The Philadelphia Experiment: The bizarre WWII urban legend about an invisible Navy destroyer

Task & Purpose: How the myth that Mr. Rogers was a deadly military sniper began

How the myth that Mr. Rogers was a deadly military sniper began

A Note On Compulsion.

There seems to be a widespread belief in the United States that the government has never compelled people to do stuff that they'd rather not do, and that this is deeply ingrained in American history.

This is quite contrary to the truth.

The first muster of Colonial militia.  You were in it because you were a male sixteen years of age or older.  No conscientious objection.  No moral exceptions.  No exceptions at all.  If you were a man, you showed up.  Professionalism, in the depiction, probably exaggerated.  Cat. .  probably not.

Now, this obviously comes about due to the recent actions by the Biden Administration to compel wider vaccinations.  What you believe on the justice of that is up to you, and I'm not commenting on it. That's up to you.

Rather, I'm commenting on the myth, and it's a real fable, that the government, or more properly governments, cannot compel you to do something of this type, and never has before. That's wholly incorrect.

Indeed, even in the category of vaccinations and quarantines, the nation has a long history of government compulsion. At one point during the Revolutionary War George Washington issued an order compelling his soldiers to receive dangerous live small pox vaccinations.

Compelled them, that is.

And that vaccination method actually was dangerous. Some people contracted small pox from it and died.  He reasoned the danger to the health of the army outweighed the danger to anyone individual, and the soldiers were vaccinated.

And since that time there's been over two hundred years of the government compelling members of the military into various health regimes.  I myself have been vaccinated by the U.S. government twice for small pox and once for yellow fever, even they didn't ask my opinion on it at all.

Okay, you are likely saying, that's the military, and the military is subject to a separate provison of the constitution, but. . .

Well, all sorts of government bodies have compelled vaccinations of children for decades. Parents protested, but the vaccinations occurred anyhow.  This is why diphtheria, for example, doesn't really exist anymore.

And the government has compelled quarantine orders as well, up to and including simply imprisoning some infectious people for the balance of their lives.  Mary Mallon, aka "Typhoid Mary" provides one such example. She was employed as a cook until determined to be highly infections and then put in a sanitarium for the rest of her life.

And going back to the military, it's well established that the government can compel you to serve in the military even if it means you'll get killed.  Contrary to what people probably believe, the United States government has been much more muscular about that than other English-speaking countries.  The Australians and Canadians, for example, didn't conscript during World War One at all.  They both did during World War Two, but it was only at the very end of the war, when manpower needs exceeded those willing to volunteer for overseas service, that such soldiers were made to serve overseas.  The US, in contrast, conscripted right from the onset of World War One, something the British didn't even do at the onset of their involvement, and we conscripted prior to our entry in World War Two.

Registering for the draft, 1917.

Indeed, up until after the Civil War, every American male served, by compulsion, in their local state militia no matter what.  You had no choice.  You were in it. And if that meant they mobilized you to go fight the British, or the Mexicans, other Americans, or Indians, your opinion on it wasn't asked.

The government can, beyond that, compel you to provide other services.  Conscripting people right off the highway to fight forest fires, for example, is something that's within living memory of Americans today.  I personally know one person who was compelled to do just that.

Drilling rig crew in 1941, before OSHA required them to wear hardhats, steel toed boots, and fire resistant clothing.

And, right now, the government compels all sorts of people to wear hard hats, fire resistant clothing, and the like.  It compels children to receive some sort of education, no matter what their parents might think about it.  It compels everyone to pay for all sorts of things, from school lunch programs to nuclear arms, no matter what they think about that.

So why is this belief so common?

I don't really know, but part of it is that we don't know our own history.  Even regular histories often claim that the Civil War conscription act was the nation's first, totally ignoring that there was universal male compulsion to serve in the militia at the time, which is a type of conscription.

And part of it simply is that the current population is young enough to have forgotten all the various compulsory acts noted above.

When I was first a student in school, for example, we were vaccinated at school.  This was the late 60 and early 70s.  Since then this has just been rolled into regular health care provided by family doctors, so hardly anyone under their late 50s remembers a time when you were lined up and given shots at school, or a sugar cube with the polio vaccine. And it wasn't once either, it was more than once.

And you have to be my age as well to recall when people still really remembered the "draft" as a real thing.  I can recall the draft being eliminated in the early 70s, and Jimmy Carter restoring draft registration in the mid 70s.  People actually worried about being drafted, even though the Selective Service Act wasn't actually operating in that fashion.  It was a real thing.  Perhaps it was a real thing because so many of us had fathers, uncles or even older brothers who had been drafted.  An uncle, for example, "volunteered for the draft" in the late 1950s, serving in the Army just before I was born.  My father volunteered for the USAF in the early 50s, but he was subject to recall until the early 1970s when I recall his being released from the Individual Ready Reserve, something he'd been kept in for nearly 20 years.  When I served in the Guard, we were frequently told about how this worked in regard to our "obligor" period of six years, which every American male had, and also told that irrespective of our Guard service fulfilling our obligor duties, we were still subject to recall as veterans.

Indeed, the government doesn't really make us do much, directly, in terms of service anymore.  And that has a real impact on things.  Since the conservative Reagan administration of the late 70s and early 80s, there's been a really strong and growing societal belief in indivdiual liberty being predominant over collective needs.  We'll note the 60s below, but if we look at it over the long haul, collective security predmonated in the 10s, waned as a societal goal in the 20s, and then roared back from 1929 through the early 1960s.  This was all in response ot external threats, but it's very clear that Americans in most of the early 20th Century were pretty willing to have a strong government role in lots of things up to and including telling people what to do in order to meet a collective goal.  Starting in 1976 this really started to retreat and has been in retreat every since.  The current view of indivdiual liberty is much stronger than it was prior to that time.

What the government none the less still does does do is to make us serve in all  sorts of additional camouflaged ways, through taxes and regulations. 

The Great Depression had the impact of making the generations that lived through them really comfortable with both.  Tax rates were high all the way into the 1980s, and it wasn't until then that people really groused about it.  The regulatory state came in during the 1930s and has never gone away, but again it really wasn't until the 1980s that people complained about it.  By and large, Americans were really comfortable with big government and its role all the way up until the mid 1970s.  Something happened then.

What that something is, isn't clear, but the disastrous Vietnam War may have been part of it, combined with a  Baby Boomer generation that at first rebelled against the government telling it to do anything.  Indeed, the same basic impulse that lead the counterculture to assert that nobody could tell them what to do as it was contrary to "Freedom", as an extreme left wing ideology, isn't really very far from the same impulse on the far right.  They're basically the same concept.  If the government and the culture can't, for example, tell you not to smoke dope or drop LSD, well it can't tell you not to get vaccinated.  Kris Kristofferson was completely wrong when he wrote "freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose", but those lyrics as a counterculture anthem sung by Janis Joplin probably ring truer for the right, than the left, today.

As part of that, this is also the era in which Roe v. Wade became the Supreme Court imposed law of the land.  Roe represented an evolution of legal thinking, albeit a poorly drafted and intellectually muddy one, but one that held that a person had a certain sovereignty over their own body that couldn't be violated by the government.  This was really a wholly new, post World War Two concept, as prior to that the law really didn't have the view that being "secure in your person" extended to a sort of radical sovereignty over your own body.  Indeed, much of the law that existed prior to Roe in this regard still exists, which makes the reasoning of Roe all the weaker.

It can't be denied, however, that Roe opened up the floodgates to all sorts of "my body, my choice" type of arguments.  Prior to the mid 20th Century the law regulated all sorts of individual conduct in this area.  Cohabitation was generally illegal, if not widely enforced, there were considerably more restrictions on marrige than there are now, and we're not referencing the shocking racial ones of the time.  Many acts in thsi area, i.e., sexual acts, that are unaddressed by the law now, where then.  All of this was regarded as a perfectly valid topic for the law.  Radical sovereignty over ones own person is actually, therefore, a very new concept in American law and American's concepts of the law.

All of this creates an interesting situation in which it may simply be the case that American society reacted to decades of strong government influence at the same time that the Supreme Court started to have a liberal sense of libertarianism.  The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so the combination of the two brought about a rigth wing libertarianism that relied in part o a left wing judicial libertaranism, the latter of which never sought to to inspire the political former.

And, of course, the strong identification of the "individual" has always been there in American culture, even if it's very much a myth in a lot of ways.  Daniel Boone, braving the frontier, all by his lonesome, remains very much part of us, even if he didn't brave the frontier by his lonesome.

Now, again, I'm not telling people what to think in regard to vaccines here.  I'm not even telling people that they should submit to them or not.  Rather, what I'm trying to do, and likely failing at, is placing the argument in context.

It just isn't the case that it's an American thing to be free of the government telling you exactly what it demands of you in an emergency, at least it hasn't been for much of our history.  The government has been doing that since the time the Congress was the Continental Congress.  So that part of the debate shouldn't be in the debate at all, or if it is, what it should be the case is that it should be recognized as part of the societal revolution that came about in the 1960s and 1970s..  And if it is discussed in an historical context or a libertarian context, it should be remembered that such debates have wider impacts.  

That is, if it really is against something, either Natural Law or Constitutional Law, to tell you to get a vaccination, to what else does that apply and are we comfortable with that?  What else can the government not really tell you to do, and how much of what it is telling you to do now, can it really not?  Is this really a call for the application of traditional American concepts of liberty, or is it an advancement of libertarianism?  And do we want that.

Or should we be debating something else, or framing this debate differently.

Anyway its looked at, we may be seeing one of the great societal shifts in views at work.  After the Civil War the United States Supreme Court massively expanded the ability of the government to act in every aspect of American life, but then, following the end of Reconstruction, it went in the other direcdtion and restricted it.  It remained restrictive in its views until the Great Depression, when it went roaring in the other direction.  In the 1950s through the 1980s the Court became very liberal and acted to forciably expand what it argued were rights, and while sections of the public very much reacted to it, by and large that was accepted.  It nonetheless helped spawn the Tea Party movement and right wing populism and libertarianism which has been very much in the news recently.

But disasters tend to operate towards central governmental power.  There was early resistance to the expansioin of government power in the 1930s but by the 1940s that resistance had more or less evaporated.  The heat of the Great Depression and then World War Two caused that.  There was very little concern abotu the large role of the government in the 1950s and 1960s even as resistance to the Vietnam War occured in that latter decade.  The real reaction to long government expansion, as already noted, only came in the late 1970s and 1980s.

What about now?  The legislature is about to convene in a special session and lots of state attorney generals will be suing over the Biden orders.  Many individuals feel that the orders violate individual liberty, with many having concepts, as noted above, that really only date back a few decades.  At the same time, in some regions of the country, support for government action on all sorts of things is stronger than it has been at any point since the 1930s.

As we write this, the state legislature is getting ready to go into a special session.  A result of that special session will be to reinforce the widespread view that the Biden Administration is acting unconstitutionally.  History's example here, however, suggests caution.

The convening of legislatures following the 1860s election which sought to exercise state sovereignty over Federalism in reaction to Lincoln's eletion and the coming restrictions on the expansion of slavery brought about instead the Civil War and its immediate end.  I don't mean to suggest that vaccine requirements and slavery are in any way similiar, but the example of a state attempt to restrict Federal authority resulting in violence first and a massive expansion of government authority tells us something.

The same example could be given by way of the 1950s and 60s efforts to oppose Federal civil rights expansion, which resulted in a reaction in Southern states that was far from successful.

Opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal not only didn't succeed, but was effectively crushed with even the Supreme Court coming around to his views, providing another example.

Somebody should put a "Proceed With Caution" sign up in Cheyenne.   And a review of American history would be a good idea prior to October.

Friday July 18, 1941. Stalin, ignoring the ongone second front, writes the British about a second front.

On this day in 1941 Stalin wrote the first of his "second front" letters, asking for the British to open up a second front in France and the Arctic.

This would prove to be an enduring Soviet theme during the war which completely ignored that the British Commonwealth had troops on the ground, fighting the Germans, on the day Operation Barbarossa commenced.  The Eastern Front was the second front.  On this particular day British Commonwealth forces were completing day two of the Twin Pimple raid, were besieged at Tobruk, had just defeated the Vichy French in Syria and Lebanon, were occupying Iraq, having just defeated a fascist coup there, were besieged, more or less, on Malta, and were engaged in the titanic Battle of the Atlantic.

None of this of course means that really enormous scale fighting wasn't going on in the East.  Operation Barbarossa is arguably the largest invasion ever conducted (although in terms of per capita population and scale, the Mongol invasion of everything to their west and the Hun invasion of the same is really actually larger).  The Soviets had, in fact, just lost 300,000 men to German captivity the prior day.  Still, it's a fact that the British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and Indians, to name a few, were fighting on the ground for months prior to any Soviet soldier firing a shot.

Stalin's repeated requests were so pronounced that they've become part of the myth of World War Two, which has gone so far as to imagine that Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944, opened up that second front.  By that time, the Allies had taken all of North Africa, Sicily, and Rome.  Additionally, the western Allies were keeping the Japanese tied up in the Pacific. While there was little risk of the Japanese entering the war against the Soviet Union. . . they'd never been able to defeat the Chinese, that still helped alleviate a Soviet security concern.

Part of the reason this myth continues to endure has to do with really effective British propaganda and assessment of their foreign audiences.  Churchill wanted to placate, not anger, Stalin, so he went along with the theme.  We really don't need to anymore.

In other war news, the United States Army Air Corps started operating out of Iceland and Secretary of the Navy Knox approved a plan to build 100 destroyers for the Royal Navy.  You can find out about that here:

Today in World War II History—July 18, 1941

Cliff notes of the Zeitgeist Part I. Some Observations on current events, political, economic, religious, and otherwise.

1.  Populism and racism aren't the same thing, even if some populist are racist.

Theodore Roosevelt.  He was a populist, and a progressive.  Just being a populist doesn't make a person a racist, or even a conservative.

What happened on January 6 with an attempted coup in Washington D. C. will go down as one of the back marks in American history.  Truly, an infamous day.

Post insurrection analysis has frequently strayed into suggesting that part and parcel of the insurrectionist goal is a deep seated racism.  To hear commentators speak of it, you'd get the idea that the storming was by the Dixiecrats of the last century.  This does a disservice to the facts and ignores the real divide in the country.

Some of the populist are racists, there's no doubt about it. And Donald Trump did nothing to distance himself from racists while he was President.  Having said that, however, the GOP started quietly down this path in the 1970s with Ronald Reagan's "Southern Strategy".  Before that, the Democrats were the party with a regional race problem and the Republicans were not.  The GOP couldn't win in the South for that reason.  So, much like in the compromise that resulted in setting the 1876 election, the GOP decided to abandon its strong civil rights position in order to court the otherwise highly conservative, and mostly white, Southern electorate.  

That's a legacy of what we're seeing now, and its a feature of some of the populist movements from around the country, but it doesn't really define what's going on. What defines it is the abandonment of the Rust Belt working class by both political parties.

The American blue collar working class was hailed since the early 20th Century as the real definers of what it was to be an American.  There's an endless amount of propaganda about it and everyone has seen it.  Rosie the Riveter wasn't a college educated career woman who was living with a Soy Boy café worker.  No, there was about a 50/50 chance that she hadn't finished high school and was going to stop working the second her boyfriend returned from defeating the Axis and took back his welding job, after which point they'd get married and have stout little kids who played baseball and football and who would look forward to the same careers their parents had had.

Now that seems to be all gone, but the implications have not been worked out at all.  You can't tell a group of people that they define what it is to be an American and then one day that they're the enemy of progress.  Men and women who simply want jobs to live rather than to live their jobs and who are Christians with traditional Christian values have, over the past decade or so, been told that they need to move on to the metro and reeducate, and that the values they held which defined society are now not only obsolete, but they need to keep them to themselves.

When people speak of a "culture war", that's what they're talking about, and that's what's brought about what we're seeing right now.  At least half the country, and probably more, is sick of being told that their deepest values need to be put on the shelf forever.  

That doesn't excuse what occurred on January 6, but it gave rise to it.  Trump gave voice to it.  And at some point a group of people who were told over 90 years that they were the real Americans, and defined Americanism, are going to react with huge suspicion if they're suddenly told they aren't.

The culture war rift in the country is now a grand canyon.  And its runs right through Western society into other countries.  It's not close to being over and there's no good reason to believe that Joe Biden can heal it.

But claiming that everyone who is on the right is basically Nathan Bedford Forest, as some on the left, and the constant press commentary, has, isn't going to make things better.  It may actually make it much, much worse.

2.  The "choice" isn't between "Democracy and Socialism".

Socialist leader of France, and anti Communist, Francois Mitterrand and his ally, Ronald Reagan.

I'm noting this here as I hear things like this all the time, and I read an op ed article in the Trib by somebody who is a clear supporter of Anthony Bouchard's run against Liz Cheney which referenced that phrase, although not in connection with Bouchard's primary effort to displace Cheney, which I'll predict will end up just being an expensive waste of time on his part.  The author of the op ed apparently wrote a book in which he claims that will be the choice for 2024.

No it won't, and it doesn't make sense.

I'm really sick of people getting these confused.  It's perfectly possible to be an ardent (small d) democrat and a Socialist.

Indeed, the Social Democratic Party is the largest party in Germany and, sorry US, its' considerably more democratic than the United States.  The current German constitution and body of electoral laws makes us look rather backward in that regard, restrictions on the freedom speech where it pertains to fascism and restrictions on strange movements like Scientology notwithstanding.

And the SDP isn't the only full democratic, and Socialist, party that's governed in Europe. France had a massively anti communist, heavily allied to the United States, elected premier during the Reagan administration, Francois Mitterrand, who was the First Secretary of the Socialist Party in France.

Every European nation except for the United Kingdom and Ireland has a viable and large Socialist Party that participates in their parliaments.  And, taking us back to history again, it was the SDP that was the last bulwark against the Nazi Party and the Communist Party in 1932 in trying to keep democracy running in post World War One Europe.  Yes the CDU was in there too, but the SDP was the big, anti Communist, anti Fascist, party.

Why do people believe this myth?

Bad historical education.

People seem to think that Socialism=Communism, and way, way back when, before there were any Communist countries, this was in fact true.  It hasn't been true since 1917/18 however, and in that time frame the Communist and the Socialist separated with the Socialists uniformly supporting democratic governments.  They went down in defeat on that point against the Communists in the Russian Revolution and in Nazi Germany.

What Socialism really is, is an economic system that argues for "social" control of the economy.

Get it straight.

Indeed, while not a Socialist whatsoever, I'd note that Socialist will claim that Socialism is more democratic than Capitalism, as there's social vestment of the economy in society at large.  I think that's mostly hooey, and in reality the economy always ends up being vested in the government, but the end game for Socialism and unrestrained Capitalism is the same. . a monopoly.  That's why nearly all Capitalist economies have Distributist laws, even if they don't call them that, such as the Sherman Anti Trust Act.

FWIW, the percentage of the GDP that's attributed to the government hovers between 35% and 40% in the United States irrespective of whether the GOP or the Democrats are in control.  There's never been a country, ever, whose government didn't dominate some aspects of its economy.  It's just that people tend not to be able to recognize it, except in the case of outright Socialism, including in Wyoming. For example, the state could completely contract out highway snow removal if it wished to, which would be a lot more free market.  But it's not going to. Or the state could close the remaining 100% of the highway rest stops and let people travel to gas stations, etc. in times of need, but that sure wouldn't be very popular.  You get the picture.

3.  While we're at it, "free market economics" doesn't equal Capitalism either.

Capitalism is a system under which business organizations which are actually partnership in the natural sense obtain state protection for their de fact partners by making them de jure shareholders and granting the corporation legal personhood.  It can't exist without the state.

There are a lot of reasons this system has proven to be such a huge success, but its a mistake to assume that the system is natural or that its a pure free market one.  In a pure free market natural economy (which would be a type of distributist economy), corporations wouldn't exist but partnerships would.

Every member of a partnership, of the traditional type, is legally liable for the acts of the company.  In a corporation, generally, only the company itself is. That's why corporations are so successful at raising "capital".  Only the shareholder's investment money is at risk.

Anyhow, if you point out that Capitalism is always a state sponsored and created economic system, as Socialism is when actually applied, you'll draw a blank look.  People are so use to thinking the opposite that they don't grasp that Capitalism is not a natural system, and that it requires state support to exist.

4.  The GOP adrift. Real Wyoming isn't as alt right as the alt right thinks.  It isn't even as conservative as people think.

There's conservative and then there's Wyoming conservative and then there's the conservatism of Wyomingites. 

They're not the same.

Time may prove me incorrect on this, but what has been going on in the state's GOP in the last few years really doesn't reflect the way most Wyomingite's actually think.  In reality, most Wyomingites just don't follow politics all that closely.

To grasp this you have to first realize that there's basically two, or maybe three, Wyoming populations. There's the temporary one made of transient workers who are here during booms, and then depart during busts.  When they're here, they make a big difference in politics and they bring their politics with them.  They aren't all oilfield workers by any means, as some of them have come in as professionals due to the boom, or occupy other boom time economic positions.  Then there's the Jackson Hole crowed, which is now more diffused than in just Teton County, who are also from somewhere else, but upon arriving here they buy a puffy coat or a Stetson and imagine themselves to be Wyomingites.  They also bring their politics with them.

And then there's the people who were born here, brought here while very young, or who were from a neighboring rural state that was much like Wyoming in some ways.  These are the people who are staying and whom make up most of the electorate.

They're political views are really unique to themselves. They aren't actually all that conservative, but can be mistaken for conservatives. They're more in the nature of rural libertarians combined with something that might be most comparable to the Russian Civil War era Ukrainian Greens.

This group isn't going to rail against Liz Cheney for voting her conscience and, like it or not, they aren't all that worked up on social issues either.  They're just as likely to support a "right to roam" as they are property rights, and no matter what your views are on one thing or another in social trends, they're going to espouse the traditional views while ignoring whatever it is that other people are doing.

I note all of this as the current drift of the GOP towards a really, really hard right is already beginning to further split an already split party and the GOP doesn't seem to get it.  At the same time that county GOP organizations are voting to censure Liz Cheney, the written comments to the Trib are overwhelmingly in her favor, including those written by her avowedly former opponents.  The GOP seems to be on the verge of splitting in two nationally and if it does, it's pretty clear that the bulk of the state party will go wherever the Trump wing of the party does, which in state politics is likely to pretty quickly end up in their becoming a minority party.

5.  Apparently "innocent until proven guilty" is something that nobody really believes. . . or at least it doesn't apply to Catholic clerics.

I haven't commented on this before and perhaps I shouldn't here, but I'm going to anyhow.

The Tribune has been following, understandably, the legal woes of retired Wyoming Bishop Joseph Hart now for years.  Bishop Hart was accused of sexual ickyness with male minors.

During the same period of time during which Hart has been dealing with this, three local Protestant ministers have faced the same accusations, and they all proved true. Mention of it in the Press was very brief.  No following story occurred.  Hart's story has, however, proven different.

The initial investigation lead the Laramie County authorities to pass on doing anything. They didn't see enough evidence.  The current Bishop, however, Bishop Biegler, chose to revive the matter within the church itself and that lead to it being looked at by the authorities a second time.  On that second occasion, the prosecutor in Natrona County again determined not to charge Bishop Hart with anything.  That lead to criticism, he reopened the file and, after some time had passed, he once again determined not to file charges.

The internal church matter, however, went on to some sort of tribunal at the Vatican. And now it also has determined that there's not enough there to do anything.  

With this being the case, Bishop Hart, over a period of decades, has endured and prevailed over four separate prosecutorial episodes, three at the state level, and one at hte Vatican level.

The American myth is that you are innocent until proven guilty.  Hart hasn't been proven guilty of anything. The Tribune, however, continues to treat his as if he is guilty and getting away with it.  Indeed, Bishop Biegler isn't helping much either as, having gotten this rolling, he's still basically sending out signals that he believes that Hart is guilty and will be crediting his accusers in spite of years and years of such efforts having failed.  This gets to something regarding Bishop Biegler we'll deal with in a moment, but we'll note this here.

Bishop Hart gets this sort of attention as he's Catholic.  The Catholic Church has gone through a horrific episode recently, now mostly addressed, with clerics who are now all older having committed terrible sexual transgressions.  Most of these, however, seem to have arisen due to a vareity of factors that let in priests who were not there for the right reasons, although their views are ones that the press also genuinely celebrates.  Indeed, this takes us back to the culture wars item above, as Catholic clerics that are loyal to the Church's traditional beliefs and dogma are ones that the press really doesn't like.

And for that reason, it doesn't like the church itself, which is why this gets so much press but real proven accusations by protestant minister is the same readership field, do not.

6.  Bishop Biegler and the rearward gaze.

We're now a full year into a present massive crisis that has caused a crisis in the Church but to look at the Diocese of Cheyenne, you'd not know it.

The Bishop has suspended the obligation to attend Mass on what is now running up on a year.  I had real doubts about this early on, but as the pandemic deepened, I have to admit that at some point, that's valid.  As soon as the churches were opened back up, I started going back to Mass, but in the recent deepened episode, I suspended going, taking advantage of the dispensation as I had a childhood asthma condition and I really don't want to get virus, particularly with vaccinations come on so soon.

Anyhow, if you check in on the Diocese website the first thing you are going to find is a statement by Bishop Biegler about retried Bishop Hart.

Bishop Hart was the bishop here from 1978 until 2001.  I.e., he hasn't been the bishop for 20 years.  He's been retired for 20 years.  We're on our third bishop since that time.

Wyoming, as we've noted above, is a highly transient state.  There's a core of us diehards who were born here, and who will die here, and who are watching people come and go in the meantime.  And quite a few of us, although its a minority in the state's population, are Catholic.  Quite a few of the transients are too. 

Most of the people in the pews have very low interest, in this point, in the Joseph Hart saga.  It doesn't impact our daily lives whatsoever.  When Hart was last Bishop, I was 37 years old and my youngest child was a baby.  

The pandemic does impact my daily life.

During the entire pandemic, I haven't had a representative of the parish reach out even once.  I've reached in several times, but at the time the pandemic struck I'd only recently gone off of a parish council.

Indeed, the pandemic struck at a particularly bad time, in this context, for me, as I'd gone off of the council and I stepped down as a lector as the Mass time didn't work well for my spouse and both kids were headed off to Laramie.  I'd been a lector at that point for years and years, and I do miss it. But as that occurred it was also the case that the downtown parish was clearly being changed into the Hispanic parish. That's fine, but Mass times were also altered for reasons that aren't clear to me, and therefore I went across town to another parish. The entire process left me feeling a bit unmoored as the parish that I'd served at quickly became pretty unrecognizable, the new Priest had no idea who I was, the focus was on a demographic that needs to be focused on but which I'm not part of, and then the pandemic hit.

The parish I was going to did a good job at first at dealing with the crisis but then the Bishop ordered the doors closed.  I'm sure I'm just lost to where I was at, and now I'm barely known where I am.  I get that.

What I don't get, quite frankly, is why there wasn't a full scale effort to require the parishes to reach out to parishioners.  There wasn't.  Or at least there wasn't one that I could see.  And to check in on the Diocese website to learn the latest in regard to the church and the pandemic is a disappointment, as the information is hard to find.  News on Bishop Biegler and Bishop Hart is easy to find, however.

And here's the point.  In a pandemic in which our connections with our parish is now strained and souls stand to be lost, dealing with a problem that's now 20 years in our review mirror should not be front and center.

7.  "I have a right to an opinion" doesn't mean your opinion is worth listening too.

Given that so much discourse happens on social media anymore, you've seen this argument. Some issue is out there, somebody argues the facts, and the reply is "I have a right to an opinion".

First of all, it's debatable if you have a "right" to an erroneous opinion.  It may be your opinion that you are a polar bear, but you don't really have a right to that, as that would be delusional.  That's an extreme example, but it demonstrates a point. At some point opinions can so depart from reality that they can lead to institutionalization.  So, in fact, you don't have a right to an opinion without question.

You may have a right to an opinion, however, on matters which are fairly debatable.  And that's the kicker.  A lot of people raise the "I have a right to an opinion" defense at the point at which their opinion is, in fact, no longer fairly debatable.  

Now, assuming that the opinion doesn't constitute a danger to yourself or others, you may have a legal right to hold it, but that doesn't amount to an existential right.  You have no right, really, to be wrong.  So taking refuge in that argument actually isn't a defense at all.

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Jean Baptiste Charbonneau

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Jean Baptiste Charbonneau: 

Wyoming Myths. Jean Baptiste Charbonneau

Okay, we recently discussed Sacagawea and, in that context, discussed Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.  Surely we have this covered?

Well, mostly. But to complete the story we really need to address Jean Baptiste as, just like his famous mother, he's the subject of a Wyoming myth. And indeed, it's the same myth.

And its illustrative as to both, as the later life of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau is very well known, and demonstrable with finality.  We know where he went to school, what he did as a young man, a middle aged man, and in the context of his times, as an old man.  

And what he did not do is to go to the Wind River Reservation with his very aged mother.

But that's the myth.

It's hard not to feel sad about the life of Jean Baptiste, even though he probably didn't see it as sad himself.  He wasn't even one year old when he was packed by his mother, as slave to his father, across the western half of North America as his famous mother acted as a guide and interpreter for the Corps of Discovery.  He was a young boy when his mother gave him up to William Clark to be educated, and Clark in fact enrolled him in two successive schools, the first a Jesuit school and the second another private school, at great expense.  He was therefore well educated for this time and became even more so when met Duke Friedrich Paul Wihlem of Wurttenberg in 1823 while he was traveling in the United States.  Jean Baptiste was working at a Kaw trading post on the Kansas River at the time.  The Duke was being guided by Toussaint Charbonneau on a trip to the northern plains.  He invited the younger Charbonneau to return to Europe with him, which he did.  He apparently traveled with the Duke in Europe and Africa while his guest.

Upon returning to North American he resumed a Western life and worked as a trapper, hunter and guide.  He was later a gold prospector.  In 1866 he died in Oregon after some sort of accident which threw him into a frigid river and left him with pneumonia.  He was 61 years old at the time.

He lived a rich and varied life, and a fairly well documented one. That he died in Oregon is something for which there is no doubt.

None the less, Grace Raymond Hebard placed his death in 1885 on the Wind River Reservation, and the work of Dr. Charles Eastman likewise places him there. And this all dates to the the stories associated with Porivo, and her adult son who entered the Reservation with her.  As with his mother, who died in North Dakota, there is a grave marker for him on the Reservation.

His actual grave is known as to location, and is in Oregon.

As with his famous mother, his reconstructed myth does not serve him well, although unlike his mother he lived a fairly long life.  He would have lived a longer one if the Wyoming myth was correct, but that would not do his life justice.  It was remarkably adventuresome right up to the point of his death, and like his mothers it crossed back and forth between two worlds in a way that makes contemporary readers uncomfortable.

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea: 

Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea

Mural in the Montana State House by Edgar Paxson depicting Sacagawea and the Corps of Discovery in Montana.  Sacagawea's actual appearance, of course, is known only by description, but Paxon was a Montana artist particularly noted for his attention to close detail.  Having said that, she was just a teenager at this time and likely appeared younger than the female figure in this depiction.

Wyoming has an association with Sacagawea, sort of.

But not quite as close as we sometimes like to claim.

Route of the Corps of Discovery.  It wholly avoided Wyoming.

Sacagawea, the Corps of Discovery's justifiably famous guide, or pilot, or interpreter, has a real world close connection with our state in that she was a Shoshone.  Having said that, she was a Lemhi Shoshone. a name they would not have recognized.  To her band, and her times, she was a Akaitikka meaning "Salmon Eater".*  At the time of her birth in 1788 the Shoshone were widely spread throughout Wyoming, Montana and Idaho and, if you consider that their split with the Comanche had already occurred, but that the Comanche are an extension of the Shoshone people, they were widely spread indeed.**

She was born in Idaho what is now near the Idaho-Montana border.  No such border existed at the time, of course, and the Shoshone, including the Lemhi, ranged over wide territories.  Her band most likely ranged into northwest Wyoming, with it being certain of course that other Shoshone bands inhabited the area.

In 1800, at age 12, she was taken in a Hidatsa raid.  The Hidatsa are a Siouan people who are closely related to another Siouan people, the Crows.  Some consider the tribes to be the same, with the Hidatsa the parent tribe to the Crows.  It's important to note, however, that when the Sioux are referred to, its typically the Lakota and Dakota, and related groups that are meant. Indeed the Sioux and the Crows would be bitter enemies in the 19th Century, as would the Sioux and the Shoshone for that matter.

The Hidatsa were wide ranging and she was taken to a location that today is near Washburn, North Dakota. This means that the raiders had effectively traversed what is now Montana, an impressive feat for a raiding party.  The taking of captives in this manner was not unusual, and while this undoubtedly meant that the very young Shoshone girls life had taken a disastrous turn, her captivity by the Hidatsa, while real, was probably not terribly harsh.  In other words, she was a captive, but a captive with domestic duties that were likely not far removed from that of Hidatsa girls of the same age.

At age 13 she was sold to Toussaint Charbonneau as a "wife".  

Histories have sometimes addressed this in various ways, including using such terms as "non consensual wife", but there is no such thing.  Indeed, it's remarkable that even though the circumstances of her initial union with Charbonneau are well known, she's still usually routinely referred to as Charbonneau's "wife."  Effectively she was purchased as a slave, and if the niceties are stripped off of it, she was kept as a involuntary concubine at first, basically, or if you really want to strip the niceties off of it, as sort of sex slave with domestic duties, at first.  She was Charbonneau's second such slave, the first being the equally juvenile Otter Woman who was probably also a Shoshone captive of the Hidatsa.***

Edgar Paxon's depiction of Toussaint Charbonneau, notable perhaps in that its a flattering illustration.  In reality, of course, we have no period depiction for Charbonneau and his reputation has never been what can be called flattering.

In 1804 the Corps of Discovery visited Hidatsa villages in the fall in anticipation of their press across the the upper West to the Pacific the next Spring. They were in search of guides, and in that context hoped to find somebody who knew the territory. They were visited by Charbonneau, who was a French Canadian fur trapper.****  William Clark noted in his journal:

french man by Name Chabonah, who Speaks the Big Belley language visit us, he wished to hire & informed us his 2 Squars (squaws) were Snake Indians, we engau (engaged) him to go on with us and take one of his wives to interpret the Snake language.…

Spelling obviously had yet to be standardized and Clark puzzled out Charbonneau's last name.  He also used a lot of colloquialisms for the names of Indian bands.  The Snakes referred to the Shoshone, which is of course not what they call themselves (like most Indian bands, they call themselves "The People").  

It's of note, fwiw, and noteworthy without trying to be "woke", that the commanders of the Corps of Discovery did not appear bothered that  about Charbonneau's irregular situation with the two teenaged Indian girls.*****  They also didn't claim, as other writers have, that either of his girls were his "wives".  They only claimed that they were his "Squars", meaning his Indian women.  Polygamy was of course illegal in the United States, and Louisiana, the vast newly acquired territory, was within the United States, but there's no good evidence in this early entry that they regarded Sacagawea or Otter Women as wives, but rather simply his held women.  And of course Lewis and Clark were both fully acclimated to slavery, something they did not regard as abnormal nor wrong, and they had a slave with them of their own, York, who belonged to Clark and who was Clark's lifelong body servant.******

On that date in 1804 Charbonneau was contracted to be a guide that following spring and to bring one of his teenage women along with him as an interpreter.  They had no apparent early preference which one that would be.

Charbonneau apparently did, as that following week he'd bring Sacagawea into the Corps of Discovery camp and they took up residence there.  He did not bring Otter Woman.*******  Prior to the Spring she'd give birth to their son, who was named Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, who'd live into his sixties and whom would have an adventuresome life and be the subject of his own Wyoming myth.  We'll get to that one later.

Otter Woman disappeared from history.  She was left with the Hidatsa and while there are oral history references to her, the story grows thin and her fate is unknown. She likely merged into the tribe that captured her and lived the rest of her life as part of the Hidatsa, but its of note that her story does not resume when Charbonneau returned to the Hidatsa for a time after completing his role with the Corps of Discovery.

Charles Russell's painting of the Corps of Discovery arriving at the camp of her native band, which was then lead by her brother.  This reunion occurred, in real terms, only a few years after she had been kidnapped by the Hidatsa.  Note that Russel, who was keen on detail, depicts one of the Shoshone as already being armed with a rifle, which was no doubt correct.

Everyone is of course familiar with the yeoman role that Sacagawea performed for the Corps of Discovery and therefore we'll omit it here.  Suffice it to say, she became the star critical guide, and a sort of diplomatic delegate for the expedition, outshining Charbonneau who seems to have been widely disliked, although the full degree to which he was disliked can be at least questioned as he'd retrain an occasional guiding role for the US Army into the 1830s, that coming to an end when Clark died.  Prior to that, he and Sacagawea would briefly live on a farm in Missouri, where she gave birth to a second child by him, named Lizette.  The invitation to live in Missouri came from Clark.  About Lizette little is known, and she's believed to have died in childhood.

Russell painting depicting the Corps of Discovery on the lower Columbia, with Sacagawea with arms outstretched.  One of the impacts of her presence on the trip was the effect it had on Indian bands they encountered, which convinced them that their intent was not hostile.

Following the experiment with farming, the couple, which by that time they seem to have been, returned to the Hidatsa.  Sacagawea died of what was described as "putrid fever" in 1812.^ At the time, it seems that she left the security of Fort Manual Lisa, where they were living, to return to the Hidatsa in what would have been sort of a premonition of death.  It also seems that she had a daughter with her at the time, who may have been Lizette, or who may have been a subsequent child about whom nothing else was known.  Jean Baptiste was left in Missouri at a boarding school which had been arranged for by Clark.

And with Sacagawea's death in 1812, the myth starts to kick in.

Truth be known, in the 18th and early 19th Centuries deaths in the United States were not well tracked in general and they certainly weren't in the West.  Birth Certificates and Death Certificates were not issued.  Nobody made really strenuous efforts, moreover, to keep track of the deaths of Indians up until the Reservation period, which was far in the future in 1812.  That we know as much as we do with the post 1804 life of Sacagawea is testimony to how important in the Corps of Discovery, and hence notable, she really was.  Period recollections on her fate can be regarded as beyond question.

None of which has kept people from questioning it.

Grace Raymond Hebard, educator, suffragist, feminist, and mythologist.

In the early 20th Century the remarkable University of Wyoming political economy professor, Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard, took an interest in Sacagawea and, with scanty evidence, concluded that she had not died in 1812 but rather had traveled to the Southwest and married into the Comanche tribe, and then came to Wyoming after her husband was killed. These claims surrounded a woman who was known by various names, including "Chief Woman", or Porivo.

The woman in question seems to have come on to the reservation in advanced old age and to have arrived with an adult son.  White figures on the Reservation at the time, including a prominent Episcopal missionary, became fascinated with the elderly woman.^^  Of note, resident Shoshone had a difficult time speaking to her, which was a clue to her actual probable origin.  Be that as it may, her advanced aged and presence with an adult son lead the European American figures on the reservation to believe that she must be the famous female "pilot", Sacagawea, and the adult son, must be Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, apparently not aware that Jean Baptiste's life was very well recorded, including his travels abroad and ultimate death in his early 60s.  No matter on any of that, those in question wanted to believe that the figures must be Sacagawea and Jean Baptiste.

In reality, they were almost certainly surviving Sheep Eater Indians.  

The Tukudeka, or Sheep Eaters, are a Shoshone band who ranged in the mountainous regions of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.  Like the Lemhi, they were named by outsiders for their principal foods source, which in their case was Mountain Sheep.  

The Sheep Easters are the Shoshone band about which the least is known.   They always lived in what European Americans regarded as remote areas.  They were highly adapted to their lifestyle and remains of their sheep traps and other high mountain artifacts are fairly common, but encounters with them were actually very rare.  They did not routinely share their existence with other, lower altitude, Shoshones. Their encounters with European Americans were fairly rare, and they didn't have hostile encounters with them until very late in the Indian War period.  The Sheep Eater War of 1879 was the last major Indian War in the Pacific Northwest for that reason.

Sheep Eaters were a presence on the Wind River Reservation as early as 1870, when the Federal Government acknowledged them as a band entitled to the Shoshone allotment, and Shoshone Chief Washakie accepted them as a Shoshone group, but they had no high incentive to come onto the reservation voluntarily and generally only did very late, as the era of Indian free ranging was drawing down.  In spite of their enormous success in their environment, they were not numerous and generally melted into the Reservation populations when they came in, but they were different at first.  Included in their uniqueness was a linguistic one.  Their language varied from other Shoshones to an extent.

Most likely the elderly woman and her son who came in onto the Reservation and were noted by the Episcopal and Reservation figures were Sheep Eaters.  Their language was different and they just showed up.  By the time that they did, the Sheep Easter era was drawing very much to a close.  Most likely the adult man and his elderly mother decided that they couldn't make it as a solitary two.  Or some variant of that, as in the son deciding that caring for his mother in the mountains had become too burdensome.

The figures noted very much took to them, although conversing with them proved difficult.  The degree to which they adopted their view of what she was saying to fit their romantic conclusion of the rediscovery of Sacagawea or that the elderly woman.  Whomever she was, she passed away in 1884.  If she was Sacagawea, which she was not, she would have been 96 years old, certainly not an impossibly old age, but certainly an old one, both then and now.

Dr. Charles Eastman.

By 1919 the myths regarding Chief Woman had spread sufficiently that they were referenced in a 1919 account on the Corps of Discovery in a second hand way, noting that that a sculptor looking for a model of Sacagawea had learned of her 1884 death on the Wind River Reservation and her supposed status as Sacagawea.  In 1925 Dr. Charles Eastman, a Sioux physician, was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to locate Sacagawea's remains.  He also learned of Porivo's 1884 death and conducted interviews at Wind River.  Those interviews, conducted nearly forty years after her death, included recollections that she had spoken of a long journey in which she's assisted white men and, further, that she had a sliver Jefferson Peace Medal such as the type carried by the Corps of Discovery.  He also located a Comanche woman who claimed Porivo was her grandmother.  He claimed that Porivo had lived at Fort Bridger, Wyoming for sometime with sons Bazil and Baptiste and that ultimately that woman had come to Fort Washakie, where she was recorded as "Bazil's mother"  It was his conclusion that Porivo was Sacagawea.

Not all of Porivo's reputed accounts, if taken fully at face value, are fully easy to discount at first, but by and large they become so if fully examined.  Long journeys are in the context of the teller, and peace medals were much more common than might be supposed.  None the less, the retold story was picked up by Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard who massively romanticized it.  Hebard's historical research has been discredited, but her 1933 book caused a widespread belief to exist that Sacagawea didn't die in her late 20s but rather in her 90s, and not in North Dakota, but in Wyoming.  That suited Hebard's Wyoming centric boosting of her adopted state, and her feminist portrayal of an Indian heroine.  It provides a massive cautionary tale about the reinterpretation of history in the context of ones own time and to suit a preconceived notion of how the past ought to be a perfect prologue for hte future.

It is, however, simply, if unknowingly, false.

And the falsity of it gives Wyoming a claim on Sacagawea that it frankly doesn't merit.  One that lead to monuments in the state to Sacagawea, to include a tombstone or over Porivo's grave that identified her as Sacagawea, which is a sort of tourist attraction.

Indeed, there's no actual indication that Sacagawea ever set foot in Wyoming.  She may have, as a young girl, as the Lemhi Shoshone ranged over the mountainous regions of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.  Be that as it may, the Lemhi Valley of Idaho is named after them for a reason.  They're not one of the Shoshone bands that distinctly associated with the state prior to the Reservation era.  Be that as it may, during the known established period of her life, we can place her in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota, in terms of regional states, but not Wyoming. . . at any time.

That does not mean, of course, that she's not an admirable and important figure.  Nor does it mean that she was not an important Shoshone figure, and the Shoshone are an important people in Wyoming's history.  Its almost certainly the case that relatives of her, but not descendants, live on the Reservation today, although that claim would be even better for the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho.  Through her son, Jean Baptiste, she likely has living descendants today, although not ones who would identify as Shoshone.

But giving people a long and romantic life rather than a short and tragic one doesn't do them or history any favors.  In reality, Sacagawea's life was heroic, tragic and short.  She was just a girl when she was kidnapped from her family, and still just a girl when she was sold to a man a good twenty years older than she was and of an alien culture to be a type of domestic slave, kept along with another similarly youthful domestic slave he already held.  In that capacity she went across half the continent and back with an infant, and did come to be hugely admired by the members of the Corps of Discovery.  It was that respect that lead, in part, to the post expedition opportunities afford to her and Toussaint Charbonneau, who seems to have evolved into her actual husband over time.  That also lead to the education of her son at the behest of William Clark.  It didn't save her, however, form a 19th Century death, still in her twenties.

She was a remarkable young woman by all accounts, and deserves to be remembered as such, and accurately.

*Lemhi comes from Fort Lemhi, which was a Mormon mission to the Akaitikka.

**Comanche is a Shoshone word meaning "Arguer"  The argument was over the adoption of horses, and the argument took place in southeastern Wyoming at the time that the Shoshones first encountered horses.  The Comanches were the early adopters of horses.

***The details regarding Otter Woman are extremely obscure.  It's known that she was in an identical status to that of Sacagawea in 1804 and the best evidence is that she was a captive Shoshone.  There are other claims for her tribal origin, however and additional assertions as to her fate.  Like Sacajawea, her history suffers from an unfortunate association with the work of Dr. Grace Raymond Hebert who places Otter Woman in the Corps of Discovery camp in the winter of 1804 and who even has her remaining in domestic union with Charbonneau in later years, along with Sacajawea.  In reality, she seems to have simply been abandoned in 1804 or 1805.  Charbonneau's reasoning for this isn't clear, but Sacajawea was pregnant at the time that Charbonneau was hired by the Corps of Discovery.  It is clear that the Corps desired that one of Charbonneau's wives accompany them to act as interpreter, and he may have chose her due to her pregnancy, not wishing to abandon her in that condition.

Of course, if Otter Woman was in fact not Shoshone, but Mandan or some other tribe as has been claimed, that would also explain why she was not chosen.  

What occurred to her is not realistically capable of being known.

****Toussaint Charbonneau was probably born in 1767 and was from a town that is near Montreal.  His first name means "All Saints Day" or "All Saints".  He had been a fur trapper for an extended period of time by 1804.  His reputation has never been particularly good and for good reason.  One of the earliest records regarding him, prior to his time as a trapper, notes him being stabbed by a woman in defense of her daughter whom Charbonneau was attempting to rape.  

Charbonneau appears to be almost uniformly disliked by people who associated with him over the course of his long life.  He appears to have been temperamental.  He also seems to have a predilection for young women as he had four or five Indian "wives" during his lifetime, all of whom were teenagers at the time of their "marriages".  This includes one who was a teen at the time of his death , which is notable as he was in his 76 at the time, assuming the 1767 birth year is correct (if it isn't, he would have been 84, which seems unlikely).  The name of at least one of his wives is unknown (the name of another was Corn Woman, leaving at least one, or perhaps, unknown as to name).  It's known that two of the four or five where Shoshone, if Otter Woman was Shoshone, and one was Assiniboine.

His estate was settled by his son Jean Baptiste, which is interesting in that it would indicate that he was in some sort of contact with his son at the time of his death in about 1843, at which time he was back in North Dakota.  It's also interesting in that it would suggest that Jean Baptiste may have been his only survivor.  The existing information confirms that he had at least two children, both by Sacagawea, and may have had a third by her.  Only Jean Baptiste is known to have survived but the information about the possible third is very limited.  This is notable as his having four or five native women in domestic arrangements, with only one bearing children, would seem to be unlikely.

Charbonneau's long life is testament to his lifestyle in the wild being of a generally healthy nature.

*****Nor were they apparently bothered by the fact that the enlisted men of the Corps of Discovery indulged themselves with the favors of Indian women, making treatment for venereal disease a medical necessity for the expedition.  This was at least in part due to the fact that some Indian tribes of the period offered Indian women as favors to visitors, although I'm not noting that in regard to the Shoshone but rather to other bands the Corps encountered early in its trip across the western half of the continent. This is significant here only in noting that while Clark in particular came to really respect if not outright adore Sacagawea, the overall view of the men of the Corps was of a rather isolated and not egalitarian nature.

******York had been a slave in the Clark household and had grown up with Clark.  His post Corps of Discovery fate is poorly documented but it seems that Clark likely freed York at some point, probably a decade or so after the expedition, and due to repeated York requests that he be set free.  During the expedition he became a fairly participating member and his slave status, therefore, would have started to wear off.  He seems to have entered the freighting business upon being freed, and it further seems that Clark had granted him a status approach freedom sometime prior to actually freeing him.  York died at approximately age 60, apparently from cholera.  His death in his sixties came a few years prior to Clark's in his sixties.

*******Hebard says that Otter Woman spent the winter of 1804/05 win camp with Sacagawea and Charbonneau and was reunited with them upon the Corps of Discovery's return. She has Otter Woman going to Missouri with them and then returning to North Dakota with Lizette.

In short, it seems that Hebard disliked abandonment and death, and who likes them?  She was an important Wyoming figure and educator, and a suffragist.  Never married, a person is tempted to see in some of this a large element of projection of a period feminist sort in which not only is Sacagawea an important figure in the Corps of Discovery, but a feminist herself, with Otter Woman as an unconventional companion, associate and friend.

The reality of it was much more harsh.  Charbonneau abandoned Otter Woman upon obtaining employment with the Corps of Discovery, which at least left the pregnant Sacagawea with support.  As noted above, her pregnancy may explain why she was chosen over Otter Woman.  At least some oral histories indicate that Otter Woman later married an Indian man, and irrespective of their accuracy this is likely.  Given her slave status, Charbonneau's abandonment of her may have been a better fate for her in real terms.

^There's always a temptation to speculate about what a disease like "putrid fever" is, but in the context of the times its impossible to know.  While in a year like this one its easier to understand than others, even routine diseases could be lethal at the time and a disease like influenza was a real killer.

On an unrelated topic that fits in to this period, it might be worth noting that the actual story of Sacagawea, like that of several other 18th and 19th Century Indian women heroines, was uncomfortable for their European American contemporaries as well as for later generations, and therefore its continually recast.  Sacagawea is, like Pocahontas or Kateri Tekakwitha, an uncomfortable example of a Native American who was acculturated to more than one culture.  This was much more common among Indians than modern Americans would like to believe.

In her case, she had spent the first twelve years of her life about as isolated from the European Americans culture for an Indian as would have been possible south of the 48th Parallel and perhaps about as much as possible outside of far northern North America. This would have changed once she was with the Hidatsa, particularly upon her enslavement to Charbonneau.  It would have changed even more upon her accompaniment with the Corps of Discovery and its notable that at the time of her reunion with the Lemhi she made no apparent effort, nor did they, to rejoin them.  By that time, of course, she had a child and in the reality of the 19th Century her die may have been caste, if not by her own will.  Indeed, her fate was was at that point similar to that of the Sabean women who plead for their attackers after becoming pregnant by them in legend.

But only a few years later she was found in Missouri, a farmer's wife, with the farmer being Charbonneau.  She felt sufficiently comfortable with European American society to surrender Jean Baptiste to Clark before returning to North Dakota.  Her going back and forth between the Indian world and the European world is not seamless, but its not absent either.  This is true of many other period Native Americans including some very well known ones.

^^The Episcopal connection is what caused this thread to be written, although we'd debated doing it for years.  On one of our companion blogs, Churches of the West, a recent comment was posted about the Episcopal church in Atlantic City, with it being noted that the church had been moved from another location and that "Sacagawea" had been baptized there.

It's perfectly possible that the church had been moved from the Wind River Indian Reservation or some other locality in Fremont County, but Sacagawea wasn't baptized there.  Porivo may very well have been, given her close connection with the resident Episcopal missionary at the time.  It isn't known if Sacagawea was ever baptized, but if she was, and its quite possible that in fact this occurred, she would have been baptized as a Catholic.  Charbonneau had been baptized as a Catholic in his infancy.  It's additionally clear that Charbonneau, in spite of his lifestyle, gave his children distinctly French Catholic names and that a known descendant of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was baptized as a Catholic.

Today In Wyoming's History: A New Sidebar: Wyoming Myths

Today In Wyoming's History: A New Sidebar: Wyoming Myths: 

A New Sidebar: Wyoming Myths

In the next couple of days we're going to premier a new sidebar series on this site, that being Wyoming Myths. The focus of the series is probably obvious.

It's not like it'll be an exhaustive series with vast numbers of entries.  By and large, Wyoming's history has been pretty accurately recorded and portrayed.  But every state's story includes some myths, some simply frequently repeated, and some that are in fact cherished.

Indeed, it's just one such myth that causes this series to come about.  It's a myth that I've known about for a long time and its simply not true.  But it is a beloved one in certain quarters.  I've avoided writing on it as deflating a beloved myth can provoke ire, particularly one like we're going to start off with, but things that aren't true, aren't true.  And preserving a falsehood doesn't do anyone any good.

One thing on this, which I'll note right from the onset, this thread won't be "revisionist".  I'll occasionally take positions on some things, although not so much on this blog, which are "revisionist" in nature, but only where they are in need of revision based upon the facts of a matter.  Indeed, one likely teed up "myth" we'll address is a revisionist myth seeking to "correct" an earlier history which, at least based upon what we currently know about the matter, was likely correct.

Indeed, that would tend to be true about the first myth we'll deal with here as well, which was the product of an early 20th Century revision.

The first entry is almost ready to go.  We hope you'll enjoy the series, or at least read it, and of course should you choose to defend the myth, well you certain are welcome and encouraged to comment on it.  And if you are relieved, surprised, or whatever when a post comes up, well please feel free to note that as well.

"Repeal Day". Bad History

Twitter proclaimed December 5, Repeal Day, in honor of the 1932 repeal of the Constituatonal Amendment and accompanying Federal legislation that brought national prohibition of alcohol into effect.  Such luminaries as Julian Castro have noted:

Julián Castro

@JulianCastro

·

2h

It’s #repealday, the day the United States ended the prohibition of alcohol. 86 years later, it’s time we end the federal prohibition of Cannabis once and for all. Legalize it. Regulate it. Expunge the records of the victims of the war on drugs.

Strong argument, correct?

Well, not really as its historically incorrect.

First of all, contrary to the way its often assumed, the repeal of prohibition didn't actually open the consumption of alcohol across the country.  Rarely appreciated in the story of prohibition, a huge wave of state prohibition statutes had been passed prior to the Federal government entering the picture with a Constitutional amendment. 

The real lesson, in regard to both the prohibition of alcohol and marijuana may be there, as its a story of misplaced Federal overreach.

Left along, the majority of American states were rocketing toward alcohol prohibition in the 1910s and many had already arrived there.  Wyoming got there months ahead of the Federal government in 1919. Colorado also had, with "bone dry" prohibition already coming into effect. 

Had prohibitionist not sought to impose prohibition over the entire country, the entire country may have gotten there on its own.  It was getting there.  But the Federal entry forced it on areas that weren't ready to accept it.  And that got the opposition to it really rolling.

Indeed, you have to wonder to what extent the country would remain dry if the Volstead Act and the Constitutional amendment had never been done. My guess is that a lot more of it would be today.  Contrary to what is imagined today, it was an extremely popular movement prior to national prohibition becoming the law.  And its overall success, in terms of national health, would speak for themselves if they were allowed to speak at all.

Indeed, one of the often missed aspects of the repeal of prohibition is that a lot of states, Wyoming included, used the repeal to fall back on their state prohibition laws, which had not been repealed, and work on new alcohol laws that controlled the trade much more strictly than had been the prior case.  States like Wyoming did follow the national lead, but they didn't go back to the open free for all that had been in place before.

The story of marijuana may be similar.  States made it illegal long before the Federal government entered the picture in the 1970s  Now that states are rushing away from their own state laws the Federal government isn't enforcing the Federal law, which is bad.  It would have been better, probably, if the Federal government had never entered the picture.  If it hand't, by now we'd have a longer history on what making it legal may mean, and I suspect the looming health disaster its likely to be, would be causing a lot of pause now.