Holy Saturday, April 19, 1924.

The Saturday Evening Post went to press observing Easter with a Leyendecker illustration.

National Barn Dance, a direct precursor to the Grand Old Opry, premiered on Chicago's WLS, running a whopping four hours every Saturday night.  It would run until 1968.

The Washington Post depicted Coolidge holding fast in a political cartoon.

In Casper, there was a big meeting to oust a city councilman who had been convicted on a liquor charge.

And Arizona tourists could get into California before Easter.

It's interesting to realize that motor tourism had become a thing by 1924.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, April 17, 1924. Japanese reaction.

1920s, 1924, baseball, Cartoons, Democratic Party, Farmers Labor Party, Francis Warren, Government, Japan, Movies, Politics, Progressive Party, Prohibition Party, Republican Party, Sports, United States, Wyoming

Yellowstone. A really radical idea.

A really radical idea that won't happen, but maybe should.

There have been really horrific floods, as we all know, in Yellowstone National Park. Roads in the northern part of the park may be closed for the rest of the summer.  Here's a National Park Service item on it:

Updates

• Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance.
• Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.
• The National Park Service will make every effort to repair these roads as soon as possible; however, it is probable that road sections in northern Yellowstone will not reopen this season due to the time required for repairs.
• To prevent visitors from being stranded in the park if conditions worsen, the park in coordination with Yellowstone National Park Lodges made the decision to have all visitors move out of overnight accommodations (lodging and campgrounds) and exit the park.
• All entrances to Yellowstone National Park remain temporarily CLOSED while the park waits for flood waters to recede and can conduct evaluations on roads, bridges and wastewater treatment facilities to ensure visitor and employee safety.
• There will be no inbound visitor traffic at any of the five entrances into the park, including visitors with lodging and camping reservations, until conditions improve and park infrastructure is evaluated.
• The park’s southern loop appears to be less impacted than the northern roads and teams will assess damage to determine when opening of the southern loop is feasible. This closure will extend minimally through next weekend (June 19).
• Due to the northern loop being unavailable for visitors, the park is analyzing how many visitors can safely visit the southern loop once it’s safe to reopen. This will likely mean implementation of some type of temporary reservation system to prevent gridlock and reduce impacts on park infrastructure.
• At this time, there are no known injuries nor deaths to have occurred in the park as a result of the unprecedented flooding. 
• Effective immediately, Yellowstone’s backcountry is temporarily closed while crews assist campers (five known groups in the northern range) and assess damage to backcountry campsites, trails and bridges.
• The National Park Service, surrounding counties and states of Montana and Wyoming are working with the park’s gateway communities to evaluate flooding impacts and provide immediate support to residents and visitors.
• Water levels are expected to recede today in the afternoon; however, additional flood events are possible through this weekend.

Here's an idea.

Don't rebuild the roads.

For years, there have been complaints about how overcrowded Yellowstone National Park has become.  A combination of a tourist economy and high mobility, and frankly the American inability to grasp that the country has become overpopulated, had contributed to that.  For years there have been suggestions that something needed to be done about that.

Maybe what is needed is. .. nothing.

Well, nothing now, so to speak.

Yellowstone was the nation's first National Park.  It was created at a time when park concepts, quite frankly, were different from they are now.   Created in 1872, its establishment was in fact visionary, and it did grasp in part that the nation's frontier was closing, even though the creation of the park came a fully four years prior to the Battle of Little Big Horn.  There was, at the time of its creation, a sort of lamentation that the end of the Frontier was in sight, and the nation was going to become one of farms and cities.

Nobody saw cities like they exist now, however, and nobody grasped that the day would come when agricultural land would be the province of the rich, and that homesteading would go from a sort of desperate act to something that people would cite to, in the case of their ancestors, as some sort of basis for moral superiority.  Things are much different today than they were then.

Indeed, in some ways, the way the park is viewed is a bit bipolar.  To some, particularly those willing to really rough it, Yellowstone is a sort of giant wilderness area.  To others, it's a sort of theme park. 

The appreciation of the need to preserve wilderness existed then, but what that meant wasn't really understood.  The park was very much wilderness at first, and some things associated with wilderness went on within it, and of course still do.  Early camping parties travelled there.  People fished there, and still do.  Hunting was prohibited early on, which had more to do with the 19th Century decline in wildlife due to market hunting than it did anything else.  This has preserved a sort of bipolarism in and of itself, as fishing is fish-hunting, just as bird hunting is fowling. There's no reason in fact that Yellowstone should have not been opened back up to hunting some time during the last quarter-century, but it is not as just as the park is wilderness to young adventurers from the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, and hearty back country folks of all ages, it's also a big public zoo for people from Newark or Taipei.  

Since 1872, all sorts of additional parks have been created. Some are on the Yellowstone model, such as Yosemite.  Others are historical sites such as Gettysburg or Ft. Laramie.  All, or certainly all that I've seen, are of value.

But they don't all have the same value.

Much of Yellowstone's value is in its rugged wilderness.  Some cite to the geothermal features of the park, but that's only a small portion of it.  And for that reason, much of Yellowstone today would make more sense existing as a Wilderness Area under the Wilderness Act of 1964, the act that helps preserve the west in a very real way, and which western politicians, who often live lives much different than actual westerners, love to hate.

A chance exists here to bring back Yellowstone into that mold, which it was intended in part to be fro the very onset, and which many wish it was, or imagine it to be, today.

Don't rebuilt the roads.

That would in fact mean the northern part of the park would revert to wilderness, truly.  And it means that many fewer people would go to the park in general.  And it would hurt the tourist communities in the northern areas, and even in the southern areas, as the diminished access to the park would mean that the motorized brigade of American and International tourists wouldn't go there, as they wouldn't want to be too far from their air-conditioned vehicles.

But that's exactly what should be done.

Wyoming Fact & Fiction - Neil A. Waring: Are More Visitors the Answer?

Wyoming Fact & Fiction - Neil A. Waring: Are More Visitors the Answer?:   Are More Visitors the Answer? Each year, six million people visit Wyoming's best-known tourist sites, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and ...

Blog Mirror: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming (1941)

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming (1941)

Lex Anteinternet: Pulling out the legs of the stool. More bad news.

Back on April 3 I wrote an article about the current not so rosey economic picture for Wyoming in a post called Lex Anteinternet: Pulling out the legs of the stool.

Now one of those legs has become a bit wobblier yet.

Cheyenne became the first Wyoming city, or at least the first I'm aware of, to announce layoffs.  Seventeen of its staff are being let go.

Cheyenne's economy has always been different from the rest of Wyoming's.  The city got started as a Union Pacific town and then became the seat of the territorial government as it was the only really significant municipality in  the state at the time the territory was established.  It naturally went on from there to become the state capitol, even though there have been occasional efforts to move it to a more central location, something that's not going to occur.  It is one of only two Wyoming towns with a military presence, the other being Guernsey where the National Guard's Camp Guernsey is located.  That camp has become a very significant military base over the years but it pales in comparison to Warren Air Force Base. Added to that, Cheyenne also has the Air National Guard's principal air strip at the town's airport.

Oil has only come to Cheyenne's Laramie County in the last decade but it has come north of town, so it's economy has joined Wyoming's a bit in that fashion, but unlike other counties that are heavily dominated by petroleum and/or coal and which also have an agricultural base, the economy of Laramie County has never been dominated by them.  In modern times Cheyenne often sat out economic slumps in the state due to its strong governmental employee base.

Well, apparently not this time.  The drastic decline is state revenues is clearly going to hit state funding and in fact already has.  Governor Gordon has been indicating that state agencies should be prepared to cut back further.  The Coronavirus has slowed down everything on I80 and I25, which meet in Cheyenne, and that no doubt has had an impact on the local economy.  I don't know what, if anything, the Union Pacific has been experiencing, but it's probably experiencing something, and while Cheyenne's airport is hardly a regional hub, a direct flight there which had gone from the city to Dallas is, or has been, eliminated on at least a temporary basis.

Moreover, according to Cheyenne's mayor, Cheyenne has lost a lot of retail sales due to the shelter in place order in Colorado.  That wouldn't have occured to me, but there are a fair number of people who live in Colorado and work in Cheyenne.  I know two people who do just that and one of them is making a bare minimum commute and the other isn't commuting at all.

So the town's revenues are down and its laying people off.

How this changes once the COVID 19 restrictions are lifted isn't apparent, but it will change things for Cheyenne.  Oil will still be in the $20s for the foreseeable future, but some traveling will pick back up.  So these layoffs, or at least the full extent of them, may be temporary.  Still, this is yet another scary development for the state's economy.

Pulling out the legs of the stool

Regarding Wyoming's economy, I've noted in the past:

In reality, Wyoming's economy is a four legged stool right now, and those legs are made of:

1.  The extractive industries

2.  Agriculture

3.  Tourism

4.  Government.

Right now, three of those legs are pretty wobbly.

Oil has been a victim of a bizarre price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.  Price at the pump, yesterday, was down to $1.75/gallon, the lowest I've seen in years, and a fellow I know who had grocery store points bought it the other day for $0.83/gallon, and almost unbelievably low price. And all of this as the price per barrel for crude has been in the low $20s.

Relief, possibly, might be in sight.  President Trump claimed yesterday that the spatting oligarchies were close to a deal, which if the people who run them are wise, the ought to be.  Irrespective of their public positions, both governments are a house of cards and if this keeps up, it's only a matter of time before somebody on an oil payroll of some kind or another begins to plan a change in government, at which all bets are really off.  They haven't reached that point yet, but they will, as neither of these governments is that stable.  Crude today is at $32.00/bbl, a considerable jump, but still far too low for Wyoming's oil to be economically produced.

All of that is outside of the Coronavirus disaster realm but certainly adds to the developing economic disaster here.  It may play a part in ending it, however, as the disease is now hitting Russia and from what can be discerned from a distance, it's hitting Russia pretty hard.  Putin may be able to ride out an oil related disaster for awhile. . . after all the Russian capacity for suffering is enormous. . . but keeping a health related one quiet and under control at the same time will be difficult.  He needs one to end.

In hopes that it will end there are efforts to try to get the oil and gas industry recognized as a critical industry if Wyoming goes into a shelter in place shut down.  Indeed, stopping anything ongoing would be difficult at best.  But the slow down is stopping a lot of work, it appears, and the longer this goes on the worse that will be.

And its trouble the state didn't need with the Coronavirus Pandemic also going on.  Lots of towns are now shut down to some degree and the entire state has closed occupations, at least for another week, that are in the food industry.  So the layoffs have been huge, hurting an economy that's already hurting.  While no shelter in place order is in place, lots of businesses have closed anyhow, following recommendations that have been but out by authoritative sources.

Suffice it to say, tourism right now is temporarily over . Teton County told its tourists, which are a bit part of its economy, to go home.  The State closed its parks to camping.  Air travel has taken a major hit.  It'll recover once the pandemic abates to an ending point, but not before then.

And the price of cattle is down while meat is up.

The only part of the economy's seat, therefore, that's not wobbly is government, as it can't be.  In this emergency situation, it's very active and has no choice but to be.  But the problems it now has to face are gigantic.

Pondering those questions looks to bring the Legislature back into session, but nobody knows when.  Indeed, doing it now would send the wrong message as convening during a pandemic is exactly what we're told not to do.  They're aware of that, but faced with an unprecedented economic disaster, they feel that later on, they'll have no choice but to gather.

Nobody knows where we will be by then.  In a couple of months, the virus could be in full retreat and science in full advance, or not.  Oil could be at $20/bbl or $100/bbl.  Cattle prices could still be low or have risen.

Let's hope the stool is mostly repaired by then.

Wednesday July 23, 1919. 1919 Motor Transport Convoy arrives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Cheyenne publishes a big newspaper. Red Summer spreads to Pennsylvania.

On this day the convoy went from Clinton to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, making 87 miles in 10.5 hours.  On the way the Trailmobile kitchen broke some springs.

A Trailmobile was a trailer, made by the company of that name.  They're still around.  Their stout trailer was used for a lot of applications, including the mounting of vehicle hauled kitchens.  There were a variety of trailers built by Trailmobile and I frankly don't know what this particular trailer was like, although a lot of them were four wheeled trailers that had an appearance that closely resembled horse drawn freight wagons.

The White Staff Observation car a large car built on a 1 ton White truck chassis.

The Red Summer spread to Darby Pennsylvania when a mob gathered and attempted to lynch the arrested Samuel Gorman.  Gorman, 17, had been an employee of a hay merchant that he killed in an assault when the hay merchant terminated his employment due to lack of work.  Upon learning of the murder, the mob gathered, but authorities prevented the lynching from occurring.

The Cheyenne State Leader, coincident with Cheyenne Frontier Days, published a massive twelve section edition of the paper that might hold the record for the largest Wyoming paper published up to that time, and which would frankly dwarf the weekday size of any newspaper published in Wyoming today. . . if not any edition of any Wyoming paper published today.  Included in that was a section that heavily featured boosting advertisements, including some for towns, and including one for Casper.

I've noted before the massive change to Casper that occurred because of World War One, and you've seen it here in part due to the qualitative change in its newspaper.  This advertisement really brings that out.

Casper had gone from a city of just over 4,000 people (which is a city under Wyoming's definition) to one three times that size in just a few years.  Oil was the reason, as this ad boosted, but the Great War is the reason that oil became such a big deal, something that coincidentally the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy accidentally emphasized.

And then as now oil tended to be the focus of the local economy, with other industries taking second position. The reference to other industries here is interesting, however, in that the sheep industry, which was a major agricultural enterprise in Wyoming up until the 1970s, was featured and in fact was centered in central Wyoming.

Tourism, however, also shows up. And tourism by automobile, which was just getting started at the time.  That three legged stool we talked about here in connection with the last general election had appeared.

Of course, you have to wonder what those 4,000 residents, assuming they remained, thought of the change.  The majority of Casperites were now new residents, grossly outnumbering the old, and the town of 4,000 had changed forever.

Lex Anteinternet: Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (d). The Economy again. . . Tourism. The fragile leg of the stool

Wyoming Gubernatorial candidate sitting on camp stool washing her feet of the tourism industry. . . okay, that's actually a cap chair.  The stool must already be broken.

Recently, in being asked about economic matters by the Casper Star Tribune, Harriet Hageman, in noting that there was a television advertisement boosting Wyoming tourism running in the background, made a dismissive comment to the effect of why couldn't Wyoming do something like that for coal.*

Wyoming state tourism advertisment.  Note what is not in this poster. . . nothing associated with the extractive industries.

Nothing could better demonstrate the fragile nature of this sector of Wyoming's economy.

Tourism is, in  my view, a byproduct of the agricultural sector of Wyoming's economy.  The large open spaces that agriculture preserves are also the preserves of wildlife and wild lands. By the same token, those industries which provide the bulk of income to Wyomingites and the state itself make use of those lands, but at their root, they are in some deep fundamental ways counter forces to tourism.  The balance between it all is preserved by the Federal Government and its multiple use policy on the Federal domain.  Candidates like  Hageman would bring in policies, if left unrestrained, that would tip that balance one way, and that balance is very easy to disrupt.  Indeed, if the really right wing politicians in the state had their way they'd flat out destroy much of the character of the state and this would put a dent in this section of the economy that made it look like it was hit by a truck.

Put another way, a lot of people come into the state to look at wildlife, to hunt, fish, ski, camp and hike.  

Nobody visits the state to see coal mines in Campbell County or drilling rigs in Converse County.

This puts this sector of Wyoming's economy uniquely on the outs with the remainder of it. And frankly a lot of Wyomingites are pretty ambivalent about tourism.  Indeed, if people are directly involved in it, a lot of Wyomingites hold a somewhat hostile view toward it in a way.  We'd rather not run into tourist crowding any spot we might wish to visit, and if we regard visiting fishermen and hunters as tourists, which we do, we're often not rather have them here at all.  Still we're aware that they contribute to the economy in a significant way.

We're not really inclined to do anything to help it, however.

And on top of that, we oddly miss opportunities to lightly tax it and help offset the loss of coal money.  Lodging taxes come up for vote in various Wyoming counties, and then lose.  It's odd, as we don't pay lodging taxes in our own counties as we don't stay in hotels there as a rule.  Likewise, the added $.01 tax is paid in large measure by visitors, and a lot of us oppose it as well (although we do pay it.)

And yet nobody is going to really speak about this sector of the economy in the election.  Nobody.

Tourism is a sector of the economy that depends, really, on the agriculture sector being successful as it preserves the basic nature of the state, and its silently in opposition to the extractive industries which contribute a massive amount of cash to the state's coffers but which almost anyone from anywhere else doesn't regard as visually pleasing.

Indeed, there are quite a few views held by Wyomingites that actually irritate visitors, and we don't care.  If you subscribe to the Tribune you'll often see letters to the editor which will state something like "I see where your legislature is consider. . . . . if this passes I shall never bring my family from Big Blight, New Jersey to visit your state".  Yeah. Well stay home.

But it is a huge factor of the economy.

And we know that big events can bring in big money to municipalities, if managed right.  The 2017 eclipse in Wyoming was proof of that, bringing in huge crowds.

A crowd that came from all over Wyoming gathered in downtown Casper during the cities week long eclipse festival.

Tourism, it might be noted, suffers in a weird way from being totally divorced from the economics that influence other sectors of Wyoming's economy.  Indeed, the economics of tourism is in some ways directly counter to the economics of other sectors of our economy.  Tourism does best if travel costs are low, and that means low gas costs.  Low gas costs mean low petroleum prices.  And if the cost of living is high, to include the cost of food at the table, tourism suffers.  Tourism does best when costs are low. As Wyoming's other commodities do better if their products are high, that creates an odd tension, although in fairness agriculture does better if petroleum is low as well.  Not that this creates an open sense of hostility, but you will occasionally hear grumbling about it.

All that would argue that the state does best with a balanced economy.

Should tourism and its role in the economy be an issue in the election?  Well, it won't be.

But we probably ought to remember that it is an important part of our economy.  While we're busy talking about other economic sectors, we shouldn't forget this one.  It's easy to disrup

*I suppose I know what she meant, that being why didn't Wyoming have an active program marketing coal, but the suggestion is extremely naive.  If that were done, it would in fact provoke a counter reaction by environmentalist which would be much more sympathetic to most people in the United States.  If anything, a "use coal" campaign by Wyoming would accelerate the decline of coal, not boost its fortunes.  At any rate, this is one of a series of statements by Hageman which would suggest her view of the Wyoming economy is basically fixed at about the 1940 level.

Mixed Economic News

Over the weekend, the Tribune reported that the tourism industry in the state, while up, wasn't making up for lost oilfield income to the state.

This is no surprise.  Most tourism related jobs don't pay particularly well.  Tourism, of course, does spill over into retail, but there's a long ways to go before the loss in employment in the extractive industries is made up by tourism. Not that there isn't an avenue to explore maximizing that, which I don't think we've done so far.  Indeed, I think there's a lot that remains to be done in that field.

And perhaps it should be. The State is reporting that the economic downturn is slowing, or flattening. That doesn't mean that an oilfield and mining rebound is in the works, although its certain that some will instantly interpret it that way.  No, rather, what that means is that we've potentially hit bottom and, at the same time, the price of oil seems to be stabilizing. That's far from the rapid recovery people were wishing for, but those wishes were never realistic to start with.

Added to this, Governor Mead has reported that the state will not be making more layoffs. That's certainly good news for the state as the role of the State government in keeping employment rolling is an under reported, maybe even missed, story.  A warning, however, went out to the legislature, which has strong anti Keynesian tendencies, not to cut more as that would reverse this.

So perhaps some stability is entering the picture for awhile.  And if that's the case, it might be a good thing to do some planning around this economy, rather than a boom one.

The new economic normal?

I started this post off about a week ago, and then let it set as I was traveling for work.  In the meantime OPEC had their meeting, and I've just posted on that. This post came back to mind at that time.  According to the Tribune, Wyoming's economy is now flat.  With the OPEC failure to put in place caps, I'm worried that it won't remain flat for long, however, which is what I had originally addressed here (i.e., a flat economy, although I thought that analysis somewhat flawed even prior to the OPEC story).

Founder of the House of Saud. Who would have guessed that the Saudi kingdom would prove so critical to the economy of a Rocky Mountain state?

Unemployment isn't increasing, and employment isn't increasing in the state either.  A state employee terms it the "new normal".

Except, it's flat in part because of construction jobs.

And those jobs have been a largely fueled by school construction.

 

 A series of major school construction projects has been keeping the state's unemployment figures from rising.  They won't go on forever.

Which is provided for by coal severance taxes, a dropping revenue.

And by tourism. Tourism is apparently up.  Which isn't surprising really, as with fuel prices in the basement, we should see more traveling, although apparently there  hasn't been much of an increase in fuel consumption nationally.  However, with gasoline now down below $2.00/gallon, we'll see if that holds.

$2.00 per gallon, by the way, is something I was frankly stunned to see.

Now, in the week or so that I've delayed on this story, I've actually seen gasoline at $1.87.  It'd dropping like a rock.

And I'm going on record right now that its my prediction that we'll see it go as low as $1.00 in the next two years.

Even as it is, right now, in real terms, it has to be as low as its ever been, and I'd think that should make air travel and ground travel much cheaper. We oddly haven't been seeing an increase in fuel consumption as the price first stabilized, and then fell, but I'm guess that we will now somewhat.  Or at least it'll begin to have a nationwide deflationary effect which will make the American dollar much stronger and create a real rise in earning power in everyone's bank accounts.  Unless, of course, you were working in a state, like I am, where we depend on the coal and petroleum industries for our economy.

Anyhow, this news time line is very familiar to those of us who lived through the early 1980s here. As before, there was denial, as in "this is only temporary", which ultimately yields to "oh, it won't be that bad", and followed by where we now are, which is "tourism will save us".

Tourism is important to the local economy, but it has problems as a n economic sector, not the least of which is that the wages it generates tend to be low. An added problem, rarely addressed, is that tourism and the mineral industry can be at odds which each other, at least to some degree. And the fact that the mineral industry is the high paying end of the economy makes quite a difference in the local impact of the various types of employment.

 

World War Two era poster discouraging vacation travel.  We're in the opposite position.

That the boom would end was something that those with a sense of history always knew.  A belief was out there that it was going to last decades, but that has never proven to be the case. What is unusual, however, is that the end of this boom was caused by a pricing determination from overseas, with Saudi Arabia seeking to keep its market share.  A boom had been fueled by OPEC oil policies in the past, but never a bust.  Whether the Saudi gamble will pay off for them isn't yet know, so the ultimately impact on the local economy isn't either.  But it is scary.

Petroleum and coal, it should be noted, have been part of the state's economic engine since the 1890s, but agriculture was the main sector of the economy for over half the 20th Century.  Petroleum only took that place in the 1960s.  This is significant as agriculture has actually lead the economic boom in some US states, and its proven to be an industry that not only has remarkable staying power, but staying power in a modern economy.  But it's really dwindled as a sector of the Wyoming economy in recent decades, all while remaining the romantic sector of the state's image.  In some ways, agriculture is really the reason for our tourism industry, whether that's realized or not, as range cattle production is the reason for the range being what it is.  That's something that the state should remember, and perhaps taking a second look at agriculture and what it can, and does, for the state, should be done.  It certainly can play a bigger role than it currently does, and its proven to have real staying power.

 

The cow, fabled in our cultural story, but often undersold in the post World War Two economic story of the state. Time to consider agriculture's position once again?

Thursday, April 1, 1909. Leaving Cuba.

American troops left Cuba where they had been since 1906, due to the Second Intervention in Cuba which saw the US intervene, which it had a treaty right to do, over an attempt to overthrow an elected government.

A law banning the importation of opium into the US went into effect.

In the United Kingdom, the Children Act 1908 went into effect, establishing juvenile courts, registration of foster parents, prohibiting children, under the age of 16 from working in dangerous trades, purchasing cigarettes, entering brothels, or the bars of trading pubs, and prohibiting the consumption of alcohol, for non-medicinal purposes, before the age of five.

The US polar expedition saw Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, Ootah, Ooqueah, Egingwah, and Seegloo, set off from a point 153 miles from the North Pole as their last supply team turned back.

As noted earlier, I frankly miss the point of these polar expeditions, and I think Peary was a louse.

The local agricultural newspaper, the Stockgrower and Farmer, was out.  I'm only putting up the first two pages, but it was a very well done ag newspaper.

Note that tourism was already being boosted.

I think I likely missed it, but this noted the February 15, 1909, formation of Park County, Wyoming.  It would take until 1911 to organize the county.  The county's formation and that it was noted in the journal may explain the number of Cody lawyers advertising in it.

Last prior edition:

Wednesday, March 31, 1909. Common Cup.

1900s, 1909, Austro Hungaria, Belfast Northern Ireland, boats and ships, Bosnia, Disease, Georgia, Health, Kansas, Serbia