander Wyoming that was a mining town, now something nearly forgotten:
What do you do when those good mining jobs go away?
by Bill Sniffin
It is a recession when you lose your job. It is a depression when I lose mine. – Old saying.
With the loss of more than 5,000 energy jobs, it should be interesting to readers to read about what happened during the last Wyoming bust at the most mining-oriented town in the state. Here is that story:
It's well worth reading.
I'd guess a lot of current Wyomingites, particularly those born since 1990, would be shocked to learn that Lander had been a mining town. Some time ago I passed by the old Taconite mine and meant to photograph it, but I was in a hurry and didn't. I wish I had now. At any rate, Sniffin is quite correct. Lander was a mining town.
Indeed, Lander and Hudson were union towns and heavily Democratic. To run for office there you practically had to be a Democrat. Some of those old Democrats are still around, and still active in politics, but they are Republicans now. Indeed, in the same race in which Governor Mead took his first nomination a serious contender for that nomination was a really well respected Republican Legislator, who had been a long time Democratic Legislator prior to switching parties. The big switches that took place, and the fact that Fremont County today has some of the state's most conservative Republican political figures, says a lot about the fate of the Wyoming Democrats over the years.
And the current nature of Lander does as well. If you went into the town today you'd be hard pressed to realizes that it had every been a mining town.
As an aside, I continue to be impressed by the columnists in the Casper Journal. They're good. Indeed, even though the Journal and the Tribune have common ownership, the Journal, a weekly paper, has better columnist as a rule. Not always, the Tribune has some good ones, but it also has some that I really wonder why they run. Bill Sniffin, of the journal, never fails to publish an interesting article, and he's not the only one in the Journal we can say that about. The Tribune does run some good national columnists, and some I could leave, but that's common for folks like me who read national columnists. Some you like, and some you don't. On local columnists their Mary Kettl almost always runs an interesting column as does Mike Kuzara, but in contrast, while Mary Billiter's have much improved, I still can't get into them. And likewise I'm consistently bored and disappointed by Edith Cook's column, which I'd not run if I were the editor.
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