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
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.
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| 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.
