More Broken: Was Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: It's broken. Or at least its fr...

Stranded semi tractors on the Happy Jack Road outside of Cheyenne.  Yes, my window is cracked.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: It's broken. Or at least its fr...: A man, woman, their horse, and dog. Tanana, Alaska, prior to World War One. I published this item last week: Lex Anteinternet: It&#39...

So, last weekend the kids and I went deer hunting.

Deer season this year is very short for some reason, I don't know why, but it is. Or maybe it seemed that way as I had no opportunity to take a day off from work to go, and the kids of course had no opportunity to take a day off from university.  So I actually missed the better part of it before I even went out.

We didn't draw into limited area tags, so our options were limited to local general areas.  There's been some changes in them recently and the area that we generally go to, when we go to a general area, is antlered deer, three points or better, now.

I'm not a game biologist and I'm not a head hunter either, so I don't quite get the "antlered deer only" thing.  I probably should study up on it, but I don't get it.  Particularly in the area where I went which has been infested with Chronic Wasting Disease in recent years, and I'd think they'd want to cut the numbers of all deer down a bit. But, as noted, I'm not a game biologist so I can't say the reasoning isn't solid.

Anyhow, we headed out on Saturday and saw a lot of deer, and hiked a lot of ground, but we didn't see any bucks at all until the afternoon.  About that time, finally arriving after hours as the spot that I intended to check in the first place, we saw a single deer.

And quite a deer he was.  He looked like the deer on a bottle of Jägermeister, a German liqueur I've never tasted, in part because it's one of those odd liquors that in the United States is associated with stupid behavior.  But the label is impressive.

The label features a deer with a large rack with a cross in between its antlers.  The image recalls St. Hubert (which I knew) and St. Eustace, both of whom had profound religious conversions after encountering deer while hunting which had the image of the cross blazing between their antlers.

St. Hubert encounters the deer.

Or at least according to Wikipedia the image on the bottle honors St. Hubert and St. Eustace.  I suspect its only meant to recall St. Hubert, who would have been better known to Europeans in the 1930s when the liquer was first created.  St. Eustace is remembered more in the Eastern church and was a Roman general who converted after such an experience while hunting and who was ultimately martyred in 118.  

St. Hubert lived more recently, post Roman Empire, having been born in 656 and living until 727.  He was born in what is now southern France into a noble family, but was sent north to Paris at an early age.  Due to political turmoil, he was one of many who ended up it Metz as sort of a noble refugee and we need to keep in mind that France, as a solid political entity, didn't exist at the time. Anyhow, he married one Floribanne, daughter of Dagobert, Count of Leuven, and the couple had a son, Floribert, later the Bishop of Liege.  In this fluid political time, therefore, fate had taken Huber from Toulouse to Liège in an onward northern migration.

Hubert was not a religious man and that condition was amplified when his wife died giving birth to Floribert, a not uncommon fate for women at the time.  After that, Hubert took entirely to hunting in the Ardennes, living a solitary hunting life.  On a Good Friday, however when the faithful were gathering in Church in honor of that day (which is not a Holy Day of Obligation) he encountered a great stag and the it turned on him, cross between its horns, and spoke, saying:

Hubert, unless thou turn to the Lord, and lead a holy life, you shall quickly go down into hell.

It's hard to ignore a thing like that, to say the least, and Hubert dismounted from his horse and immediately, according to tradition, replied; "Lord, what would You have me do?", to which the reply came "Go and seek Lambert, and he will instruct you."  Hubert entered the priesthood and rose to the rank of Bishop of Liege, which he occupied until his death, at which point his priest son took over that position.  Both are saints.

According to the legend of his encounter, the deer also lectured St. Hubert on having higher regard for animals and engaging in human hunting practices, including taking old stags beyond their prime breeding years, and also to take sick or injured animals even if it meant passing up on a shot at atrophy.  There's more to it, but St. Hubert is accordingly still  held in high regard in Germany, Austria and France among hunters and ethical hunting principals taught in European hunting societies are attributed to him.

Anyhow, the deer was like that one depicted, but lacked of course the cross.  That would have been life altering to say the least, but at least day altering was the fact that I rose my rifle up, shot, and missed.

Now, I'm a good shot and this totally perplexed me, as did missing a second shot from a greater distance.  After all of this, I shot at a couple of rocks at varying distances to see if something had happened to my rifle's zero.  Nope, it was right on.

I have no idea what happened.  Suffice it to say it was frustrating.

We stayed out but never saw another buck deer.  Only does.

On the way in, when we hit the junction with 287, it was like a parade.  Vehicles coming home in the dark from UW's Homecoming Game.  Something I've never seen, not even when I lived in Laramie.

It was also getting a lot colder and it was clearly going to snow.

It wasn't in the morning, however, and therefore the plan to get up and attend the 8:00 a.m. Mass across town seemed a solid one.  "Across town" was now the required option as the Priest at our parish changed the Mass time at the downtown church from 8:00 to 9:00, also moving the 11:00 to 11:30. This is part of a demographic change I understand, but it also means that those of us long habituated to 8:00 (at one time it was 7:30) now have to find another parish.

On the way out of the church after Mass, it was snowing.  And on the road home, it was snowing heavily.  By the time I checked the WYDOT site, the roads in and out of Laramie had closed. They'd closed in fact pretty early.

This proved to be particularly problematic for my daughter who had academic matters at UW she could not miss.  By noon it appeared it was not going to change and I decided to head back out hunting (I don't mind hunting in bad weather), but Long Suffering Spouse informed me that "you better wait until you see what they're going to do", which amounted to an instruction not to leave in anticipation of having to do something.

Now, Long Suffering Spouse has a unique manner of speech in which, when she wants somebody to do something, or somebody to correct something they are doing, rather than address the person directly, she comments on "People".  For instance, rather than say "Please take out the garbage" or simply command "Take out the garbage", she'll say "People need to take out the garbage".  This is something she comes by naturally as a learned behavior and its not going to be possible to break it, but it can be baffling if you are in a group. When she directs the comment to "people", there's only one of the people who it's being addressed to and she knows who it is.  That's not so obvious to other people.

About 2:30 she came into a room where I was reading and somewhat dozing and announced that "If people need to really get to Laramie they may need to go to Cheyenne and up through Ft. Collins".  As a little earlier in the day the possibility if me driving my daughter to Laramie if the roads opened up was discussed, while allowing my son to wait until the next day, and as I was the only one in the room, it was pretty clear to me that I was the "people" and this meant, "You need to drive her to Laramie and should plan on going through Ft. Collins".  She then went out to shovel snow.

I addressed my daughter on the topic and she was wanting to go for the aforementioned reasons so she packed right up, we loaded up in the old Dodge diesel truck and turned it on.  Long Suffering Spouse then came to the driver's window and asked "what are you doing?"  I informed her we were leaving, just as she'd instructed, and she disclaimed having done that.  I dismissed it and we headed off.

That may seem odd, but part of the "People" line of speech can be accompanied, if there's a decision to be made, by a long deliberative process.  This gets into our Ninth Law of Behavior, but Long Suffering Spouse really likes to debate options prior to making a decision, and if at all possible, to have somebody else make them.  It's not uncommon for options to be presented, for me to make a decision, and then still find options being presented well after the decision has been made.

This is a process that makes people who have that inclination comfortable and its hardly unique to her.  I've had at least one employee who was so extreme on it that absolutely nothing the employee did wasn't subject to a request for input, no matter how minor it was.  That's not the case here, it's just her decision making style.

That style, however, doesn't lend itself to making decision that need to be made immediately and I simply dismissed her question as being the typical one we'd have, in which a decision has been made and now we're getting extra options. We even do this on the way to dinner when we eat out.  Options are presented, I'm asked to make the decision, I do, and then on the way there, additional options are added.  Given as it was 3:00 p.m. and I was off for a long ride down and back, I left before additional options could be added, as there did not appear to be any.

The roads down to Cheyenne weren't great, but they weren't horrible either.  By the time we got to Cheyenne the Happy Jack Road was open to local traffic only, but by my reasoning Laramie is local.  So we turned off to take it.

But not before a Highway Patrolman stopped me on I80 on the portion of the road where it was closing.  He whipped around with flashing lights so I pulled over.  He then announced on his bull horn that I couldn't stop on the side of the road.

I was only stopped on the side of the road as he'd pulled me over.  He never even got out of his patrol car.

Anyhow, we found Happy Jack Road, which I haven't been on for more than thirty years, and started up it.  The road was in excellent shape. . . until the top.

The ten or fifteen miles on the summit were horrific and were among the worst roads I'd ever been on.  But we made it to Laramie without incident after a white knuckler up on top.

By the time I made it to Laramie, 287 and 487 were open, so I headed home the normal way.  Roads weren't awful, even if stretches weren't great, and I made it home about 10:00 p.m., much earlier than I expected, but late for me.

It turned out I'd totally misinterpreted Long Suffering Spouse's "People" instruction and in fact she had only brought the topic up as an interesting topic of discussion with no intention whatsoever to send anyone off on such a trip.  Indeed, it turned out she was horrified the entire time and didn't think anyone should have hit the road at all.

I'd been up since about 3:00 a.m. and so when we got home, about dark, I was pretty tired.  That evening, however, my son suddenly recalled that he'd meant to tell me that there'd been a little water on the floor down at my mother's old house.  He attributed it to condensation from the water heater as the thermostat had been set low and it had turned cold.  I feared something else.

I was right.  The bottom of the gas water heater had rusted through.  This was confirmed the second I saw the water heater, which was at about 11:00 p.m.

In my son's defense, he hadn't experienced this before and he's been fortunate to grow up in a house with very few plumbing problems.  Thinking back it seems to me that our home when I was a kid was constantly afflicted with plumbing problems.  I suspect hat this is one of those areas in which the march of technology has made things much more reliable, as it has with automobiles.  When I was a kid, the man of the house working on plumbing at least once a year was pretty normal, and I'd experienced prior water heater failures.  Now, this is pretty rare.

It took us about two hours to get the tank drained and the water turned off.  The plumbers came the next day and installed a new one.

Going to bed at 1:00 a.m. doesn't mean I get to sleep in the next day and so it was off to work at the normal time. Before that, however, I got a text that our ceiling was leaking at work.

And indeed it was.

Very recently the air conditioning system was worked on and it was immediately and ocrrectly suspected that this had something to do with the leak.  The leak was quickly addressed once somebody came to work on it, but that wasn't until about 3:00 p.m.

So during the day, it became leakier.

It's now fixed.

On the way out of the building in the evening, which was on my way to an evening meeting I had scheduled, the young Asian woman who is always very friendly asked what the floor sheet on the elevator was for.  She's among the very best dressed people in the building and was wearing either a white fur or faux fur.  "Ceiling leak" I replied.  "Old building", she replied back in her very thick accent (I've never been really sure where she's actually from, I'd like to ask, but I don't want to appear rude in doing so).

Well maybe.  But sort of just one of those things, recently.

Casper Daily Press for May 1, 1918.

We return today to the Casper newspaper.

The headline was correct, actually.  The Germans were stalling out massively in the second stage of the 1918 spring offensive.  And they were making a massive effort, commencing on May 1, to move large numbers of troops to the West.

Not that this didn't pose its challenges.  Only yesterday the Germans had help Ukraine take Sevastopol from the putative Crimean soviet republic.  This was accompanied by the Ukrainian navy moving its ships out of harms way for the time being, although the Germans occupied those that were left.  Lenin ordered their commander to scuttle them, and he refused, showing a Ukrainian navy that proved more loyal to Ukraine in 1918 than it did a couple of years back when it basically defected to Russia.  And the Germans were fighting in Finland against the Red Finns for the White Finns.

Nonetheless, they were moving troops west now, which they should have done months ago.  Having taken massive casualties in the spring offensive, they had little choice.

Eddie Rickenbacker, who really was a race car driver, made his appearance in the paper as a fighter pilot on this day, at least in the local paper, for the first time, thereby achieving the role for which he is remembered.

And Mother's Day was coming up.

So its Easter Sunday, March 31, 1918.

 Church of the Ascension in Hudson Wyoming.  I don't live in Hudson, but this Catholic Church in the small town is just about the same size as the original St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church where I would have attended, everything else being equal, in 1918.  Because of the huge boom that occurred in my home town during World War One, that original church was taken down and the current church built during the late teens with the new church being completed in 1920.

Which, if you read this on a timely basis, means that you are reading it on Holy Saturday, 2018.

Let's look back on your Easter Sunday of that year, assuming of course that you are somebody situated like me, not assuming by extension that you are a young man in an Army camp somewhere that's being ravaged by the flu, or in France fighting against the German onslaught.

One thing you'd have to endure is the very first occurance of Daylight Savings Time, on this day in 1918.

So the US endured the ravages of false time for the first time on this day in 1918.

 

Oh, the humanity.

 

A sleepy nation "sprang forward".  And on Easter Sunday, no less.

So let's assume that you are in fact somebody like me living in the region I do.

If that were the case, you'd be living in what was still a small town, but an enormously expanding one due to a tremendous oil boom (something I've experienced at least twice, in fact, in my own life).  You  have an office job, but maybe you have an interest in cattle too, or perhaps farming, somehow, although mixing professions would have been much, much, more difficult in 1918 than in 2018, although it did actually occur.  If you had a military age son, as I do, you'd almost certainly have seen him off at the local train station, or in our case one of the two local train stations, last year.

And you'd be worried.

So how would the day go?

Well then, like now, most people would have attended a Church service on this Easter morning.  There's a really common widespread belief that religious adherence was universal in the first part of the 20th Century and has sadly declined markedly now but  that is in fact mostly a myth on both scores.  And part of that is based upon the region of the country you live in, and it was then as well.  But Easter Sunday, like Christmas, is always a big event and many people who don't attend a service otherwise, do on those days.  Others, like me, go every Sunday and of course adherent Catholics and Orthodox go every Sunday and Holy Day.

Now, one feature of the times that has changed is that by and large people tended to marry outside of their faith much less often and people's adherence to a certain faith was notably greater.  Currently, we often tend to hear of "Protestants and Catholics", but at the time not only would you have heard that, but people were much more likely to be distinctly aware of the difference between the various Protestant faiths.  And this often tended to follow a strongly economic and demographic base as well.  People of Scottish background, for example, tended to be Presbyterians.  The richest church at the time was the Episcopal Church and if people moved within Protestant denominations it tended to be in that direction.  I know to people here in town, for example, who made a move in that direction in their pre World War Two marriages, although one of those individuals, who married prior to World War One, went from the Catholic Church to the Episcopal Church, which was quite unusual.  In the other the individual went from the Presbyterian Church to the Episcopal Church, which was not unusual.  In both of the instances I'm aware of the men adopted the faiths of their brides to be in order to marry them.

People of "mixed marriages", i.e., where the couple were of different faiths, did of course exist so this can be taken much too far.  Even then it wasn't terribly uncommon for Catholics to be married to Protestants, although it was much less common than it is now, with the couple attending the Catholic Church.  Marriages involving Christians and Jews were much less common but also did occur, with at least the anecdotal evidence being that this also tended to be something in which the Jewish person married (it seems) a Catholic and they attended the Catholic Church.  I'm sure that this also occurred between Protestants and Jews but it's harder to find immediate examples.  In the area we're talking about, however, the Jewish demographic was so small that it would have been practically unnoticeable, although it was sufficiently large in Cheyenne such that a synagogue had gone in there in 1915 and it was about to be absorbed, in 1919, by a new Orthodox Jewish community.  I don't know if Jewish people even had a place that they could attend services of their own in this era, here in this town.  I doubt it. But I don't doubt that there were Jewish residents of the town by 1918.

What was hugely uncommon at the time were "mixed marriages" in terms of two different "races".  As I've noted here before, however, the concept of "race" is a purely human construct and what this means is not the same in any one era.  Because of the oil boom in Casper, Casper was starting to have a black and Hispanic community, and both of those groups have "race" status in the United States today, and then did then as well.  Mix marriages between blacks and whites, while not illegal in Wyoming as they were in some areas of the country, would have been completely socially unacceptable at that time.

Marriages between Hispanics and "whites" were certainly uncommon at that time, but that barrier was never as stout.  For one thing Hispanics were co-religious with various other groups that had "race" status earlier and that caused the boundaries to break down pretty quickly in some regions.  The Irish, Italians, Slavs and Greeks all had "race" status at the start of the 20th Century but by even World War One that had basically disappeared in the case of the Irish and it was disappearing for the other groups as well.  It had not, and still has not, for Hispanics but the "no mixed marriages" social taboo was not as strong.  It was oddly not as strong in regards to men marrying Indian women either.

All of which is only introductory to noting that on this Easter Sunday, March 31, 1918, you'd likely have gone to church with your family in the morning, assuming all of your family was in town, which if you had a young male in your household, wouldn't have been true.

Before you did that, however, you likely would have picked up a newspaper from your front step.

Now, I've been running newspapers here really regularly for a couple of years and that may have created a bit of a mis-impression.  Quite frequently, when I run newspapers, I run the Cheyenne paper or the Laramie paper.  I don't run the Casper paper nearly as often although I do occasionally.  I hardly ever run a paper like the Douglas paper, and Douglas is just fifty miles from Casper and much closer to Casper than Cheyenne.

Why do I do that?

Well, because there was a huge difference in Wyoming newspapers at the time.

Cheyenne and Laramie had excellent newspapers.  I think the Laramie Boomerang, which still exists, was a better paper then than it is now, which is not to say it's bad now.  But a feature of those papers is that they were all on the Union Pacific rail line and they were Associated Press papers.

Casper's newspapers had never been really bad, but they were much more isolated going into the early teens.  They only became contenders, sort of, in terms of quality in 1917 when the big oil boom caused buyouts in the local newspaper market and the quality really started to improve.  Immediate global news became more common in the papers.  Unfortunately, at the same time, a sort of massive economic myopic boosterism also set in and on some days, many days, there was nothing but oil news in them.

Some other local papers, like Sheridan's, were pretty good, but others were strictly local news.  So if you got the Douglas paper in Douglas, it was just all local happenings. Hardly any global news at all.

And that really matters.

There was no other source of news, other than letters, in 1918.

In the entire United States there were just a handful of commercial radio stations. In fact, those stations were;  KQW in San Jose California, WGY in Schenectady New York, KGFX in Pierre South Dakota, and KDKA in Pittsburgh, absent some university experimental stations and a couple that did Morse Code transmissions only.  Early radio, moreover, until the 1920s, was practically a hobby type of deal and a person depending upon radio, where there was radio, for the news would have been a rather optimistic person.

So, no radio, not television, no Internet.  The newspaper was it.

So if you relied upon a paper like the early ones in Douglas, you'd know that the State Fair was doing well, how local events were going, and that Miss. Barbara Jean Romperoom visited her aunt Tille for three days before returning to Chicago.

You wouldn't have been aware that the Germans were knocking on the door of Paris.

You'd be doing better if you read the Casper paper, after wading through the Oil!, Oil! Oil! hysteria, but not as well as you would have been if you were reading the Cheyenne paper.

Which maybe you were.

 No really cheerful news on the cover of this Easter addition of the Cheyenne State Leader.

Newspapers being so important at the time, traveled. Indeed they did well into the 1980s.  When I was a kid you could buy the Cheyenne Tribune Eagle, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, every day, from newsstands, in Casper.  Now you sure can't.  Indeed the Rocky Mountain News doesn't even exist, having been bought out by the less impressive Denver Post.

Now, in 1918, they couldn't have trucked the paper up from Denver and Cheyenne every day early in the morning, but they could have put them on the train and I suspect they did, at least with the Cheyenne paper. That is, I suspect that sometime that day, or the next day, a reader in Casper was able to pick up the Cheyenne papers.  I didn't know that for sure, but that was the general practice of the day.  It's no accident that the really major newspapers in Wyoming were all on the Union Pacific.  So I'd guess that perhaps the Cheyenne papers, if they didn't come overnight (and they may have) arrived late that day or the next and were available at newsstands, which did exist at the time.  Indeed, one such stand existed in the "lobby" of my office building, which had gone up in 1917, at a stand that also sold cigars. Don't they all?

  The office.  It had a newsstand and cigar shop in the small lobby originally.  Another cigar shop that sold papers for many years was just on the corner.

So my guess is that if you lived on a rail line, you were probably able to pick up the Cheyenne papers, and maybe the Denver papers, if perhaps on a day late basis.

So, let's get back to the day.

Chances are that you picked up the daily paper (there were two different ones, maybe you picked up both) from your front step about 5:00 a.m., assuming the local paper published on Sunday, which not all of them did.   You likely read it as you waited to go to Church.  If you are Catholic or Orthodox, you didn't eat anything as you couldn't break the Sunday morning fast.  Indeed, if you were Orthodox, and there were some Greek Orthodox in this region at the time, you were in an interesting situation as your faith had no church and, at that time, no pastor.  As a rule, you went to the Catholic Church instead, although perhaps a traveling Priest would come up next weekend for Orthodox Easter, which was a week behind that year.  If so, he'd use the Catholic Church for his Easter service.

Of course if you were Catholic or Orthodox, and you had a resident pastor, you could have gone the night prior to the Easter Vigil and you may have well done so. Given as that's the preference for my family, I'll assume that would have also been the case in 1918.  If that was the case, I'd be firing up the cook stove for coffee.  If you are a President, and had no pre service fast, you likely would have done that anyhow.

So, I'd fire up the cook stove and boil coffee, probably before anyone was up, put out the dog, and wait for other people to get up. I know that I'd have to wake my wife up, as she has a long standing tradition of Easter morning minor gifts that have replaced hidden eggs as the kids have grown older.  This year, that is 1918, it'd be sad and worrisome of course, as it'd be unlikely that our son would be here.

If I felt energetic, maybe I'd start breakfast.  I don't see us going out for breakfast in 1918, although that was just as much of an option in most places as it is in 2018. Frankly, I've never liked eating out after Church on Sunday mornings as I feel that it sort of occupies a lot of time involving sitting around eating a lot more then I normally would.  I'd have likely felt that way then.  My wife and my late mother, I'd note, feel very much differently so who knows.

So, at some point, I'd have read the local news.  Me being who I am, if the Cheyenne papers came in by train in the morning, at some point in the morning I'd have likely fired up the Model T, which would likely have acquired, and driven downtown to the station to buy one.

 A 1910 manufacture Ford Model T in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Model Ts had been out for fifteen years by this time and were becoming quite common.

And so, as a newspaper reading person, what would we have learned and have known that Easter of 1918?

Well, what we would have known is that the Allies were in serious trouble.  We'd have been constantly reading this pat week of a massive German offensive that was throwing the British, against whom it seemed primarily aimed, back.   We'd have also know that the Germans had resorted to the shocking measure of shelling Parish with some new huge long range artillery.  Every recent issue of the newspapers would have asserted that the Germans were slowing down and would soon be thrown back, but it sure hadn't happened yet.

We would have also seen it claimed (and not terribly accurately, we'll note) that the Americans were taking a role in the fighting, although we would also have seen that just a couple of days ago Pershing volunteered to deploy US troops to the fighting, which wouldn't have made a lot of sense if they were actually fighting already.

And that might have caused us a lot of concern if we had a relative in the Army, let alone if we had a son in the Army.

And if we were in that position, we might know more about the status of the Army in March 1918 than the average paper reader who was reading about our "Sammies", as the press oddly called them.

If you were in that position, your son (or other relatives) would have ended up in the Army one of three ways.  They could have been 1) drafted; or 2) joined the Army prior to the draft taking over everything; or 3) they could have been in the National Guard.

Indeed, they could have been in the National Guard even if they hadn't been until after war was declared.

That's actually an oddity that can still occur, and it was quite common in 1917.  For that matter, while a little different, quite a few men joined the National Guard in 1940 after it had been mobilized for the emergency.  There were strong incentives to do so as it allowed you to serve with people you knew, where you were from.  And in 1917, when the Guard was called back up, after having been demobilized from the Punitive Expedition's border service, the tradition that carried over from the Civil War of mustering state units was still sufficient strong that the states were raising Guard units as state units that were larger than their peacetime establishment.  Indeed, Wyoming not only called back up the infantrymen who had recently been on the Mexican border, but added new infantrymen to them, and planned on trying to raise an entire regiment of cavalry.  It didn't get that far with the cavalry, however.

Men who had been drafted after war was declared and also men who had volunteered were still in training all over the United States. But many prewar regulars and some National Guardsmen were already in France, undergoing training there.  Those infantrymen had gone to Camp Greene, North Carolina as the 3d Infantry Regiment, Wyoming National Guard.  At Camp Greene, however, they were soon converted into part of the 148th Field Artillery, as artillery, and the 116th Ammunition Train of the 41st Division.  The 41st had been established just five days before the declaration of war and it as an all National Guard division.  The 148th Field Artillery was an artillery unit made up of National Guardsmen from the Rocky Mountain region, only some of whom had been artillerymen before the war.  Conversion of the Wyoming infantrymen into artillerymen spoke highly of them, as artillery was a considerably more complicated role than infantry.  Conversion of the remainder into the 116th Ammunition Train spoke to their experience with horses and freighting, both of which were a necessary element of that role.

The 41st had already gone to France and it had been one of the five U.S. Divisions sent over by this time.  However, it met with bad luck when the SS Tuscania was sunk on February 5, as the men on it were of the 41st.  We earlier dealt with that disaster here:

SS Tuscania Sunk, February 5, 1918.

SS Tuscania

The first US troops ship to be sunk during World War One, the SS Tuscania, went down due to German torpedos launched by the UB-77.  210 lives were lost.

It was only briefly dealt with in the local papers, and no doubt not much was known at the time, but some of the passengers on the Tuscania were Wyoming Guardsmen.  I don't know if any of them went down with her.  By March 31, anyone with relatives who died when the ship sank knew it.  Wyoming Guardsmen definitely witnessed the sinking from a nearby vantage.

Gen. Pershing only had five divisions of men in France, all trained, but he needed a source of immediate replacements.  The 41st Division became that source.  Units of unique value, like artillery, were taken out of it wholesale.  The 148th was equipped there with French 155mm guns, large artillery pieces, and also equipped with French artillery tractors.  They thereby became highly mobile, highly modern, heavy field artillery and were soon to be split out of the 41st in that role, if they hadn't been already.  The 116th Ammunition Train, however, went to Tours with the rest of the 41st and waited there to be pieced out as replacements, a sad end to the division.

French 155 GPF gun. This is the same type of artillery piece used by the Wyoming National Guard during World War One. They had not yet fired their first shot in anger.  A version of this gun would serve alongside a more modern 155 all the way through 1945.

You'd be unlikely to know much about that, however, unless you had letters home that might raise the question.  And they might.  If your son or loved one was an artilleryman, you might have had a hint about the fate of the Tuscania and that the unit was training with French artillery pieces.  If your son was in the 116th Ammunition train you might have received a disappointing letter from Tours.

You'd be worried either way as the papers were full of reports about Americans going into action, which wasn't happening much yet.

Well all that would be pretty grim to think about for Easter, wouldn't have it been?

Well, sometime mid day we'd likely gather for an Easter Dinner with relatives. Chances are really good that it'd feature ham, but that ham would likely be boiled ham.

You've likely never had boiled ham.  I never have.  But I recall my father speaking about it and he wasn't a huge fan. Boiling drove off the salt that was part of the curative brine and it took quite awhile.  Of course there's be other good foods as well, including likely pie.

My guess is that there's be beer too.  Maybe wine. And perhaps some whiskey.

The day would likely wrap up about 5:00 p.m. or so, and then back home. Back home would probably entail some reading, and some worrying as well.  If you are like me, that would entail worrying about the next days work, but it surely would have entailed worrying about what was going on over in France.

The local news, June 2, 1916. The Battle of Jutland hits the news. . . but not quite accurately.

Residents of Cheyenne were waking up to the shocking news that the British had a "naval disaster", something that was far from the truth.

This is interesting in several respects.  One is that it still took some time for news of naval engagements, not surprisingly, to hit the wire services.  That isn't surprising.  The other interesting thing is, of course, the matter of perception. Today we'd regard the Battle of Jutland as a British victory or, at worst, a draw, albeit one with some serious British losses. At the time, however, the press, at least locally, was weighing the British losses to conclude the Royal Navy had been beaten.

It's also important to note, however, the propaganda aspect of this. 

As noted, the British effort at Jutland was to keep the German High Seas Fleet in harbor, or to sink it. Either way, the British had to keep it from breaking out into the North Atlantic.  If the Germans had managed to do that, the Germans may have seriously contested for control of the North Atlantic.  Indeed, what would have occurred is a big spike in the loss of commercial shipping, the probable near complete shut down of the sea life line to the Allies at this critical point in the war, and a massive game of cat and mouse until one or the other of the fleets got the advantage of the other. There's no real way to tell how that would have come out.

So, the British effort, as we know, was to keep the Germans from breaking out, either by keeping them bottled up, or destroying the fleet. An outright destruction of an opposing force would have been a great thing for the navy achieving it, but very risky at the same time.

It's widely assumed now that the Royal Navy had such an advantage in the final maneuvers at Jutland that it could have in fact destroyed the German Navy.  But what it it had?  It would have made little difference to the war effort, as the Allies could not effect a sea landing on the German coast. So the risk entailed in achieving that had to be weighed against the risk of loosing the British fleet.  If that had occurred, the Germans, absent a sudden American intervention, would have won the war within a matter of months. Even in the highly unlikely scenario of the United States intervening in 1916, it's quite uncertain that the US could have swept the Germans from the North Atlantic.  Jellicoe was right not to risk it.

In not risking it, of course, he was risking a later German outbreak, and the British had to live with that.  But, hindsight being 20/20, what actually occurred is that the German navy became an expensive liability to Germany.  It was impossible, in those days, not to keep the ships basically ready to put to sea at any time, which meant that the Germans had to consume expensive resources simply to keep the fleet.  Having determined not to use it again, the Germans would have been better off simply docking the entire thing and walking away from it, but no nation can do that.  So, the Germans consumed fuel, oil  and rations for something it could ill afford and didn't need.  German sailors, in turn, became radicalized and actually sparked the rebellion in 1918 that would bring Imperial Germany down.

The only part of the German Navy that remained viable was the submarine wing of it. But it was primitive and figured outside the morals of the Edwardian world.  Indeed, it quite frankly figures outside the morals of the world of 2016 as well.  Primitive ships that were barely able to engage in combat underwater, they relied upon stealth and darkness for cover, and normally attacked on the surface.  Tiny ships, they couldn't pick up the survivors of their attacks as a rule, and a single merchant seaman determining to fight on with small arms could sink them.  And yet Imperial Germany had to turn to them.

Before that, however, its High Seas Fleet would go back into harbor. Germany would report the British losses, which were truly grater than its own, and the Press would react as if it was a German victory, as seen here.

It wasn't.

So, on the day thousands lost their lives violently at sea, what did the local news look like? May 31, 1916

Well, given that the Battle of Jutland was a naval battle, we can't expect it to show up in the day's news, even the late editions, at all.

Indeed, something that's easy to forget about the battle, as we tend to think of the later battles of World War Two a bit more (which also features some large surface engagements, contrary to the myth to the contrary) is that World War One naval battles were exclusively visual in nature.

That's not to say that radio wasn't used, it most certainly was. But targeting was all visual.  And as the battle took place in the North Sea, dense fog and hanging smoke played a prominent role in the battle.

Now, we note that, as while the British and German fleets were using radio communications, they weren't broadcasting the news, and they wouldn't have done that even if it were the 1940s.  And the radio communications were there, but exclusively military.  News of the battle had to wait until the fleets returned home, which is interesting in that the Germans were closer to their ports, so closer to press outlets.  Indeed, the point of the battle was to keep the Germans in port, or at the bottom of the sea.

So, on this day of a major battle, maybe in some ways the major battle of World War One, what news did local residents see?

The death of Mr. Hill, and the draft Roosevelt movement were receiving headline treatment in Sheridan.

I'm surprised that there was a University of Wyoming student newspaper for this day, as I would have thought that the university would have been out of school by then.  Maybe not.  However.  Interesting to note that this was published the day after Memorial Day, so it was a contemporary paper.  Now, the current paper, The Branding Iron, is weekly, I think.  The crises of the times show up in the form of UWs early ROTC making an appearance on Memorial Day.

Casper Daily Press for April 29, 1916

No Casper Daily Press was put up yesterday as the Friday edition, the Casper Weekly Press, was simply a copy of the prior day's edition.

Casper Daily Press for April 26, 1916

The Casper Daily Press for April 25, 1916.

And, a couple of days after it occurred, a new violent event for 1916, the Easter Rebellion, hit the news.

Casper had a lot of Irish expatriates at the time for whom this news would have been of intense interest.

What the crud, is this the This Day in 1916 blog or something?

Geez Louise!  First the Punitive Expedition, then all these 1916 newspapers, then the Easter Rebellion, and now the first Anzac Day, what the heck is up?

Well, as we've explained from time to time, this blog focuses on this time period and is really the reason the blog exists.  And, as odd as it may seem, the recent 1916 entries have a lot to do with our focus on the Punitive Expedition.

The reason that we've been posting the old newspapers is to put the Punitive Expedition in context, and by that we mean the context of the average person as they would have received the news every day.  But in receiving that news, they wouldn't have received it in a vacuum, even while they also wouldn't have received all of it instantly as it occurred.  And the entire picture of what they received is important.

In looking back on history, we tend to view big events as if they were the only events, and as if everyone was involved in them. But that's just not the way life works.  Even as major events occur, most people keep on with their day to day lives, worries, and concerns, unless they live in an area immediately impacted by the big events. This is true even if they had family members involved in them, whom they worried about, just as its true for us today.

So, while we've been looking at the Punitive Expedition, we've been filling in what else was going on, in an attempt to present the overall picture, both as it was, and as it would have been received at the time.

And what a picture it was.  1916, quite frankly, was awful.  War in Europe, near war with Mexico, rebellion in Ireland.  It was bad.

The Casper Daily Press for April 24, 1916.

And the train robberies come to an end.

William Carlyle, the robber, gave himself up rather than resort to violence.  Probably more misdirected than anything, he converted to Catholicism while in the penitentiary and became a model citizen.

The Casper Daily Press for Holy Saturday, April 22, 1916

Train robberies, something more associated with the 19th Century over the 20th Century, appear once again as the late famous series of those events in this year reoccurred in Wyoming.

And Casperites received the opportunity to appear as extras in a movie.

The Casper Weekly Press for Good Friday, April 21, 1916

Casper Daily Press for April 20, 1916

Casper Daily Press for April 19, 1916. Mexico, Germany and the early campaign for Henry Ford, yes that Ford, for President

This edition has a note about something we have largely forgotten.

Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motors, was a candidate for the Presidency in 1916.  He ran on the GOP ticket, and he took Nebraska's and Michigan's delegates that year.

That's all he took, but for a time Ford, who was of course a well known businessman (and of course that calls to mind Trump invariably) and an opponent of entry into World War One to such an extent that he opposed military preparation, which was a big ongoing deal at the time, did well in those two states and was a sort of serious contender.

 

Casper Daily Press for April 18, 1916

The following evening, the paper was doubting the news of Villa's demise the day prior, and in a whimsical fashion.

A civil war in China, amazingly enough, managed to make the front page, in spite of the nearer strife.

Casper Daily Press for April 17, 1916

The Casper paper, printing on Monday after a Sunday off, reports a rumor that turns out, as we know, to be in error.

If this seems odd, let's consider all the similar rumors about Osama Bin Laden  before he was ultimately killed in Pakistan.

The Casper Daily Press: April 15, 1916

In this edition we're reminded that Easter of 1916 was in mid April, unlike this year when it was in mid March.

Casper Weekly Press: April 14, 1916

The Friday Casper paper, oil taking its place besides the Punitive Expedition and the slow march of the US towards entering World War One.

The Wyoming Tribune: April 13, 1916

Back to a Cheyenne morning paper for today, lacking the Casper paper.

Casper Daily Press: April 12, 1916