The Casper Weekly Tribune for December 29, 1916: Carranza official arrives in Washington, land for St. Anthony's purchased, and the Ohio Oil Co. increases its capital.

While a protocol had been signed, a Carranza delegate was still arriving to review it.  Keep in mind, Carranza had not signed it himself.

Also in the news, and no doubt of interest to Wyomingites whose relatives were serving in the National Guard on the border, Kentucky Guardsmen exchanged shots with Mexicans, but the circumstances were not clearly reported on.

In very local news two locals bought the real property on North Center Street where St. Anthony's Catholic Church is located today.  The boom that the oil industry, and World War One, was causing in Casper was expressing itself in all sorts of substantial building. As we've discussed here before, part of that saw the construction of three very substantial churches all in this time frame, within one block of each other.

St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Casper Wyoming.

The news about the Ohio Oil Company, at one time part of the Standard family but a stand alone entity after Standard was busted up in 1911, was not small news.  Ohio Oil was a major player in the Natrona County oilfields at the time and would be for decades.  It would contribute a major office building to Casper in later years which is still in use. At one time it was the largest oil company in the United States.  In the 1960s it changed its name to Marathon and in the 1980s moved its headquarters from Casper to Cody Wyoming.  At some point it began to have a major presence in the Houston area and in recent years it sold its Wyoming assets, including the Cody headquarters, and it now no longer has a presence of the same type in the state.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 29, 1916. Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 becomes law.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 29:

 

Abandoned post Wold War One Stock Raising Homestead Act homestead.

1916  The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 becomes law.  It  allowed for 640 acres for ranching purposes, but severed the surface ownership from the mineral ownership, which remained in the hands of the United States.

The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 recognized the reality of  Western homesteading which was that smaller parcels of property were not sufficient for Western agricultural conditions.  It was not the only  such homestead act, however, and other acts likewise provided larger  parcels than the original act, whose anniversary is rapidly coming up.   The act also recognized that homesteading not only remained popular, but the 1916 act came in the decade that would see the greatest number of  homesteads filed nationally.

Perhaps most significant, in some ways, was that the 1916 act also  recognized the split estate, which showed that the United States was  interested in being the mineral interest owner henceforth, a change from prior policies.  1916 was also a boom year in oil and gas production,  due to World War One, and the US was effectively keeping an interest in  that production.  The split estate remains a major feature of western  mineral law today.

Mid Week at Work: Big Metal Bird: Episode 6 – Flight Attendants Onboard and Big Metal Bird: Episode 7 — Flight Attendant Training

A job that always impresses me as being really difficult and under appreciated.

The Wyoming Tribune for December 28, 1916: Villa commanding 10,000.

The Tribune carried disturbing news about a resurgent Villa and a reluctant Carranza.

And now the secondary impacts begin. . . the pool again.

The Casper Swim Club, the amateur  youth team, has suffered 75% attrition in its membership, its reporting.

The reason? 

Pool time.

It hasn't been able to get adequate pool time with the School District down to one pool.  With recent renovations to that pool, moreover, its now a 25 yard pool rather than a 25 meter pool.

Not that this wasn't predictable.

Says something in and of itself.

From the Wyoming Department of Transportation's website:

The Wyoming Department of Transportation has exceeded the maximum map loads per day for the High Bandwidth Map.

We are currently in the process of developing a new map to address this issue and will have a version available for the public to test drive in early 2017.

In the meantime, you will be redirected to www.wyoroad.info in 15 seconds...

Movies In History: Brooklyn

This is a film I'd hoped to catch in the movie theater but didn't.  I wish I had.

Poignant might be the best description for the film.

This movie surrounds the story of Eilis (Saoirse Ronan, herself born in Brooklyn to Irish parents but raised in Ireland), a young Irish woman who immigrates to the Brooklyn, New York in the 1950s.  The movie follows her experience including living in an Irish boarding house, meeting an Italian American suitor, and a return trip to Ireland.

In some ways this is an usual modern example of a "small story" movie, very well done, of a type we rarely see anymore.  The 1950s Marty comes very much to mind.

It might seem odd to see a film like this on this blog, but this movie has a close attention to detail that makes it not only charming but well worth watching.  Eilis finds herself in an alien world that's only barely alien to us.  It's an urban tale about immigrants and children of immigrants that a huge number of Americans will personally recognize.  It also shows a world only barely removed from our own but in some ways quite a bit more real.  Eilis immigrates out of a type of poverty but not of the street kind we think of.  Ireland remains a strong call to her, so much so that she wonders in one scene why a group of older Irish poor men have not returned to Ireland.  The very close supportive connection with the Catholic Church for Irish and Italian communities is quite accurate.  The torment over a personal decision while back in Ireland might seem, for that reason, an accuracy departure but for those who know the legalities of what's depicted accurately it isn't.  The need to live in a boarding house for her, and in an apartment with his family for the Italian American man she meets is completely accurate for the era. 

This film is well worth viewing and portrays an era, or rather the end of an era, in the United States that we still sense but don't really dwell on too closely quite well. 

Movies In History: The Imitation Game

This is a movie that I considered seeing at the theater when it came out but which, for one reason or another, I didn't.  I happened to catch it recently on Netflix.

First let me say its a good move and I enjoyed it.  Secondly let me say that people shouldn't take their history of Benchly Park, MI6's code breaking operation during World War Two, and the British work on code breaking from this film.

The film is a fictionalized account of the story of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who was a central figure in breaking German ciphers associated with the German use of a the military Enigma machine.  The story, if taken at the 30,000 foot view, gives a rough approximation of what occured in that endeavor, but only if taken at that view.

That doesn't make The Immitation Game a bad movie by any measure, except perhaps as the straight historical one.  Turing truly was central to the story of breaking the codes associated with Enigma and with the construction of the Bomba, a proto-computer that allowed the British to break an appreciable percentage of Engima coded messages.   The portray of Turing's character seems to be on,. and the story is loosely, although I'd emphasize loosely, portrayed correctly albeit in a ficationlized and very simplified fashion.  And that's the problem for a person who is historically minded.

An accurate story of these events would be supremely interesting, but quite complicated, and slightly disappointing.  The effort involved by Turing, and others, was so supremely cerebral that it would frankly be extraordinarily difficult to depict in film.    And the story of British code breaking is much more complicated than simply that of Enigma.  The British broke, for example, another German cipher based on wire telegrammetry that didn't involve Turing and actually was nearly completely simply due to the mental deductions of the character who broke it.  The use of Ultra, as the broken code information was called, was also highly complicated and not accurately portrayed in the film.  Soviet penetration of Benchly Park was much more extensive than the film would allow and not at all winked at by MI6 as suggested. 

In short, it is a much more complicated, and interesting, story than set out in this film.

One thing that should perhaps be mentioned is that it does seem, to the extent I'm familiar with it, that the film got the story of Turing's homosexuality correct.  That has little to do with his code breaking, of course, but it is an element of his personality and that part of the story seems to have been done correctly, to the extent I'm aware of his personal story, which isn't all that much.

So, a decent film worth viewing, but don't take it as an in depth history of MI6 or Benchly Park.

Lex Anteinternet: Viewing Milestone

This ran on October 25, 2016:

Lex Anteinternet: Viewing Milestone: Sometime yesterday this blog went over the 200,000 views mark.  Pretty remarkable in some ways.

On the other hand, this blog has been around for quite awhile, so perhaps not.   While there are a few postdated entries here, the actual first post came on May 1, 2009.  200,000 views in seven years isn't exactly an Internet sensation by any means.  Of course, early on the blog was very inactive and therefore its not surprising that it received little in the way of readership. 

It's readership has picked up a lot this year.  It has ups and downs, but starting in March it really picked up. That was the anniversary of the Punitive Expedition and we started posting a lot on that.  Searches on that, perhaps, might explain it.  The frequent insertion of newspapers from 1916 also seems to have had a marked impact.  Given that we were basically running some things in "real time", so to speak, we also started linking some of those threads into Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today subreddit, which also had quite an impact.

Indeed, an impact of 100 Years Ago today is that the longstanding list of most viewed threads changed nearly completely.  Only one of the threads on the all time top ten, the one on hats, was on that list before Reddit impacted the list and changed it nearly completely.  Posts on Arminto, Wyoming, young Queen Elizabeth II in Canada and the Niobrara County courthouse left the top ten, presumably for all time.  Most of those thread would have about half of the views they'd need to be on the top ten list, even though some of them had been on it for years.

Indeed, some of the newer threads on the list have gone over 1,000 views in a day, pretty remarkable when we consider that getting about 500 used to guarantee that the thread would be on the top ten list.  Right now, the site gets over 15,000 views per month.  Prior to March of this year, the all time high had been September 2014 which had seen 5,000 views that month.  In February 2015 the number was back down to a little over 2,000 per month.  March of that year brought it back up to a little over 4,000 and it hovered around that for a long time.  March 2016 brought it back up to nearly 5,000.  Last month in had a little over 19,500.  It's had just over 16,000 this month, with the month nearly over, so my guess is that September 2016 will be a peak for some time.

Thanks go out to everyone who reads the blog.  Special thanks go out to everyone who has commented on a thread.  This blog remains mostly a learning exercise, so I particularly enjoy any engagement we receive.

Some time to today the blog went over 250,000 views.

Everything I said in the post above remains true, except the number of monthly views.  The past couple of months its been averaging about 20,000 views per month and this month might actually top out at 30,000.  As before, I thank everyone who bothered to stop in her and read the blog.

I hope that some of the interest continues after the close day by day tracking of the Punitive Expedition and the events surrounding it, including the day to day life of 100 years ago, drops off.  We're approaching the end of the American expedition in Mexico, although quite a bit of close attention to the upcoming centennial of events in 1917 shall remain.  I also hope that folks who have comments of any kind add them, I very much enjoy reading them as I'm sure those who stop in here do as well.

Merry Christmas!

USS Arizona heads into New York Harbor, December 25, 1916

The USS Arizona heads into New York Harbor following sea trials.

Brother Albert Chmielowski dies on this day at age 71.

Albert Chmielowski, a Polish painter whose concern for the poor lead him to become a Franciscan monk died at age 71.

Chmielowski was born to a wealthy family and studied agriculture in order to step into the role of managing his family's estates.  Drawn to politics he joined in the Polish uprising of 1863 in which he lost a leg.  Following the Polish defeat he relocated to Belgium where he developed an interest in painting.  In 1874 he returned to Kraków, Poland where his interest in politics and the poor ultimately lead him into the Franciscan order in 1887.  By that time his identification with the poor had already lead him to a voluntary life of poverty.  He founded the Brothers of the Third Order of Saint Francis, Servants of the Poor in 1891.

Lex Anteinternet: The Hornet's Nest: TheRussian Bear in Syria is st...

Lex Anteinternet: The Hornet's Nest: TheRussian Bear in Syria is st...:  American Committee for Relief in the Near East poster from World War One.  The tragedy of the Middle East just keeps going on and on. ...

One thing that I haven't clarified on this is that the attacker in Germany turns out to be Tunisian. The poor Pakistani guy who was arrested just happened to be there.  Talk about a nightmare for him.

The Tunisian attacker seems to have spent most of his time in Europe in Italy, where he was a troublemaker but not an Islamic troublemaker. This shows, perhaps, the propensity for extreme causes to attack the messed up, sort of like the SA attracted thugs who gave their allegiance to Nazism, but who were thugs first.

This also stands out as an item of both curious reporting and good Italian police reaction.  In reporting, the US news seemed baffled about how the attacker could travel "so far" across "so many borders". Really? The EU has open borders amongst members so that should be no more difficult than traveling across state lines. And for that matter, Milan isn't really all that far from Berlin.  Sort of like driving from Denver to Oklahoma City. 

Italian police stopped him and when it went badly they came out on top in a gun battle. That speaks favorably for their reaction abilities and marksmanship.

Lex Anteinternet: Coal and Oil stabalizing, maybe, but does it help?...

Lex Anteinternet: Coal and Oil stabalizing, maybe, but does it help?...: I haven't been reporting on the price of coal and oil for awhile as in some ways not much has been going on.  But enough has been to at ...

Maybe it does, or maybe something else is going on.  According to the Tribune, local retailers are finishing the year out with a really strong finish.  Better, apparently, than even Black Friday.

The Mexican American Commission actually comes to an agreement.

On this day the commission, which had seemed to have reached an agreement back in November, actually reached one.

They agreement provided that the US would leave Mexico within forty days.

This agreement would not be signed by Carranza, but it didn't need to be.

Coal and Oil stabalizing, maybe, but does it help?

I haven't been reporting on the price of coal and oil for awhile as in some ways not much has been going on.  But enough has been to at least put in a little.

On coal, the price of coking coal, it has been noted, is up, which generally reflects increased industrial output.  That's been noted in reports on local coal but Wyoming's coal isn't of the coking grade so that likely doesn't mean much.  On the other hand coal producers are coming back out of bankruptcy and the situation at least appears relatively stable.

A report in the Tribune today states that its unlikely that oil shall exceed  $55/bbl in 2017, which if true means not much will be going on in terms of new exploration in the US.  It needs to rise above that for anything to really happen. 

On other combined news its reported that Wyoming's unemployment rate has improved but that the state's population dropped last year.  Those are really part of the same story.

The Cheyenne State Leader for December 23, 1916: Stock Raising Homestead Act passed

While it only merited a single paragraph, it did make the front page.  The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 had passed.

This was a major change in the homesteading laws in that it was the first of two homestead acts that recognized the stock raising and arid nature of the West. Rather than grant 40 acres, as the original Homestead Act had, it allowed for 640, an entire section.  It would be signed into law by President Wilson on December 29.

While we do not associate this period with homesteading it was actually the height, and close to the finish, of it.  A large number of entries were being taken out, and soon a large number would fail in the post World War One agricultural crash and drought.

The Wyoming Tribune for December 23, 1916: Carranza loses cities.

The Wyoming Tribune reported that Carranza was losing cities, suggesting he was losing the civil war in Mexico.  At the same time, the paper reported that people were being generous to Pershing's command in Mexico.

Fred Sawkins - December 23, 1916

The Massive Decline in Violence (shout out to 100 Years Ago Today Subreddit)

The purpose of this blog has been, and remains, to explore all things, technology, culture, society, etc, of the approximate 1890 to 1920, more or less (adding, probably, something like 50 years on either side of that).  I stray from that a lot, as any reader very well knows, but I tend to come back to it.

Recently I've been running 1916 is century delayed real time so often that a person could be excused for thinking it was the 1916 day by day blog, or something like that, but it isn't.  I've been doing that do the centennial of the Punitive Expedition.  Once that story basically concludes the near day by day entries will slow down as well, to the likely relief of everyone who stops in here, but some of the newly added features that are basically slice of life type entries will likely keep on keeping on, maybe.

Anyhow, in keeping with this, I've found that there are a couple of other sites that run 1916 in delayed real time, one of which is Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit.  I like it, and I post quite a few of the entries here that are posted on the centennial of their happening as links there.  But I read those entries over there was well.

Recently one of the moderators of that Subreddit posted an end of the year item noting that the murder rate in 1916 in the US was 145% of today's.

145%.

Now, this shouldn't surprise the readers here, but I still wonder to what degree we fail to appreciate that violence has really declined.  Massively, in fact.

We have run a lot of items on this before, including, Violent society? andPeculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.  So this should not  be a surprise to readers here.  But what an impressive statistic.

And how interesting in terms of how we look at the world we live in. In terms of violence, in spite of spectacular examples to the contrary, this is about the best era there is to live in, unless of course you are a victim, in which case, no doubt, that's no comfort at all.