Oddly enough, this issue, which just arrived yesterday, involves the town of Hillsdale, a really tiny obscure Wyoming town, which I just posted something about on Sunday:
Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: United Methodist Church, Hillsdale Wyoming
Churches of the West: United Methodist Church, Hillsdale Wyoming:
United Methodist Church, Hillsdale Wyoming
This is the United Methodist Church in Hillsdale Wyoming. Hillsdale is a very small Laramie County town which was probably more viable at some point in the past than it is now, but it's still a town and this church is still an active church is spite of the very small population of that town.
While undoubtedly nobody would recall it, Hillsdale has been featured here twice now, the first time in 2015. Here's my entry on that occasion, which relates a lot more closely to the the topic of the article, sort of.
Evidence of changes in technology and transportation in geography.
The photograph above depicts a United Methodist Church in Hillsdale, Wyoming. Hillsdale is a really tiny town, with a population of under fifty people. It's on the Union Pacific.
By rail, it's less than 15 miles from Cheyenne. It's less than five miles from Burns, another little town, albeit one that's bigger than Hillsdale. Another five miles down the Union Pacific is the town of Egbert. And a few more, maybe eight or so, is the town of Pine Bluff. In Pine Bluff, I know, there's a Catholic Church.
I've been in Hillsdale (as of yesterday) and Pine Bluff, but I've never been in Burns.
Of these towns, only Pine Bluff and Cheyenne on are the Interstate Highway. Hillsdale is probably four miles or so off the Interstate Highway, effective marooned out there in the rolling hills of Laramie County, Wyoming.
I was actually amazed that this United Methodist Church is active. The Catholic church in Pine Bluff also is. So these communities are obviously keeping on keeping on, but what a change this evidences.
All of these towns were built on the Union Pacific Railroad. Only Pine Bluff and Cheyenne are on the Interstate. Coming in from Nebraska, I'm sure that well over 90% of all travelers go right by Pine Bluff. Leaving Cheyenne (and no, not the song, that takes you to Montana), probably nearly 100% of travelers go right by Pine Bluff.
All of these towns, save for Cheyenne, must have been built as farming towns along the Union Pacific. They're not far from each other today, but when founded they would have been just far enough to travel to each other, by wagon, and get back home, which is how they served the area farmers. That is, towns in this area where just far enough from towns so that you could get into one, conduct your business, and go back home. Saturday was traditionally the big "into town" day for farmers and these towns were probably pretty big on Saturdays. I'd guess that their populations swelled during Sundays as well, but how farmers got to services I don't know. In some regions of the country the population prior to World War Two heavily reflected a single faith or perhaps only a couple of faiths (and this is still the case in some regions), and perhaps that was the case in this region of Wyoming, but it wouldn't be the case for Wyoming in general at any single point.
These towns remained viable in the early automobile era, but clear by the 1950s the handwriting must have been pretty visible on the wall. Cheyenne is the dominant city in the area, and it always has been, but for all practical purposes its the only one that is truly fully viable now. That wouldn't have been true at one time.
The article features a story from the Tribune which dated only back a few months prior to my post, even though I was completely unaware of it at that time. Curtis Bowser had died and bequeath a substantial sum to the museum in Pine Bluffs, and a columnist from the tribune was wondering who he was. The author of the article, from that quarter of the state, sought out to answer that question.
The answer is fascinating and I'll forgo going into it in detail, but rather I'd note here that he was from Hillsdale originally, although he hadn't lived there since graduating from high school.
No, the reason that I'm noting this is that a really good description is given in the article of the history of the Bowser family locating in the region.
They came in during the first decade of the 20th Century, with Mr. Bowser, the father of the benefactor, arriving on an immigrant train after being encouraged to move to Wyoming for "free land" by his sister and brother in law. This is only the second time I've heard of such trains, with the first being an example given to me by somebody whose grandparents had relocated in Wyoming in that fashion. Basically, a single car was loaded up with enough to start a rough homestead and to build a small, one room, house. That was it. That was substantial amount of stuff, but frankly being able to make a go of it being dropped off in that fashion would be difficult in the extreme.
In the Bowser example that didn't even include a stove to heat the one room house he built. When his wife came out, with a baby, that December, he still didn't have one, even tough he'd built a barn and the house, and they lived in his sister's nearby farm house Ironically, his sister was moving to Iowa by that point to teach school. For the first five years of their presence near Hillsdale they hauled water five miles.
Now, keep in mind, the Bowers located in this area in 1908, which means that they were hauling water until 1913. Mr. Bowser, who had previously been employed as an enameler in New York City, and Mrs. Bowser, had four children, not a large family by the standards of the day, two of whom lived in the water hauling era. The last one was born in 1921. Mr. Bowser made a successful go of it and his initial homestead expanded significantly over the years.
Okay, why have I pointed this article out?
Well, for one thing, it's just flat out interesting.
Beyond that, however, this is the era we've been focusing on.
It's so easy to assume that people in the past were just like us, and lived just like us. But they didn't. Mr. Bowser the younger, by the time he passed away in 2014, had apparently done extremely well and hadn't lived in Wyoming for years. As the story makes plain, he never forgot his childhood home, but by the time of his death he wasn't living in conditions anything like that which he had when he was young. For that matter, the Bowser's still in Wyoming weren't either.
That family in 1908 lived a life that was more like 1808 than 2008. Most people today wouldn't be able to endure those conditions. Mr. Bowser put up with no stove until his wife and baby arrived. That means he was living without heat, and Wyoming isn't warm. The Bowser's started off with a one room home. It didn't have water to its location for years.
The younger Mr. Bowser was a Marine during World War Two. People have looked at that generation and been amazed by its toughness. No wonder it was tough, as growing up the way he did wasn't unusual, and it'd make you tough.
But imagine that generation that fought World War One.
Some have noted that the American soldiers of the Great War seemed amazingly unaffected by it in many ways and wondered how that could be.
Conditions had a lot to do with that.
And some have noted how closely they bonded with the rural French during their service, while as in World War Two, they tended to be shocked by the conditions that the French, and the Italians, lived in.
An article like this explains why. The conditions they lived in weren't much different.
So imagine those farm and ranch conditions, for average westerners, in those first couple of 20th Century decades. Remarkably different from those later on, and certainly remarkably different from those we live in today.
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