Wednesday July 23, 1919. 1919 Motor Transport Convoy arrives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Cheyenne publishes a big newspaper. Red Summer spreads to Pennsylvania.

On this day the convoy went from Clinton to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, making 87 miles in 10.5 hours.  On the way the Trailmobile kitchen broke some springs.

A Trailmobile was a trailer, made by the company of that name.  They're still around.  Their stout trailer was used for a lot of applications, including the mounting of vehicle hauled kitchens.  There were a variety of trailers built by Trailmobile and I frankly don't know what this particular trailer was like, although a lot of them were four wheeled trailers that had an appearance that closely resembled horse drawn freight wagons.

The White Staff Observation car a large car built on a 1 ton White truck chassis.

The Red Summer spread to Darby Pennsylvania when a mob gathered and attempted to lynch the arrested Samuel Gorman.  Gorman, 17, had been an employee of a hay merchant that he killed in an assault when the hay merchant terminated his employment due to lack of work.  Upon learning of the murder, the mob gathered, but authorities prevented the lynching from occurring.

The Cheyenne State Leader, coincident with Cheyenne Frontier Days, published a massive twelve section edition of the paper that might hold the record for the largest Wyoming paper published up to that time, and which would frankly dwarf the weekday size of any newspaper published in Wyoming today. . . if not any edition of any Wyoming paper published today.  Included in that was a section that heavily featured boosting advertisements, including some for towns, and including one for Casper.

I've noted before the massive change to Casper that occurred because of World War One, and you've seen it here in part due to the qualitative change in its newspaper.  This advertisement really brings that out.

Casper had gone from a city of just over 4,000 people (which is a city under Wyoming's definition) to one three times that size in just a few years.  Oil was the reason, as this ad boosted, but the Great War is the reason that oil became such a big deal, something that coincidentally the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy accidentally emphasized.

And then as now oil tended to be the focus of the local economy, with other industries taking second position. The reference to other industries here is interesting, however, in that the sheep industry, which was a major agricultural enterprise in Wyoming up until the 1970s, was featured and in fact was centered in central Wyoming.

Tourism, however, also shows up. And tourism by automobile, which was just getting started at the time.  That three legged stool we talked about here in connection with the last general election had appeared.

Of course, you have to wonder what those 4,000 residents, assuming they remained, thought of the change.  The majority of Casperites were now new residents, grossly outnumbering the old, and the town of 4,000 had changed forever.