Thursday, November 17, 1910. First annual conference of Wyoming clergy.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 17: 1910  First annual conference of Wyoming clergy held. Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

Last edition:

Wednesday, November 16, 1910. No canal grabbing.

Labels: 1910, 1910s, Kites, Panama, Panama Canal, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), William Howard Taft

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates, 2025.

Today In Wyoming's History: Updates, 2025.: 

Updates, 2025.

February 20, 1900.  Death of Chief Washakie.

July 2, 1975.  Dead Savage Spring.

August 14, 1945.  New material added on VJ Day.

August 27, 1915.  The Pershing tragedy.

August 31, 1915.  Casper becomes a first class city.

September 7, 1925.  Nellie Tayloe Ross visited Casper for Labor Day.

November 3, 1875.  Grant's cabinet meets to consider how to deal with Native Americans in the Rocky Mountain Region.

November 3, 1945.  Game Wardens killed.

November 4, 1875.  Gov. Campbell issues a Thanksgiving Proclamation.

November 10, 2025.  Death of Susan Anderson.

November 13, 2025.  Massive Wyoming power outage.

November 14, 2025.  Great Americans

Today In Wyoming's History: Whitewashing Wounded Knee. The Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

Today In Wyoming's History: Whitewashing Wounded Knee. The Wounded Knee Medal...:

Whitewashing Wounded Knee. The Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

It seems like we live in an age when political polarization will have no ends and no bounds.

Burying Sioux dead at Wounded Knee.

Let's start by noting that the Battle of Wounded Knee occurred almost 135 years ago.  Usually, when you say something like that in a casual conservation, you get the "that's a long time ago".  In historical terms, it's not.  It particularly is not for a defeated people, such as the Sioux.  It also isn't, however, for a culture that seemingly is involved in a sort of cultural civil war.

What happened at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on December 29, 1890 isn't really all that well understood now and wasn't really then. other than that 90 Sioux lost their lives, and four were wounded, while 31 US troops fo the 7th Cavalry were killed, and 33 wounded.  The fact that the 7th Cavalry sustained 64 casualties typically comes as a surprise to people who don't know much about the event, as it shows that it had at least some character of being a battle, while the 90 Sioux deaths show that it was certainly lopsided. The fact that only 4 Sioux were reported as wounded says a lot as well, as normally there are more wounded that killed.  The entire event took place with the Ghost Dance in the background of the times, and the residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation being absolutely desperate.  Sitting Bull, as often noted, had been killed by Indian Police just a few days prior.

The actual fight came about with Colonel James W. Forsyth ordered the Sioux disarmed.  It's easy to see why this would not have been well received, as that rendered an oppressed people completely defenseless while making them also 100% dependant upon the United States government for provisions.  Modern proponents of the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution, which the Trump Administration purports to be, would normally have regarded this as being completely beyond the pale, but at the time Native Americans were not American citizens and the common current understanding of the meaning of the 2nd Amendment really didn't exist.  At any rate, the disarming was going fairly well when something happened, with it not being clear what, and gunfire ensued.  By at least some accounts the first shot was accidental (something that may well be true of Lexington and Concord as well) and occured when soldiers tried to disarm a deaf man who also had no command of English at all.  General shooting broke out instantly and the officers very rapidly lost control of their men.

Wounded Knee, as a location,  had received the attention of the Western Press at least back to November, 1890, a full month or more before the incident took place, due to the Ghost Dance and the things occuring there.. The action at Wounded Knee was reported almost immediately, with the Laramie Boomerang and the Cheyenne Daily Leaders being the first papers to report on it in Wyoming.

By the first week of January, the newspaper in Buffalo was reporting on the event as a "sorious [sic] engagement".  It didn't take long, however before the press was commenting on what occurred there and criticizing it.  When looked at, it didn't appear that the Army had covered itself with glory by any means.  Perhaps because of that, it took steps to do just that, issuing 20 Medals of Honor, nearly as many has had been awarded due to the Battle of Little Big Horn..¹

Four years ago, we reported here on the review of those Medals of Honor that were awarded for action at Wounded Knee, which were under review by the Biden Administration's Department of Defense:

Today In Wyoming's History: Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.: Sgt. Toy receiving the Medal of Honor in 1891.  Sgt. Toy was cited for "bravery while shooting Indians" at Wounded Knee.  He is kn...

We link in, although it's probably bad form to do so, our original post below, complete with the names of those who were awarded the medal.²

Now, Secretary of Defense Hegseth.³   has ended the review and determined that all twenty soldiers who were awarded the medal shall retain it "forever".

There's no "final" anything in the U.S. Government or the greater world at large.  The Secretary can order the sea held back forever, but he'd be no more successful at that than King Canute.  The next administration may very well revisit this topic.

I'd somewhat forgotten about this story, and I'm really surprised that it took four years to get around to the point of a decision being made.  For goodness sake, how much time would such a review actually need?  Enough time had in fact elapsed that I'd returned to my original misunderstanding on this subject, which was; "that I was under the impression that the Army had rescinded these medals long ago, and I'm not completely certain that they haven't.  Having said that, I can't find that they were, so my presumption must have been in error." A lot of pre Great War Medals of Honor have in fact been rescinded, as the criteria for being awarded the medal have radically changed.  I addressed that in my original post, noting. that; 

To put this in context, the medals that were rescinded, if any were, weren't rescinded because Wounded Knee was a massacre.  They were rescinded because they didn't meet the post April 1917 criteria for receiving the award."

The Medal of Honor was first authorized in 1861 by the Navy, not the Army, following the retirement of Gen. Winfield Scott, who was adamantly opposed to the awarding of medals to servicemen, which he regarded as a European practice, not an American one.  The award was authorized by Congress that year, at the Navy's request.  The Army followed in 1862 in the same fashion.  The medals actually vary by appearance, to this day, depending upon which service issues them, and they've varied somewhat in design over time.

During the Civil War the award was generally issued for extraordinary heroism, but not necessarily of the same degree for which it is today.  Because of this, a fairly large number of Medals of Honor were conferred after the Civil War to servicemen who retroactively sought them, so awards continued for Civil War service for decades following the war.  New awards were also issued, of course, for acts of heroism in the remaining decades of the 19th Century, with Army awards usually being related to service in the Indian Wars.  Navy awards, in contrast, tended to be issued for heroic acts in lifesaving, a non combat issuance of the award that could not occur today.  Indeed, a fairly large number were issued to sailors who went over the sides of ships to save the lives, or attempt to, of drowning individuals, often with tragic results to the sailors.

At any rate, the period following the war and the method by which it was retroactively issued may have acclimated the Army to issuing awards as there are a surprising number of them that were issued for frontier battles.  This does not mean that there were not genuine acts of heroism that took place in those battles, it's just surprising how many there were and its clear that the criteria was substantially lower than that which would apply for most of the 20th Century.

Indeed, in the 20th Century the Army began to significantly tighten up requirements to hold the medal. This came into full fruition during World War One during which the Army made it plain that it was only a combat medal, while the Navy continued to issue the medal for peacetime heroism.  In 1917 the Army took the position that the medal could only be issued for combat acts of heroism at the risk of life to the recipient, and in 1918 that change became official.  Prior to the 1918 change the Army commissioned a review board on past issuance of the medal and struck 911 instances of them having been issued.  I'd thought the Wounded Knee medals had been stricken, but my presumption must be in error.

Frontier era Medals of Honor, as well as those issued to Civil War era soldiers after the Civil War, tend to be remarkably lacking in information as to why they were conferred.  This has presented a problem for the Army looking back on them in general.

Indeed, the Wounded Knee medals have this character.  They don't say much, and what they do say isn't all that useful to really know much about what lead them to be awarded.  There is a peculiar aspect to them, however, in that they don't reflect what we generally know about the battle historically.  

I additionally noted about these specific awards that:

Indeed, save for two examples that reference rescuing wounded comrades, I don't know that any of these would meet the modern criteria. They don't appear to.  So once again, most of these would appear to be subject to proper unilateral Army downgrading or rescission all on their own with no Congressional action.

Hegseth's action revivies, and in the worst possible way, a sort of dormant glacial debate on the battle itself, with the popular understanding of what occurred there having somewhat shifted, although perhaps not as much as we might imagine, over the years.  Right from the onset, as noted, there were those who regarded what happened at Wounded Knee with horror.  While it may have been a battle, it has every appearance of being one in which the officers of the 7th Cavalry simply lost control of the situation and their troops.  Had the Sioux been properly armed, chances are high that the 7th, in spite of being very well armed at the battle, would have taken massive casualties.  The fact that the Army's dead nearly equalled the wounded says a lot.

But not as much as 90 Sioux being killed, including women and children, and only four being wounded. The battle is normally called a massacre, with the terms battle and massacre not being mutually exclusive.

Regarding the medals, it's also not impossible that some of them were for genuine heroism, but the typical 19th Century spartan citations make it hard to tell. They read:

Sergeant William Austin, cavalry, directed fire at Indians in ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mosheim Feaster, cavalry, extraordinary gallantry at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mathew Hamilton, cavalry, bravery in action at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Joshua Hartzog, artillery, rescuing commanding officer who was wounded and carried him out of range of hostile guns at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Marvin Hillock, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Bernhard Jetter, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee for "killing an Indian who was in the act of killing a wounded man of B Troop."

·         Sergeant George Loyd, cavalry, bravery, especially after having been severely wounded through the lung at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Albert McMillain, cavalry, while engaged with Indians concealed in a ravine, he assisted the men on the skirmish line, directed their fire, encouraged them by example, and used every effort to dislodge the enemy at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Thomas Sullivan, cavalry, conspicuous bravery in action against Indians concealed in a ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         First Sergeant Jacob Trautman, cavalry, killed a hostile Indian at close quarters, and, although entitled to retirement from service, remained to close of the campaign at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant James Ward, cavalry, continued to fight after being severely wounded at Wounded Knee;

·         Corporal William Wilson, cavalry, bravery in Sioux Campaign, 1890;

·         Private Hermann Ziegner, cavalry, conspicuous bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy;

·         Lieutenant Ernest Garlington, cavalry, distinguished gallantry;

·         First Lieutenant John Chowning Gresham, cavalry, voluntarily led a party into a ravine to dislodge Sioux Indians concealed therein. He was wounded during this action.

·         Second Lieutenant Harry Hawthorne, artillery, distinguished conduct in battle with hostile Indians;

·         Private George Hobday, cavalry, conspicuous and gallant conduct in battle;

·         First Sergeant Frederick Toy, cavalry, bravery;

·         Corporal Paul Weinert, artillery, taking the place of his commanding officer who had fallen severely wounded, he gallantly served his piece, after each fire advancing it to a better position

A few of those seem pretty clear.  A few of those would never meet the current standards.  Indeed, almost all of these would not.  Pvt. Hartzog's seems to be the only one that probably would under the modern standard, but then again it's hard to know what most of these are really for.

Only 86 men were awarded the Medal of Honor for the entire Philippine Insurrection, which occured only shortly after this event.  112 Medals of Honor were awarded for servicemen for the Spanish American War, of which 31 went to soldiers, and the balance went to sailors.

Can it really be possible that the men of the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee were that much more heroic than the men who fought at Kettle Hill?

That's awfully hard to believe.

It's a least questionable.  

It was obvious even at the time that Wounded Knee closed entirely the era of Frontier campaigning.  There would be some fighting with Native Americans even after that, but the West had been won and the real wars were over.  Wounded Knee was the tragic and sad end to it.  By that time the Army was simply trying to keep Natives on their reservations, and to some extent was a police force poorly trained for that role, and frankly arguably just poorly trained.  Wounded Knee occurred because the Army feared that the Sioux on Pine Ridge would try to break off of the reservation  and they knew that disarming them would render them completely helpless.  That reasoning was not incorrect. Doing it got very badly out of hand and the events thereafter had every appearance of an Army attempt to whitewash what happened.  It didn't succeed at the time.

And it won't now.

The fact that the Administration feels that this somehow serves its interest, 135 years after the events, but with the wounds still fresh for the Sioux, says a lot about it views history, and those who have suffered at our hands.

Footnotes:

1.  It's common to see it stated 19 medals were issued.  It was 20.

2.  Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

Sgt. Toy receiving the Medal of Honor in 1891.  Sgt. Toy was cited for "bravery while shooting Indians" at Wounded Knee.  He is known to have shot two during the engagement, which is about all that his citations and the supporting material relates.

 Tribes Want Medals Awarded for Wounded Knee Revoked.

While this isn't a Wyoming item per se, the Battle of Wounded Knee has been noted here before, as its a regional one.

It would likely surprise most readers here that twenty Medals of Honor were awarded to soldiers who participated in the actions at Wounded Knee.  The odd thing is that I was under the impression that the Army had rescinded these medals long ago, and I'm not completely certain that they haven't.  Having said that, I can't find that they were, so my presumption must have been in error.

To put this in context, the medals that were rescinded, if any were, weren't rescinded because Wounded Knee was a massacre.  They were rescinded because they didn't meet the post April 1917 criteria for receiving the award.

The Medal of Honor was first authorized in 1861 by the Navy, not the Army, following the retirement of Gen. Winfield Scott, who was adamantly opposed to the awarding of medals to servicemen, which he regarded as a European practice, not an American one.  The award was authorized by Congress that year, at the Navy's request.  The Army followed in 1862 in the same fashion.  The medals actually vary by appearance, to this day, depending upon which service issues them, and they've varied somewhat in design over time.

During the Civil War the award was generally issued for extraordinary heroism, but not necessarily of the same degree for which it is today.  Because of this, a fairly large number of Medals of Honor were conferred after the Civil War to servicemen who retroactively sought them, so awards continued for Civil War service for decades following the war.  New awards were also issued, of course, for acts of heroism in the remaining decades of the 19th Century, with Army awards usually being related to service in the Indian Wars.  Navy awards, in contrast, tended to be issued for heroic acts in lifesaving, a non combat issuance of the award that could not occur today.  Indeed, a fairly large number were issued to sailors who went over the sides of ships to save the lives, or attempt to, of drowning individuals, often with tragic results to the sailors.

At any rate, the period following the war and the method by which it was retroactively issued may have acclimated the Army to issuing awards as there are a surprising number of them that were issued for frontier battles.  This does not mean that there were not genuine acts of heroism that took place in those battles, it's just surprising how many there were and its clear that the criteria was substantially lower than that which would apply for most of the 20th Century.

Indeed, in the 20th Century the Army began to significantly tighten up requirements to hold the medal. This came into full fruition during World War One during which the Army made it plain that it was only a combat medal, while the Navy continued to issue the medal for peacetime heroism.  In 1917 the Army took the position that the medal could only be issued for combat acts of heroism at the risk of life to the recipient, and in 1918 that change became official.  Prior to the 1918 change the Army commissioned a review board on past issuance of the medal and struck 911 instances of them having been issued.  I'd thought the Wounded Knee medals had been stricken, but my presumption must be in error.

Frontier era Medals of Honor, as well as those issued to Civil War era soldiers after the Civil War, tend to be remarkably lacking in information as to why they were conferred.  This has presented a problem for the Army looking back on them in general.

Indeed, the Wounded Knee medals have this character.  They don't say much, and what they do say isn't all that useful to really know much about what lead them to be awarded.  There is a peculiar aspect to them, however, in that they don't reflect what we generally know about the battle historically.  

Wikipedia has summarized the twenty awards and what they were awarded for, and this illustrates this problem.  The Wounded Knee Wikipedia page summarizes this as follows

·         Sergeant William Austin, cavalry, directed fire at Indians in ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mosheim Feaster, cavalry, extraordinary gallantry at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mathew Hamilton, cavalry, bravery in action at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Joshua Hartzog, artillery, rescuing commanding officer who was wounded and carried him out of range of hostile guns at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Marvin Hillock, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Bernhard Jetter, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee for "killing an Indian who was in the act of killing a wounded man of B Troop."

·         Sergeant George Loyd, cavalry, bravery, especially after having been severely wounded through the lung at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Albert McMillain, cavalry, while engaged with Indians concealed in a ravine, he assisted the men on the skirmish line, directed their fire, encouraged them by example, and used every effort to dislodge the enemy at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Thomas Sullivan, cavalry, conspicuous bravery in action against Indians concealed in a ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         First Sergeant Jacob Trautman, cavalry, killed a hostile Indian at close quarters, and, although entitled to retirement from service, remained to close of the campaign at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant James Ward, cavalry, continued to fight after being severely wounded at Wounded Knee;

·         Corporal William Wilson, cavalry, bravery in Sioux Campaign, 1890;

·         Private Hermann Ziegner, cavalry, conspicuous bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy;

·         Lieutenant Ernest Garlington, cavalry, distinguished gallantry;

·         First Lieutenant John Chowning Gresham, cavalry, voluntarily led a party into a ravine to dislodge Sioux Indians concealed therein. He was wounded during this action.

·         Second Lieutenant Harry Hawthorne, artillery, distinguished conduct in battle with hostile Indians;

·         Private George Hobday, cavalry, conspicuous and gallant conduct in battle;

·         First Sergeant Frederick Toy, cavalry, bravery;

·         Corporal Paul Weinert, artillery, taking the place of his commanding officer who had fallen severely wounded, he gallantly served his piece, after each fire advancing it to a better position

For quite a few of these, we're left without a clue as to what the basis of the award was, at least based on this summation. But for some, it would suggest a pitched real battle.  A couple of the awards are for rescuing wounded comrades under fire.  Others are for combat actions that we can recognize.

Indeed, one historian that I know, and probably only because I know him, has noted the citations in support for "it was a real battle", taking the controversial, albeit private, position that Wounded Knee was a real, pitched, engagement, not simply a slaughter.  This isn't the popular view at all, of course, and its frankly not all that well supported by the evidence either.  But what of that evidence.

A popular thesis that's sometimes presented is that Wounded Knee was the 7th Cavalry's revenge for the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  Perhaps this is so, but if it is so, it's would be somewhat odd in that it would presume an institutional desire for revenge rather than a personal one, for the most part.  Wounded Knee was twenty four years after Little Big Horn and most of the men who had served at Little Big Horn were long since out of the service.  Indeed, some of the men who received awards would have been two young for service in 1890, and while I haven't looked up all of their biographies, some of them were not likely to have even been born at the time.  Maybe revenge was it, but if that's the case, it would demonstrate a 19th Century retention of institutional memories that vastly exceed the 20th and 21st Century ones.  Of course, the 7th Cavalry remains famous to this day for Little Big Horn, so perhaps that indeed is it.

Or perhaps what it reflects is that things went badly wrong at Wounded Knee and the massacre became a massively one sided battle featuring a slaughter, something that the Sioux on location would have been well within their rights to engage in. That is, once the things went wrong and the Army overreacted, as it certainly is well established that it did, the Sioux with recourse to arms would have been justified in acting in self defense.  That there were some actions in self defense which would have had the character of combat doesn't mean it wasn't combat.

And that raises the sticky moral issues of the Congressional efforts to rescind the medals.  Some of these medals are so poorly supported that the Army could likely simply rescind them on their own, as they have many others, and indeed, I thought they had.  Some seem quite unlikely to meet the modern criteria for the medal no matter what, and therefore under the practices established in 1917, they could be rescinded even if they were regarded as heroic at the time.  Cpl. Weinert's for example, unless there was more to it, would probably just merit a letter of commendation today.

Indeed, save for two examples that reference rescuing wounded comrades, I don't know that any of these would meet the modern criteria. They don't appear to.  So once again, most of these would appear to be subject to proper unilateral Army downgrading or rescission all on their own with no Congressional action.

But what of Congressional action, which has been proposed. The Army hasn't rescinded these awards and they certainly stand out as awards that should receive attention.  If Congress is to act, the best act likely would be to require the Army to review overall its pre 1917 awards once again.  If over 900 were weeded out the first time, at least a few would be today, and I suspect all of these would.

To simply rescind them, however, is problematic, as it will tend to be based neither on the criteria for award today, or the criteria of the award in 1890, but on the gigantic moral problem that is the Battle of Wounded Knee itself.  That is, these awards are proposed to be removed as we regard Wounded Knee as a genocidal act over all, which it does indeed appear to be.

The problem with that is that even if it is a genocidal act in chief, individual acts during it may or may not be. So, rushing forwards to rescue a wounded comrade might truly be heroic, even if done in the middle of an act of barbarism.  Other acts, such as simply shooting somebody, would seem to be participating in that barbarism, but here too you still have the situation of individual soldiers suddenly committed to action and not, in every instance, knowing what is going on.  It's now too late to know in most cases.  Were they acting like William Calley or just as a regular confused soldier?

Indeed, if medals can be stricken because we now abhor what they were fighting for (and in regard to Wounded Knee, it was questioned nearly immediately, which may be why the Army felt compelled to issue medals to those participating in it, to suggest it was a battle more than it was), what do we do with other problematic wars?

Eighty six men, for example, received the Medal of Honor for the Philippine Insurrection.  In retrospect, that was a pure colonial war we'd not condone in any fashion today, and it was controversial at the time.  Theodore Roosevelt very belatedly received the Medal of Honor for leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill during the Spanish American War, and he no doubt met the modern criterial, but the Spanish American War itself is morally dubious at best.  

Of course, none of these awards are associated with an act of genocide, which takes us back to Wounded Knee.  As noted above, maybe so many awards were issued there as the Army wanted to to convert a massacre into a battle, and conferring awards for bravery was a way to attempt to do that.

Certainly the number of awards for Wounded Knee is very outsized.  It's been noted that as many awards have been issued for heroism at Wounded Knee as have been for some gigantic Civil War battles.  Was the Army really more heroic at Wounded Knee than Antietam?  That seems unlikely.

Anyway a person looks at it, this is one of those topics that it seems clear would be best served by Army action.  The Army has looked at the topic of pre 1917 awards before, and it removed a fair number of them.  There's no reason that it can't do so again. It was regarded as harsh the last time it occurred, and some will complain now as well, but the Army simply did it last time.   That would honor the medal and acknowledge the history, and it really shouldn't be confined to just Wounded Knee.

Dead men and horses at Wounded Knee following the conflict.

3.  Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense, not the Secretary of War. The Defense Department can't unilaterally change its name and Donald Trump can't change his title.  He can call himself Pete Hegseth, Warrior Princess if he wants to, but officially he's still the Secretary of Defense.

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact: 

Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

One of the things that's aggravating for students of history is the way that popular portrayals botch the depiction of the topic of their interest or interests.  Sometimes this is mildly irritating, and sometimes colossally aggravating.  This is just part of the nature of things, which doesn't make it any less aggravating, and this is just as true of Wyoming history and the depictions of Wyoming and its citizens as it is with any other topic.  I suspect that the residents or students of any one area could say the same thing.

Before I go further with this, however, I should also note that this blog is very far from perfect, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. As a daily catalog of Wyoming's history it's doing okay, but even at that, it isn't anywhere near as complete as it should be, and with certain big events in Wyoming's history its grossly incomplete.  A blog of this type should allow a person to follow a developing story as it plays out, and so far, for the most part, this one doesn't do that, that well, yet.  It certainly isn't up to the same standard that the World War Two Day By Day Blog was before it sadly, and mysteriously, terminated on September 24, 2012.  It'll hopefully get better with time, and it's doing okay now, but it is an amateur effort done with very limited time, so it isn't as complete as it should be yet.  We can hope for better in the future, of course, and it is better this year as compared to last.  We can also hope that it gets more comments in the future, which would assist with making it more complete.

Anyhow, while noting that, it's still the case that there are a lot of aggravating errors and depictions out there.  Maybe this blog can correct a few of them, although with its low readership, that's pretty doubtful.  And people cherish myths, so that operates against this as well.

What motivated this is that I was doing a net search for an update of a recent entry here and hit, through the oddity of Google, a website devoted to the movie Brokeback Mountain, which I have not seen.  I'm surprised that there's a fan website devoted to the movie, which of course I have not seen, as I'm surprised by any fan movie site.  A movie has to be of massive greatness, in my view, before I can imagine anyone devoting a blog to it.  Say, Lawrence of Arabia, or a movie of equal greatness. There probably aren't a dozen movies that are that good.  

Anyhow, if a person wants to devote a blog to a movie they really like, but isn't one of the greatest movies of all time, that's their business, but there is a difference between fact and fiction. And the reason I note the site noted is that there's a page on the site the one I hit debating the location of the Brokeback Mountain. The blogger thought it was in one place, but cited author Larry McMurtry for another location.

Well, McMurtry notwithstanding, there is no Brokeback Mountain. The book and movie are fiction.  It makes no more sense to say that some mountain is Brokeback Mountain than it does to say that the Grand Tetons are Spencer's Mountain, unless the point was intended to be that some backdrop for a film was a certain identified location.  If that's the case, i.e., identifying an actual location, I get it, but that's not what they seemed to be debating.  I don't think the film was actually filmed in Wyoming, although I could be mistaken and perhaps some background scenes were (although I don't think so).  Of course, if I am in error, I'm in error, in which case they're trying to identify a location they saw in the film, and I'm off base.

Along these same lines, when the film Unforgiven came out, I went to see it.  The movie was getting a lot of press at the time, and it was hailed as great.  It isn't.  It's not really that good of a film frankly, and I didn't think it was at the time.  I think it was hailed as great as a major Western hadn't been released in quite some time, and it starred Clint Eastwood.  Eastwood has been in some fine movies to be sure, but he's been in some doggy Westerns also, and this one, while not a dog, wasn't great.

At any rate, while watching that film, I recall a young woman asked her date, several rows in front of me, where the town the film depicts, Big Whiskey, Wyoming, was located.  I thought surely he'd say "there isn't one," but, dutifully he identified its location, essentially morphing Whiskey Mountain, a mountain, into the fictional town.  Whiskey Mountain is a real place, but Big Whiskey, the town, is a complete fiction.  It doesn't even sound like the name of a 19th Century Wyoming town.  I don't know of any Wyoming town named after an alcoholic beverage, or even a beverage of any kind.  For that matter, I don't know of any named for anything edible or potable, save for Chugwater.  In the 19th Century, the founders of towns like to name towns after soldiers if they could, which gives us Casper, Sheridan, Rawlins, Lander and probably other locations.  

While on the topic of fictional towns, there's the fictional characters in them.  Big Whiskey, in the film, was ruled over by a well dressed tyrannical sheriff and a well dressed tyrannical Englishman, if I recall correctly.  Tyrannical sheriffs are popular figures in Western movies, and in recent years they're well dressed tyrants.  In quite a few films the tyrannical sheriff is the ally of a tyrannical (probably English) big rancher.

In actuality, sheriffs all stood for election in those days, just as now.  They often had a really rough idea of what law enforcement entailed, but they did not tend to be tyrannical.  They tended to be grossly overworked, covering huge expanses of territory.  They also probably didn't tend to be snappy dressers.  While some of them had been on both sides of the law, quite a few were Frontier types that fell into the job for one reason or another, like Johnson County's "Red" Angus or Park County's Jeremiah Johnson (the famed mountain man).  Sheriff's of that era tended to spend days and in the saddle without the assistance of anyone and often tended to resort to gun play, which average people did as well, but they did not tend to be agents of repression.  If they were, they would loose office pretty quickly.  Probably one of the better depictions of a Frontier lawman is the recent depiction of Marshall Cogburn in the Cohen Brothers version of True Grit.

The tyrannical local big rancher thing is way overdone as well.  The reason that there was a Johnson County War is that the old big landed interests were loosing control so rapidly, not because they were retaining it.  Films like Open Range, or Return to Lonesome Dove, which depict people straying into controlled territory are simply wrong.  The cattle war was more characterized by an ongoing struggle than Medieval fiefdoms.  There were some English and Scottish ranchers as well, but there were big interests that weren't either.  And the both sides in those struggles formed interests groups that involved lots of people, rather than one big entity against the little people, contrary to the image presented in Shane and so many other films.

As part of that, one thing that these period films never seem to get correct is that the West was a territory of vigorous democracy.  Yes, in Wyoming large cattle interests tried to squash the small ones in Johnson and Natrona Counties through a shocking armed invasion, but they also had to content with the ballot box. When things went badly for them in the Invasion, the legislature briefly turned Democratic and Populist.  Newspapers were political arms in those days as well, and they were often exceeding vocal in their opinions.  Their opinions could sometimes be shouted down, or crowded out, but the concept that some English Duke would rule over a vast swatch of territory unopposed is simply incorrect.  More likely his domain would be subject to constant carving up and the sheriff was less than likely to be in his pocket.

While on the topic of films, the way that characters are depicted, visually, is very often incorrect.  In terms of Westerns, to a large extent, films of the 30s and 40s depicted characters the way that film makers wanted them to look, films of the 50s the way that people thought the viewers wanted them to look, films of the 60s reflected the style of day, and so on.  It wasn't until the 1980s, with Lonesome Dove, that a serious effort was made to portray 19th Century Western figures the way they actually looked, with a few really rare exceptions.  Shane, which I otherwise do not like, did accurately portray the visual look of a couple of characters, the best example being the gun man portrayed by Jack Palance. Why they got that one correct, for the region, and few else, is a mystery.  The older film Will Penny did a good job in these regards.  The Culpepper Cattle Company is very well done..  In recent films, the film Tombstone was very accurate in terms of costume for the region it was set in, so much so that it received criticism for the odd dress styles it depicted, even though they were period and location correct.  Modern Westerns tend to botch this if set in Wyoming or the Northern Plains, and are almost never correct in these regards.

Hats get very odd treatment in this context.  From the 20s through the 30s, hats were fanciful in film, and didn't reflect what people actually wore.  In the 50s, the hats that were then in style were shown as being in style in the late 19th Century.  Only recently have historical films generally been correct, and they still hit and miss on films set in the present era.  A lot of movie makers can't tell the difference between Australian drover's hats and real cowboy hats, and would probably be stunned to find that a lot of cowboys look like they did over a century ago, to a large extent.

The expanse of territory is also routinely inaccurate in old and new depictions.  Film depictions of Wyoming either seem to think that Wyoming has the geographic expanse of Alaska or, alternatively, Rhode Island.  Distances seem to be rarely related to the period in which they are set, with some depictions set in the 19th Century seemingly thinking that a town was always nearby, while ones set now seemingly thinking there isn't one for a thousand miles.  Expanses in Wyoming are vast, but the state is not Alaska.  Conversely, ranch and farm geography isn't grasped at all, and frankly its forgotten by most Wyomingites, in a historic concept, now.  Up into the 1930s there were an increasing number of small homesteads, meaning the farm and ranch population, throughout the West, was much higher than it is now. 

Probably the single worst depiction of modern geography, geography in general and ranch geography, is the horribly bad film Bad Lands, a fictionalized account of a series of events that actually mostly took place in the Mid West but which ended in Wyoming, in reality.  In that film the teenage murderers are shown driving across the prairie and there's actually an absurd line about being able to see the lights of Cheyenne in the distance in one direction and some extremely far off feature to the north.  In reality, you can not drive a car, any car, across the prairie as the prairie is rough and cut with gullies, ravines, gopher holes, etc.  And there's a lot of barbed wire fences.  The thought, as the movie has it, of driving dozens and dozens of miles straight across the prairie is absurd.  Not quite as absurd as being able to see Cheyenne's lights from a safe vast distance away, however.  Cheyenne sits in a bit of a bowl in the prairie, and if you see its lights, you are pretty close, and if you are driving across the prairie, pretty soon you're going to be entering some ranch yard or F. E. Warren Air Force Base.

One of the best depictions of geography, however, comes in McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, which does get it basically correct, and which the film gets basically correct.  In the film, the cattle are driven across arid eastern Wyoming, which is actually correctly depicted as arid.  Film makers like to show Wyoming as being Jackson's Hole.  Jackson's Hole is Jackson's Hole, and while it is very beautiful, and in Wyoming, it's darned near in Idaho and most of the state doesn't look like that.

On the topic of land, a really goofball idea depicted in many, many, current depictions of Wyoming and Montana is that you can go there and buy a ranch. No, you cannot.  Well, if you have a huge amount of money you can, but otherwise, you are not going to.  In spite of this, films all the time have the idea that people will just go there and buy a ranch.  One episode of Army Wives, for example, had an episode where a Specialist E4 was going to leave the Army and buy a ranch.  Baloney.  Buying any amount of agricultural land actually sufficient to make a living on in the United States is extremely expensive, and you aren't going to do it on Army enlisted pay.  Specialist E4 pay wouldn't buy a house in a lot of Wyoming.  Part of this delusion is based on the fact that in Western conditions the amount of land needed to make a living on is quite large and Eastern standards, which most people have in mind, bear no relationship to this in the West.  Out of state advertisers sometimes take advantage of this ignorance by suggesting that people can buy a "ranch" in some area of Wyoming, by which they mean something like 20 to 40 acres.  That isn't a ranch in the working sense of the words by any means in that there's no earthly way a person could make a living ranching it ,or farming it, or even come anywhere close to making a fraction of a living wage.  I've run into, however, people on odd occasion who live very far from here but believe that they own a ranch, as they bought something of this type site unseen.  In one such instance a person seriously thought he would bring 100 cattle into a small acreage that was dry, and wouldn't even support one.  This, I guess, is an example of where a mis-impression can actually be dangerous to somebody.

On ranching, another common depiction is that it seems to be devoid of work.  People are ranchers, but they seem to have self feeding, self administering, cattle, if a modern ranch is depicted.  Ranching is actually very hard work and a person has to know what they are doing.  Even if a person could purchase all the ranch land and all the cattle they needed to start a ranch (ie., they were super wealthy), unless they had a degree in agriculture and had been exposed to it locally, or they had grown up doing it and therefore had the functional equivalent of a doctorate in agriculture, they'd fail.  This, in fact, is also the case with 19th Century and early 20th Century homesteads, the overwhelming majority of which failed.  People who had agricultural knowledge from further East couldn't apply all of it here, and often had to pull up stakes and move on.  And, often missed, it took a lot of stuff to get started.  One account of a successful Wyoming 19th Century start up homestead I read related how the homesteader had served in Wyoming in the Army for years, specifically saving up his NCO pay and buying equipment years before he filed his homestead, and he still spent a year back east presumably working before he came back and filed.  J. B. Okie, a huge success in the Wyoming sheep industry, worked briefly as a sheepherder, in spite of being vastly wealthy, prior to coming out well funded to start up.  Many of the most successful homesteaders, but certainly not all, had prior exposure to sheep or cattle prior to trying to file a homestead.

On erroneous depictions, one particularly aggravating one is when films attempt to depict what they think the regional accent is.  There is a bit of a regional speech pattern, i.e, an accent, but it's so rarely done accurately that it shouldn't be tried.  For the most part, native Wyomingites have the standard American Mid Western accent, but they tend to mumble it a bit.  That sounds insulting, but it isn't meant to be, and Wyomingites are so attuned to it, as are rural Coloradans and Montanans, that they generally cannot perceive it.  I'm from here, and no doubt I exhibit that accent.  Most people don't recognize an accent at all, and it takes a pretty attuned ear to be able to place it, although some people very definitely can.  I can recall my father having told me of that having occurred to him on a train in the 50s, and I've had it happen once in the 1980s.  In my father's case, the commenter noted that he must be from one of the Rocky Mountain states.  In mine, I was specifically asked by a fellow who had worked for the Park Service for decades if I was from the West Slope of Colorado, as many park rangers were and I had the same accent.  Most Wyomingites, at some point, probably get a puzzled question from somebody about where they are from that's accent based, but the questioner never reveals that.  It's a regional accent, so the best a person can do is tell that you are from rural Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana if they know what the accent entails, or that there even is one.  Film makers, who must be aware that there is an accent, occasionally try to insert one in a modern Western, but when they try it they present a bizarre laughable accent that doesn't occur anywhere on the planet.  Years ago, for example, there were advertisements on television here for the Laramie Project, which is another film I haven't seen, and which I couldn't have watched due to the horribly bad efforts an accent that the filmmakers were attempting. We do not drawl.  We speak more like Tom Brokaw, but perhaps with a bit of mumbling that we don't recognize as mumbling. 

I've read that Irishmen find American attempts at an Irish accent hilarious.  Some English attempts at an American Mid Western accent are really bad.  Our accent here is fairly rare, and there's no way that they're going to get it right, and they ought not try.  By not trying, they're closer to the mark.

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

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

The grave of Alvah H. Unthank

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

One of many such tragic deaths on the trails.