Friday, October 11, 1923. Cantlin found not guilty.

We have no image of the Casper Daily Tribune today, but if we did, you would have seen an article about the Cantlin trial.

Moreover, if you could have read the Casper Herald, a different newspaper, you would have seen the following.

CANTLIN FREED BY JURY WYOMING'S SHAME

Erroll J. Cantlin has been granted legal permission by a jury of Douglas citizens, (God save the Word) to shoot and kill women autoists who fail to put on their dimmers while he is driving on the same road. The acquittal of this self confessed slayer marks a victory for the Invisible Empire in Wyoming. The slimy hand of the Ku Klux Klan, stained  with the blood of hundreds of innocent men and women, showered its hold in the right place.

Twelve good men and true! have set aside the laws of the civilized world in order to free a man whose hands are red with the blood of a defenseless victim. With such support and encouragement Cantlin should wind up with an enviable record as a gunman. No longer will he have to accept the wages of an undersheriff. The way is open for him to go on the stage and clean up thousands. A man that can hit an automobile twice at point blank range with bullets fired from a pistol aimed in another direction is indeed an object of curiosity. His name should live forever in the Hall of Fame. There should be a great demand for his memoirs. We suggest that he write a book and call it "The Wonders of Moonshine, or Women I Have Killed." With the riches that will pour in from the receipts at the vaudeville houses and the sale of the book we hope Cantlin will not forget the men who helped place the stamp of authenticity on his weird tale. They should at least be entitled to one-half of what he earns. But then again maybe they won't need it. The Ku Klux Klan it is said, pays those who serve them with a generous hand. And transposing some of Attorney Hemmingway's words, spoken yesterday, 'we don't see how any attorney could be so vile as to protect such a client.' Again we repeat, 'twelve good men and true.' True to the principles of that doctored brand of Americanism taught by the Ku Klux Klan. They served their Kleagle well. And they undoubtedly will be handsomely rewarded. An innocent woman lies dead in her grave. Slain for no cause at all. And a jury of 12 Douglas citizens declare it was Cantlin's duty to kill her. If you drive a car, be careful. The 'crime' of failing to turn on your dimmers is punishable by DEATH. Warn your wife and sisters. Human life is something to be taken at will by an undersheriff. 'Twelve good men and true' have so declared at Douglas. Here are their names, men. Look them over. These are the men who said after hearing the evidence that Cantlin was justified in killing Mrs. Nellie B. Newcomb who now rests unavenged in her grave.

The article would end up in charges of criminal liable, a crime that no longer exists, being filed against the newspaper in Converse County.  It would result in a conviction.

As for Cantlin, I can't find anything much about him, but he did return to Casper apparently, as he is buried in Casper's cemetery with a tombstone that indicates that he died in 1947 at age 61.

The Giants took the third game of the series in a 1 to 0 game.

Saturday, September 29, 1923. Mandates and Floods.

The British Mandate for Palestine went into effect, as did the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon.

With this, the British Empire, and I'd guess French Empire reached their maximum territorial extents.

The grim news kept coming in on the recent Cole Creek disaster.

Apparently the floods occured almost everywhere in Wyoming, and into Nebraska.

Friday, September 28, 1923. The terrible news.

The news of the prior day was in the paper, much of it horrific locally.

Abyssinia, known better as Ethiopia, was admitted to the League of Nations.

The Giants took the National League pennant, beating the Brooklyn Robins 3 to 0.

September 27, 1923. Disaster at Cole Creek.

Today In Wyoming's History: September 27: 1923  Thirty railroad passengers were killed when a CB&Q train wrecked at the Cole Creek Bridge, which had been washed out due to a flood, in Natrona County.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

It was a horrific event.

Flooding had taken out the railroad bridge over Cole Creek near Casper Wyoming, which was unknown to the railroad.   The night train to Denver approached the bridge on a blind curve, and the headlights detected its absence too late to stop the train.  Half of the people on the train were killed.

It's the worst disaster in Wyoming's railroad history.

Italian forces withdrew from Corfu.

Bulgarian troops took Ferdinand, ending the September Uprising.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court allowed a referendum to proceed to recall the legislature to take up impeachment.

German Army Maj. Bruno Buchrucker sent out an order directing 4,500 men of the paramilitary Black Reichswehr to assemble to overthrow the government on September 30.

The Soviet Union deported anarchists Senya Fleshin and Molly Steimer to Germany after they went on a hunger strike.

Col. M.C. Buckey & Laddee Buck, the the half-brother of President Warren Harding’s Laddie Boy, who belonged to the Coolidge family. Mrs. Coolidge changed his name to Paul. September 27, 1923.

Tuesday, February 23, 1943. Tragedy in County Cavan and Converse County, Retreat in North Africa, Steel Pennies, Red Army General deaths.

 A B-17 crashed between Glenrock and Douglas on this day in 1943.  More specifically, B-17F 42-5102 crashed, with the loss of the entire crew of ten, 28 miles east of Casper.

A marker is planned for this site.

Air disasters during training happened at what would now be regarded as a horrific rate.

The Afrika Korps, overextended, began to withdraw back through the Kasserine Pass.  Rommel's decision to commence withdrawing was objected to by his senior officers at first.

Rommel addressing German troops riding in a captured American M3 halftrack.  By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1990-071-31 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5419522

His decision was correct, but telling. The attack had been largely successful up to the day prior, but now with a change of command and facing growing Allied firepower and superior logistics, the advance was effectively ended and now the battle's gain were about to turn into losses. This could be said of the entire North African effort, and for that matter, the entire German war effort at this point.

Steel pennies were first stamped, and then put in circulation on February 27.  The act was to save copper and was not popular.

Ukrainian born Lt. Gen. Grigory Kravchenko, age 30, fighter ace and twice Hero of the Soviet Union, was shot down and subsequently died from his injuries when his parachute failed to open.  He'd grown up in Kazakhstan after being born in Ukraine.

Soviet Major General M.M. Shaimuratov, died following his brutal torture by Cossacks serving under German command.  He was a Tartar cavalryman who had first joined the Red Army in 1919.

A terrible fire at the St. Joseph's Orphanage in County Cavan, Ireland, resulted in the death of 35 girls and one adult. The fire which occurred in the very early morning hours was not detected until it was advanced.

The girls who perished ranged from 7 to 15 years of age.

Holscher's Hub: The County Line

Holscher's Hub: The County Line

The County Line

Mixed news for coal. .. and a glance at Glenrock.

Wyoming's largest utility to retire majority of coal-fired power plant units by 2030

Wind Farm north of Glenrock as viewed from Muddy Mountain south of Casper.

This includes units at Dave Johnson, outside of Glenrock.

At the same time, the sale of mines to a Navajo corporation has been given the go ahead in spite of some questioning by members of the Navajo nation on whether the purchase is a good idea.

The reason that  might be questioned is because a person might legitimately look at the trend line for coal and not be too optimistic about it.  The closure of coal fired electrical generation units right withing the state really puts that into focus. Most of the coal  mined in Wyoming goes elsewhere, but if generating units are being closed down in the state, where transportation costs are obviously the lowest, there's reasons to be pessimistic about coal's future in general.  Particularly when the owners of one of those plants announced one of the units was being converted to natural gas.

Glenrock may be in the very epicenter of what we're seeing in terms of changing times and reflective of them.

I like Glenrock.

Indeed, in an odd tidbit, I guess, my wife and I spent our first night as a married couple in Glenrock where we stayed at the Hotel Higgins.

The little Converse County town between Casper and Douglas was originally Deer Creek Station, an Army post along the Oregon Trail.  It shares that sort of history with Casper, which of course was the site of at least three "stations" during the 1860s, and which is bordered on both sides, if you include the neighboring communities, by the locations of former Oregon Trail bridges.  In being an Oregon Trail place marker, Glenrock also shares a common history with Casper, as it was a marked place on the trail.  A small batholith there was the "rock in the Glen".

Glenrock as a town is at least as old as Casper, or at least I suspect it to be.  It supported ranching in the area, when transportation was much more primitive, and was an established compact town prior to World War One.  Oil was discovered between Casper and Glenrock in 1913 and the Big Muddy field was in development by 1916, fueling the refineries in Casper.  A refinery was built in Glenrock in 1917 to take advantage of the production which was closer to Glenrock than to Casper.

My father took this photograph of sheep in a pen, but I don't have any of the other details and can't quite tell where it is. It's clearly on a railroad, and the building in the background makes me suspect that it's near Glenrock, but I don't know for sure.

Following that, like all of Central Wyoming, Glenrock was tied to the oil and gas industry, and it has been ever since. But at some later point, and I don't actually know when, the major Dave Johnston Power Plant was built there.

Dave Johnston borders the North Platte River and is just a few miles away from a coal bed that at one time fueled it.  It became the economic hub of the town for decades.  It's been there my entire life and its so much in the background that its one of those things I don't ever think of as having not been there.  At least one of my earliest memories involves me going with my father to hunt east of Dave Johnston when I was no more than five.  My father's 1956 Chevrolet truck became stuck and we started to walk out, but a railroad crew stopped and pulled us out before we had to walk too far.  I recall my father was impressed that I hadn't been worried by the event.

St. Louis Catholic Church in Glenrock.

During the 1970s and 1980s Dave Johnston was a mock target for the Strategic Air Command, and occasionally you could see B-52 bombers flying low over it, using it as a mock Soviet target.  And during winter months you always take note of the plants steam rising up from a distance, a marker that you are near Casper if you are heading that way, or not far from Douglas if you are going in the other direction.

For many years now, the workforce at  Dave Johnston has been declining, and the town has been hurting as a result.  During  the oil boom of the 2000s the town picked up in economic activity as oil and gas workers passed through it.  Some lived there, but  many more were temporary residents or Casper residents, pulling off of the Interstate Highway to access the oilfield north of town.  An effort to boost the local agricultural community by putting in a sale barn failed, as modern transportation, perhaps, continued to give Riverton and Torrington, the established barns, the regional advantage.

And as wind has been coming in, the same is true.  Now, when you go by Glenrock, you not only see the massive coal fired power plant steaming just east outside of town, but massive wind turbines turning north of town.  If you take the highway out of the town, you run right past them on the highway.

Where this leads is yet to be seen. Converse County is having a major oil boom right now.  And it has a lot of wind turbine construction going on at the same time. The ranches in the area remain, but the town has also seen, very slowly, a unique retirement phenomenon in which Casperites retire there, wanting to stay in the region but tired of Casper's growth.  No fewer than three of the men I've served with in the National Guard have settled their in retirement, with two in Glenrock.

Glenrock was a way station on the Oregon Trail. Then a small ranching town.  Then an oil and gas town, and a power company town.  Where it's headed can't be known, but through Wyoming's boom and busts, it's remained remarkably viable, if not always fully well, compared to many other Wyoming communities.  It likely will weather the storms it seems to be facing fairly well.

More folks leave the state in 2017 (are we really that upset about that. . . and what's going on?)

The Casper Star Tribune reported on May 25, that the state continued to loose population in 2017. Casper, the state's second biggest city, dropped down to about 57,000, putting it down to where it had been 20 or more years ago.

Of course, that figure is more than a little off as in the last 20 years Bar Nunn has really grown and so has Mills, so those figures are more than a little offset by the two adjoining communities which make up the larger metropolitan area, together with Evansville.

Still, that's pretty interesting as the price of oil was claiming at the same time.

That might mean something, or nothing at all.

Eh?

That Casper in particular and Wyoming in general lost population in the last several years is no surprise, but in 2017 petroleum and coal prices were stable. For that matter, petroleum prices climbed.  Based on the old model, that should have meant a slow climb in employment figures, but it appears we really aren't seeing that.  Why not?

Well, we actually may be.  They may must just not be as much as expected and there could be an attendant fall in other areas.  But it could also be due to technology.

One thing that has really been missed in the analysis and close watching of petroleum prices is that insiders in the industry have been predicting that when the price of oil climbed and exploration picked up, the return of the exploration end of the industry would feature a much more high tech industry than previously. 

Almost completely missed, but well known to those who are familiar with the industry, is the fact that the last boom featured a combination of a lot of new equipment and a mass amount of old.  When the directional drilling boom hit the United States did not have a lot of high tech rig within its boundaries. We tend not to think of ourselves like this, but our exploration infrastructure really went back to the 1970s.  Given the price of oil between the 1970s and the 1990s there had been no real reason to have high tech rigs in the US, but they did exist.  They were in use in the hot oil provinces overseas.  Indeed, some workers who returned to the US to work in the 1990s boom were shocked about how primitive the industry was here, even as new fracking and directional technologies came in.  One such worker I know wanted to return to the Middle East to work just because he found American rigs so primitive and dangerous.

Things will be different this time.  New rigs started to come in during the 1990s and they are out there now.  As the industry contracted recently it meant the old stuff could go.  Insiders feel that the old stuff won't be coming back.

Does that meant that a predicted drilling boom like that predicted for Converse County will have no impact on the workforce?  Not hardly. But it may wall mean that predictions regarding that could be off significantly. And where that boom may be felt may be quite off the mark.  The petroleum industry, much like other sectors of the economy, may start to be a lot more clicks and storkes than nuts and bolts that it use to be.

Before we leave this, there's a couple of other interesting aspects of this.  One is that at least in Casper the building seems to go on and on even while the population is falling.  It makes no sense at all unless the developers are gambling that there's going to be a big increase in the local population as the drilling starts in the neighboring county.  South Casper has an apartment building going up that, by my uneducated guess, would easily house 1/5th of the entire number of people predicted to be coming in.  Subdivisions continue to be developed, although at a much slower pace than previously. 

Learning what is going on in the real estate industry at any one time is darned near impossible as the industry, like most others, has no real interest in being too open about market conditions at any one time.  However, it can't possibly be the case that there are waiting residents for all of these homes at the same time the population of the town is declining.  If this gamble doesn't pay off for them, there's going to be a real vacant building mess.

Regarding the use of the term "mess", one thing that might not be regarded as a mess, among long time residents, is the decline in population.  It's a dirty little secret of the local view, but quite frankly, most long time or native Wyomingites don't cry about declining population figures.  Indeed, if you look where people are free to comment anonymously, they tend to be happy about it.  The way that most Wyomingites figure it a declining population means that a lot of Texans, Oklahoman's and the like went back home and left those of us from here, here. And most Wyomingites are okay with that.

Which gets us back to a different economy, such as Galeotos has been talking about, and like we've talked about before here.  It's hardly articulated, but what Wyomingites hope for is not so much that any one sector does super, but rather that there are enough jobs for people who grow up here and want to stay. That's a pretty difficult thing to achieve, but that's what folks generally hope for.  The booming dreams of politicians tend not to really reflect their views very much.

The Community Hall

The sign reads "Community Hall, Restored 1976, Gillette FFA".

Between Wright and Edgerton.

There are a fair number of these.

Little halls for isolated rural communities.  Communities that were really too far from town to go to town's regularly.  Even as late as the 1970s, when this one was restored, I can recall one in northern rural Carbon County that received a fair amount of use.

Now, I'd guess none of them do

Railhead: The Coal Train

Railhead: The Coal Train

 

Something we'll be seeing less of in the future? 

The Lonely Bull

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The best-laid schemes o' mice an...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The best-laid schemes o' mice an...:   Small rig, in mine, 1972.  A type that's change a lot. Lex Anteinternet: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men: Lex An...

The past couple of years the campgrounds at the Wyoming State Fairgrounds have been really packed, in part because the decision was wisely made to allow those campgrounds to be partially used year around by oilfield workers.  It made a lot of sense, the facilities were there, but most of the year weren't used that much. Why not relieve the housing shortage in Converse County and maximize the return on the facility?

Last week the Tribune ran an article that now a lot of those campers have cleared out and others are contemplating doing so.  Oilfield workers hauling off their trailers and going home.  Another, very real, sign of the decline.

Today the Tribune reported that the Legislature proposes to take a $200M payment to the "rainy day fund" and apply it to the budget, to make up for a projected revenue shortfall.  Also a sign of the decline in drilling.

And yet, we're still at the denial stage in some quarters, although that's gone from "it's not happening" to "it'll be short".  I don't think the industry is saying that however.