Showing posts with label Glenrock Wyoming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Glenrock Wyoming. Show all posts

Thursday, June 29, 2023

Friday, June 29, 1923. Poincaré replies, The Tribune notices the Klan, Harding in Montana.

Replying to the Pope's letter of earlier that week, but not naming him by name, French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré stated in a speech in the French Senate "the only screw that we have on Germany is her desire to recover the Ruhr. We have no thought of annexation, and we energetically refute all accusations of imperialism. France does not wish to confiscate the Ruhr. We will keep it, however, until Germany has paid her debt."

The Tribune finally got around to reporting on recent events in Glenrock.


Preisdent Harding visited Butte and Helena Montana, delivering this speech in Helena:

My Countrymen:

One of the greatest lessons which the World War taught to society was a realization of its stupendous producing capacity under modern organization. When the war started many of us, probably most of us, believed it could not last very long because we could not conceive that it could be economically and industrially supported for a long time. We had been taught to believe that as a whole the community annually consumed pretty nearly all that it produced, and that in order to maintain this ratio it was necessary to keep all the producers steadily at work. We were convinced that when the most efficient producers were taken by millions away from the fields, the shops, the mines, and the offices, and set at the business of armed destruction, they would very presently pull down upon themselves the whole fabric of our complex industrial system, and that the war would be smothered in the ruins. This view was the basis of what became almost an obsession with many people, indeed with most of the best informed people, during the early stages of the war. It was commonly and freely said that economic exhaustion would compel an end to the struggle before a year, and a much more popular limitation was six months.

The event showed how very little we understood either the tremendous producing capacity of the community as a whole or the strength and solidity of our industrial structure. When the first year of the war had passed, the world was just beginning to realize that in all probability the struggle was only in its larger beginning. Millions of men had been called from the fields, and yet still other men were being trained for it. At the end of two years the war was greater than ever, and after three years it had still further expanded until it actually involved, whether as combatants or as the sources of supply for the combatants, the whole world. The industrial, the agricultural, the financial, the social, and spiritual forces of the world were mobilized at last for the great final test of strength. In the end that test was both military and economic. Victory rested upon the banners which were borne by the side that represented the greatest number of soldiers, of ships, of guns; which represented the greatest capacity to bring together, control, and fabricate the necessaries of war and to maintain great civil populations behind the lines.

It became very early a war of conscription. Governments conscripted their men for service in the field; patriotism and public opinion conscripted everybody else for work at home. A new system of division and dilution of labor was introduced through which men and women, boys and girls, old men and old women—millions of people who under the old order of peace days had been rejected from the realm of skilled production—were quickly trained to the most intricate and technical tasks. So, in the midst of the most destructive storm that mankind had ever invoked upon itself, there was presented the marvelous phenomenon of a world producing at a greater rate than it had ever done before.

How was this gigantic industrial phenomenon wrought? By putting everybody at work. By inducing everybody to work to the limit of strength and capacity. By paying the workers at rates which enlisted their utmost eagerness to produce to the limit. Yes, if you please, by letting labor and capital and management all engage more or less in profiteering at the expense of society as a whole. Unheard-of wages were paid to people who in other times would have been considered quite incapable of earning them, but who, under the stimulus of the emergency, became effective and absolutely necessary factors in the industrial organization. Particularly was this true of the women, young and old, who took up tasks in the shop, the field, the transportation systems, and behind the lines of combatants, such as had never before been assigned to them. And the women made good so emphatically, so impressively, that as to-day we look over the whole field of the world mobilization and the world conflict we realize that something very much like a revolution was effected in the varied relationships of the industrial community.

Viewed in the retrospect we see more clearly than ever the sordid side, of war. I have said before, and I choose to repeat it very deliberately now, that if war must come again—God grant that it shall not!—then we must draft all of the nation in carrying on. It is not enough to draft the young manhood. It is not enough to accept the voluntary service of both women and men whose patriotic devotion impels their enlistment. It will be righteous and just, it will be more effective in war and marked by less regret in the aftermath, if we draft all of capital, all of industry, all of agriculture, all of commerce, all of talent and capacity and energy of every description to make the supreme and united and unselfish fight for the national triumph. When we do that there will be less of war. When we do that the contest will be aglow with unsullied patriotism, untouched by profiteering in any service.

Of course, we are striving to make conditions of foreign relations and so fashion our policies that we may never be involved in war again. If we are committed to universal service—that is, the universal commitment of every American resource and activity—without compensation except the consciousness of service and the exaltations in victory, we will be slower to make war and more swift in bringing it to a triumphant dose. Let us never again make draft on our manhood without as exacting a draft on all we possess in the making of the industrial, financial, commercial, and spiritual life of the republic.

If we had been in a state of mind to philosophize about it all, I think we might have recognized that women have been for a long time preparing themselves for this tremendous incursion into the field of industrial production. For a long time before the war began there had been evidence of a reaction among the women against the old ideals of the Victorian period. For three or four decades, the more venturesome women had been timidly breaking away from the old-fashioned home and its old-fashioned ideals. Even those who viewed the new-woman movement with greatest misgiving and least approval had already been compelled to recognize that a new and revolutionary idea was taking possession of them. We might iterate and reiterate, and theorize and dogmatize, upon the old thesis that the place for woman was in the home; but we will have to admit that despite all our preachments, all our urgings, all our misgivings, woman wasn't staying there. She was teaching in the schools, she was accounting for perhaps a majority of the graduates from the high schools, and a big and increasing minority of the student community in the colleges and universities. She was practicing law and medicine, preaching sermons, working in the shops, the offices, the factories; she was, in short, becoming a competitor with her brother in almost all the departments of productive effort and activity.

Then came the war, and all at once even the most dubious among us realized that the women, everywhere, constituted the first line of industrial reserves upon which society must fall back in its great crisis. They volunteered for every service in which they could be useful, and at once established their right to a new and more important industrial status. They built ships, they operated munition factories, they learned to perform the heaviest and most difficult tasks; they tilled the fields, filled the offices, largely conducted the hospitals, and even served as most useful auxiliaries to forces on the battlefield. Not as a boon, but as a duty, full partnership in the conduct of political affairs was conferred upon them.

All this has inevitably worked a profound change in the relation of woman to the social and political organization. We may approve it or disapprove it, we may view it with satisfaction or with misgiving, but the fact is before us that woman has taken a new place in the community. And just as her participation in the industrial sphere expands, so her relations to the home and its interest is necessarily contracted. Whether we account it wise or otherwise, we must recognize that the tendency is to take the modern mother more and more away from the control, the training, the intellectual guidance and spiritual direction of her children. The day nursery, and after that the kindergarten begins to care for her children in the earliest years; after that come the public school, the high school, the college and the university, taking over from her more and more of the responsibility and influence over the children. We may entertain the old-fashioned prejudices against this development; but we are compelled to recognize that under modem conditions a large and increasing proportion of women are bound to be at the same time mothers in the home and industrial producers or professional workers outside the home, or else they must be denied the service and responsibility of motherhood.

Frankly, I am one of those old-fashioned people who would be glad if the way could be found to maintain the traditional relations of father, mother, children, and home. But very plainly these relations are in process of a great modification. The most we can do, to the utmost possible extent, is to readapt our conditions of industry and of living so as to enable the mothers to make the utmost of their lessened opportunity for shaping the lives and minds of their children. We must hope, and we must make it possible, that mothers will not assume, when their babes of yesterday become the schoolboys and schoolgirls of to-day, that the responsibility of the mother is ended, and that the teacher, the school authorities, the college, the state, will henceforth assume it. Rather, we must recognize that no other influence can possibly be substituted for that of motherhood; and we must make it possible for the mothers to cooperate with these social institutions of the new order, to give the children so far as possible the privileges of a home atmosphere which will supplement the advantages of mere education and training. It must be made possible for the mothers to familiarize themselves with the problems of the people, the school superintendents, the college authorities, the health and sanitation officials. In short, the mothers must be placed in such position that despite their obligations outside the home they shall not have to surrender their domestic responsibility. Rather, means must be found to enable them, through the varied instrumentalities which, society affords, to equip themselves for the better discharge of their responsibility toward the children of the land.

Through such effort as this there will be opportunity for a great service. Those mothers who have the advantage of the best material and intellectual opportunities will, if they make the most of these advantages, help greatly to improve the conditions of children that come from families and homes less fortunately situated. They will be able to help in lifting up the poorer, the less fortunate children, to a higher level. The mother who tirelessly seeks rightly to train her own children, to instill into them that indefinable essence which we know as good breeding, will be performing this service not alone for her own children, but in only less measure for the children who come from homes less blessed with the finer things of life. Herein is the supreme advantage of the public-school system. I have never been able to find much satisfaction in die good fortune of families who, when they are able to do it, prefer to take their children out of the public schools and give them the doubtful advantage of more exclusive educational methods. I think we should cling to the democracy of the public schools.

The teacher, and the authorities back of her, must be equally ready to cooperate with the home and the mother. In the home must still be performed the duty of instilling into the child those fundamental concepts of religion and of faith which are essential to rightly shaping the character of citizens, and therefore of the nation. It would be an irreparable mistake if in surrendering to society a larger responsibility for the child's intellectual and physical well being, we should forget the necessity for proper religious training. That duty must be performed in the home; it will always be peculiarly the duly of a mother.

Mankind never has stood more in need than it does now of the consolations and reassurances which derive from a firm religious faith. We are living in a time of many uncertainties, of weakened faith in the efficiency of institutions, of industrial systems, of economic hypotheses, of dictum and dogma in whatever sphere. Yet we all know that there are certain fundamental truths of life and duty and destiny which will stand eternal, through the evolution and the revolution of systems and societies founded by mankind. There must be no mistake whereby we shall confuse the things which are of eternity with those which are of time. We must not let our engrossment with the things of matter and of mind distract us from a proper concern for those which are of the spirit and the soul.

It must be kept ever in mind that the higher and finer attributes of humanity will rarely be developed from a human seedling planted in a soil adapted chiefly to the production of that which is selfish and sordid, in which it will be forced by special circumstances to struggle unduly for the bare continuance of existence. We will not grow strong minds in unsound bodies, nor may we hope that illuminated souls will often seek habitation in human frames weakened and tortured by disease and malnutrition. To an astounding and alarming certainty it has been demonstrated that a large proportion of school children, and even of adults, suffer from undernourishment. I may congratulate you that there is little of it in the West. Perhaps it is true that as to most of the adults the fault is of the individual rather than society. Whether that be true or not we can at least agree that the children are not to be blamed for their share in such misfortunes. If society has permitted the development of a system under which the citizens, of to-morrow suffer these deprivations to-day, then the obligation is surely upon society to right the wrong and to insure justice to the children who are not responsible for being here.

But we can not expect to bring full justice, full equality of circumstances and opportunity to the children, unless we shall make it possible for the parents. We are all too much given, I suspect, to a rather unthinking admiration for our highly mechanized social system under which we have so abundantly produced wealth and the possibilities of comfort and culture. We have not thought enough about the evils attendant upon the great inequities which mark the distribution of our stupendous product. But we are coming into a time when more and more we are giving thought to these things. Our satisfaction in the material achievements of our industrial age is being qualified as it never was before by our questionings along these lines. We are thinking of the weaker links in the social chain. We believe the equality of opportunity must be attended by a fitness to embrace it.

Here, again, the war was responsible for a great broadening of our social vision. It made its demand upon the highest and the lowest, the proudest and the humblest. It demanded a sacrifice that was just as great in the case of the poor man as the rich man. What was more, it brought a realization of the fact that men and women were of real service to the community just in proportion as they were capable of producing the things that were needed. So the workers, the builders, the producers attained a new sense of their dignity and importance. Contemplating its supreme crisis, the community was willing to render to those who were capable of serving it effectively in this juncture a greater share of their product than they had formerly been accustomed to receive. Wages, the world over, went to new high levels, salaries and fixed incomes shrank to lower levels of actual exchange value. There was a leveling up from the lower strata and downward from the higher. On the whole, despite many instances of injustice and of maladjustment in this process, its results marked a long advance on the road to equity and justice as among all elements of the community. A few years of civilization's desperate grapple with destiny brought to the working masses of the world an aggregate betterment of conditions, a general improvement of circumstances and opportunity, which otherwise would, have been possible only through the slow processes of generations.

We know now that the advances which were thus effected in the direction of social justice and economic equality will not be relinquished without determined opposition. There were those who, regarding the injustices of the old order as inevitable, mistakenly assumed that by a simple process which they called the "deflation of labor" the old relationships would presently be restored. They insisted that "wages must come down"; some of them went so far as to sound the slogan that "organized labor must be crushed." These have forgotten the lesson in organization, in cooperation, in community of sacrifice, by which civilization had been able to rescue itself. They had forgotten that the right of organization, and of cooperative dealings, is not any longer the special prerogative of management and of capital. The right of men, and brains, and skill, and brawn, to organize, to bargain through organizations, to select their own leaders and spokesmen, is no wit less absolute than is the right of management and of capital to form and work through those great concentrations of interests which we call corporations.

Labor, indeed, is fast becoming one of the great builders of capital. Whether it concentrates its savings by depositing them in its own banks, of which the number is rapidly increasing, or pools them with the general savings of society by making its deposits in other banks, the result is the same. Labor is more and more coming to be the financier and backer of its own employment. We shall not go back to the time when considerable elements in the community were wont to assume that a sharp line of demarcation should be drawn between labor and capital. Labor is becoming more and more a capitalist on its own account, and capital is more and more discovering that it must work, must contribute, must give us, through some superiority of method and management, a justification for its existence as a sort of separate estate. Those to whom the management and investment of capital is intrusted must recognize, as I know most of them already do, that the right of organization, and the title to those special efficiencies which come to organization, is not the exclusive prerogative of capital. It is equally the prerogative of labor.

I am quite aware that there were some who imagined, before the present administration was voted into responsibility, that it was going at least to acquiesce if not definitely sympathize with projects for the deflation of labor and the overthrow of labor organizations. Before this time these have come to realize their error. Nothing has been farther from the purpose of the present administration than any thought of destroying the right of either labor or capital to organize, and each to deal in its organized capacity.

We have recognized that there are evils and abuses on both sides of the almost imaginary line which now is presumed to separate labor and capital. We have wished and sought to minimize these abuses, through better organizations and better understanding, without destroying organizations or the right to form them. We have not wished to compel men to work when they did not want to work; we have not wished to compel employers to keep men at work under conditions which were impossible; but we have earnestly sought to lessen the occasions for conflict between the two parties. We have tried to bring to both of them a realization that both owed in this connection an obligation to the great public interest which is always the great sufferer by reason of their conflict.

In this connection let me say quite frankly that I know there were some elements which hoped for a great and decisive conflict between organized employment and organized labor, and that those elements were not all on either side of the imaginary dividing line. On the capital side of the line were those who hoped that the administration would lend itself to their program of breaking down organized labor and sending it back to the era of individual bargaining for the individual job. On the labor side of the line were those who hoped, by exorbitant demands and an attitude of uncompromising insistence, to force the nationalization of some of our most important industries and services. Between these two extreme groups, confident we had behind us the overwhelming public opinion of the nation, we have tried to hold the scales even; to prevent on the one side the destruction of organized labor, and on the other side to frustrate those programs which looked to the ultimate destruction of private capital and the nationalization of all the instrumentalities of production.

How well have we succeeded? At least, we have saved the nation from the extremists of both sides. Those who were sure that our salvation lay in the destruction of organized labor and the precipitated reduction of wages have found -that the national administration was not disposed to Acquiesce in their program. For many months past they have noted that the demand for labor was greater than the supply; that instead of millions of men out of jobs, there were tens of thousands of jobs without workers; that instead of a sharp and progressive reduction of labor's wage, there has been now for a long time a steady; continuing, persistent increase in that wage. On the other side, those who would have been glad to drive the country into an industrial crisis through the stoppage of production, arid to force the nationalization or communization of industry, have been equally disappointed in the outcome.

I believe our policy, and its results, have reflected the sound judgment of the overwhelming majority of the American people. I believe this people is firmly and finally committed to the ideal of preserving the fullest rights of private initiative and private enterprise, together with the right of organization on both sides of the line between capital and labor, and always consistent with the right of the public to be served efficiently and at a reasonable cost.

We have come thus far, and thus fortunately, through the most difficult period of reconstruction that we have ever known. We have been sheltered against the world storm of tendency to social revolution. The best test of policy is by results. By that test, we ask no more than a fair and reasoned verdict on our program; We ask that its results be compared with the showing, in these after-war years, that can be presented by any other country on the face of the earth. We ask that you examine the contrast, thoughtfully and seriously, between the general state of the public weal in this country and in others. For our vindication, we point to a great nation, its credit preserved, its industries crowded to the point of capacity production, its people employed, its wage scales high beyond all comparison with any other in the world, its banking system standing as the final bulwark of sound money and the gold standard, and its average level of comfort and prosperity unexampled among the races of men.

If I could make the fortunate picture stand out by offering contrast, I would speak of Russia and the colossal failure of its mad experiment. The dissatisfied working forces of America, where there are such, and the parlor theorists who have yet to create a single, thing useful to aspiring human kind, will find there less of freedom, much less of reward, and little of hope in much proclaimed emancipation. Royal absolutism has been destroyed, only to be superseded by what appears to be despotism in the name of democracy. To a limited few of democracy's advocates has come vast power. Perhaps wealth attends. Undoubtedly a new Russia is in the making, and there is no doubt the present sponsorship will survive.

Apart from the tragedy of it all, I am glad Russia is making the experiment. If twenty centuries of the Christian era and its great story of human progress and the countless centuries before the light of Christianity flamed have been lived and recorded upon mistaken theories of a righteous social order, then everything is wrong, Christianity a failure, and all of civilization a failure. I think Russia is going to rivet anew our belief in established social order. Meanwhile we know ours is the best the world has revealed, and I preach the gospel of holding fast to that which has proven good, ever trying in good conscience to make it better, and consider and treat as an enemy every man who chooses our land as a haven in which to assail the very institutions which shelter him.

There are two phases of the commitment of the great human family.

It is of little use to advance unless we hold to the advanced position. It is useless to construct unless we preserve. In the recognized test which our civilization is now undergoing America's supreme task is one of preservation. I call upon America to protect and preserve.

His rail route took him through Idaho from Utah the prior day, so this was an example, really of extensive backtracking.

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Friday, June 28, 1923. Turkey's first election, Hi Power patent, Osage Murders in Oklahoma, Klan in Glenrock, Bert Cole accident.

Turkey's first general election was held, which chose secondary electors who then would choose the Grand National Assembly.  Only the Republican People's Party was allowed to exist, but the number of candidates was unlimited.

John Browning, the legendary and massively influential firearms designer, many of whose designs are still in use, unabated in their utility and not regarded as old, filed for his patent application for the Hi Power.  He would die before it was granted in 1927.

British in Oosterbeek  Left to right Pvt Ronald Philip Walker Pvt John Dugdale 10pin C.co 156 Para L.Cpt Noel Rosenberg 10 pin C.co 156 Para Pvt Alfred J Ward HQ Para Brgd. Driver for Hackett.  Dugdale carries a Hi Power.  Rosenberg might be.  The Canadian manufactured John Ingleiss Hi Powers were adopted for British and Canadian airborne, that introducing the design to British troops.

The design went on to widespread use, seeing military use with every country in the British Commonwealth or which was formerly part of the late British Empire, as well as World War Two use by China and, ironically, Nazi Germany.  Germany produced the pistol in occupied Belgian plants.  It saw very limited experimental use with the US in the 1960s.  I knew a Navy pilot, for instance, who was issued one.

Canadian troops training with Hi Power.

Regarded as obsolete, in recent years it has been phased out of British service, which commenced during World War Two with airborne troops, and most recently out of Canadian service.  Canada chose to take this step as its World War Two manufactured pistols no longer had a reliable parts source.  Ironically, just as they made their decision, a boom in manufacture of Hi Power pistols resumed, starting off a story in civilian, and perhaps military, markets much like that experienced by the M1911, which went through a similar story. The M1911 is, of course, also a Browning design.

Uruguayan marine with Hi Power.

The Hi Power is the pistol the U.S. should have adopted when it went to 9mm (and it shouldn't have gone to 9mm).  The pistol was so widely used that at one time US special forces of various types would carry it on certain missions because, if one was dropped, it was evidence of who had been there.

Osage oil millionaire George Bigheart summoned Pawhuska Oklahoma lawyer W. Watkins Vaughn to his hospital deathbed, where he was receiving treatment for poisoning.  Bigheart died the following day, and Vaughn was murdered on his way home, his body being found in Pershing, Oklahoma.

The Osage Indian Murders are the subject of the recently released movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is based on the 2017 book investigating the same.

The Glenrock Gazette reported on the recent KKK demonstration n that town.


The Glenrock Gazette, in its reporting, basically endorsed the racist organization as being one for law and order.

Bert Cole, famous local pilot, but one already known for a tragic airborne death in Evansville, died in an airplane accident himself.

From Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub, the inquiring photographer was out again.  I was surprised how uniform these answers were.


I would not have guessed that there would be uniform answers.  The fact that there is, speaks volumes of how women perceived their status at the time.

Indeed, in much of the US women had only recently received the vote, but it is true that they were highly restricted in what was regarded as appropriate work.  That wouldn't really start changing for another fifty years, although that's probably a topic for a separate entry.  Also clear here, however, social rules bothered some women.  The really fascinating thing here is that it seemed not to be something vaguely in the background, but something that caused a lot of women, all the women in this sample, to hold deep seated resentments.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Monday, June 25, 1923. Harding comes to Cheyenne and Laramie. The Ku Klux Klan came to Glenrock


The Tribune headlined with an auto accident that occurred in connection with Hardin's visit to Denver the day prior.

In Laramie, it was noted, but the focus was on his visit that would occur today.


He was stopped by Cheyenne as well, where the city gave him a cowboy hat, and he delivered a speech on the coal situation.

Glenrock had a different type of visitor:



The size of the demonstration is surprising.  I was not small.

The paper was silent on the lawlessness that concerned the Klan, but it was likely violations of Prohibition.  The KKK was a supporter of Prohibition.

An elevated train collapsed in Brooklyn, killing seven people.

The Progressive Conservative Party won provincial elections in Ontario.

Portland:



Thursday, November 17, 2022

Today In Wyoming's History: The grave of Alvah H. Unthank

Today In Wyoming's History: The grave of Alvah H. Unthank

The grave of Alvah H. Unthank

Alvah H. Unthank was a 19-year-old pioneer travelling the Oregon who died of Cholera at a spot near the Dave Johnson Power Plant outside Glendrock in July, 1850.  

One of many such tragic deaths on the trails.







 

Sunday, August 15, 2021

Friday, March 5, 2021

Wyoming Music. Johnny Cash - I've Been Everywhere


This Johnny Cash song is more debatable.  The lyrics reference a "Glen Rock" or Glenrock".  It is Glenrock Wyoming?  Well, Glenrock Wyoming is the only Glenrock that I know of, but I probably don't know every place that might be called that.

As Cash did reference Cheyenne, Wyoming in the other city song we referenced yesterday, Wanted Man, we'll assume some knowledge of Wyoming's geography and include this one in the list.

Monday, May 25, 2020

Today In Wyoming's History: The Rock in the Glen, Glenrock, Wyoming.

Today In Wyoming's History: The Rock in the Glen, Glenrock, Wyoming.:

The Rock in the Glen, Glenrock, Wyoming.


The Rock in the Glen, in Converse County, Wyoming is one of the numerous places along the Oregon Trail that served as a register and a marker for those traveling on the Oregon Trail.  It shows up in the earliest guide books for the trail and like other sites in Wyoming, those who camped here often carved their names into the rock.



The location is near the North Platte River, as the trail itself is in this portion of Wyoming, and ultimately the areas features lead to the foundation of the town in the late 19th Century.  Upon formation, the town was named for the rock.





The actual location of the rock belonged to the Continental Pipeline Company up until 1982, when it donated the land to the Town of Glenrock.





The location today is a town park which is currently undergoing improvements.






Saturday, October 5, 2019

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.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Is Beer the Most Distributist Product Ever?



Eh?

Okay, let's start off with a definition refresher, as for many folks the term "Distributist" is a mystery.

People generally believe that there's two economic systems, and only two, and anything else is just some shade of them. Those systems, most folks believe, are "Capitalism" and "Socialism".

Most folks are wrong.

There are other economic theories other than those, although those two have dominated for the last century and Capitalism has come to absolutely dominate in its various forms.  People like to point out that's because the "free market" wins for being the most efficient system, but ironically they very rarely note that none of the modern Capitalist states actually have a free market system as every single country that is Capitalist uses a model based on some variant of the corporate business form which requires state action. 

Yup.

So bold free marketeer, you are actually a bold state supported business enterprise proponent.

Now, I don't mean to maintain that this is good or bad, just that it is. And what it is, is this.  Since their introduction in the 1600s business organizations are dominated by corporations.  Corporations are treated at law as people, and their shareholders are immune from any finding of corporate liability.  That's massively different from partnerships where individual partners are liable for the acts of the partnership.  This favors the creation of large entities which frankly couldn't exist but for the corporate business form.  But make no mistake, the creation of corporations is, in and of itself, an instance of state action.  By recognizing corporations, the state is taking a state action and intervening in the economy.

That's right.

One of the Wyoming locals.

Anyhow, one of the things that corporations have done over the years and are still doing is causing consolidation in the market place.  The natural drive for all corporations is to become bigger, the biggest and then the only, with some exceptions (given that there are a lot of small corporations. . . indeed, they grossly outnumber large corporations).   This is the case with all sorts of products and all sorts of places where you buy them.

Take, for example, something we discussed just the other day and which is also the subject of one of the most popular post on this blog, grocery stores

Groceries were once all bought locally.  Indeed, if we went back, let's say, 200 years ago to 1819, we'd find that most people raised, slaughtered, hunted and fished for a fair amount of their yearly provisions. . . no matter what they were.  There were products, to be sure, but a lot of things you were just on your own for.  Products that you bought, however, had to be bought at a variety of stores.  If they were "dry goods", you went to a small locally owned store and bought them there.  Vegetables were sold by vendors who just sold those.  Meat was purchased from a butcher.

As we move forward over the 19th Century, we'd see some change in that.  Even as late as 1919 a lot of people, indeed most people, still bought their groceries at locally owned green grocers, butcher shops, etc., although the first grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, had come in just prior to that time and was expanding.

So what if you were a beer drinker?

Beer has been brewed in North America since Pre Colombian times.  The Mayflower Pilgrims may have dropped anchor when and where they did as they were out of beer (truly), but they didn't introduce it to North America.  At that time, brewing beer was an all go it your own type of deal, however.  In other words, people didn't go to the store and buy a six pack of their favorite local brew.  But by the early 1800s commercial breweries were popping up and one of them, Yuengling, which commenced brewing in 1829, is still in business.  Pretty amazing really.

At first, rather obviously, these were all local operations. But the development of rail car refrigeration changed all that, and a lot more with it.

Rail car refrigeration started before the Civil War and by the 1850s beef was being moved by refrigerated rail car.  You'll frequently hear that the large cattle drives of the post Civil War period were designed to drive cattle to rail heads, which is quite true, but why that mattered isn't' explored that much.  Beef was being transported by rail to packing houses that then shipped the processed beef by refrigerated rail car.

Beer, pretty obviously, can be shipped the same way.

Anheuser-Bush reefer.

And in fact it soon was.

Rail reefers meant that some breweries learned to take advantage of them and then began to ship their product as far as they could sell it.  Anheuser-Bush is one of the prime examples.  It shipped by rail and marketed across the country, sending out not only beer but thousands of illustrations of the Battle of the Little Big Horn after 1876 as part of its marketing program.  The age of modern marketing, which arrived with the Jordan automobile wasn't there yet, but it was arriving.  So, Custer meeting his end, probably worried and thirsty, sold Budweiser, rather than girls who could barely fit into their clothes.  That age was yet to arrive, but the big brewery had appeared.

But local breweries remained and thrived at the same time. There were zillions of them, even in the remote West in smaller towns and cities.

Advertisement for the Casper Brewing Company's Wyoming Light Lager.

And that's true of the very local.

In this locality, starting at some point fairly early on (maybe 1914), a brewery was founded and brewed beer prior to Prohibition.  I've dealt with this here on our blog before.  Prohibition shut the brewery down, of course, just as it did thousands of breweries across the United States.  Unlike many of them, however, it came back after Prohibition and seems to have lasted, with a couple of interruptions, until 1948.

The exceptional part of this story isn't that Casper Brewing Company ceased operations in 48, it's that it made it that long.  Prohibition was devastating to local brewing and most breweries in the U.S. didn't make it back out of Prohibition when it was lifted twelve years after it started.  And, over time, those that did tended to be absorbed by the larger breweries that came to dominate the market after Probation's repeal.  Looked at from the vantage point of perhaps the 1960s, a person would have predicted that fewer and fewer breweries would have existed over time.

But something else has happened.

I've dealt with this, as noted, before.  But something really remarkable on this topic is going on now.

If we looked back two years ago there would not have been a single brewery of any type in this small to medium sized city.  There had been a couple of start up attempts, but they all failed.

Now there are three.  And all three basically came up in the last year.

There's a fourth in nearby tiny Glenrock.

All of these are locally owned and operated outfits.  They vary in size, but one of the very best is one of the smallest. And that brewery, Skull Tree, is so local in its focus that its making an effort to buy its constituent elements for its products from independent farmers in the region.  I.e., not only do the folks who own the brewery work there and make the beer, they buy the products to make it from locals or near locals who are independent businessmen.

And its product is really good.

This might give us an insight into something.  In the new era, maybe brewing has things figured out better than other industries, in the new economy, in some ways.  Local outfits can, with the right product, thrive in competition with bigger entities, and even do better than them.  As noted in an article from last year, some local beers are commanding a real local following in towns around Wyoming.  Now, in one of the cities that had no local brewing, it's really taken off.  Something in this industry has caused younger innovative people to take advantage of markets and technologies in a way that few others have.  We'll look at some of those industries that haven't and wonder about them a bit.

But in the meantime, maybe we'll have a beer.