Mail. . .. and Junk Mail

Mail is one of those classic and perennial subjects of conversation.  Like the weather, everyone has an opinion on the mail.  Usually the opinion is the same one that has seemingly always existed. . . that the mail is slow and everything in it is bad.  By and large, that's a pretty unfounded opinion but it doesn't seem to vary much over time.

A classic example of this is something once overheard by my son in the barber shop.  A couple of older gentlemen were in the barbershop waiting their turns and discussing the mail.  One complained that the German postal service could move a letter clear across Germany in a day and there was no reason that the US Postal Service should not be able to do something similar.

Well, the Post Office does do something similar to that every day.  Germany's geography consists of 137,847 square miles.  Wyoming's geography consists of 97,814 square miles.  Mailing a letter from one place in Wyoming to another, overnight, is not hard to do, and that's about the same mileage a typical German letter would put in.  This was probably all the more case in the complainers case as his time in Germany likely came before German reunification when the square mileage of the BDU was less than that of Wyoming.  The Unites States, as a whole, consists of 3,794,083 square miles, and obviously moving a letter from one place in the US overnight may be a much more difficult matter.

In other words, people, in part, like to complain about the mail.

Which is not to say that the mail hasn't changed over the years.  One thing I was recently surprised to learn is that in at least the UK twice daily mail delivery was the norm in the early part of the 20th Century and it was common to mail a card in the morning and have it delivered in the afternoon, an impressive feat.  This is the reason that there are so many photo cards from the early 20th Century.  Average people, and businesses, used them for short messages.  Sort of like having a fancy email signature, using a photo card was a little spiffier way of sending a message.  Photo cards were extremely common, and existed on all topics, including news, travel, and politics.  Even radical organizations had photo cards, designed not only to serve as messages for their adherents, but basically as advertisements for their causes.Of course, then as now, people also collected them to.  But probably the chance to get a photo card, which many of these were, added a bit of happy anticipation to receiving mail.

As twice daily mail delivery might infer, mail delivery was an extremely important governmental function at one time (and really still is).  Delivering the mail is one of the duties of the United States government that's specifically referenced in the U.S. Constitution, putting it up there with providing for the nation's defense.  Indeed, its one of the task that the US took on right from the onset.

Early postal delivery was a daunting tasks.  Now forgotten the Post Office was in effect one of the nations' early "mounted services", in that much mail was delivered by mounted men.  This was so much the case that it is claimed that the etymology of the equestrian term "posting" comes from postal riders.  Posting is the practice of "rising to the trot", as opposed to "sitting the trot" in which a rider rises to the beat of the trot, a practice which generally makes the trot easier for the rider to do and which also provides some relief for the horse.  Whether posting actually comes from postal riders is not undisputed, but it at least there's some basis to make that assertion.

Seal of the former United States Post Office Department, the predecessor to the United States Postal Service.

Moving the mail was so important to the country that being Post Master General was a cabinet level position in the US Government from 1872 to 1971, when the Department was converted into the Postal Service. Few people probably recall that change now, but it was a real one.  I'm actually pretty surprised to learn that the elevation to a full cabinet position came in 1872, however, as that would seem rather late.  Still, having said that, I suppose that delivering the mail in the vast West at that time must have been a chore of epic proportions.  It's a forgotten one too.  For example, an historical oddity is that one of the government installations near Independence Rock, during its 19th Century hay-day, was a post office.  People remember the forts and what not, but they don't remember the post office.

I suppose the importance of mail started to diminish slightly with the telegraph, and then the telephone, but not much really.  It's the Internet and Email that's really cut into the importance of the mail.  Not that mail isn't important, but it's declining in importance nearly every day.  Offices still send out vast quantities of mail, however, and the law in particular relies on the mail as many types of legal instruments and documents must be "served" by mail.  A ritual in any law office is the daily sorting, stamping, and delivering of the days' mail, followed by the daily mailing out of pleadings and notices. The law, however, is generally a slow adapter of new technologies.  Electronic communications are making their inroads here too now, and now Federal Courts use electronic filing, as system by which all pleadings in actions are filed electronically.  The Federal Pacer system also sends out the notice of filings as well, which replaces the requirement that lawyers mail out pleadings.  So far only the Wyoming Supreme Court has done something similar, with other Wyoming state courts retaining the mailing and hard copy requirements.  It's only a matter of time, however, before all state courts in the US use some variant of electronic filing.  I'd be very surprised if I was still filing hard copies of pleadings, and mailing the service copies, a decade from now.\

Of course, part of what everyone has received in the mail for many years is "junk".  "Junk mail" is the term loosely used for advertisements.  It should be regarded as pretty loose of term, however, as a lot of people are looking forward to some of that junk.  Catalogs and advertisements may be unwelcome to some, but many look forward to those very things, and cringe at the other major thing that the Postal Carrier delivers, that being bills.

Its interesting to note that junk mail is an unwelcome aspect of mail that Email not only managed to catch up with, but to really surpass the old written mail with.  On most days I get a few advertisements in my home mail, and I get a few every couple of days in my work mail, although quite frequently the work advertisement mail is relevant to what I'm doing and isn't really all junk by any means.  But my Email, particularly my work email, is amazingly full of junk mail.  And junk mail, as any Emailer knows, is derisively known as Spam, a name that the makers of the canned meat by that name are probably less than thrilled with.

The real Spam.

Spam, the electronic kind, is really irritating.  It's at least as irritating as junk mail ever was, and arguably its much more irritating.  Spammers bombard my work email with junk every day, and with repeated emails using the same bogus email addresses.  As a result, I've reset my Spam Filter on my email from Stun to Kill, and now most of it gets weeded out, thank goodness.  I hope for a day when Spam Filters will be so efficient that Spam will die off, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.  Indeed, I'd like the Spam filters to hunt the perpetrators down, leap out of their computer screens, and hurl cans of Spam at them.

Most irritating of all the Spam, and the one that seems to come into my work email the most frequently, are those that purport to somehow be business related, or which closely mimic real email that a person might receive. For example, I get fake Amazon spam fairly often.  I know when I've ordered something from Amazon, so I don't click on them, but it's irritating.  Likewise, for awhile I got piles of them purporting to be from the IRS, even though I know very well that the IRS does not send out official information by email.  Others mimic banks, or other business institutions.

Oddly, some of these purport to be from people at these institutions, which are the most bizarre of them all. Probably a very high percentage of these Spam emails originate overseas, and they contain either malicious viruses or some sort of nasty tracking program of some sort.  They're dangerous. But they're sort of amusing at the same time, as apparently the Spammers in Russia or Nigeria, or wherever, think the average American has a very unusual name.  Just the other day, for example, I got one that purported to be from ArmandRosenberg, or soemthing like that.  Armand?  Unusual names like that are common for these.  There will be things like SpankadorVonLudwig, or ZiangchwoSpencer.  Apparently Spammers spend a lot of time watching American television in which names are, indeed, sometimes odd.

Anyhow, it's extremely frustrating.  I almost miss the day when junk mail was limited to catalogs and mailings that I could just toss, rather than electronic Spam I have to filter out in vast quantities, some of which probably contain viruses and all of which I wish to avoid.  Even bloggers, such as we, have to worry about the occasional spam attempt as a comment to this and our other sites.  We love it when we get comments, but every few months there's one where some poster claims to love the site and wants to direct to his own time share in the Caribbean, or something, site. 

It was refreshing, therefore, when some I twice received mail from a local car franchise a couple of weeks ago that had hit upon the idea of sending out envelopes with no return address, and their add, with a sticky note attached addressed to a household member's first name.  It looked oddly personal, even though it was apparent it was not. Still, it came by mail, and it didn't contain a virus.

Closed

This blog attempts to track changes, amongst its other topics, occurring over the past century or so.  It strays from that fairly frequently, but here's a clear change that's worth sadly noting.  The end of actual days of rest.

This is an observation I've made elsewhere here from time to time, but it's really on my mind today as for the first time in my life, some major retain stores are open, today. Thanksgiving Day.  It's reprehensible, in my view.  Frankly, I'm not really all that thrilled about "Black Friday", the biggest shopping day of the year. This is a phenomenon that only developed within the past couple of decades in and of itself.  It really brings into sharp focus the extent to which the US has gone from a production economy to a consumption economy.  So does the end of the day of rest.

Wyoming has never had Blue Laws, or at least if it did, I'm unaware of them.  Blue Laws, for those unfamiliar with them (which is undoubtedly an increasing number of Americans) are laws that mandate that stores be closed on  Sunday.  Blue Laws tend to be strongly associated with religion, but that association may in fact be inaccurate.  What causes that belief is that Sunday is the Lord's Day in almost all of the Christian denominations, with the Biblical injunction against working on the Sabbath being regarded as having been transferred from Saturday to Sunday.  This isn't a theology tutorial, so I won't get into the the theology behind that, but all Christian denominations have the concept of The Lord's Day, with all Judeo Christian religions believing that there should be a day of rest.  Hence, the widely held belief that Blue Laws are merely a civil law to enforce a Christian belief.

Christ observed that the Sabbath was made for man; not that man was made for the Sabbath, and that really reflects the general concept behind Blue Laws.  As the nation industrialized it was observed that many employers would not give a day off of any kind, if they could avoid it.  Generally, social pressures meant that most employers had to give Sundays off, but that was it.  Ten hour long days, six days a week, were the rule.  And the labor was very grueling.   Blue laws meant that there was at least one day off for everyone, which not only meant that the Biblical injunction was observed, but that people had a de facto chance to rest, if only for a day.  The labor movement, through long arduous efforts, eventually secured a second day, Saturday, and the weekend was born. This didn't come about because employers were eager to make the work week five days long, but because workmen struggled for a second day off.  Its' a necessary day as well, as at a certain point people become unproductive and even dangerous by overwork.  Some time off is necessary.

The weekend off also came at a time when the Federal government, like other national governments, saw fit to provide for a few extra holiday days off during the year.  These days have never been very large in number in the United States.  Other nations tend to have many more.  These Federal holidays are largely observed simply by giving Federal employees the day off, and by closing all Federal services on those days.  But, up until a few decades ago, most civil employers followed suit.

That really leads to the current conversation, as even where Blue laws did not exist, it was the rule up well into the 1960s and even early 1970s that employers did not require employees to work on Sunday, and things were closed on Sunday.  Religious people and non religious people observed the custom. This custom extended to Federal holidays.  I well remember, as a young child, that my father would make sure to buy gasoline early if the 4th of July fell on a Monday or Friday, for example, as it would be impossible to buy it anywhere all weekend long.  No gasoline stations were open.  None. Not even the truck stop out on the highway.  It wasn't the law, it was the social custom, and it was observed.

Some businesses were open on Saturdays, but they were certain types of retail outlets, and they tended to open later than normal. Automobile dealerships were open on Saturdays, but they may have kept shorter hours.  Department stores and certain other stores were as well.  This allowed people who worked all weekend long to shop on Saturday, which was also a long held custom.

About the only stores of any kind which were open on holidays were grocery stores.  My father always found this to be a bit appalling, and my wife still does.  Even major holidays saw some big grocery stores open.

Now, all this is passing rapidly away, and soon it'll be the case that all people, in all occupations, will be working seven days a week.  In the name of convenience and service, we're giving up the ability to have any free time off at all.

This has been a slow process, but the dam has really broken on it in recent years.  It started with some types of retain outlets, which probably reflects the evolution of the United States from a production economy to a consumer economy.  When most people were producers of some sort; industrial, agricultural, etc., or when most people serviced material items if they didn't work in these industries, it was naturally the case that the economic engines wouldn't see it as necessary to stay open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Washing machine manufacturers, for example, can shut down for the weekend and not be hurt economically. Washing machine repairmen don't need to fix things on Sunday. They can still do it on Monday.  But, retail outlets make no money at all if they're not open.  So, we saw the big "department" stores (a name that now no longer really used ) move towards seven days a week, a move that happened a long time ago.  This was followed by outfits like WalMart that simply never close.  Ever.  Small convenience stores followed suit, which at first made them a novelty, but which now really is not.

A person could state, of course, so what?  That's more convenient for me, right?

Well, probably not really.  Many more Americans are employees in that sector of the economy than in prior eras, which means that many more people now work any day of the week, and any hour of the day.  Now this is has advanced into the Thanksgiving Holiday. With that being the case, Christmas will not be far behind.  When a huge section of the economy begins to base their hours in this fashion, soon everything does.  At some point it will be probable that only schools and governmental offices will be closed on the traditional weekend.  This isn't a good development at all.

In much of the country Blue Laws never did exist, but the weekend did.  This was only because people felt it should.  That's probably the only way a real observance of holidays will return.  But that will require the shopper to realize that having the convenience, in 2012, of shopping on Thanksgiving is likely to mean that, in 2014, they'll be working on Thanksgiving, no matter what they do.

A Revolution In Rural Transportation

 

When I seemingly had more free time, I used to occasionally publish articles in various journals.  This posts has its origins in one such article, which came about, as a concept. right about the time that I became to busy to really keep at that endeavor, so I never wrote it.  Perhaps, if worthwhile, I'll develop this blog entry into an article later.  I'd also note that this is a topic which I've actually posted on here before.  And its a topic I consider every year during hunting season.  The topic of back country travel, and indeed travel in rural areas in general.

 

Now, in 2012, we can hardly conceive of how recent the revolution in rural travel has been, or even how little rural travel occurred not all that long ago.  While I've never accommodated myself to them (I'm sticking with the 4x4 for road and the horse or shoe leather for everything else) the ATV, or "four wheeler", is seemingly everywhere.  Or at least its more places than it arguably should be.  But not all that long ago, even the automobile didn't go most places.

And, indeed, people didn't go most places, truth be known.

On one of my other blogs I attempt to catalog Wyoming's history on a daily basis.  On occasion, that notes people going here and there early in the state's history, for one reason or another.  To give a bad example today, October 31 (the day I started, but not finished) this entry is the anniversary of the 1903 Battle of Lightening Creek, a freakish event related as follows:

1903  The Battle of Lightning Creek occurred in Weston County Wyoming when Sheriff William Miller and a party of men under his leadership, having already arrested twelve Sioux in the area for hunting violations, engaged in a firefight with Sioux under Chief Charley Smith.  Miller, Deputy Louis Falkenberg and Chief Smith died in the battle.  Nine Sioux men alleged to have participated, and twelve women, were later arrested by Crook County Sheriff Deputy Lee Miller, but they were released for lack of evidence.

Now, nothing in this entry says anything about how Sheriff Miller and his party, nor how Chief Charley Smith and his party, arrived at Lightning Creek.  But the answer is pretty evident to most, they rode horses there. But this somewhat obscures what the reality was of that era, while illuminating at the same time.  And what that illuminates is that rural travel was by horse.

 

Now, that would hardly seem to be an illumination. But, in this modern era, few people really know what that meant.  It's common to assume, "well, of course, everyone traveled by horse"  But, in fact, most people did not travel by horse during the horse era.  And not only in the 19th Century horse era in North America, but during the horse era in almost all (but not quite all) societies everywhere. That his, during the eras in which the fastest mode of travel across the land was the horse, most people walked.

This is as true of Wyoming as anywhere else, as surprising as it may seem, and what that meant to average life is difficult for most of us to now really grasp.  Perhaps, however, before looking at that, it would be helpful to look at why that was true.

As folks with horses know, you really can't keep a horse anywhere.  For that reason, only rural people or aboriginals can keep an individual mount relatively easy, although certainly not without cost.  Some people like to imagine that in the pre automobile era they would have somehow kept a horse in town and rode where they drive today, or perhaps they'd have kept a buggy in town and have driven a team or single draught animal to pull it.  This is a really common depiction in films.  Some fellow lives in town doing this or that, needs to go somewhere, and hitches up his wagon.

 

Forest Service pack string.

But in reality few people could or did keep horses in town, which does not mean that there were not horses in town.  Average people, however, didn't do that.  If a person kept a horse in town, and worked in town, there was a specific reason for that.  Why was this true.

Well, those who own and keep horses probably instantly know.  Horses are expensive, and they have to be fed.  Additionally, they die.

Feeding a horse, in and of itself, would have been a very difficult endeavor any average person, even in a small Wyoming town of the late 19th or early 20th Centuries.  A person's yard, and yards were much smaller (as a quick glance around at most older neighborhoods in Wyoming demonstrate) certainly doesn't provide adequate forage for a horse, even during the summer growing season.  So any in town horse has to be fed.

Today horse owners feed their horses in the winter, at least, depending upon the forage they have available in their pasture.  Buying hay is certainly an option, but an expensive one.  It would have been more problematic in the late 19th Century, however, than now, as hay was not really a significant Wyoming crop until after the disastrous winter of 1888.  Indeed, at that time ranchers began to cut hay for cattle, not for horses, but the pattern of working horse usage also began to change, due in large part to barbed wire.  From early in the state's history up until around 1900 most ranchers simply turned the remuda out for the winter, where it fended for itself, grew semi wild again, and then was rounded back up in the Spring.  Only a few saddle horses were kept in.  After the range started to be fenced, and after cattle started to be fed, it no longer was as practical to simply turn horses out, as they were both needed to do winter work that hadn't previously existed, and it wasn't as possible for them to range where they might need to go.

 

Winter stock working.

In town terms, of course, what that meant is that anyone keeping horses in town, and of course there were some who did, had to find a source of hay to feed them all year long.  Not a cheap thing to do.

People who did keep horses in town essentially had two options.  They could stable them at home, or in a livery.  The few people who did stable a horse at home were well off.  There is, in Casper, at least one very old, early 20th Century, home that has a carriage house.  That would indicate that at least the original owner of that house in fact did keep a horse or horses, in town, for a carriage.  Unfortunately, I no longer know the history of the house's ownership, as I once did, so I can't recall why that person was likely to do that, if I ever knew.

 Grand Central livery in Casper, from Wyoming Tales and Trails.

Livery stabling was more likely, but that was also not inexpensive.  A livery boarded horses and every town had one or more.  Casper's Livery was the Grand Central, located downtown on what is now Yellowstone Avenue.  Liveries also served the purpose of allowing the rural employed to board a horse for a day, if they needed to come into town, as well as allowing town people to keep a horse if they needed to.  Photographs of Western liveries generally show that they were not all that large, which demonstrates that at any one time they were not housing vast numbers of horses.

So, if people didn't keep horses, what did they do?  Largely, they walked.  Henry Fairlie, in his famous essay The Cow's Revenge, gives some of the fascinating details on that.  In larger and industrial cities, the number of miles a person walked on a daily basis was staggering by modern standards.  "Mechanics", those individuals employed as skilled machinists and the like, often walked as far as seven miles one way just to get to work, and walked the same distance back to get home, after days that were endless by current standards.  This is not to laud 19th Century industrial conditions, but as Fairlie noted in his essay the necessary expenditure of calories at the time makes our current modern effort to artificially replicate that seem fairly pathetic in comparison. Of course, for a town the size that Casper, or Cheyenne, or Laramie then were, walking to work, whatever that work was, would not have been much of a burden, or wouldn't have seemed like one.  For many years at that, I walked to and from work, which was a distance of about 1.5 miles, and I used to (and sometimes still do) ride a bicycle to work.  In the late 19th and early 20th Century that would have simply been routine and unremarkable for anyone living in a smaller town or city.

Also, of course, quite a few people lived above their places of employment.  This is starting to become common once again, but was very common, even in smaller towns, at that time. Several of the older buildings in Casper, for example, have a second story apartment.  And by apartment, I mean sufficient living quarters for an entire family.  This was quite common for shopkeepers, but it wasn't uncommon for some other professions.  Doctors often operated out of their houses early on, and the term "office hours" meant that they kept "office hours" for an office in their house.  At least one lawyer I knew as a kid worked out of his home, and this was as late as the 1970s.  Houses were simply more public than they now are, in the pre automobile era.

Many more people than, as opposed to now, worked in rural occupations everywhere, however, and it's really rural travel that we started out writing about.  Even after World War One statistically half of all Americans lived in "rural" areas, although that statistic is deceptive as rural doesn't equate with working on a farm or ranch.  People who live today, for example, in Shoshoni or Meeteetsee live in a "rural area", statistically, even if they have nothing to do with farming or ranching.  Be that as it may, certainly working on a farm or ranch, or being part of a farm or ranch family, meant having access to horses.  And, for that matter, residence in a very small town, and there were many very small towns, probably meant that there was a greater need to own a horse no matter what you were doing.

So what was rural travel like for those folks?  In watching movies, a person gets the impression that if you wanted to go from here to there, or hunting or fishing, or just go somewhere, you went out the front door, jumped on your highly compliant already saddled horse, and off you went.  But that's not correct either.  Much more work was often involved in a trip of that type than that.

To illustrate what I mean, perhaps there it's best to cite a couple of written examples.  A few  years ago Wyoming Wildlife, the journal of the Wyoming Game & Fish Department, ran an article about a notable  figure who went on an extended hunting/camping trip with his family around the year 1900.  I've now forgotten who the figure was, but he was a Wyoming figure.  Photographs were included.  What was remarkable was that the family of about four had been requiired to take several saddle animals and a wagon, in order to get out, ot the out back.  It was a remarkable effort that took weeks to undertake.

Likewise, Theodore Roosevelt, who was admittedly rather wealthy and therefore probably not the best example, wrote a Colliers article about going hunting in Wyoming while he was a rancher in Medora South Dakota.  The trip likewise involved a wagon and several hands, and took weeks.  Indeed, in order to supply themselves the hunting party had to hunt all along the way, even though their plan was to go into the Big Horns to hunt elk.  A trip of that type turned into a rolling hunting trip just to make it.

Yet another example is provided in the book by B. B. Brooks on his life up until about 1920.  Brooks, who started off as a well educated prospective rancher and trapper and who became Governor took a hunting/fishing trip from his home in Natrona County to Fremont County.  I've forgotten the year, but it would be in approximatley 1900.  This trip with his family involved several horses and a wagon, and ultimately ended up discovering an unnamed lake in the high country of Fremont County.,  Again, it took weeks.

Rather obviously not everyone had weeks to devote to such endeavors and it would be completely untrue to suggest by this that only those with lots of time, and perahps lots of cash, engaged in outdoor activities.  Many average people did as well. But what that does mean is that for people who lived in towns such endeavors were almost certainly normally quite close to town.

Pioneer Wyoming rancher, Dick Latham, with antelope.

Another thing that this should make plain is that inter state travel was not what we might imagine.  Today it's a well known aspect of life in the rural West that traveling enormous distances in any one day are routine, far more so than elsewhere.  I've driving, for work, from Casper Wyoming to Lewistown Montana, and back, in a single day and I don't regard that as particularly abnormal. Generally, if a trip is 300 miles or less, I regard it as a one day deal.  If a trip is only 100 to 150 miles one way, I regard it as a short trip.

This would not have been the case, however, in the pre automobile era.  150 miles on a horse is a three day trip, normally, if a person is really pushing it.  Four days, or five, would be more likely.  There are examples of riders riding 100 miles or more in a day, but they're noted examples simply because they are extreme.  The Army standards was "forty miles a day on beans and hay", a rhyme which is not only notable because it is a rhyme, but because 40 miles is a long ways to riding on a horse.  It'ts particularly a long ways to ride if you have to do it day after day, as it becomes very hard on the horse.  Cowboys, then and now, generally never rely on one horse.  The 19th Century standard was seven horses to a man.

Travel long distance was normally by train, if a rail line existed, and quite frequently it did.  Wyoming had a few 19th and early 20th Century rial lines that carried passengers which are now completely absent, and the nationwide existance of rails to trails programs provides ample proof of that.  Most business or commmon people, if they needed to travel, took a train, if they could.

A nice example of how this worked is provided in Davis' book Goodbye Judge Lynch, about law in Big Horn County Wyoming.  Prior to the railroad coming in a practical trip in and out of the basin took weeks, not days.  And as a result, there was really no law in the basin, particularly as the distant sheriff of Johnson County, who had to travel by horse over the Big Horns to get there, could not really be there for any practical policing.  The railroad changed all that however and a person could then get there from many Wyoming localities in a day, or no more than two. This certainly made a huge differeance to lawyers, who could then actually defend cases in Big Horn County even if they lived in Natrona County, or Fremont County, or Laramie County.  It also made a big difference to the court too, as the judge didn't have to engage in an expedition to get there, even if he still had to travel a circuit from his home.  Indeed, harkening back to a much earlier era, it's interesting to note that East Coast circuit judges of colonial and early US history were in a mounted occupation, as the judge, and the lawyers, rode together from town to town in a circuit to adjudicate their casees.

All that must have come to a crashing halt on September 27, 1908, when the first Model T left the plant at Detroit Michigan, correct?  Well, no.

This is not to say that the Model T's introduction wasn't a big deal.  It was.  Automobiles, and motorcycles had of course been in manufacture for some time prior to the Model T (the first Harley Davidson came out in 1903), but they were extremely expensive and beyond the means of most people.  Model Ts were much more affordable, and indeed had been designed to be.  Ford's hope was that Most Americans could buy one, and he came darned near close to realizing that goal.  The car, and very rapidly modified examples that became early pickup trucks, were a huge success.  And no wonder. For the first time, people living in towns could buy a vehicle that didn't require storing a horse to move it, and which simply sat idle, ready for use, when not in use.

The extent to which cars spread very rapidly after the Model T, and because of the Model T, is almost impossible for us to imagine today.  Starting in 1908, by World War One the simple, and frankly rather primitive, car was everywhere.  The impact it had on town and city travel was enormous.  Fairly quickly after its introduction, and indeed even before it, the phenomenon of driving into the country, or "touring" became quite popular  So popular in fact that more expensive models of automobiles, and there were a tremendous number of automobiles, offered "touring cars".  Americans rapidly became car crazy, although the evolution was not entirely welcome everywhere by everyone.  In farm regions cars were at first not particularly welcome, as they were conceived as a threat to livestock.  Once farmers realized, however, that owning a car. . . or truck, allowed them to get to town and back quickly, that soon changed.

 

Model A Coupe.

In an area like Wyoming, this change was impressive.  For the first time ever it became easy for people living in a town like Casper or Laramie to travel some distance outside the town for a day.  And early cars were very high centered, almost like 4x4 trucks today, and very low geared.  Indeed, although they were 2x4 vehicles, they were quite well suited to rural travel.

 Ranch Truck, Big Horn County Montana, 1939.

This didn't, however, necessarily make long trips really easy.  Early newspaper articles from Wyoming are full of tales about locals driving long distances, such as between Cheyenne and Casper, and note that the trip took one or two days.  It now takes under three hours.  Of course, the trip was being made over roads that were really wagon roads.  It took some time before improved paved highways, at first very narrow, came in.  Indeed, interstate highways were non existant until after World War One, when an Army experiment gave them a boost by demonstrating that cross country automobile travel was possible, if extremely difficult.  After that an interstate highway system, the remote predacessor to today's Interstate Highways, started to come in, with the early highways named.  The highway across southerin Wyoming was the legendary Lincoln Highway. 

 Ranch truck, 1939.

Ford built the Model T up until 1927, an impressive twenty year long production run. By that time, more modern cars with some improvements had entered the scene. As the 1920s and 1930s arrived, cars became more recognizable to us today in terms of their features.  The Great Depression killed off the vast number of car companies that existed up until that time, and fewer more productive companies remained, such as Chrysler, Chevrolet, Ford, Studebaker, Willys, Kaiser and Hudson.  By modern terms, the cars remained surprisingly suitable for dirt road travel, although they were much less the "truck" that the Model T had been.  An even later car, a 1954 Chevrolet, I once had was quite easy to drive on dirt roads as a rule, and I often took it fishing while I owned it, something I'd never do with any later car I owned.  Given its relatively low gears, heavy weight, and low horsepower high compression engine, it was also pretty good in snow.  It's no wonder, therefore, that you see photos of hunters with deer strapped over the hoods of their cars.  The cars could get a fairly far out, as long as the driver wasn't crazy about it.

 

1954 Chevrolet Four Dour Deluxe Sedan.

 1954 Chevrolet Deluxe in wintertime conditions.  While I'd hesitate to drive it in conditions like this, the car exhibited pretty good winter characteristics, save for the lousy vacuum wipers and the iffy personnel heater.

None of which meant that wintertime and really outback travel was easy.

As a rule, up until sometime after World War Two, families that owned a car; owned a car.  That is, they owned one car.  Most of those cars, even in the rural West, were cars, not pickup trucks, although pickups were always more popular in this region than in others.  Prior to World War Two, however, even those trucks were two wheel drive, not 4x4.

That fact is really significant in terms of the ease of travel.

Prior to the 4x4 vehicle, much of Wyoming was either periodically, or completely, closed during the winter.  We travel from town to town now when nobody, or only the foolhardy, would have attempted it prior to seemingly everyone owning 4x4 vehicles.  And if they did try it, tire chains were in order.  We still see tire chains, of course, but not like we once did.  Even as a kind in the 1960s and early 1970s I can recall tire chains being fairly common on cars.  Now I usually only see them on 4x4 trucks, and only when conditions are really awful out back.

And people just didn't drive to the back country after the weather started getting bad.  It just wasn't really possible. 

The impact of this was vast.  Ranches, for example, had started using trucks almost as soon as they were available, but the trucks were 2x4, not 4x4 trucks, up until after the war.  This meant that they couldn't go where 4x4s can.  Wintertime feeding operations, therefore, retained a lot of hay wagons.  Horses continued to haul sheepwagons up to summer pastures, and sheep tenders were horse drawn as well.  In the winter, ranches that had distant pastures, and sometimes even mountain pastures, kept a cowhand there all winter long.  He couldn't be driven in or out, he just stayed and came down in the spring.  The less motorized operation meant that more cowboys needed to be employed than current are.

 Heavy truck in Army use, 1917.

For outdoorsmen, this meant that seasons shut down, except those close to town, once the heavy snows came.  Nobody was fourwheeling in and out of a high country elk camp after the snows.  It couldn't be done.  Even prarie travel could be difficult.  People gauged the weather and stayed in accordingly. 

Most long distance travel continued to be by train, which are much less plagued by snows.  If, for example, a person wanted to go from Casper Wyoming to Lincoln Nebraska, they were likely to take the train, not drive.  Now, of course, you can't take the train, although you can probably take a couple of airplane commuter hops. 

Even summertime trips weren't as easy.  It's routine now to find people who will drive a 4x4 far into the backcountry to fish, for example.  But they can due that due to the 4x4 and would be much less limited, or at least have to take alternative travel, if they lacked one.  Many now will take ATVs even further, and it's not uncommon to see somebody haul an ATV up into the hills with a 4x4 truck.

The 4x4 truck, and for that matter the all wheel drive car, is a byproduct of World War Two.  It wasn't until the war that they were anything more than a specialty item.  The U.S. Army began to develop the 6x6 truck in earnest in the 1920s when no suitable commercial artillery "tractor" (i.e., truck) was available  The developed truck was what the artillerymen wanted, but it was very expensive to produce.  Fortunately for the Army, by the 1930s commercial manufacturers were ready to pick up what the Army had started.  

 

 6x6 2 1/2 ton Trucks on the Alaska Highway during World War Two.

The 6x6 truck was  the workhorse of World War Two, and it arguably was the single most significant item produced by the United States during the war.  People like to imagine that tanks, or guns, or aircraft won the war, and of course a good case can be made for any of them, but as the old saying goes, professionals study logistics, amateurs tactics.  The 6x6 truck gave the US such a  logistical advantage over its opponents that it would be difficult to exaggerate.  That advantage extended to all the Allies, as the 6x6 was supplied by the Army to all of them.  Indeed, for years after the war the Soviet Unions 6x6 truck bore a striking resemblance to the Studebaker variant of the 6x6 supplied to them by the US during the war.

The Army didn't limit itself to 6x6 trucks of course, it also put out specifications for 4x4 trucks.  While Chevrolet, and International are part of the WWII 4x4 truck story, it was principally Dodge that filled that need with trucks and a car that are the parents of almost all larger 4x4s today.

The father of every 4x4 pickup on the road today. . . a Dodge 1/2 ton Army 4x4 truck.

Dodge started in the late 1930s by making a 1/2 ton 4x4 truck for the Army. That truck soon gave way to a 3/4 ton truck.  It also made "command cars" for the Army, which predicted the large SUV of later eras.

The original SUV, a Dodge 4x4 command car.  Note the tire chains on all four wheels.

Dodge 3/4 ton Weapons Carriers, a 3/4 ton pickup truck.

 

Nice preserved 3/4 ton command car.

Most vehicle fans, in terms of World War Two U.S. Army vehicles, will immediately recall the 1/4 ton Jeep, which of course was also a very significant 4x4 car of the war.  It's really misunderstood in some ways thought, as it was an extremely light weight vehicle, and arguably not as important as the vehicles mentioned above.  None the less, it can't be ignored.

Franklin Roosevelt in a Jeep at Casablanca

A striking feature of the 6x6 and 4x4 trucks of World War Two is that they all used existing engines.  Therefore, to some extent, putting them into post war manufacture was fairly easy.  This did not occur as the 6x6s, as there was only limited civilian application for them, but Dodge and Willys both understood that there was a market for what they were making post war.  Willys, one of two manufacturers of Jeeps, basically kept its World War Two production line up and running and introduced the wartime Jeep as the CJ2A, which varied only slightly from the military Jeep (including the addition of a tailgate).  Dodge, for its part, restored the enclosed cab to the 4x4 3/4 ton truck it was making for the Army, which had been omitted in favor of a soft top in the military edition, simplified the box, and introduced the truck as the Power Wagon, a name it was already using during the war.

Both vehicles were phenomenally successful, although the Jeep never really lived fully up to its promise.  Marketed as a vehicle that could be used for anything, including being used as a farm tractor, it really could not be.  Nonetheless, it was a popular vehicle with sportsmen, and it continues to be to this day.  The vehicle probably more closely resembles a vehicle of the World War Two than any other vehicle made today.

1958 Willys M38A1 Army Jeep, in civilian use and repainted.  This version was introduced to the public as the CJ5.

4x4 trucks took off a little more slowly than Jeeps.  The Dodge Power Wagon, introduced in a 3/4 ton and 1 ton variant, were heavy duty vehicles that were a little more truck than most civilians wanted.  The original Jeep wasn't a very good "daily driver", but the heavy Dodges were definatelty not.  None the less, the original Dodge Power Wagon, resembling the Army product very strongly, was made all the way up into the 1970s.  In the 1950s a second, equally beefy, version came out with a V8 engine, which bore the name "Power Wagon" as well, but which were marketed as Power Giants, reflecting the fact that they were actually larger than the Power Wagon.  While finding only a limited market with sportsmen, the truck was a huge success with commercial and agricultural users.  I recall seeing Power Wagons still in use as late as the 1990s on some ranches.  In the meantime, Dodge began making lighter 4x4 trucks in the 50s, reflecting a less industrial market.

Dodge Power Giant.

While the Power Wagon was really too stout for use by most non business or non agricultural users, the utility of 4x4 truck wasn't lost on outdoors men and all the American automobile manufacturers soon started offering a lighter truck, often with running gear actually made by Chrysler or Marmot Harrington for that market.  In 1959 Ford finally introduced its own, all Ford, 4x4 truck, a good decade plus after Dodge.  Chevrolet followed suit in 1960, although it had been selling Chevrolet and GMC trucks with NAPCO parts since 1956. 

As this might reflect, while there was a market, the manufacturers were unsure of it at first, and frankly all the early 4x4 trucks were very heavy duty.  For that reason, in Wyoming, a lot of 2x4 trucks were around well into the 1970s, and they were the rule for town truck owners up through the 1960s.  4x4s were bought by sportsmen, but they tended to shy away from them as they were very heavy duty, rough riding, and there was a common well founded belief that they more expensive to maintain.  Even some ranchers and farmers were reluctant to really heavily use 4x4s, tending to keep a Power Wagon just for when a 4x4 was really needed.

 

1956 Chevrolet 2x4 pickup truck.

This means that the change 4x4s brought was slow in coming, but it did come.  The first big impact they had in Wyoming was on ranching.  The Dodge Power Wagon, in both its civilian and military surplus variant, ended the career of many cowboys just at the same time when many of them were returning from World War Two and looking for other employment in any event.  Equipped with the Power Wagon, there was no longer any need to keep a cowboy in the high country all winter long, as the rancher could drive there if he needed to.  And the Power Wagon replaced the hay wagon on many outfits.  

The 4x4 also meant, that for the first time, many really dedicated sportsmen could get into the back country much later in the year. The post snow fall elk camp became a possibility for hte first time, with the hunters equipping themselves with pickup trucks or Travelalls (early full sized SUVs) and heading to the high country.  Quite a few Jeeps also were employed by them in that capacity, and the Jeep as a backcountry summer time vehicle came on rapidly.

 

Modern Dodge diesel 1 ton truck with stock trailer in heavy snow.

The WWII Dodge 4x4s were the predecessors of every 4x4 truck and SUV out there today, unless they're smaller, in which case the Jeep is.  That's opened up the country for us year around, an evolution which occurred extremely rapidly.  In 1944 ranchers and outdoorsmen still couldn't reach the high country, or go out in heavy snow far from their home bases.  By 1949 they could.  Not everyone switched right away, particularly in town, but by the 1970s a high percentage of pickup trucks in  Wyoming were 4x4s. By the 1980s, they majority of them were.  Now, a 2x4 truck is a freakish oddity.

Dodge D150 1/2 ton truck, a direct descendant of the WWII Dodge military 4x4.  Indeed, with this body style, the Army would employ the same truck in a 1.5 ton version as the D880.

4x4s are now everywhere in the American West, and indeed, they're everywhere in general.  But that hasn't been the end of backcountry vehicle evolution.  Motorcycles made an early appearance on rural roads and then the "dirt bike" became a big, but temporary, hit in the 1970s. Following them was the 3 wheeler, a popular if dangerous light motorized trike.  Both the dirt bike and the trike came and went, but a newer vehicle, the ATV, appears to be a permanent addition to the scene, and not one that's an unqualified good thing.  Light, somewhat dangerous, but capable of going many places that even a Jeep could not, the hills are crawling with them.  Contrary to the expectations of some, they have not replaced the horse by any means in ranching, and like the dirt bike they've appeared and then started to disappear in that application, but many outdoorsmen now seem almost permanently glued to them.

 

The ATV for those too cheap to buy an ATV.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Related Threads:

Horsepower.

Riding Bicycles.

Walking.

Working With Animals.

Interest, Fans, and Sports

In recent days, football has been very much in the news, the product of some pretty upset fans.  Not upset with the game, but with the temporary officials. And, perhaps much more significantly, it's been in the news a lot recently because of a growing body of evidence that football is causing a lot of early traumatically induced dementia amongst its players.  I actually started this entry off awhile back after reading an article about that in The New Republic, and today, when I'm finally publishing this rather longish entry, there's a news story that's broken in which player Jim McMahon has indicated that, if he could go back, he'd play baseball instead.  He's now suffering from the early stages of dementia himself.

 Schoolyard football, 1940s

I guess that makes this as good to time as any to delve into the professional sports, or sports in general.  Indeed, we're nearly on the 120th anniversary of what's become the American Sport, professional football.  It was on this day November 12, 1892 that professional football made its debut.  Or, rather more accurately, the first professional football player made his debut.  That player was William "Pudge" Heffelfinger, who was paid $500 to play as a lineman for Pittsburgh's Allegheny Athletic Club.  Heffelfinger had been offered half that to play in a prior game, but declined so as to not jeopardize his amateur status.  But apparently the former Yale football player felt that the $500 amount was ample compensation. And, while diminutive by today's standards, $500.00 in 1892 was indeed a substantial amount to be paid for a single game, when the value of that $500.00 at that time is considered.  He must have been pretty good at the primitive game.

William "Pudge" Heffelfinger, while a student at Yale.

To know a thing like that, you'd probably assume that I must be a die hard football fan, or perhaps a die hard sports fan, but I am not.  I only know who Heffelfinger is because he was mentioned in the truly freighting article on head injuries associated with football (really scary) in the most recent issue of The New Republic, although it appears that Heffelfinger, who played in the non helmet era, when head injuries may actually have been considerably less frequent, lived until age 86.  Anyhow, sports are one of the very few areas where my father's interests diverge from my own.  My father loved football.  Indeed, he loved all sports.  I can recall him watching the Wild World Of Sports very routinely, and there were very few major sports that he would not follow, to some degree, if they were on television.  And, moreover, he knew something, often a great deal, about each one.  He was, for instance, the first person I ever recall talking knowledgeably about stock car racing, long before NASCAR achieved its current level of fame.  At the same time, however, he knew a lot about golf, even though he didn't play it.  And he knew a great deal about football, which he had played at the high school level in the 1940s.  Indeed, I know he played for the local NCHS, and I believe he played for the high school in Scottsbluff before that.

I, on the other hand, just can't seem to muster up enough interest to follow too many sports, or even follow any steadily.  I'm not sure why, but I simply lost interest in a lot of them in my early teens.  Some I never had any interest in.  I have nothing against them, I just don't seem to be able to follow them. For example, I've never been able to follow any kind of automobile racing at all.  It's not that I won't, I simply can't.  I used to like watching football when I was very young, but about the time I hit junior high school my interest was waning and indeed it simply passed away.  I did watch a few football games while in high school, and even photographed the 1980 Oil Bowl for the high school paper, but that 1980 game was the second to last one I ever personally attended.  Indeed, I think I went to the high school games more because there were high school girls there, rather than being interested in the sport itself, save for the game I photographed, which I was watching for that reason.  The last one I ever watched was a Guernsey High School game I watched while in the National Guard.  At that occasion I happened to just be at Camp Guernsey when the game was going on. The football field at that time adjoined the camp, and I didn't have anything to do, so I went and watched it.  It would stun real football fans to know that even though I lived in Laramie Wyoming for six years, I never once saw a football game while there.  I was, moreover, a student at the University of Wyoming at the time.

Indeed my record on football is so poor that I went from that last Guernsey game all the way up until I was married before watching a full game on television again.  In our household my wife is a real football fan.  She'll watch the games, and every year the Super Bowl is a minor party at our house.  So, I'll watch that game now.

My track record is no better for most other major sports either, although I really do like baseball quite a bit.  I don't watch a lot of it, but I like it, and will follow it in some years.  That's about the only major professional sports I follow at all, and I don't follow any of the university teams in any sport.

This is not to say, however, that I somehow disapprove of them (although the article on football mentioned above causes me to have real concern about it as a sport).  Not following them is not the same as disapproving of them, and I've often wished I did follow them, although I've now given up trying to.  I've liked it a great deal when my own kids played sports and watched them.  On other sports, I've tried to read the sports page so that I can pick up a knowledge of them, and hopefully be able to talk about them intelligently, but it's such a lost cause that I'm never able to do that for more than a few days.  Indeed, when both my wife and I are at the breakfast table, with the local newspaper out, she'll often just state "give me the sports page" knowing that I'm not going to read it.  If there's important news on something else on that page, I miss it.  Just today I was at a firm lunch when the topic turned to the Denver Broncos and as usual I was clueless.  One of our lawyers has a near relative on that team, and I can't even recall who he is, even though he's a starter.  And this is the second time we've had an employee with a near relative on a professional football team whom everyone else recognizes, and I'm out to sea on.

As odd of character trait as it is, however, I will watch some sports if I happen to see them, and really like those off sports.  When a student at the University of Wyoming I'd watch the ruby games if they happened to be going on while I was around, and I really liked rugby.  I used to watch Australian Rules Football if it was televised, even though I have no idea what the "rules" in Australian Rules Football are.  I really like equine sports and, when they are televised, I'll watch them. Steeple Racing is a great sport.  Polo is a super sport in my view.  What all this says about me, I have no idea.

Anyhow, mostly looking at the really popular sports from the outside, looking in, has made me notice a bit how what is popular as a sport varies by location, setting and time, even while knowing that I'm somehow missing out on the enjoyment of them today.  That's a bit worth exploring in the context of what's noted here.  Professional sports as part of the national background, and even amateur sports, have really changed enormously over the decades.

This entry stared off noticing football, but the truth of the matter is that football is a sport that did not have a great following until after World War Two.  There was a following, to be sure, but mostly of college teams.  Professional football existed after some point in the 20th Century, and beyond the bonus for a game level noted above, but it wasn't a very big deal. There's reason that that baseball figures were used for ad hoc identity tests by American solders during World War Two and football knowledge was not.  Not everyone could be expected to have it.  Football only achieved its current status in the 1950s, and only after it started to be televised.  Television made professional football what it is. Before that, it was a college sport, much like rugby is today, or to a degree like what US soccer now is.  It also had a huge high school following.  This all actually makes sense, as football is a theoretically 1.25 hour long game.  Just perfect for what was a game mostly played by students who were real students.  That also made it the perfect television game, however, as it could easily fit into a convenient and predictable television time slot, even with commercials.  That probably also made it about 2 hours long, over the original 1.25 hours.  None the less, as odd as it may seem now, it was a select group who followed any kind of professional football before World War Two.  Lots of folks followed college football, but it was actually a game more likely to be played by real students, as opposed to the "student athletes" we have today.  A scandal like the current Penn State football scandal would be almost unimaginable in that prior era, as having a full time football coach, or at least a big program like so many schools have today, would have been unthinkable.

Baseball, then, was a very early, widely followed, sport in the United States.  Indeed the first efforts to organize professional baseball date back to 1870.  Two US teams actually were part of that very early organization.  National League baseball dates back to 1876.  The American League to 1901.

The 1896 Baltimore Orioles.

It's more than a little difficult to imagine how professional sports were followed before the advent of the radio, but they were.  Commercial radio got its start in the United States in 1920, and there were really no easily accessible radio stations of any kind in the US prior to 1916.  That baseball (and as we'll see boxing) had such a major following therefore, and so early, is really fairly amazing. But it did. Baseball had a major American following by the early 20th Century and gave Americans their first annual major sporting spectacle, the World Series in 1903 when the Boston Americans took on the Pittsburgh Pirates.  Boston prevailed after taking five games in a contest designed to be a best of nine series.  The amazing thing is, however, that in an era in which the fastest transportation was the train, a series of this type had been created.

 Jim Thorpe, the legendary athlete who excelled at nearly every sport, including football and baseball, as a baseball player for the New York Giants.

Perhaps demonstrating to an even greater degree the early popularity of baseball, the game had become such a big deal by 1919 that gamblers famously conspired to "fix" the series for gambling purposes, giving the US its first major sporting scandal.  Still very prominent in the sporting popular imagination, The Black Sox scandal saw some members of that team, who still played a pretty good series, throw it, nearly devastating the sport as a result.  This before the advent of radio play by play, when the news of the game, for most people, would have come in the form of the newspaper.

The 1919 Chicago White Sox before the disastrous "Black Sox" scandal.

Americans weren't just avidly following baseball in the late 19th Century and early 20th, however. They were also following the other major American sport of the era. . . . boxing.

Boxing, in recent years, has darned near died as a popular professional sport.  I would never have guessed that would have occurred when I was a kid.  Boxing was really popular up through the 1970s, and it seems that many, many people, men and women, followed at least the heavy weight boxers.  Sonny Liston, Mohammed Ali, George Frazier, etc, were all major sporting figures and televised boxing was very popular.  It had its critics to be sure, but it wouldn't have seemed obvious to anyone in the 1970s when Mohammed Ali engaged in banter with Howard Cosell that the sport would collapse in on itself like it has.  Now Ali is a sad shadow of his former self, likely demonstrating the effects of repeated poundings in the ring and Cosell is gone.  Boxing does not appear on network sporting television anymore.  I don't ever pick up Sports Illustrated (which seems to me to also sort of be a sad shadow of it former self) but I haven't noticed a stop action photo of boxing, sweat flying off the face of a boxer getting struck, as was so often the case in the covers of the 60s and 70s.

If boxing was big in the 60s and 70s, it was simply enormous in the 1890 to 1950 era. 

Boxing is an ancient sport, even as a professional sport, with champions in the UK going back to the 18th Century.  It had a huge following in the Western World and in some ways may be regarded as the first international sport.  A certain gentlemanly glamor attached to it at some point fairly early on, in spite of its undeniably brutal nature, and it had its own super stars very early on.  In the late 19th Century bare knuckle boxing gave the world one of the very first such sports super starts, the legendary John L. Sullivan, who became the last boxer to be a heavyweight champion under the London Prize Rules.

Sullivan defended the world's last real bare knuckle championship in 1882.  He'd been champion since 1889.  He was, at that point, undefeated and didn't fight a defense of his title for fifteen years, when he went on to fight Gentlemen Jim Corbett under the Marquess de Queensbury Rules, thereby signalling the end of the bare knuckle era.  This was ironic, perhaps, because most of Sullivan's matches had in fact been fought under the Queensbury rules with gloves, with only three being bare knuckle.  At any rate, Sullivan lost and Corbett became the new champion.  Sullivan went into semi-retirement after that and died at age 59, the results of over eating, over drinking, and boxing.

Boxing was also the one of the first integrated professional sport, acquiring that status long before baseball or football (with football obtaining it before baseball).  It didn't integrate without controversy, but it did integrate.  Something about the one vs. one nature of it probably made that inevitable.

Boxing also gave Americans, and indeed sports fans worldwide, one of the, if not the, first international black super star, Jack Johnson.  Johnson is sometimes inaccurately remembered as the world's first black champion, which he was not.   He was the first black heavyweight champion, however, and in the sport of boxing the heavyweights have always captured the public imagination, even while boxing fans tend to often admire the welterweights, and even the featherweights and bantamweights more.  The lighter boxers "box" more.  The heavier ones pound more.  I'm not sure what that says about the public as fans, but there you have it.

 Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world, 1908, and the second black boxing champion.

Johnson was also popular because he was controversial.  A larger than life figure in an era of strong segregation, he ignored it and lived not only contrary to the color line but in many ways he lived in a way that couldn't help but draw a lot of attention.  Some have claimed that his disregard for societal boundaries damaged the cause of black athletes, and perhaps by extension American blacks in general, but I very much doubt that.  Chances are better that his refusal to adhere to such things helped them in the long run, as it required people to confront prejudices through a person who wouldn't honor them and who was obviously the best at his sport.  Which is not to say that his personal life was universally honorable, which would not be true.  Johnson was champion from 1908 through 1915.  He lost the title to Kansas cowboy Jess Willard in the 26th round of an intended 45 round fight in Havana.  He actually continued to fight up until age 60, but engaged in at least one war bond promotion fight in 1945, at age 68.  He died in a car wreck in 1946.

Johnson is remarkable in numerous ways.  Once again, from our prospective here, he's remarkable in that he was a sports super hero, or super villan, prior to the radio age.  People weren't following his fights on the radio or television, they were reading about him in the newspaper, and yet he was widely known, widely followed, and widely vilified.  His personal life was followed, which is truly remarkable for a character so early in the modern sports era (which this really was).

And, perhaps, something about both of these widely followed, pre-broadcast sports, may say something about the pace of life.  Baseball, in the early era, was played all in the day. The phrase "day game" would have made no sense at all. They were all day games.  And boxing matches and baseball games were nearly unrestricted in terms of allotted time of play. Baseball still is, which is one of the reasons it has trouble as a televised sport.  Boxing no longer is.  The thought of a 45 round bout, like the 1915 title fight, or the even earlier no limit fights, would be unthinkable now. Of course, they'd be unthinkable not just because they'd be incapable of being broadcasted, but in the case of boxing, because a bout of that length would be unthinkably brutal.

Boxing, as noted, broke the color barrier before any other major professional sport, and that continued on into modern times.  If Johnson was a bit of a villain in the public imagination, Joe Lewis, the champion of the 1930s and 1940s, was an unqualified hero.  Some claim that Lewis repaired the damage that Johnson had done, but again, I don't think so.  I think Johnson paved the way for Lewis, but Lewis, in his own right advanced the cause of black athletes.

That cause was soon to be advanced, of course, not only by Lewis, but by the great amateur track and field athlete Jessie Owens.  We're not really looking at amateur sports here, but because this topic naturally leads to Owens, some mention of him should be made.  What's interesting here, with an athlete like Owens, is that at least by the 1930s people were following not only professional sports, but some amateur ones as well.  Owens may be the single greatest track and field athlete of all time, and he famously made a great showing in the 1936 Munich Olympics.  Coming before the era when amateur sports translated into wealth, however, he lived a fairly quiet life after the Olympics, working at fairly routine jobs in later years.  Chances are overwhelming that if he'd been born now, he would have been a wealthy man.  But, in his own era, he was mostly a man famous for his Olympic victories.  Indeed, sports greatness in general did not really equate to wealth in this time, even for professional athletes. That's a feature of the much more recent era.

It wouldn't be fair to say that boxing and baseball were the only professional sports, or sports in general, with wide followings in the early 20th Century.  Horse racing, at least compared to now, was a surprisingly widely followed sport, and the first half of the 20th Century gave us two of the most widely known race horses of all time, Seabiscuit and Phar Lap.  Both of those horse are part of remarkably similar Great Depression rags to riches stories, but the interesting thing about horse racing of that era is that it was very widespread and widely followed. Today it tends to be only really followed, by average sports fans, if a really dramatic Triple Crown event is in the offering.  

The legendary Australian race horse Phar Lap in 1930. Photo by Charles Danile Pratt

Interestingly, horse racing was also integrated early on in the sense that the human part of the racing team, the jockey, were sometimes black. African Americans had a major presence in the post Civil War history of the sport which is largely forgotten today, but which probably makes sense if we consider that the African American population was overwhelmingly rural and southern prior to the Great Depression.  Oliver Lewis, a trainer and a jockey, trained the winning horse in the very first Kentucky Derby, and black jockeys figured prominently at the Derby for years.  Isaac Murphy is still remembered as one of the greatest jockeys of all time.  Murphy was the first jockey to win three Kentucky Derbys and won a record 44% of all races he rode, a record that nobody has yet approached. 

It wasn't just conventional horses races that were followed in this early time frame.  Before World War Two there were a surprising number of long distance horse races in the United States. Several of these, for example, were held in Wyoming involving very long rides.  At least a couple of such races occurred with the starting point being Gillette Wyoming, and the finishing point being Denver Colorado.  At least one similar race went from Rock Springs Wyoming to Denver Colorado.  Endurance races still occur, but not really of a similar nature to these.

For that matter, local sports of certain types were very common prior to World War Two.  Polo, for example, was a huge deal in the United States Army.  I'd guess that most Army officers do not know this today, unless they are in the cavalry or artillery branch and attune to the mounted history of those branches, but it was simply enormous prior to World War Two.  Cavalry and artillery officers were avid participants in the sport, having picked it up from the British.  Not only did they participate, but they were encouraged to do so by the military.  This was also true of the National Guard, the only reserve of the Army up until after World War Two.  Cavalry and artillery National Guard units featured teams, some of which even played indoors. The ability for average men to be able to play the sport, otherwise an expensive endeavor, provided a major recruiting incentive for the Army and National Guard at the time.

Indeed, horses in general, and horse sports, were such a feature of Army life prior to World War Two that they provided an incentive or disincentive for some people to join, or to join various branches.  Men who hated horses, and of course there are people who do hate and fear them, shied away from military careers.  Presumably somebody who was allergic to them would have to.  Men who loved horses joined and sought assignment to the cavalry or artillery.  One famous World War Two general, with a career stretching back to prior to World War One, Terry Allen, retired immediately after World War Two, in spite of a brilliant wartime career, simply because he did not want to be an Army without horses.  His wife would claim that Gen. Allen loved horses, the Army, and her, in that order.

Rounding this out, I suppose, I should note a sport that features horses and cows, but was very regional in the period we're looking at, that being rodeo sports.  "Rodeo" itself, of course, is  not a sport, as it's a collection of sports that all are grouped into that event for presentation.  Rodeos got their start as sporting events in the late 19th Century and were big deals in the Western United States and Canada by the 1890s.  Now they've spread across the country, but well into the 20th Century they were really pretty much a Western deal, but a pretty steady feature of Western life.  The Professional Rodeo Cowboy's Association dates back to 1936, so at least by that time there were men who were making a career of it.  That a person could make a career out of being a rodeo cowboy in 1936 is notable in and of itself, as that was in the depths of the Great Depression.

Roughstock, Cheyenne Frontier Days, 1910.

I suppose, after all of that, the logical question would be, well. . . what's the point?  I don't know that I particularly have one, other than to look how the public fascination with certain sports has evolved over the years. We can easily track professional sports in the United States back well over 150 years, which is something that's amazing in and of itself, and perhaps says that the fascination with sports isn't anything new at all. ESPN may be relatively new, but what it taps into isn't.  People were avidly following certain professional sports in an era prior to automobiles, television or radio, meaning that people were following some sporting events by newspaper pretty avidly.  The sports page, apparently, isn't anything new at all.  And play that was at least somewhat cross country came in pretty early as well, as baseball teams were obviously riding the rails pretty early, and boxers going to some exotic venues. The types of sports that people routinely followed, however, have changed.  In the early 20th Century, people were following some sports  that took a very long time to reach a conclusion.  Baseball may be the classic example,  being a daytime game, with most games played during the weekday.   It takes hours to play, but that didn't stop it from being watched or followed.  Now, people follow sports that lend them selves to a compact televised segment, to some extent.  Or at least they seem to watch sports that take less time to watch and which are easy to televise.

It also seems to me to be the case that in some ways, perhaps very minor ways, people have less of a connection with the sports they follow now as opposed they did previously, although such an analysis can definitely be taken too far.  Be that as it may, professional athletes always stood apart as great athletes, but  it was somehow easier to imagine yourself as a Babe Ruth, or even a Ty Cobb, than it is to imagine yourself as a Peyton Manning. Perhaps that's in part because the professional athletes of former eras were not so separated from average people in terms of incomes, but perhaps it is also because they really were more average.  Or at least most of them were.  Most of us cannot imagine being a Jessie Owens or Jim Thorpe.  And in that earlier era a sport based on playing for hours on a grassy field, or racing a horse, was closer to what many people worked on or experienced everyday.  While professional sports have always been spectator in nature, I suspect that the spectators were a little closer to the participants at one time.