When Wyomng Registered, and then Confiscated, Firearms

Gun registration and then confiscation, in Wyoming?

Yes, as part of the vast nationwide overreaction to all things German during World War One.

It's largely been forgotten, but prior to the Great War Germans in the United States were quite proud of their heritage and stood out, almost, but not quite, uniquely as an immigrant group that strove to retain their traditions and identity.  In many places shooting matches, a strong German sport in rural Germany, remained one in the rural German areas of the United States.  Many communities that had been originally settled by German immigrants retained German as the primary language, including for example Dyersville Iowa where my grandfather had been born.  

But the Great War changed much of that.

A real wave of anti German prejudice swept the nation and German communities reacted by shutting down much of the outward cultural attributes they had exhibited. Still people remained strongly suspicious of Germans and, oddly Eastern Europeans.  Those sorts of feelings lead to the item we saw recently accusing breweries of being money pipes to Germany.  And, in Wyoming, they lead to the 1917 act of the legislature requiring aliens to register their firearms.

Many apparently didn't, as this article notes, because they were simply unaware of the law.  And on this day the news hit that the state, using the Game and Fish Department as state police, raided a mining camp and confiscated the arms found there.  Clemency was granted to those aliens who simply surrendered them and plead ignorance, prosecution awaited for those who objected.  This amounted to a haul of seventeen firearms, not exactly a large number.

There are lessons here of all sorts, and people will draw their own, I suppose.  I suspect, although I don't know, that all the miners who found their arms taken were German, Austrian or Eastern European.  This occurred in the Sheridan area which had a large ex-patriot British community but somehow I doubt they found their arms taken.  I'll bet not.

Miners, it might be noted, were rural people and this wasn't necessarily a minor matter for them.  T he article notes that the 17 arms included a Sharps rifle, a large 19th Century rifle best recalled for use by frontier buffalo hunters. That was likely that miners hunting rifle and he likely was then going without a means of augmenting the dinner table.  Other arms may have been for self protection. Mining communities were not dens of passivity.

For what its worth, there was some armed opposition to the American role in World War One within the United States, or perhaps more accurately to conscription. We've already covered one such incident. Those incidents were, however, ones in which rural Americans took up arms against the government.  Not armed fifth column actions by immigrant aliens.