Message to Nebraska GOP State Central Committee

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse on being censured.

You are welcome to censure me again.  But let's be clear about why this is happening. It's because I still believe, as you used to, that politics isn't about the weird worship of one dude.

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse.

November 13, 1920. Those teenage years.

A photographer was at work in Craig Colorado, where he took a photograph of the students of the school there, which must have been a unified (all grades) school.  He also photographed the athletic teams of Craig and Meeker.

On the same day, a band of teenagers in Omaha pulled off what was, up until that time, the largest train robbery in the United States, taking over $3,500,000 in fresh United States currency being shipped from a mint.  It involved breaking into into a train car and then departing it at its first stop, where there was a waiting car. So it was a planned thing.

In current dollars, that would amount to $46,000,000.

They burned most of it shortly thereafter, although some of what was taken was in the form of coins.  The amount of money must have spooked them, and therefore they didn't profit by their crime and, in the end, the US really didn't lose much.

Not to condone theft, but burning the cash was really stupid.

December 20, 1919. Pershing in race?

No, he wasn't.

A committee in Nebraska was attempting to draft him.  He'd end up declining.

Pershing fits into that group of American military heroes that the public seriously thought about elevating to the nation's highest office.  He fits into the subset of them that declined that invitation when it became serious.

Men, and at that time it was all men, were lining up to be candidates for the 1920 Presidential election, which in our era should give us pause.  It was December of 1919, and the candidates were not yet fully identified by any means.

September 29, 1919. The Red Summer becomes a red fall in Alabama and Nebraska, the franchise for women comes to Utah.

On this day in 1919, racial murders came to Montgomery Alabama when two black veterans, one still in uniform, were pulled from a police car and gunned down in nearby woods. They'd been accused of assaulting a white woman, but obviously had not been convicted. A third black man then in hospital would be lynched the following day in a completely unrelated event.

This followed race riots that occurred in Omaha Nebraska the prior day which saw violence on a large scale.  It was based on a similar accusation but required military intervention to be put down and saw the horrific lynching of Willie Brown, whose body was subsequently burned, resulting in a widely distributed photograph.

The news from Omaha made front page news in Wyoming, but interestingly would be remarkably different from the front page that was found in Omaha. There, the victim of the lynching was simply proclaimed to be guilty and the mob enacting vigilante justice.  In Wyoming, the heroic actions of the mayor in attempting to stop the mob were the focus.

While a 1919 act of racial violence in Montgomery Alabama isn't surprising to read about today, many would be surprised to learn of one in Omaha.  But Omaha was and is a Midwestern city and had a large black minority that had been drawn to the location due to the manual labor opportunities it afforded. Racial tension in the city was high in the town and would remain so for many years.

Indeed, while we don't association him with the city, it's worth noting that Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was born and grew up in Omaha.  His father was an outspoken black Baptist minister and there's always been some suspicion that the streetcar accident he died in was actually a murder.

In other events, on this day a special session of Utah's legislature the state's Senate voted in favor of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the franchise. The House would do the same the following day.

The Enigma of Western Writers.

This post is on Western writers.

By which I mean writers from the West who write about the West.  By the "West", I mean the West of the Mississippi United States in general, and the various regions of the West as well. 

I don't mean writers like Annie Proulx, who move into an area, write something that they set in the area, and then are celebrated by reviewers outside of the area who are completely ignorant on the area in the first place.  Or even ones like Sam Western.

Nothing was western about the originator of Western writing, Owen Wister, who was an East Coaster through and through.

I'm not saying, well not saying completely, that a person has to be born in one area to write knowledgeably about it. There are certainly examples to the contrary.  Cormac McCarthy has notably written about the west of Texas and in the Southern Gothic style, but he's from Rhode Island originally.  Owen Wister, who is sometimes credited with inventing the Western novel (and at the time he wrote The Virginian he was writing about the recent past) was very much an Easterner.  His friend Theodore Roosevelt wrote beautifully about the West of his day, but he was a new Yorker.  Frederic Remington, the legendary illustrator and painter, is not only famous for his Western paintings and illustrations, which dramatically capture an era, but he was a writer as well, writing on the same topics that he depicted in his paintings.   Edward Abbey was from Pennsylvania and didn't experience the West until he was 18 years old.  Thomas Berger who wrote the only really great novel about Indians, Little Big Man, lived on the East Coast his entire life.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who was also a prolific reader and writer.

But I am saying that there's something different about writing on a culture that you are part of and about a region you are from.  I'd even go on to say that its really difficult to do that without being born in an area. Some writers can pull that off, but they are few.  So if you were born and raised in New England, or Zimbabwe, two actual examples for recent "Western writers", you can probably credibly pull off novels about the shipping news, or not going to the dogs tonight, but your regional novels aren't going to appear authentic to anyone from the region at all, because they are not.

Indeed, could Go Kill A Mockingbird have been written by anyone but a Southerner?  What about anything that Flannery O'Connor wrote. . . would they have been just as impactful if written by a Vermonter?   Would Doctor Zhivago have been what it was if it was written by a New Yorker?  Could Musashi have been written by anyone other than Ejii Yoshikawa?

I doubt it.

Boris Pasternak, who was born in Imperial Russia in 1890 and who died in the Soviet Union in 1960.  His famous work is the novel about the Russian doctor Zhivago, who would have been born right about the same time and and have experienced many of the same things.  Hardly anybody would maintain that a non Russian, let alone a non Russian who hadn't experienced these things, could have written a novel like Doctor Zhivago.

So I'm talking about writers who have spent their youth, even if not perhaps born here, in the real West.  Writers growing up, like Norman Maclean, in Montana, or writers growing up in Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, New Mexico, and so forth.  And writers, I will credit, from Texas.  Having said all of that, I'd currently exclude writers, for the most part, who may be from any of those regions but whose lives have been spent in the really big cities of the region, like Denver, Dallas or Houston. Big cities are their own thing, and that thing isn't the West.  Modern Denver, and indeed increasingly much of the Front Ranger for hundreds of miles around it, are no more The West than Newark is.  So too with Las Vegas, Phoenix, or any of the giant Texas cities.

Anyhow, some observations.

Western writers, as I've defined them, clearly have a deep, deep, love for the region.  If you read, for example, Norman Maclean's work, he clearly loved Montana.  Indeed, no other writer described the Rocky Mountain West as accurately and deeply as Maclean.  Nobody.

Mari Sandoz clearly loved Nebraska and the plains.  So did Willa Cather.

And what's so notable about that is that they all left the region they loved.

In the film A River Runs Through It and in the novella, Norman Maclean has his brother express the view that he, the brother, will "never leave Montana".  Indeed, Maclean has Paul, his brother, express the view that those who moved from Montana to the West Coast suffered from moral defects, a view a lot of Westerners do in fact have.  But both Paul Maclean and Norman Maclean, in real life, moved to Chicago. At the time that he wrote his works, late in life, Norman Maclean had spent more years in Chicago than in Montana.  He died in Chicago in 1990 at age 87 (his wife, Jessie, had a much shorter life, dying due to respiratory aliments in 1968 at age 63).

Mari Sandoz was born in Nebraska in 1896. She moved to Denver, which at that time remained a Western city, in 1940, at which time she was 44  years old, but then moved to New York City in 1943, where she remained until her death at age 69 in 1966.

Wila Cather, was born in 1873 and her family moved to Nebraska in 1883.  She was steeped in the West from her youth, but she moved to Pittsburgh in 1896, at which time she was an up and coming writer.  She moved to New York in 1905, which is where she remained for the rest of her life.

What's going on here?  It seems that "Western" writers don't achieve success at that unless they've moved to somewhere distinctly non Western.

Maybe some of that has to do with what Garrison Keillor, who is a Western writer (Minnesota and North Dakota are part of the West the way I've defined them) noted about the region in general.  Our number one export is our children.  While we often don't credit it, and we frequently argue about it, the West has both a small population and a good educational system.  We work hard here to educate our youth, but we really don't have anywhere for them to go, as a rule.  That's been noted by outsiders, such as non Westerner, Sam Western (who is in  the non Westerner import class of writer), but they rarely seem to grasp the nature of it.  The West remains the West, where it has, because of natural features which translate into economic ones.  This means that while we really appreciate the need for solid educations, it also means that we educate generation after generation of Westerners who have no place to go with their educations. So they go elsewhere.

That seems to me to be the story for Maclean and Cather.  Norman Maclean obtained a degree in English from Dartmouth in 1924. What use would that have been in the Montana of 1924, or for that matter in the Montana of 2019?  It'd be limited, at best.  He clearly retained his affection for Montana and spoke of himself, from his actual home in Chicago, as a Montanan in his writings.  He married a woman from Montana in 1931, showing the extent to which he retained actual roots there. But he lived and died in Chicago.

The situation for Cather was likely even more pronounced.  An educated woman in the West in the 1890s, her career options were necessarily  highly limited.  Indeed, they were limited in the Western world in general. She never married, something very unusual for her era, and focused on her writing career, but that would fairly obviously be a lot easier to do from New York than from Nebraska.

Sandoz doesn't quite fit this mold, but maybe she provides another example.  Sandoz was a difficult character from her youth on but first found herself published while living in Nebraska, having relocated to Lincoln from the Sand Hills. She's struggled up to that point to establish herself as a writer, but when she did, it was with two novels both of which met with gigantic disapproval in Nebraska.  So she moved to Denver, and then on to New York.

And perhaps Michael Punke gives us another example.  Punke is the author of The Revenant.  Punke was born in Torrington Wyoming.  He's a practicing lawyer, as well as an author (and therefore obviously a much more disciplined person than myself), but he has worked nearly exclusively outside of the West, both inside of and outside of government.

And maybe Punke's example brings home that this phenomenon is widespread with Westerners in general.  At what point you cease to be a Westerner by leaving a region can be debated.  I think it that does happen, and am one of the many who disregard lamentations published in the letters to the editor section of the newspapers that start off with "I read the article about so and so last week, and while I left Wyoming forty years ago. . . .". 

But it's clear that people who were largely raised in a region conceive of themselves, quite often, as remaining part of it their entire lives.  Which I suppose makes sense.  Wendell Berry has lamented that modern American life means that people don't become "of" a place, but maybe they do more than we might imagine (which is another reason that novelist from Zimbabwe or Vermont don't become regional authors by moving here).  Beyond that, however, what we see with writers may be nothing more than what we see with legions of Westerners.

For a long time, at least for rural Westerners, which is a definition that would fit many in the West, growing up and getting an education has meant either narrowing the scope of your education or leaving.  I.e., if you are educated as a lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, school teacher, accountant, or engineer, you can find work here.  But if you have a PhD in English, you probably better be looking elsewhere.

Indeed, even with these other professions, as time marches on, this is becoming more and more true.  In 1990, at the time I graduated from the University of Wyoming's law school, it was already the case that maybe 1/3d of the class was headed to Colorado.  In some recent years over half the class has, as changes in the nature of practice have made that necessary.  Indeed, with the passage of the UBE, there's really no longer a reason for a Wyoming law school at all, and its only a matter of time until the legislature realizes that.

For some this is compounded with the American ethos of money meaning everything.  There are areas of various professions you can find work in the state, to be sure, but it won't pay the same lucrative amount that it might elsewhere.  So people move for the money.  Interestingly, they often find themselves in personal conflict after that, and are often among those writing to the editor with letters such as; "I'm distressed to read that such and so is going in near my beloved home town of Little Big Horn. . . I want it to be just like it was when I left in 1959 and I'm planning to return soon from the hideous dump of Los Angeles where I've been piling up cash since the early 1960s . . ." 

So, maybe it's the nature of the regional economy, and perhaps the national economy at that.  Writers gravitate to where the writers are, and the writers, by and large, are in the big cities.

Not all of them of course, but a lot of them.

Maybe.

Maybe something else is also at work, and perhaps that's most notable in what we noted above about Mari Sandoz. She didn't leave Nebraska for more futile publishing grounds.  She left Nebraska as she was taking a lot of heat after getting published.  Indeed, her second novel was censored in the state.

So maybe its the classic example of a person not really being too welcome on their own home ground in some instances.

In fairness, Sandoz's writing was always very critical of various things, and indeed quite frankly her histories, for which she remains famous, aren't terribly accurate in various ways.  At least her histories haven't born the test of time except, perhaps, for Old Jules, the book her extraordinarily difficult father asked her to write about him after his passing.  But still, maybe the West doesn't welcome its own writers much?

Or maybe it does.  Novelist Jim Harrison, who was from Michigan, which is pretty rural in some locations and the near west to a degree, lived in Arizona and Montana after leaving Michigan.  Garrison Keillor, mentioned above, flirted with New York after already being well known, but returned to Minnesota.  Patrick McManus, the humor writer, lived in the West his entire life.  Current crime writer C. J. Box, whose protagonist is a Wyoming Game Warden, is from Wyoming.  Tim Sandlin, whom I've never read, was born in Oklahoma but lives in Jackson.

Indeed, if Oklahoma is sort of like Texas in some ways, it's worth noting that Texas has had a lot of native authors who have continued to live in Texas, Larry McMurtry notable among them.  McMurtry grew up on a ranch outside of Archer, Texas, a town so far north in Texas its nearly in Oklahoma.

So added to that, maybe these long distance travels aren't as far as they seem. . . in some instances.  In my grandfather's era Chicago was the hub of the western cattle industry and Denver just a very large city on the plains.  Chicago's role in that went away, but the point is that economists and politicians who are baffled by the fact that the West doesn't spawn very many large cities are potentially missing the point that it has. . . its just that everything is more spread out here.  So Chicago, a Midwestern city, may have more of a link to the West of an earlier era than we might suppose.  Denver serves that purpose for much of the Northern Plains now and, I dare say, Calgary does as well at a certain point.

Indeed, those cities filled that roles, or fill them, as they were, or are, centers of industry for regions.  And while we don't like to think of writing as an industry, it's a type of one, so perhaps some relocation makes sense.  Indeed, it might even now, in spite of the electronic age, which seems to be pulling the working population towards the city centers like a black hole draws in light.

Anyhow, something to ponder.

August 7, 1919. Big Springs to Kimball, Nebraska. 86 miles in 11 hours.

On this day in 1919, the Motor Transport Convoy picked up speed and made 86 miles in a little over 11 hours.

Not that the day was without trouble.  The tarpaulin on a Liberty Truck caught on fire as it pulled into camp.

Lunch was had at Sydney Nebraska, now famous as the home of Cabelas.  When I was a university student at the University of Wyoming, we thought Sydney sufficiently close to Laramie to drive there, although it made for a really long day.  Looking it up now, it was 148 miles. . . further away than I'd bother to drive to look at a store today. The store at that time was the old Cabelas, in downtown Sydney, not the big one by the Interstate that people visit today.

After lunch, the convoy trekked on to Kimball, Nebraska.

Cheyenne was anticipating their arrival.

On the same day, in eastern Siberia, the U.S. Army and the Red Army came to blows when respective patrols made contact.  The Red Army unit attacked at Novo Litovoskaya with the result that the they sustained significant casualties while the Americans took none.  The action featured the bravery of Cpl. Frankenfield who overran a Russian position single handedly armed only with his M1911 pistol.

August 6, 1919. The mess of the roads and the Mess Officer arrives. Ogallala to Big Springs, 22 miles in 6 hours.

On this day in 1919, the now much slowed Motor Transport Convoy made 22 miles in six hours.

Sand was again the problem.

One of the trucks mentioned in today's journal was a Riker. Riker's were heavy trucks made by Locomobile, a major manufacturer at the time.  Interestingly enough, the Riker company, which had been acquired by Locomobile, started off as an electric car company.  Early on, there were quite a few electric cars, although by this time gasoline engine vehicles had very much taken over.

Cpt. Guvine reported on this day as Mess Officer, probably arriving in Big Springs by Union Pacific train.  The Army diarist had earlier reported that a lack of a mess officer was causing morale problems.

Big Springs is a very small Nebraska town which is now on Nebraska State Highway 138.  The old Lincoln Highway tracked very close to the Platte throughout Nebraska, and the Union Pacific did as well. There were good reasons for this, as the region is dry and water, obviously, a necessity for everything.

August 5, 1919. Slogging through Nebraksa

Dessemona Oil Field, Texas.  August 5, 1919.  A  long way from Ogallala, but part of the oil age.

The Motor Transport Convoy left North Platte and slogged for 16.5 hours through quicksand and sand until they reached Ogallala.  Bridges were damaged and trucks had to be recovered.

Traveling was proving much more difficult now that the convoy was in the West.  And all this on something that was regarded as a "highway".

Ogallala is the county seat for Keith County, Nebraska, and is a small town.  It's also a fork in the road, being the spot where travelers can turn northwest towards Scottsbluff or keep on towards Cheyenne, or potentially Julesburg Colorado.  Interestingly at the time, the Lincoln highway ran north of the South Platte in this area, where it remains in use as U.S. Highway 30.  Interstate 80, the road that basically replaced it more or less along the same route, runs south of the South Platte.  The North and South Platte come together just east of North Platte, Nebraska, where the convoy started out on this day a century ago.

August 3, 1919. Slow moving in Nebraska, dramatic events in Arkangelsk.

The 1919 Motor Transport Convoy was plagued by horrible road conditions again on this day, July 3, 1919. Once again, only about 30 miles of progress was made, and much of that was done under tow.

The convoy made it to North Platte, the county seat of Lincoln County, Nebraska.  

North Platte is the first of the cities and towns mentioned on this trek where I've stayed overnight.  I've traveled the entire path of the modern I 80 through Nebraska, but I've stopped and overnighted, years ago, in North Platte, before driving south into Kansas the next day.

In Arkangelsk in far northern Russia, the Allies were withdrawing. The city had been the base of operations for the Allied expedition to Russia but its position had become tenuous in the Spring.  On this day there occurred a claimed Marian apparition to a group of children.

There are a series of Marian events claimed for the teens, with this one being the third one of which I'm aware, if a person considers the series of apparitions at Fatima to be one single event rather than a collection.  The apparitions at Fatima are the most well known and by far the best documented.  Those events are an approved apparition in the Catholic Church.  Much less known is the discovery of the icon Our Lady Derzhavnaya in Russia that same year.  The event on this day is likely even less well known, but was commemorated locally in Arkangelsk a few years ago.  Of interest, all three events, including the one in Fatima, Portugal, are tied to events occurring in Russia at the time.

August 2, 1919. Lexington to Gothenburg Nebraska on the Motor Transport Convoy. Muddy roads. 30 miles in 10.5 hours.

It was a muddy day in 1919 when the Motor Transport Convoy, with great difficulty, slogged through 30 miles to go from Lexington to Gothenburg Nebraska.  They didn't even make it out of Dawson County.

No notations of dinners at the Elks Club or street dances in this entry.

August 1, 1919. Grand Island to Lexington Nebraska, 82 miles in 11 hours

Lexington Nebraska in 1909, ten years prior to the convoy.

The 1919 Army transcontinental Motor Transport Convoy made the 82 miles from Grand Island, Nebraska to Lexington, Nebraska in eleven hours on this day in 1919.  Weather was good and the roads, while dirt, were good as well.

Reaching Lexington marked the halfway point in the journey.

July 31, 1919. Yoemanettes muster out, Motor Transport Convoy treks from Columbus to Grand Island, Nebraska. 64 miles in 9.25 hours. Red Summer in Syracuse and Philadelphia.

Female sailors (foreground) and Marines (background) being mustered out of service on this day in 1919.

The Department of the Navy released a large group of women from service in this day, giving them their discharge from the Navy and Marine Corps.  The "Yoemanettes" and "Marinettes" had been brought in to fill largely clerical roles during the war which were returning to male servicemen in reduced numbers as the services declined to peace time numbers.

On this occasion, their service was honored by the Department of the Navy before they were officially released.

Problems with dust yielded to problems with mud on this day in July 31, 1919 for the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy.  The Elks provided dinner for the officers and Grand Island, Nebraska provided a dance for everyone.

The Red Summer made its appearance at Syracuse New York, although in the form of an industrial riot, which made this occurrence somewhat different than earlier ones.  On this day in 1919 Polish and Italian steelworkers who were on strike attacked black workers who had been brought in as strike breakers.  The riots ended when Syracuse mobilized its entire police force.

Race riots also occurred in Philadelphia, but a quick response by the city's police rapidly brought them to an end.

The formal adoption of the Weimar Constitution occurred in Germany, which was now an official republic with a constitution.

July 30, 1919. Omaha to Columbus, 83 miles in 10.25 hours for the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy.

The Motor Transport Convoy resumed normal progress on this Wednesday, July 30, and went from Ft. Omaha to the county seat for Platte County, Nebraska, Columbus.

Trucks of this era had magnetos, a type of electric generator that aircraft sometimes still have but which automobiles have long since abandoned.  The Dodge had to have its carburetor and Bosch magneto cleaned in route.  The remarkable thing here is that Bosch is and was a German corporation, and therefore the Dodge was equipped with German magnetos.

A pontoon trailer was left in Ft. Omaha as too much of a strain on the Mack truck that had been towing it.  And a person might wonder about the strain of nightly entertainment in nearly every town in which the convoy was now stopping in.

Elsewhere, the Anglo Irish War took a new turn with the IRA carried out its first authorized assassination.  The target was a policeman. The act had been authorized by Michael Collins.  It's hard not to view such acts now, a century later, as what they were, murder.

And in Germany, the German government adopted a new constitution.

July 29, 1919. 1919 Motor Transport Convoy. Council Bluffs Iowa to Omaha Nebraska, 5 miles in 2 hours

Omaha in 1914.

On this day in 1919, the transcontinental Motor Transport Convoy drove across the Missouri at Council Bluffs and into Omaha, which is just across the river from Council Bluffs.

The crossing was a parade and only five miles were achieved that day, which no doubt was a planned slow advance.  The convoy camped at Ft. Omaha, which was just north of the city. Today it is principally the site of Metropolitan Community College.  During World War One the fort was the site of a balloon school for part of the war, and this entry notes the presence of balloons at Ft. Omaha, but the location was determined not to be suitable for that use during the war and the school itself was transferred to Camp John Wise, Texas.

The stand down on this day was apparently used for maintenance, which graphite lubricants removed.  I don't know what the thought was but those sort of lubricants, while they work, traditionally also caused concern as they cause wear.  What may have been occurring is that dust laden grease was simply being changed out.

The Dixon graphite lubricant was a popular lubricant for automobiles at the time, and was made by the Dixon Crucible Company, a company that had been in existence since the late 18th Century and which made pencils.  It still does, its most notable product being the legendary Ticonderoga pencil.  The graphite lubricant was likely a byproduct of what they were already doing in making pencils.

1912 Dixon's pencil advertisement. The company that manufactures these pencils, while now merged with another company, is one of the oldest companies in the United States.

This entry also gives the reader a nice example of RHIP, i.e. Rank Has Its Privilege.  Officers dined at the new Omaha Athletic Club.  Enlisted men. . . probably just a mess hall at Ft. Omaha.

A headline a person shouldn't have to be reading in 2019

Nebraska Is Avoiding Measles Outbreak With Its High Vaccine Rate

No kidding.

The Nebraska floods and Wyoming agriculture

The Tribune published a story today on how the huge floods in Nebraska may impact Wyoming and Nebraska agriculture.  It's a story I've been wondering about a bit myself.

The paper reported that 1,000,000 head of cattle may have been lost in the floods.  If so, that's a devastating loss.  A person is reporting with the quote from Wyoming that "that's not good", which is self evident.

It's likely to mean a rise in cattle prices, almost certainly.  A 1,000,000 head loss at one time is something that flat out can't be absorbed by the industry without a price result.  It may also mean the loss of quite a few feedlots, I suspect, and that'll have an impact as well.  My guess is that by summer the price of putting that steak on the grill will be up, and noticeably, but that's just a guess.  As my steaks come from volunteer cattle of our own seeking to enter retirement, the price doesn't impact me much directly and I'm often really surprised by it.  But anyhow, that's my guess.

A big jump in price, it might be noted, isn't a great thing for cattlemen.  Too big of rise really favors other meat industries such as pork and poultry, although I'd be surprised if the pork industry wasn't also hit.  Anyhow, when the price goes up at the grocery store counter it doesn't always mean good things for cattlemen, and it never does in a direct dollar to dollar correlation.

Loss of agriculture production will have an impact.  The paper had this quote, and its quite correct:

“We rely on Nebraska a lot,” said Brett Moline, director of public and governmental affairs for the Wyoming Farm Bureau Association. “A lot of our feed grains come in from Nebraska and eastern South Dakota. That’s one reason we move cattle out there – it’s cheaper to move the cattle than it is to move the feed. We’ll have to see what the storms do to feed prices too.”

And that's not only true of Wyoming, in regards to Nebraska, but other local ares of the Northern Plains as well.

On a total side note, the author of the article, which wasn't a bad article by any means, did insert an odd term, apparently not knowing what it means.  That's found here.

Though life has continued unabated in Wyoming – upriver from the swollen sections of the North Platte – the devastation felt across the state’s 138-mile border could ripple into the agrarian economy of the Equality State.

Agrarian economy?

Wyoming doesn't have an agrarian economy and it never has had one, save for perhaps the very early New Mexican vegetable farmers who lived  out on the Mexican Hills outside of Ft. Laramie.  They probably could be regarded as being agrarians, but they're the only ones.

Agrarianism is the production of agriculture principally for self subsistence.  Lots of North Americans engaged in agrarian agriculture at one time, even into the 20th Century, but Wyoming's agriculturist never did, or never did on any substantial level.  Agrarians can and have existed in modern economies, so we shouldn't mistake that fact, but that style of agriculture emphasizes self subsistence and reliance over the market, and production is sold that's surplus.  A surplus crop, however, is never the principal goal.

Almost all early North American farming was agrarian.  At the time of the Civil War much of American agriculture and nearly all of the edible crop and animal farming in the South was agrarian (cotton and tobacco farming were production agriculture, not agrarian agriculture).  All farming of all types at that point retained some agrarian aspects, and that remained true up until after World War Two.

At that point, following World War Two, the South's agriculture, which featured the last remaining bits of agrarian agriculture, was rapidly disappearing. That was a result of the policies of the New Deal, which were hostile to it.  Quebec's agriculture remained highly agrarian at that point, but it too would start to really fade quickly.

Wyoming's agriculture, however, and Nebraska's as well, was always principally production agriculture.  The farming of wheat and large scale corn is production, not agrarian, in nature.  Cattle ranching in the West, outside some regional pockets in New Mexico and southern Colorado, has also always been production agriculture.

All of which we'll explore in a future post.

At any rate, pray for Nebraska and its farmers.  This is a true disater.

Eastern Nebraska is Flooding

This past weeks mid latitude cyclone dumped epic amounts of snow over Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado and now its melting.

Dams are breaking, and flooding is going on all over Eastern Nebraska.

Having not watched television at all this weekend, I don't know if this is getting the attention it deserves.  And it deserves a lot.

Wyoming, North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, and Missouri push the 18th Amendment over the top.

On this day in 1919, Wyoming, in combination with North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska and Missouri ratified the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  These legislative acts secured a sufficient number of votes to make the 18th Amendment the law. The Senate had passed the original proposal on August 1, 1917 and the House a revised variant on December 17, 1917.  The various states passed it in the following order:

1. Mississippi (January 7, 1918)
2. Virginia (January 11, 1918)
3. Kentucky (January 14, 1918)
4. North Dakota (January 25, 1918)
5. South Carolina (January 29, 1918)
6. Maryland (February 13, 1918)
7. Montana (February 19, 1918)
8. Texas (March 4, 1918)
9. Delaware (March 18, 1918)
10. South Dakota (March 20, 1918)
11. Massachusetts (April 2, 1918)
12. Arizona (May 24, 1918)
13. Georgia (June 26, 1918)
14. Louisiana (August 3, 1918)
15. Florida (November 27, 1918)
16. Michigan (January 2, 1919)
17. Ohio (January 7, 1919)
18. Oklahoma (January 7, 1919)
19. Idaho (January 8, 1919)
20. Maine (January 8, 1919)
21. West Virginia (January 9, 1919)
22. California (January 13, 1919)
23. Tennessee (January 13, 1919)
24. Washington (January 13, 1919)
25. Arkansas (January 14, 1919)
26. Illinois (January 14, 1919)
27. Indiana (January 14, 1919)
28. Kansas (January 14, 1919)
29. Alabama (January 15, 1919)
30. Colorado (January 15, 1919)
31. Iowa (January 15, 1919)
32. New Hampshire (January 15, 1919)
33. Oregon (January 15, 1919)
34. North Carolina (January 16, 1919)
35. Utah (January 16, 1919)
36. Nebraska (January 16, 1919)
37. Missouri (January 16, 1919)
38. Wyoming (January 16, 1919)
39. Minnesota (January 17, 1919)
40. Wisconsin (January 17, 1919)
41. New Mexico (January 20, 1919)
42. Nevada (January 21, 1919)
43. New York (January 29, 1919)
44. Vermont (January 29, 1919)
45. Pennsylvania (February 25, 1919)
46. New Jersey (March 9, 1922)

Connecticut and Rhode Island told Congress to pound dry sand and didn't ratify the amendment, not that that matter in context.  There were, of course, only 48 states at the time.

The 18th Amendment provided:

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

While the intent of the Amendment was clear; "bone dry prohibition", it didn't actually provide any definitions and so it required legislation to make it effective, which was quick in coming. 

As this list should indicate, Prohibition was actually massively popular in the United States including the Western United States.  Only two states refused to ratify the proposed amendment.  I'm not sure what the situation was in Connecticut, but Rhode Island was heavily Catholic with a large Italian demographic and likely found the proposal abhorrent for that reason.  Still, it's somewhat telling that Wyoming's ratification came with a slate of late Western states that voted for it.  Still, the entire process really only took one year once Congress had passed it.

Everyone is well aware of how the history of Prohibition worked and its generally regarded as a failure.  Like most popular history, it's become mythologized, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself as myths are the means by which humans originally remembered their history.  However, like other instances in which an event quickly turned into an unacceptable defeat, the myth isn't completely accurate.  The popular myth is that Prohibition was unpopular from the start and is a failed example of legislating morality.  While it may be an example of such a failure, it very clearly wasn't unpopular at first and in fact the opposite was very much the case.  Indeed, as late as the election of 1922 it remained so popular in Wyoming that William B. Ross, the Democrat who ran for office, ran on a platform of more strictly enforcing its provisions.

So a person might reasonably ask what happened to cause it to so rapidly fail and to be so inaccurately remembered.  Quite a few things really.

For one thing, the final push to pass Prohibition came in the context of World War One.  While momentum to pass it had been building for well over a decade, the war caused an enormous fear that American youth would be exposed to the corrupting influences of European culture.  If that seems really odd, and it is, we have to keep in mind that American culture in the 1910s remained predominantly Protestant in outlook (and indeed it still is).  English speaking Protestants took a distinctively different view of drink in this period than their Catholic fellows, in part because their history with it was considerably different.  While early Protestants had not been opposed to drink at all, this had evolved and by this point there was a strong anti drinking culture in the English speaking world.  People feared that progress on the anti drinking front would be lost when young Americans were exposed to French wine and, frankly, French women.

But for the most part the cultural impact on Americans, who were not in the war long, was much less than it would be for later wars, even where they fought overseas.  So this fear did not really last that long.  The short but deep depression that followed the war, moreover, reminded people that alcohol was an agricultural byproduct, and like a lot of things that impact a person's wallet, that had an influence.  The lid coming off of the culture in the 1920s had an additional big impact on things as the 1920s started to Roar and Prohibition became fashionable to flaunt.  That in turn inspired criminal activity that became a major problem.  By the early 1930s Americans had substantially changed their minds as a second depression, the Great Depression, again depressed the agricultural sector along with every other.  So, after a short stint, Prohibition went from massively popular to substantially unpopular, and the 18th Amendment was repealed.

Churches of the West: Traditionalist Anabaptist In Wyoming?

Churches of the West: Traditionalist Anabaptist In Wyoming?:

Starting at some point about six or so years ago, which means its actually probably more like ten years ago as things that occurred about that time seem more recent to me than they really are, I started running into some type of traditionalist Anabaptist from time to time here in Wyoming.

The first ones I ran into were at the rest stop outside of Waltman.  There was a travel trailer there with a flat tire that was being repaired and the people with it were outside of the trailer.  In my naivete, as I didn't expect to run into Anabaptist here, I thought at first "oh. . . reenactors", as the women were all wearing what appeared to me to be very traditional 19th Century style dresses with sun bonnets and the men were wearing straw broad brimmed hats, blue shirts, and jeans; and sporting that type of beard which lacks a mustache.  Very quickly I realized, however, that they weren't reenactors, they were some sort of community of Anabaptist adherents or perhaps a family of Anabaptists traditionalist.

Now, for those for whom this term is a mystery, what I'm referring to is Christians who are members of a traditionalist Anabaptist denomination, such as the Amish, traditionalist Mennonites, or Hutterites.  The most famous of these groups is, of course, the Amish, but there are some Mennoites in Colorado and Nebraska and there are Huttertites in Montana and the prairie provinces of Canada.

This is the Greeley Mennonite Church in Greeley Colorado.  The church was originally a Lutheran church but I don't know when it the Prairie Gothic church was built.

Now, while these groups are all Anabaptist, they are not all the same, and I don't want to suggest that they are.  That is not my intent at all.  And while it is my understanding that all Amish are traditionalist in the sense I'm using it (which would likely be grating on their nerves and be regarded as singularly unfair by them), and I think that this is also the case for Hutterites, it is not true for Mennonites.  Indeed, there are Mennonite congregations that are not distinct in dress and which are not otherwise traditionalist such as limiting the use of technology over time.   I'm frankly unclear on which denomination the group I've been seeing belongs to, and that's what I'm curious about.

I've noted above the first instance in which I encountered them.  The second time was, oddly enough, in Sam's Club. There were a group of women who met the description set out above, except I see that their head covering is a simple covering, not a sun bonnet, buying huge lots of flour and other baking goods.  Since then I've run into them here and there, most recently at the past two gun shows here in town.

On the first of those occasions two men and a boy were present selling old farm equipment.  A woman was present selling baked goods, and seemed to be married to one of the men.  The men were all dressed as described save for wearing cowboy boots, which causes me to lean towards Hutterites.  This past weekend they were back but it was two different women and a different man, and they were all selling baked goods. The man was wearing heavy work boots.

The presence of traditionalist Anabaptists in Wyoming would be a new thing and I'm curious.  Does anyone know who they might be, what group they're actually in, and where their community or communities are located?