August 25, 1919. Ely to Pinto House, Nevada with the Motor Transport Convoy, London to Parish with Aircraft Transport & Travel, back to Texas with the 8th Cavalry, north to the Stampede in Alberta.

American cemetery at Belleau Wood, photograph taken on August 25, 1919.

On this day in 1919, a photographer was at work taking photographs of the recent American battle ground of Belleau Wood.

View of Chateau Thierry and the famous bridge where the Marine stopped the Hun hoards on their march on Paris, taken on August 25, 1919.

Things picked up a bit on this Monday, August 25, 1919, for the Motor Transport Convoy, although they now suffered a mechanical failure beyond their ability to address.

Other soldiers, much further south, had come back across the border.  The most significant US incursion into Mexico since the Punitive Expedition had come to an end.

As with the last, this incursion had featured the use of aircraft fairly extensively.  In this case, the press was reporting that aircraft had proven decisive by resulting in the deaths from a strafing run by U.S. planes.  The expedition had also started, of course, due to aircraft when U.S. airmen had been held hostage by Mexican bandits.

Also occurring on this day was another significant aircraft related event.  The predecessor to British Airways, Aircraft Transport & Travel Ltd., commenced the first regularly scheduled commercial channel hopping flight.  That early ride between London and Paris must have been a bit frightening to the passengers, but clearly pointed the direction of the future.

The flight was made in an Airco DH16, an plane that was converted from the wartime DH9.  It could hold four passengers.

North of the border, in Alberta, the 1919 Calgary Stampede commenced, but this year it was termed "The Victory Stampede".    The artwork of Charles Russell played a part in the big event that year.

If that seems surprising, Russell painted quite a few paintings with Alberta themes or for Alberta ranchers.  The ranch culture of Montana and Alberta were closely connected.

The first Calgary Stampede had been held in 1912. This was only the second. So it was not only first post war Stampede, but a real resumption and continuation of something that may not have become the big rodeo event that it did.

Maps and governments continued to change in Eastern Europe.  Today, the first Lithuanian Soviet Republic came to an end due to Polish occupation of the principal portions of its territory.  The USSR would reestablish it as a puppet state in 1939.

Harry Houdini was performing, but on film, in a movie featuring him that was released on this Monday.

Transportation disasters and milestones, and a draft war. July 9, 1918.

101, officially, (it may have been 121) people were killed and 175 injured in  a train collision of two trains belonging to the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway near Nashville.  Many were black munitions workers on their way to work in Nashville.

The locomotives were actually repaired and put back into service, being retired in 1947 and 1948.

It is the worst railroad accident in American history.

Elsewhere, and more specifically in Alberta, American aviatrix Katherine Stinson made the first airmail flight in Western Canada, flying a mail sack from Edmonton to Calgary.

Stinson had been flying for six years at the time and had already set air records. Indeed, she's figured on our blog before.  She would later become an architect and worked in that profession for may years.

In other news of the day, July 9, was day two of the Cleburne County Draft War in Arkansas.  The small armed conflict involved draft resisting members of the Jehovah's Witnesses who became involved in a gunfight with local law enforcement and then fled into the rural hills, picking up other draft resistors on the way.  The Arkansas National Guard responded to search for them.  The event would end in a few days, after the loss of one life in the conflict, when the resistors surrendered.  This was one of three "draft wars" in Arkansas, which was highly rural and retained strong aspects of the Southern ruralism at the time, which would occur during World War One.

Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (e). What about those other industries?

The shaded stool of Wyoming's other economic sectors.

More economics?

Yep.  We still haven't covered it all.

But then the candidates haven't either, and that's the point.

In the June 24 issue of the Star Tribune there's an article over concerns in the tiny Carbon County town of Rock River about a lack of housing there that threatens to soon become a problem due to an economic boom.

Coal coming back to Carbon County, you might be thinking?

And indeed, the last time southern Carbon County had a boom that's what brought it about.  But that one skipped Rock River.  Rock River last was doing really well a long time ago, although it still did well enough at some point that a relatively new modern school was put in there since the 1970s.

What the anticipated boom in this case would be caused by is an expiration in Federal wind power subsidies which is causing companies that put in wind farms to rush to try to get theirs in, and qualify, before the subsidy expires, which it is likely to do.

Wind turbines have been used for power generation since houses were first wired with electricity.  Indeed, one of the missions of the Rural Electric Administration was to get farmers and ranchers off of windmills in their yards and on to the grid.  Granted, the grid was probably safer than the wind generators of the time, but, none the less.

Now, this isn't an article on wind power.  I've had others on that topic. Rather, this is an article on the topic of "the other" industries that candidates in the election will vaguely reference, but rarely specifically actually address.

It's odd.

In part this doesn't occur as, at least now in the GOP, you just can't say "well. . . oil and gas is doing fine and coal isn't going to get better, so we better look at . . . .".  The official mantra is that coal will recover and oil and gas wouldn't be boom and bust if only the Federal government would stay out of things.  That's naive.

And we know that its naive at that, but we don't want to say too much.  It's sort of based on the power of wishful thinking thesis, but nobody wants to really deal with the decline of coal.

Which is all the odder when we consider that Wyoming at one time had a lot of other extractive industries.  Wyoming was an iron producer, for example, and was well into the second half of the 20th Century.  And Wyoming was a major uranium producer.  All that is no longer the case, due to market forces. Uranium, I'm pretty convinced, will come back.  But you only have to go to Shirley Basin to see that its gone.  There's no town there, where once there was a mining town there.

But there are windmills there, that's for sure.

Wind mill installation has become a big deal in Wyoming. That doesn't mean you could plan an economic future on it, as installation is like petroleum exploration.  It isn't really steady.  It goes in, and then you have the infrastructure.  So, for places like Rock River and Medicine Bow, you have to deal with the boom in construction followed by a bust, but the infrastructure and the jobs associated with it, remain.  And they remain for a very, very, long time.

Now, this post isn't the "why aren't the candidates speaking about wind power" post, although so far they don't seem to be.  It's the "what are those other economic areas" they vaguely reference?

This is probably too broad of category to make a fair post about, frankly, but some attention does need to be given to it. There are a lot of economic activities in Wyoming and we've addressed a lot of them.  But not all by any means. When candidates speak of "improving the economy", what are they talking about.

Some candidates, to be fair, have made specific references to other areas.  Galeotos and Throne have both spoken about technology, although oddly Galeotos was sort of uncharacteristically hostile to the topic in one instances, assuming the Tribune is reporting that accurately, as Throne seemed to get to it first.  Having said that, Throne and Galeotos both have spoken about trying to harness the computerized technological advances of recent years to Wyoming's benefit, and they seem to have some concepts, vague though they may be, about how that would work.

Hageman seems outright hostile to any discussion that doesn't involve 100% application of Wyoming's traditional industries, by which she is pinning her hopes on the extractive industries.  That doesn't seem to show much vision at all, but she's not the only one who likely looks at the economy in that fashion.  If you are in a line of work, and most Wyomingites are not, which is somewhat insulated from booms and busts, that is in fact an attractive way to look at things. . . somewhat.  It has its own problems no matter what, but suffice it to say if you are a small business owner or a laborer, this view really has its problems.

Other candidates simply promise to fix the economy.  Foster Freiss, for example, notes that he's a successful businessman and he can be trusted to fix the economy. Well, being so successful that you can keep a home in Jackson and another in Arizona means something, but what it doesn't mean is that you know anything whatsoever about Wyoming's economy.

And a lot of things go into an economy.  You can't just "fix" them.  Economies are natural in a way (although the corporate capitalist model we have is not a "natural economy" in the pure sense).  That's a big aspect of the economy that the candidates haven't really addressed in a full on way, although some have topically.

As an economic unit, the state, the state has to play to its strengths and attempt to build some where they are lacking.  Some have noted that, and that's particularly noted by people who are strongly reliant on the extractive industries. But it is missing in regards to other things, such as agriculture, in the discussion.

Be that as  it may, there's been little (some, but not much) reference to our weaknesses. Those weaknesses are specifically what the ENDOW study looked at.

There's a lot about Wyoming that makes development of its economy outside of the existing areas its strong in tough.  We lack good transportation and we lack intra state air travel nearly entirely.  We have no passenger rail at all.  Travel during the winter season can be death defying. . . or in fact deadly.

It's also popular to note that we have no major urban areas, but in fact we do.

Wyoming does have a major regional city.  Or actually two such cities.

And those cities are Denver Colorado and Salt Lake City Utah.  Maybe more than that.

Now, that may sound like I'm missing something, but the opposite is true.

Wyoming does have its own culture within the regional culture.  But we have to acknowledge that it is still part of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Northern Plains. And that matters as, at the end of the day, while the states and provinces (did I say provinces, as in Canadian provinces, why yes I did) have their own cultures, their boundaries are not natural ones, for the most part, and therefore they do not have the geographic impact of natural boundaries.  The line separating Wyoming from Colorado, in other words, is not the Rhine River or the Atlas Mountains.  It's just a line.  That line is real in various ways, but you can cross it and never know.

Indeed, as an aside, when a student in Laramie I had a deer license in southern Wyoming and the only really good place I could find to hunt was so near Colorado in those pre GPS days that I constantly worried about crossing into Colorado.  I'm really good with a topographic map, but none the less I worried about it.  Oddly enough, I was hunting in an area where there was a very large stream, a proto river, present and instinctively you found yourself thinking that "across the river is Colorado".  Not so much.

Anyhow, we live in age of increasingly improved transportation and communications. And we live in an age in which economic consolidation has moved towards the cities.  It's been often noted by demographers that, over a long period of time, indeed a period of time exceeding a century, Americans have been leaving rural areas for cities, and leaving towns and small cities for big cities.

Whether this is good or bad is another matter.  Frankly, I feel its nearly universally a negative trend. But it being a negative trend doesn't mean it isn't a trend.  And in our region, that has meant that for much of Wyoming Denver Colorado is the regional hub. For far western Wyoming, that hub is Salt Lake City.  And that's the way it is.

That may be more fine with most Wyomingites than we care to admit (and I'll have more in that in an exciting conclusion to this series) but the truth of the matter is that our major hubs are regional. Denver and Salt Lake City.  If you expand out just a bit, the hubs also include Calgary, St. Paul, Minnesota and Houston Texas.

If you feel otherwise, consider the evidence.  I've worked with and for people in the oil industry who worked in Denver and had bosses in Calgary or Houston.  If you grew up in Wyoming and have an advanced degree, other than in medicine, veterinary medicine, dental medicine, law or accounting there's a really good chance that you moved to Denver, Salt Lake or St. Paul.  Shoot, a lot of Wyomingites end up moving to Denver or Salt Lake simply due to economic reasons, irrespective of their educations.  That includes individuals with nearly no education, and those with advanced degrees.  One friend of mine with an advanced degree grew up outside of Hanna, worked in the mines for awhile, before ended up with what will be a life long career in Denver.  Pretty typical.

And this is the way it is, and we're not changing it.

So, when we speak of those other areas, we have to accept the geographic and economic realities, including that we can't really change a lot of that.

So what are our plans, really?

Caring for the dying

 My mother, as a young woman.

My mother, age 90, is dying.

This isn't a sudden thing.  She was remarkably physically good health up until her mid 80s, when things began to fall apart.  It impacted her mind first, and not kindly.  She had always been a very physically active person, riding a bike and swimming daily, up until she was about 85 years old, when she suddenly quit. That's when I knew that I couldn't ignore things anymore.

Not that it wasn't obvious before that. 

It's a long story I care not to repeat, but her mind had been deteriorating for some time, but she was still able to live on her own and she loved doing so.

Now, on that, perhaps a bit of that is a rationalization on my part.  My father and I were very, very close, and I miss my father dearly to this day.  He died when he was 62 years old after becoming suddenly ill.  The anniversary of that death, in fact, is coming right up.  I'm 52 years old now.  My father's father died when he was in his late 40s, and they were very close as well.  I think that weighted heavily on his mind, particularly as he came up to and then passed that age.  I know that as I begin to see 62 on the horizon its on my mind, but then I didn't expect to make it out of here alive anyhow.

And I'm seeing that advanced old age has not been kind to my mother.  Nor has it been kind to most of her siblings.  It hasn't been the same for all of her siblings, all but one of whom have lived into advanced old age.  Some, including one of my uncles, have remained very mentally sharp.  But others have endured what my mother has.  Seeing it, I hope that I'm spared that, and frankly if Providence should provide it, while I'd like to live long enough to see my children well established as adults and enjoy their adult company, I don't know that I'd like to endure the ravages of extreme old age.  I know that its been horrible to watch.

 My mother, center, as a little girl.

And given this, I've thought a lot about how I've generally handled it and frankly sometimes considered how things like this were handled in prior times.  Frankly, I don't know that they were handled all that much differently, to some degree, in our fluid North American society.

 My mother, far left, with her sister and her oldest brother, Terry, in his Canadian Army uniform prior to his going to Europe in World War Two.  Of those depicted, Terry and Brenda (second from right), in addition to my mother, are still living.

My mother is originally from St. Lambert, Quebec.  She was born there and grew up there with her extended family of siblings.  Born in 1925, the family hit very hard times during the Great Depression.  Indeed, it's generally not realized that the Great Depression hit harder in Canada than it did in the United States, but it did. The percentage of Canadians out of work exceeded that of Americans. Having said that, that Quebec, which is now a thing of the past, had a huge rural, French speaking, agrarian population.  My mother's family was an Irish-French urban family, and therefore not part of the agrarian population, although they shared the common faith that it had.  They principally spoke English, although everyone could speak French. Anyhow, she went to work in her mid teens as the family was in such desperate straights, working at first for the Canadian Pacific Railway.  In her 20s she moved out to Calgary and worked as an oil and gas secretary, before leaving that job, as the urging of her mother, in order to be bridesmaid for her youngest sister, who married in Denver Colorado.  Returning north after that she stopped here as we were having an oil boom and she thought it likely should could find work, which she did.  All in all, she was pretty adventuresome when young.

I'd be hard pressed to know who is who is this photograph of my mother's siblings, and I'm not even sure if she is in it.

She met my father at St. Anthony's Church and they were married in 1958.  My mother would have been 33 years old at the time.  When I was born she was 38, fairly late, particularly in those years, to have a child.  I'm my parents only one.

 My mother, right, riding.  This photograph was likely taken in Alberta when she was in her twenties, but I'm not really certain and now there's nobody I ask.

We were a pretty active family. Indeed, I feel that I compare unfavorably as an adult to my parents.  But my mother started sliding into illness when I was in my teens and by the time I was 20 she was very ill.  And that illness expressed itself as a severe example of dementia.  It was scary, and during the process it strained our relationship severely.  My father admirably stayed very loyal to her the entire time, in spite of all the embarrassment that accompanies such an affliction before old age.  Ultimately she arrived at death's door.

During that time, I prayed that she'd recover, and she did.  There's no explanation for it other than a miracle.  No doctor has ever been able to explain it. The recovery wasn't full, but it was large, and when on death's door she began a recovery over a period of months that ultimately allowed her to return home from a brief hospitalization and a brief stay in a nursing home.  Her mind cleared up to a large extent, if not fully, and she was amazingly physically fit.  She bicycled and swam everyday, and in her 80s was so fit that I was often quite stunned that others were not equally fit.

 My mother with a bicycle while in her teens.  She rode a bicycle daily up into her mid 80s.

My father died at age 62 after a sudden illness afflicted him. He struggled for a period of months before passing away.  It was a horrific experience for both of us.  By that time, I'd gone down to the University of Wyoming twice and had graduated from law school.   When I returned to town I'd planned on only being at my parents house briefly but first my father grew ill and then he died, so I stayed on there, first to help him and then to try to help my mother.  Two years after he died I met my wife and we married, and with my mother doing well I moved out.

She did well after that for a long time.  Indeed, twenty or so years.  However, slowly, anyone could see things were changing.  About six years ago it was too much to ignore, although I tried to.  I couldn't bring myself to contemplate her moving from her house to which she was so attached, so I did nothing.  The last winter we debated what to do.  It was a nightmare as she panicked over snow, or forgot how common things worked. Finally, unbeknownst to me, she quite being careful about the food she was eating, which started making her ill.  Ultimately she fell very ill and at that point received the diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia.  But a diagnosis wasn't probably really necessary, it was pretty clear what was going on.

That lead to the nursing home, which we had no choice but to arrange for.  She couldn't return home, and with a will that was incredibly strong, we could not take care of her.  Over time her condition advanced much less slowly than anticipated and we were able to move her, when her wing of the nursing home closed, to a new facility that had a memory care unit that was newer and nicer, with more freedom, seemingly.

Now the end has arrived.  She's been in the hospital twice in less than a month and her physical condition has declined.  Her memory is now almost completely gone.  She can't remember things day to day, and I doubt from morning to afternoon.  She once, prior to her first illness, and again after recovering from it, had a very active mind.  Now, none of the old interests are there.

I don't know how well I've handled any of this.  Not very well, I think.  From time to time I've looked and thought that in prior ages this was handled better within families, at home, in times that were slower. But I don't think that's really that true.  We've always been so mobile.  I know that my father was there for his parents when they died, but then my grandfather was only in his 40s and my father a teenager when he died.  I can remember my father's mother dying when I was a small child, and all her children were there, and they all live here.  On my mother's side I can barely remember her mother, having met her I think only once when I was old enough too, and I don't know if my mother went out to see her as she was dying.  I dimly recall that it came too quickly.  And I think that was the same for her father.

When I was young, I recall prayers for a good, or happy, death being common in the Middle Ages.   Then are not unknown now, but they are less common.  While young, I was always struck by that with a bit of horror.  A good death?  How could that be?  

But I understand it now.  All too often that isn't how things happen.  Or at least its now how those who observe it perceive it.  It makes sense to me now.

O God, great and omnipotent judge of the living and the dead, we are to appear before you after this short life to render an account of our works. Give us the grace to prepare for our last hour by a devout and holy life, and protect us against a sudden and unprovided death. Let us remember our frailty and mortality, that we may always live in the ways of your commandments. Teach us to "watch and pray" (Lk 21:36), that when your summons comes for our departure from this world, we may go forth to meet you, experience a merciful judgment, and rejoice in everlasting happiness. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Anyway you look at it, this is one of those areas where I don't measure up to my father and his siblings.  I  simply don't.