Lex Anteinternet: A normal winter.: A normal winter. That's exactly what we're having. The weather here has been normal. And in Central Wyoming, that means multiple be..
After I posted the item above, it occurred to me that part of the complaining people do about winter is because they've so been able to defeat natural conditions in their daily lives and then, although only rarely, nature comes along and reminds you it's dominant for the most part. So far, our means of defeating it only do so in fairly average conditions.
Now, these are fairly average conditions, but people aren't used to them. And there are some things you can't get around. Six foot drifts on the Interstate highway, for example, are one such thing.
Anyhow, this caused me to recall that there was a time when people just basically endured these things. It's always easy to say that, but it's true.
Thinking back to when I was a teenager in high school, and fewer people lived on the mountain, it was the case that the county used to annually simply inform people that the mountain road was not its first priority. So if you lived up there, they'd get around to the road after they'd cleared every other country road. It was last. If you didn't like it, don't live there, was the message. People still complained, but not as much, and they didn't receive much sympathy either.
Ranchers, much like now, really didn't expect to get plowed out at all. During the famous Blizzard of 1949 there were instances in which aircraft were ultimately flown over some ranches to see if the occupants of them were in trouble. They didn't have phones or their lines were down. Having known some of the ranchers who experienced that when I was young, their reaction was surprise. They didn't expect anyone to send out an airplane, and they didn't figure they'd be regarded as imperiled for the most part. There were excepts that year, I should note, which resulted in the Wyoming Air National Guard dropping hay for cattle.
This blog started off with the pre World War One era. What about these environs, then?
Cars already existed, and the predominant car of the era, the Model T, would actually have been a fairly good car for the conditions. It has high clearance, thin wheels, low gearing, and it was fairly heavy for its size. Therefore, it was a good car, to some degree, for snow.
It wasn't a four-wheel drive, of course, and the snow we've been getting has been phenomenal.
Snow removal wasn't a thing anywhere before Milwaukee started doing it in 1862. For the most part, most municipalities didn't do it, however, until the automobile era. Quite a bit of plowing originally was done with draft horses, and this continued on until after World War Two to some extent. When streets started to be plowed I don't know, and it's a little difficult to tell, without going through piles of old newspapers to find out. The oldest example I could find was a municipal truck plowing snow in Washington, D.C. in 1916, which is frankly earlier than I would have guessed.
You don't have to have paved roads to have roads that are plowed, but it helps. In 1916, Washington had paved streets. Photographs of Casper show it having maintained dirt roads in the early 1920s. I'm sure that by the 1930s, they were mostly paved. What I don't know is when the city started plowing the snow. A photograph that's online from the Wyoming State Archives shows the Wyoming Highway Department's first snow plow, when it was purchased, which has a date of 1923, just one hundred years ago coincidentally enough. It's probably safe to assume the State didn't plow any highways prior to that. Another photo from the same source shows the local high school's snowplow, which is mounted to a tractor, and has a date of 1930. All in all, plowing the streets and highways must have come on during the 20s and 30s.
Older newspapers also show that in the 20s, the State simply closed more highways than it does now. Some highways are still closed for winter, but at least in the early 1920s the State simply closed, for example, the highway between Shoshone and Thermopolis. Of course, you could, at that time, still make that trip by train.
That brings up this, which we've addressed before. Prior to World War Two, 4x4 vehicles were a real rarity and tended to be confined to industrial operations or logging. Ranchers didn't have 4x4 vehicles, and regular people certainly did not. For that matter, early 4x4s were a real slow moving off-road affair, and they wouldn't have been very useful for most people. It was the U.S. Army that really started the development of the road capable all wheel drive vehicle and it took World War Two to really make them common. Even after the war, it took a long while before very many town residents owned a 4x4.
This meant that once winter came, winter travel in and out of towns became much more limited. Sure, in the 20s, when the weather improved, you could venture out, and people no doubt did. But busting drifts and the like became a post-war thing, and wouldn't have really become common until the 1960s for town residents. Ranchers, for that matter, kept more employees at the time and some of them were stationed in the remoter areas of larger ranches so that they could take care of necessary chores during the winter. In some instances, that meant that cowhands were stationed in remote cabins all winter long, and were checked on rarely, if at all. And they spent the winter there without television or the internet, or for that matter, electricity.
Of course, the other thing this meant is that people whose livelihoods were in town, lived in town. People didn't live on small acreages outside of town, for the most part, if they had jobs in town. If you needed to be in the office, you needed to be within a reasonable distance, which often meant walking distance, of the office. For that matter, people with industrial employment tended to live near it.
The point of all of this, other than things were different then? Well, they were different then.
They were different, for that matter into the 1980s.
And maybe folks need to have a little patience now.
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