Railhead: The Nightcrawler. The train from Denver, Colorado, to Billings, Montana.

Railhead: The Nightcrawler. The train from Denver, Colorado...:   I had no idea that this is what this train was called.  Thanks go out to MKTH for letting me know! I've been looking into local passen...

The Nightcrawler. The train from Denver, Colorado, to Billings, Montana.

 

I had no idea that this is what this train was called.  Thanks go out to MKTH for letting me know!

I've been looking into local passenger train travel as part of my efforts with a novel.  What I found is that I knew very little about it.  Probably more than your average bear, but that's about it.  I'd long assumed that a person could board a train in Casper in 1916 and take the train to Douglas or Cheyenne, and then return that evening, but the more I looked into it, that was just an assumption.

I'm not the one who figured out how it really worked. That goes to MKTH.  the result is fascinating.

It turns out I was right sort of. The Burlington Northern ran a train from Denver Colorado, to Billings Montana, and vice versa, daily.  This article takes a look at it.

What I imagined, for novel purposes, was boarding in Casper, and traveling to Douglas.  I may, as I work at it, make it Cheyenne.

Union Station, Denver Colorado

Union Station, Denver Colorado

Union Station as viewed from in front of Denver's Oxford Hotel.

 

 

Anyhow, this is a really interesting article and give a really good look at what traveling on the Denver to Billings night train was like, complete with stops for food, which is something I hadn't considered.  It also picked up mail, and my source indicates, cream, something I also hadn't figured, but that may explain why the creamery my family owned was just one block from the Burlington Northern.  In fact it probably does.

Jersey Creamery Inc.

The trip took 19 hours.  It take 8 hours today by car, assuming good weather conditions, and not figuring in stops for food, etc.  The train moved about 34 miles an hour.

We'll look at the return trip first.  The train having come up from Cheyenne boarded there at 12:49 in the morning.  Uff.

It got to Casper at 6:20 in the morning, having made a couple of stops along the way.

Burlington Northern Depot, Casper Wyoming

What I imagined?  

Not really.  And I also had no idea that there was a major cafe right off the railroad.  This article deals with the early 1960s, but I can see that some variant of it was there decades prior.  That makes piles of sense, really.  Of course there would be.  How else would people eat if they were making the long journey?  

It simply hadn't occurred to me.

In my imaginary trip., that'd be it.  If I stuck with the Douglas variant of this, my protagonist would be boarding the train in the early, early morning hours and get in a couple of fitful hours of sleep, probably interrupted by a stop in little Glenrock.  Indeed, this train stopped everywhere to pick up mail, and a few passengers.

What about the other way around?

Well that was a day trip, but as we can see, the 19 hours the train traveled in total meat that it took a good 6.5 hours to travel just from Cheyenne to Casper.  Going the other way would mean the same thing, and likely a bit in reverse.  The 6.5 hour trip from Cheyenne to Casper was the second major leg of the trip (it'd still stop in numerous small towns in between), the first being Denver to Cheyenne.  Going the other way around meant that the Cheyenne to Denver leg was about five hours.  The article notes that the train actually arrived from Billings 40 minutes before its 7:00 p.m. departure.  So it arrived, more or less, at 6:00 p.m. and changed crews.  That would have meant that it left Cheyenne, on the way to Denver, at about 1:00 p.m. or so, which makes sense.  Passengers traveling all the way to Denver would have eaten lunch there.

By extension, however, that meant that the train left Casper at about 6;00 in the morning, approximately.

These times are almost unimaginable now.  When we had good air travel to Denver I'd frequently board United Express here about 6;00 a.m. and be in Denver about 8:30, and take the train downtown and be to work by 9.  I'd be back in Casper on the redeye about 10:00, or if I was lucky, 6:00.

And when I go to Cheyenne, I drive.  Normally that takes me a little under three hours.  I haven't stayed overnight in Cheyenne for years, although I recently had an instance which should really cause me to.

Anyhow, if I'm looking at 1916, why not just drive?

Well, in 1916 most Americans, including most Wyomingites, didn't own automobiles, and those who did, didn't normally make long trips with them.  They frankly weren't that reliable, even though they were simple.  Roads also tended to be primitive, and not really maintained for weather.  Could a person have driven from Casper to Cheyenne in a Model T, the most likely car they would have had?  Yes, but it wouldn't have been any faster.  It may well have been slower, quite frankly, as well as much riskier.

Tuesday, March 16, 1926. Sgt. Stubby crosses the Rainbow Bridge.

Boston Terrier Sgt. Stubby, mascot of the mascot of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, died at age 10.  He'd served for 18 months in France in the Great War, participating in 100 battles and four offensives.  He provided warnings of attacks and of the use of mustard gas, and captured a German soldier by holding him by the seat of his pants.

He was a genuinely heroic dog.

The Casper recaptured fugitives indicated that they'd left Casper by rail.

I posted this page for the bus schedule.  I have a detailed thread coming up on trains, and then noted this.  I wasn't aware that there was a bus by 1926.

A closer look.

What isn't clear is how long the bus trip took.

There is bus service from Casper today.  Greyhound.  We'll take a look at that in some future post.

Apparently unrestrained immigration was worrying some.  Others were worrying about Wyoming's oilfield population leaving for Texas.

Robert Goddard launched the first liquid fuel rocket in the United States at his Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts.

Rocketry, like aviation, advanced like crazy.  By World War Two rockets would be in use as ground weapons, air to air weapons, and of course, with the first ballistic missiles.

Last edition:

Monday, March 15, 1926. Boxer Rebellion Echoes, Manhunt ends, National Guard Cavalry Inspection.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, Boxer Rebellion, cavalry, China, Costa Rica, Crime, Disaster, French Navy, Idaho Army National Guard, Imperial Japanese Navy, Italian Navy, Railroads, Royal Navy, U.S. Navy, Wyoming National Guard

Sunday, March 14, 1926. Reddy Kilowatt introduced. Manhunt in Natrona County.

 

Introduced on this day in 1926, the cartoon emphasized, in its introduction, electrical appliances and how they made life easier.  Power companies used the cartoon figure for decades.  I well recall it from when I was a kid.

There'd been a jail brake in Casper.

A railway disaster in Costa Rica resulted in the deaths of 248 people.

One via Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub, 16 year old Maybelle Addington married 27-year old Ezra J. "Eck" Carter, brother of A.P. Carter, in Virginia giving rise to the "first family of country music".

Country music, we'd note, is a bit deceptive in this context. As we've discussed before, Country & Western were actually two categories of music identified by early record companies, as was Rhythm & Blues.  Western ballads, associated with cowboys and ranching, was really its own distinct genre, as was "Country", which was sometimes referred to as "Hillbilly Music".  The current categories of C&W, Folk, etc, really hadn't set in, in a hard and fast way, either.  Folk and Country music were in fact very rapidly evolving.  Blues, which of course also had a Southern rural origin, was frequently picked up by Country artists at the time, even while it was breaking out in new directions in the Midwest and East coast, where it has already given rise to Jazz.

Last edition:

Saturday, March 13, 1926. Daydreaming.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, Art, Clothing, Daily Living

Painted Bricks: Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate about it.

Painted Bricks: Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate ...: What the crap? The original intent of this blog was simply to record the ghost signs of Casper, Wyoming.  It did that pretty rapidly, and th...

Dissing the ConRoy Building, and being inaccurate about it.

What the crap?

The original intent of this blog was simply to record the ghost signs of Casper, Wyoming.  It did that pretty rapidly, and then it went on to catch them elsewhere and expand out a bit from there. Basically, we like historic buildings here.

One of the things we've noted, however, in doing this is that fables grow up around buildings.  Sometimes it's really hard to figure out their origin.

I've been familiar with this building for over fifty years.  It's one of three sister buildings in Casper that all were designed by the Casper architectural firm of Casper firm of Garbutt and Weidner, who at least based on these three buildings, were heavily into the same appearance for their "skyscrapers" at the time. This is the "ConRoy Building", the Consolidated Royalty Building.  We noted its centennial several years, well nearly a decade, ago, elsewhere:

Happy Centenary! Things or rather places, that are 100 years old.

I've been meaning to post this forever but just wasn't in any big hurry to do it. Then it suddenly dawned on me that if I didn't do it soon, these places would be 101 years old, not 100. So here goes.

A thread dedicated to a few local places and establishments that made it to year 100 in 2017.

The ConRoy Building

 

 The ConRoy (Consolidated Royalty Building).  The building's appearance has changed somewhat, but you have to really observe it to notice the changes.  The windows were replaced from the original style about fifteen years ago, giving it more modern and more efficient windows.  The elevator shaft, not visible here, is an enlarged one to accommodate a larger elevator than the one put in when it was built in 1917.  The awning restores the building to an original appearance in those regards which it lacked for awhile, but at street level the building has a glass or rock masonry treatment which clearly departs from the original.

One that I've mentioned here before is the ConRoy, or Consolidated Royalty Building.  Built in 1917 as the Oil Exchange Building, the building was one of Casper's first "sky scrapers",  if in fact not the absolute first.  Ground was broken in the summer of 1917 and the building was completed some time in August 1917. The Consolidated Royalty Oil Company, a company in which former Governor B. B. Brooks had a major interest, occupied the fifth floor of the structure.

 

The ConRoy Building occasionally gets some interesting avian visitors.

Unlike its two sister buildings, the Wyoming National Bank Building (now apartments) and  the Townsend Hotel (now the Townsend Justice Center) designed by the same architect, the building has never been vacant and remains in use today.  At least one of the current tenants descends from a firm that was a very early tenant, and perhaps a 1917 tenant.

 

The building has been updated over time, and its appearance is slightly changed due to the addition of an odd decorative rock face in the 1950s, but it by and large looks much like it did in 1917 from the outside.  It's one of the few old downtown Casper buildings that hasn't undergone major appearance changes over the years.

May 2, 1917 edition of the Casper Daily Tribune announcing vacancies in the yet to be built Oil Exchange Building.  The remainder of this issue was full of war news, and indeed it was partially the oil boom caused by the war that brought the building about.

More recently it figured here, as the owners of the building commissioned some murals on the fire escape doors:

Backdoor art.

So how on earth does it end up in a political campaign?

Frankly, I have no idea, but the entire idea of it being built by "a Democrat" is a real wild one.  The principal figure in the building being built was B. B. Brooks, who served as a Republican Governor for Wyoming, as we noted above.  Brooks had his offices on the fifth floor of the building.

B. B. Brooks, Republican.  He would not be amused.

This building has been continually occupied since 1917, and some of the businesses currently in it have been in the building since the 1940s although as earlier noted, one of them might have been in the building as early as 1917. Of the other two sisters, one is now the Townsend Justice Center which houses Natrona County's courts, and Wyo. Bank Bldg is an apartment building with a cafe on the street level.

All three buildings originally had, fwiw, massive period style lobbies which are sadly now all gone although you can catch glimpses of them, particularly in the Wyo. National Bank Bldg. The ConRoy once had a cigar store and magazine stand on the street level, after the lobby was taken out, and into the 50s, which explains the current appearance of its very small lobby today.  Basically, the ConRoy and the Wyoming National Bank building were victims of "modernization" concepts in architecture from the 1950s and 1960s, at which time those buildings were forty years old and less, and nobody thought of them being particularly historic.  The Townsend probably retained its architecture the longest, as it was a hotel originally, and up into the 70s when it closed. By that time it was pretty much a flop house with a popular cafe.  I recall it as my father had lunch there until the cafe closed, which many other downtown businessmen and professionals did as well.  It made for an odd place to go as a kid, which I sometimes did with my father, as the cafe was really popular, as was the adjoined Petroleum Club, but in the lobby the working girls were recovering from their prior night.

The ConRoy, on the other hand, has hummed on much like it has since 1917, although some of the notable early tenants, like the Casper Star Tribune, have moved on.  The building was recently featured in the Oil City News when some of the equipment for a new elevator, replacing the one from the 1950s that replaced the one from 1917, was lifted by crane into the structure.

Anyhow, this is baffling.  Of course, I only know of this as somebody else whose familiar with the building pointed it out to me and was horribly amused by it.  I don't know that I am, as I like things to be accurate.

But why would a person do this, and how would such a wild rumor get started?

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 115th Edition. The Killing of Alex Pretti, Hageman flees the stage, ICE blocked in hotel.

CNN has an excellent breakdown of the killing.

Film analysis.   

People like to say you can see more than one thing on these things. Well, let's say you can. Those last few shots are an execution.

These guys should be tried for murder.

ICE/Border Patrol in the interior should be disarmed.

Frankly, these morons are lucky this wasn't a local matter.  Things are turning against ICE and Trump, even here.  The ICE/Border Patrol killings became a topic that surprised Harriet Hageman, running for Senate, and current Wyoming Congressman, at a really hostile town hall meeting in Casper.

Hostile.

She was confronted on this and her reaction was to flee the stage.

She next appeared in Thermopolis where things didn't go much better. The crowd started yelling at each other.

Meanwhile, in Riverton, locals blocked ICE agents into their hotel. The police had to come and rescue them.

In some parts of the country, there's an effort at a general strike today.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 114th Edition. The Armed Citizen and ICE. He never served but they did. Geographically ignorant. He's demented. Canada comes to the US's aid. . . again.

Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Border Patrol, Donald Trump, Greenland, Gun Control, Ignorance, law, Mental Health, The Second Trump Administration, Zeitgeist, Дональд Трамп — агент России

Wild Ride.

 Casper Man Plows Into Patrol Trucks During Wild 100 MPH Chase

Friday, December 21, 1945. Patton dies.

George S. Patton died at age 60, the result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident several days earlier.

The general's daughter woke up in the United States and saw him standing, in full uniform, at the foot of her bed, where he smiled.  His daughter Beatrice received a phone call in which he asked "Little Bee, are you alright?'”  An attempt to confirm the call in the morning ended up in the information that no oversees call had been placed.

Such incidents are not uncommon. A fairly large number of people experience post death visitations of people they knew, with it most commonly being the case that they happen very soon after the person's death.  Indeed, in ancient times, Jews believed that the spirits of the dead were not aware of their deaths for a three day period, and the Irish custom of a wake stems from a desire to stay awake with the recently departed to help them know that they had died.

Patton was one of the most controversial American generals of the Second World War.  A member of the cavalry branch, he's famously recalled as an armor general. Almost all of the really effective armor generals in the U.S. Army from the Second World War were cavalrymen.  While now hugely admired, during the war the two slapping incidents he was involved in nearly cost him his career.

Patton, although he died due to an accident, fits into a fairly large collection of senior military officers that died right after the war.

The Battle of Shaobo in China ended in a Communist victory.  It was another one of the battles in which Chiang Kai Shek pitted Chinese collaborationist units that had rejoined the Nationalist against the Communists.

From the same newspaper as above:

Casper received news that the Texas Refinery was going to expand.

It's now closed.

Ethiopian Airlines was founded.

Last edition:

Thursday, December 20, 1945. Tires.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Automobiles, Rationing, Transportation, United Nations

Friday, November 27, 1925. Hill Packing.

The Casper Tribune reported on major events of the day, but what drew my attention was the horse packing plant.  I was completely unaware that Casper had every had one.

A little digging shows the company was still in business in February 1928, and doing well enough to have a full page ad.

By that time it was then packing everything, including poultry.  Horses were still noted, however, with the reference to wild horses, "outlaws of the range".  The company advertised into the 1930s, and there were newspaper reports of it taking in huge numbers of horses.

What happened to it?

Of interest on this story, the plant was owned by Hill Milling Company, which still exists.  It's Hill's Pet Nutrition today.  Apparently in the 1930s it was a major supplier of horse meat to Europe.

The Soviet Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars.established Gostrudsberkassy, the savings bank for workers in the Soviet Union.

On the same day, the USSR and the Emirate of Afghanistan went to war over control of the island of Urta Tagay.  

The small war over the island resulted from Imperial Russian troops having to abandon the island in 1920 in order to aid the White cause, with the island, long claimed by Afghanistan, then occupied.  The fight drew the attention of western nations, and amazingly Afghanistan won.

The Reichstag approved the Locarno Treaties.

Last edition:

Thursday, November 26, 1925. Thanksgiving Day.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Blog Mirror, Calvin Coolidge, Christianity, football, Holidays, religion, Sports, Thanksgiving, United States Marine Corps, Whatever It Is I'm against it, Wyoming (Edgerton)

Monday, November 23, 1925. USS Wyoming commences an overhaul.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 23: 1925   The USS Wyoming commences an overhaul at the New York Navy Yard.

Not wanting that to be the only item for the day, we offer the following (note, this was in error, this is a paper from 1923):

The paper noted that it was for the whole family, clean, and unbiased.  It might have been all of those things, but what a bunch of horrible news.

Note the big collection of drug charges.

A surplus store in Casper was going out of business.

The building that business occupied is still there.  It's an office building today, right between the Rib & Chop House and the Ugly Bug Fly Shop, both of which occupy old buildings that were also there, but neither of which were in operation at the time.

Rib & Chop is going out of business with the conclusion of the year.  The most famous occupant of that building was The Wonder Bar which opened in 1937 and which was a Casper institution, with ups and downs, for decades.

Last edition:  

Saturday, November 21, 1925. Lava Beds.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Calvin Coolidge, football, Geology, Lava Beds National Monument, nature

Thursday, November 19, 1925. First lighted high school football game.

 The first nighttime lighted football game in the US was played between Midwest and Casper.

Let There Be Light!: 1st Prep Football Night Game

Midwest was a football titan at the time.

Out Our Way for the day:

That cartoon hits hard, in a way.

Footnotes:

Yes, this was published a day late.

Last edition:

Tuesday, November 17, 1925. Earthquake at Big Horn.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Geology, Wyoming (Big Horn), Wyoming (Johnson County), Wyoming (Sheridan County)