A matter of prospective

Observation by Army officer Thaddeus H. Stanton, about the Powder River Basin, in April 7, 1876, as published in The New York Tribune:

The country lying east of the Bighorn Mountains, along the Rosebud, Tongue and Powder Rivers, is extremely uninviting.  It is generally a badlands country, with high buttes of indurate clay and sandstone, attaining almost the magnitude of mountains.  But in this entire region there are no auriferous strata, and no rock harder than that above described.  I feel compelled to make this statement in opposition to the statements of many maps of that country which are being scattered throughout the land, upon which gold  is represented as among the minerals to be found in the Panther and Wolf Mountains (the highest badlands buttes above described), and where there is not only i no gold, but where the country has not a single gold-bearing strata or feature.  The Bighorn range of mountains, one of the finest on the continent, doubtless is rich in precious metals and this region is large enough to give room for a large mining population.  The Black Hills country does not compare with it in extent, and probably not in the amount of concealed treasure.  But between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains there is no gold, and no gold-bearing country. Neither is there any land that would bear the hardiest grain or vegetable.  There is no timber worthy of the name; and water is scarce and of bad quality usually, and grass is poor and thing.  Altogether, nearly the entire region lying south and east of the Yellowstone River, from the Bighorn range to the Black Hills, is utterly worthless.

Major Stanton's opinion seems a bit harsh.

Painted Bricks: Sidewalk Clock, Casper Wyoming

A landscape feature of days gone by, a sidewalk clock on our of our companion sites.

Painted Bricks: Sidewalk Clock, Casper Wyoming: The March 10 entry on Today In Wyoming's History , which featured a sidewalk clock from outside of Wyoming, reminded me of this o...

Op-Ed: It's Time To Recognize The Valor Of Cyber Warriors : NPR

Op-Ed: It's Time To Recognize The Valor Of Cyber Warriors : NPR

Hmmmm. . . I"m not convinced.  Seems like the existing awards had it covered to me.

It's amazing to think that, up until World War One, the award that a U.S. serviceman could get was the Congressional Medal of Honor. That was it.  Just that.  They started awarding that during the Civil War, and that was the only award. Even the Purple Heart didn't exist until after World War One.  WWI US troops received wound stripes.

By World War Two awards had expanded, but to a reasonable level basically.  Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, etc., and the Combat Infantry  Badge. The first two awards came in around World War One, and were regarded as such significant awards that the Army went back and took quite a few Congressional Medals of Honor away from soldiers who had received them during the Indian Wars, much to their horror.  The Combat Infantryman's Badge was so restrictive that at first even medics who served with them couldn't receive it.  Cavalrymen, who were mostly deployed as infantrymen during World War Two, couldn't even get it.  All were pretty well thought out awards.  Those basically carried us through Vietnam. But, for some reason, awards have really expanded since then.

 Audie Murphy, who was for many years the highest decorated member of the U.S. Army from World War Two, although at some point in the 70s or 80s, another individual received a late award and surpassed his total.  Murphy went from being a private to a captain during the war, and is pictured here wearing his Congressional Medal of Honor and other medals. Think this is a lot of awards? Take a look below.

Even I have a medal, awarded to me for my six years of service in the Army National Guard.  It's a Reserve Achievement medal of some type (I'm forgetting the correct name), but basically you get that just for having five or six years of service.  It's sort of the Reserve equivalent of the Good Conduct Medal, which in my view is obsolete.  That medal came about in an era when quite a few troops could get through a career as a private without particularly good conduct.  No more.  Now we have an up or out system, and good conduct is part of just staying in. There's really no reason to even have those medals anymore.  Your good conduct is implied by your remaining in the service, or your Honorable Discharge is proof of it when you get out.

My view of this topic includes ribbons as well.  I have an Army Service Ribbon, which is awarded to you simply for getting through basic training.  Does that make sense?  Seems to me getting to wear the uniform implies that you got through basic training.  And I qualify for an Army Reserve Overseas Service Ribbon.  That one is just for serving in an overseas training mission.  I went to South Korea. But, once again, I was ordered to do that. That wouldn't seem to qualify me for a ribbon.  And should I get to wear a ribbon for going to South Korea when Regular Army troops just were allowed to wear overseas service stripes?  That doesn't make very much sense to me.

All this may not mean much to average people, but in my view the endless creation of ribbons and awards cheapens them all.  All the way up through at least the Vietnam War, ribbons and rewards really meant something.  Now, when a medal is created especially for a class of soldier who isn't really in harm's way, that's much less the case, particularly when that new award takes priority over some of the older, combat awards.

General of the Armies John J. Pershing.  Pershing is the second highest ranking U.S. officer of all time, ranking just below, in a technical sense, George Washington but above the various Generals of the Army of World War Two, such as Eisenhower.  Note how he only has a few ribbons even though he was in the Army from 1886 until 1924.  He saw service during the Indian Wars, the Spanish American War, and World War One.

General David Petreaus.  Petreaus retired as a General (the rank, ie., just above Lieutenant General and just below General of the Army, a rank that nobody has been promoted to since the 1950s).  He entered active service in the Army in 1974, and therefore was in during both wars with Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.  Granted, that's real service. . . but doesn't the ribbon volume seem a bit excessive in comparison to Pershing?

Today In Wyoming's History: February 4: The Dams

Recently the Today In Wyoming's History blog ran this item:

Today In Wyoming's History: February 4:

1905  Construction starts on Pathfinder Dam.

Presently construction is undergoing to raise the height of the dam to take into account a century of silting.

 Walkway on the top of the dam, soon to be removed due to dam being heightened.

View from the top of the dam, on one of the rare occasions that water is released through a tunnel from it.

It occurred to me that this illustrates a massive physical change in our region.  One we're so used to that we hardly even recognize it.

Pathfinder Dam is on the North Platte River, a river that runs from northern Colorado, north into Wyoming, before turning East and Southeast and flowing to Nebraska.  It's one of the most controlled rivers in the world.  I honestly do not know the most upstream of the dams on the river, but I believe there's some sort of small such structure in Colorado.

In Wyoming, the most upstream dam is Seminoe Dam, which was completed in 1939.  Below that, just a few miles downstream, is Cortez Dam, a dam apparently so obscure that it doesn't get much mention anywhere, except by locals, even though its a pretty impressive structure.  It likely was built about the same time.  Below that is Pathfinder Dam, depicted above, the only dam of its particular vintage and necessarily the first of the dams on the river.  Below Pathfinder is Alcova Dam, which started impounding water in 1938.  A couple of miles below that is the very small dam, Grey Reef.  Miles downstream is Glendo, and then Guernsey.  All of these dams, except for Pathfinder, were part of the Kendrick project, a project designed to bring irrigation to Central Wyoming.

Prior to the dams, the North Platte River flooded every spring, and then was a trickle by fall.  Paintings of Ft. Caspar from the 1860s show the river in flood stage as being absolutely massive, something that would surprise people in the area today, but which squares with contemporary accounts.  In the Fall it was the opposite.  Very clearly the river as we know it today was not the river that existed at least prior to 1910.  It isn't even the river as it was known in the 1940s, as at that time the Bureau of Reclamation didn't worry about choking the river off in Fall to impound water.  Now it does, as that's a pretty destructive process.

The difference between having water all year long and not is too great to really expound on.  We're used to having it all year round, and its part of the background to our lives.  It wasn't always that way.

Railhead: Arminto Wyoming

Recently I received some interesting comments on my post on the Railhead blog on Arminto Wyoming.  The link to it is here:

Railhead: Arminto Wyoming: This is what is left of the sidetrack at Arminto Wyoming, and of a hotel along the rail line, which was located where the grove of t...

The comments were from a former resident of Arminto who lived there in the commentor's youth.  The first hand recollections are very interesting as to what the town was like at that time.  As people familiar with the town know, it's  mere shawdow of its former self today, and is even less now than what it was when I was in my late teens in the early 1980s.

This provides a really interesting example of how the fortunes of a town can rise and fall. Arminto was once the busiest sheep shipping point on Earth. Not in the US, but on the planet.  Now the sheep are mostly gone, and the town is mostly gone as well.

Carnegie Library, Lewistown Montana.

This is the Carnegie Library in Lewistown, Montana.  The library has an addition, clearly visible, which makes for quite a juxtaposition of architectural styles. Still, in spite of that, it works quite well.

Just recently Natrona County Wyoming's voters turned down an effort to build a new library, thereby opting to keep the county's strained library.  The current library in Natrona County dates back, I think, to the 1970s, with an older portion of that library dating back to the 30s or 40s. That older portion replaced a library that was an original Carnegie Library of the same approximate vintage as this one. 

I note that as it shows, perhaps, how the importance of libraries has changed to communities over time.  Or perhaps it says something only locally, as at least one other Wyoming community recently passed a bond measure to expand their library.  Anyhow, I've been in libraries all over Wyoming, and indeed, in a few in other regions of the country, and note how much use they still receive.  They don't, however, always figure in the public's mind like they once did.

This library is a good example of how central they once were.  The original small library is direction across the street from the courthouse in Lewistown, and courthouses tend to get pride of place in a community's downtown. That this library was constructed in such a central location says a great deal about how the residents of Fergus County Montana viewed it at the time they received a grant from the Carnegie Foundation to build it.

Images of Oil Production

Oil Field, Grass Creek Wyoming, 1916.

Some other "big picture" oil photographs from outside of Wyoming:

The "small picture":

1920s:

 Lance Creek, 1920s.

Moving Drilling Equipment, Lusk, 1920s.  Public Domain from Wyoming Tales and Trails.

1930s and 1940s:

Loading facilities, Cody, 1930s-40s.

Geologist at work.

I find this photograph interesting as it exactly how I recall doing this in the early 1980s.

All photographs from our Flickr site.

The Mustachioed Era

It can no longer be ignored.

 

 Wyoming Territorial Governor John A. Campbell.

Something was going on with facial hair in the late 19th and early 20th Century.  And on a massive scale.

In addition to this blog, and my others, I try to catalog Wyoming's history on a daily basis with my Today In Wyoming's History blog.  This being November, I've been running a lot of items on various politicians being elected or appointed, including a lot of them in the 1865 to 1920 time frame. And the evidence is overwhelming.  In order to be anything in that time frame, business wise or politically, you had to have some serious mustache action going on.

 

George A. Baxter.  It probably took him longer to grow that mustache and cookie duster than he served as Territorial Governor.  Note also the starched upright collar, a type of dress style thankfully now more or less gone.

Francis E. Warren, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient from the Civil War and and one of the longest serving Senators in Senate history.  And also father in law to General John J. Pershing.  The Wyoming politician had this serious mustache his entire political career, including the point in time when this photo was taken, after the passing of the Great Mustache Era.

Clarence Clark, long serving but forgotten mustachioed Wyoming Congressman.

James Weaver, a surprisingly successful candidate for President on the Populist ticket, who went right from the Huge Beard Era to the Giant Mustache Era.

Now, it so happens that I happen to have a mustache myself, but nothing like the gigantic mustaches so popular in the this era.  These mustaches are practically their own species of mustache, bearing a faint resemblance to current mustaches the way that giant animals of the Pleistocene bear a relationship to their smaller cousins today.

How did this occur?  It's hard to say. We can tell, of course, that just prior to the Giant Mustache Era there was a Giant Beard Era.

 

Territorial Governor Moonlight, who'd been a Civil War era general before being appointed Territorial Governor of Wyoming.

Enormous beards seem to have come in during the Civil War.  Perhaps everyone was too busy fighting to shave.  

 

 Rutherford B. Hayes, whose mouth has completely disappeared from view due to his beard.

Mustaches, however, started to dominate in the late 19th Century.  No idea why.  And not only mustaches, but the super sized mustache, such as that sported by Theodore Roosevelt.

Zachery Taylor.  Apparently razors were in use when he was President, but combs clear were not.

Theodore Roosevelt, who went to the big mustache when was a rancher.

Roosevelt cultivated a thin, very well groomed mustache, until he went to the Dakotas to ranch. At that time, the busy stache was already in vogue in the West.  I've heard it claimed that the reason for this is that it keeps the lip from sunburning.  Perhaps.  At any rate, bug mustaches remain pretty common amongst ranchers and cowboys today, so perhaps there's something to it.  And perhaps Roosevelt's adoption of the style helped popularize what was already a growing trend at the time.

 Goatee pioneer Governor Carey.  Was Carey a proto-hipster?

And it wasn't just in the United States.  It was a global trend.  South of the border, Mexican revolutionaries Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa both sported some serious mustaches.  Lord Kitchener, the legendary British Field Marshall did as well.

 Even now, Lord Kitchener's command is compelling.  The mustache the reason?

Frankly, based upon the photographic evidence, I doubt a man prior to 1914 or so could expect to be a success without a serious mustache.  Just look at William Jennings Bryan, for example.  Universally regarded as brilliant, he just couldn't get himself elected President. And he didn't amount to a great Secretary of State when appointed by the equally clean shaven Woodrow Wilson, a President who couldn't persuade Congress to approve the Versailles Treaty.  Perhaps it was the lack of a mustache that left the Senate lukewarm about the entire deal.

 Writer Owen Wister.  He didn't go into law like his father had hoped, but the sensitive writer had to be taken seriously in print, with a mustache like that.

Well, this leads us to an obvious conclusion.  In this season of seemingly ongoing political confusion and strife we're left wanting for character in our leaders.  Gen. Petraeaus engages in activity that brings him down.  Even many Republicans and Democrats are less than enthusiastic about their recent candidates, Mitt Romney and Barrack Obama.  Clearly something is missing.  And that something must be the serious mustache that obviously instilled moral fiber and character in an earlier stalwart generation. 

All photographs from our Flickr site.