Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: City and County Building, Cheyenne Wyoming

Courthouses of the West: City and County Building, Cheyenne Wyoming:

This is the old City and County Building in Cheyenne Wyoming which, at one time, housed all of the offices of the City of Cheyenne and Laramie County, including the courts.

This building has been partially replaced by the Laramie County Government Complex, which physically adjoins it.

This Federal style Classical Revival building was built completed in 1919.  A better view of the building would be from its front, rather than the sides as depicted, which would show its classic columns, but under the constraints of time when this photograph was taken, that couldn't be done.

8th and 9th Training Regt's, Platsburg, August 1916

8th and 9th Training Regt's, Plattsburg, August 1916, published August 21, 1916

Army Soldier Pray for Success prior to entering Mexico.

Some Gave All: Ft. Fred Steele, Carbon County Wyoming

Some Gave All: Ft. Fred Steele, Carbon County Wyoming: In the past, I haven't tended to post fort entries here, but for net related technical reasons, I'm going to, even though these a...

Changing times; the electronic newspaper.

I've been posting a lot of newspapers up here recently. . . from 1916.  Part of my effort to focus on that year and things about it, in the context of the purpose of this blog.

This morning, however, I had a different interaction with our local 125 year old newspaper.  I read the online copy, which is now, an electronic copy that's 100% duplicative of the paper version.

I woke up really early, something I've been plagued with recently, and the hard copy wasn't here yet.  I've noted that the electronic copy looked pretty good. . . well, I stumbled into that as I'd been ignoring the daily emails on it and finally opened one up.  But, well, it's quite well done.  It may actually be, for some odd reason, more readable than the paper version.

That's great, I suppose, but I worry how they'll continue to keep on keeping on in the electronic era.  Good though it is, I wouldn't subscribe to it.  Perhaps others would. But for the paper version, I wouldn't be getting it.  Which I suppose is part of the reason that local papers are in trouble now days.

Cheyenne Sunday Leader, August 13,1916: Deutschland Sunk?, Guard to the border, Wyoming Guard sure it will go.

Lots of sobering news in this Sunday edition of the Leader.  Guard to deploy, French and Russian gains in Europe, and the Deutschland reported potentially sunk. She wasn't and would survive the war.

The weather was going to be partly cloudy with a chance of rain, much like our weather today, a century later.

Sheridan State Enterprise, August 13, 1916. All National Guardsmen to deploy to the border.

All Guardsmen were ordered deployed to the border, and the situation with Mexico appeared to be getting a bit more tense again.

Meanwhile, the Russians and French were reported gaining in the war in Europe, and a front page cartoon worried that Japan was taking US trade while the US focused on war production for Europe.

The Basin Republican for August 13, 2016. "Great Scott Woodrow! I've been Up in the Air Almost Four Years!"

As we'll see with the two following posts, the Basin Republican was one of the local papers that must not have subscribed to a wire service, and therefore published almost all local news.  It did, however, in this election year run an add directed at Woodrow Wilson, captioned "Great Scott Woodrow!  I've been Up in the Air Almost Four Years!"

Lex Anteinternet: Queen Elizabeth II in Canada. Has the Queen been deposed?

Almost from the very moment I posted it, this post has been in our photograph of a young Queen Elizabeth in Canada has been one of the top ten here.

Lex Anteinternet: Queen Elizabeth II in Canada:

Well now, suddenly, it isn't.

I was always surprised it was so popular (although not anywhere near as surprised as I am about the Niobrara County Courthouse thread, I have no idea why it so popular.  People just like the Queen, I suspect.  I'd often find that "young Queen Elizabeth" was a popular search term that brought people to the site, and I suspect it still will be.  And it could get back in to the top ten, it isn't far off. But it might be soon.  The bottom half of the top ten are mostly recent arrivals, and in the last couple of weeks, and indeed, the last few months, new threads have appeared and shot up into the top ten very rapidly, replacing ones that had been there for months or now even years.  In the bottom half of the top ten, only the post about the Girl Scout's manual remains from the older set of posts.

Queen Elizabeth had been up there since nearly the moment her photograph was first posted.  Indeed, at one time that post was the second most popular post here.  Not that this means a lot.  When it slipped off the top ten it was a little shy of 300 individual views, which isn't that many.  The perpetually popular post on hats has over 1,500, but that's not really that many either.  There are blogs where individual posts no doubt get that many viewers in a single day.  This blog, right now, has a little over 150,000 views for the whole blog, which really isn't that many either.  There are apparently a fair number of email subscribers who get daily posts, which is evident from how quickly some posts get views, but very few of them have registered on the blog as "followers", which you do not need to do in order to get the email updates.  So it's not like we're one of those blogs that gets thousands of views a day.

Recently, however, we've been getting a lot more views than we used to.  It started off when we posted a series of newspaper front pages on the Punitive Expedition or perhaps when we started posting on the Punitive Expedition in general.  Recently we've been getting over 10,000 views per month with some days having really high viewership.  Very recently we posted a few items on the 100 Years Ago Today subreddit, and that explains the items that recently shot up to the current top ten in part.  Not entirely, however, as the one on How The West Was Settled merely referred to another site, but it shot up almost instantly.  Likewise the commentary piece on Playing Games with Names shot up very quickly.  They must have gotten linked in somewhere or circulated on some email chain as there's no other easy way to explain it.

The popularity of a couple of threads is fairly inexplicable in and of itself.  Why the Niobrara County Courthouse thread has been popular forever is beyond me.  No other courthouse thread is, and that same courthouse on our less viewed Courthouse blog sure doesn't receive that much attention.  It's odd.  I suspect that people are looking for the courthouse and hit upon this site, but not the lesser viewed Courthouse blog one. But why just that one?  And Niobrara County is the state's least populated county, so are that many people actually looking for the courthouse?  Well, maybe, if we keep in mind that its only a few hundred views.

One that went out with Queen Elizabeth was the Mid Week At Work photo of workmen working on the furnace of the Shoreham Hotel.  That one also always baffled me.  It was, until recently, just ahead of Queen Elizabeth.  When she briefly popped back up into the top ten she came out ahead of it, of course, but she didn't stay there long.

She popped back in, I'll confess, as I posted a link to that photo on a couple of sites hoping she'd make it back into the top ten.  I like that photo.

1916 Election and Foreign Policy. C-Span

1916 Election and Foreign Policy.

The New York Times (via Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today) reports Army's Apache Scouts restless

The NYT was reporting on this day that the U.S. Army's Apache Scouts, were restless in camp due to inactivity and were accordingly placed in a separate camp due to the same. 

This news would seem to suggest that the pursuit of Villa had, indeed, grown cold, which of course would reflect the changed nature of the mission in Mexico following Constitutionalist resistance.

Walther H. Page arrives from the UK in New York August 11, 1916.

American Ambassador to Great Britain Walter H. Page upon his arrival in New York City aboard the S.S. Philadelphia on August 11, 1916.

WHEELS THAT WON THE WEST®: The World of Wagons, 100 Years Ago

WHEELS THAT WON THE WEST®: The World of Wagons, 100 Years Ago: Understanding the ins-and-outs of America’s first transportation industry requires a great deal of research.  It’s one of the reasons I spe...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Cognitive Disconnect on the left and right. Mark Shea and Moral Delusion. Father Longnecker weighs in.

I posted this item recently asserting that Mark Shea, who publishes as a Catholic commentator, doesn't seem to be on solid ground as a Catholic writer in his burn the boats and vote for Clinton, on moral grounds, argument for swing state voters:

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Cognitive Disconnect on the left and right. Mark Shea and Moral Delusion.:  

 

 AGH photo, Jefferson Memorial.

I'm going to make my recent analysis on political discourse a bit sharper.  In doing so, I&#39...

Well, now I find that I'm not the only one who found his logic shaky, or at least logic of that type shaky.   Without naming Shea, and perhaps without even being aware of his argument specifically, Catholic writer and Priest Father Dwight Longnecker, in two separate entries, examines both Trump and Clinton, and finds the logic of both Shea, and yours truly, wanting.

The first article addressed Clinton, and asked:

The question is very simple.

Can a faithful Catholic vote for Hillary Clinton?

Father Longnecker runs through the logic and arguments and at the end comes to this conclusion, based on the Democratic platform on terminating the lives of the unborn at the mother's option, and noting in addition that Clinton's support of that is a "litmus test" for her, and her support additionally goes far beyond what even most Americans who support her position to a lesser extreme suport:

Can a faithful Catholic vote Democrat in the coming election?

The answer is no.

There's more to it than that, and his logic is well set out.

He's also, however, addressed Trump, starting off:

After writing an opinion piece about Catholics voting for Hillary Clinton, someone asked me to write a similar article about Donald Trump.

Can a Catholic vote for Donald Trump?

He goes on, after looking at Trump's moral character, to conclude the following:

So the question remains, can a Catholic vote for Donald Trump?

Because of his serious character faults, his lack of experience, his ignorance on the issues and his bullying personality I would answer “No.”

However, it is my own opinion that a Catholic just might, holding his nose and with great reservations, vote for the Republican Party platform and hope for the best.

But I realize others would say (with good reason) they are going to hold their nose and vote Democrat and hope for the best.

The dismal news is that whatever happens (barring some extraordinary intervention) we are in for at least four years of a v. unpopular and dangerous President of the US.

I don't think his second conclusion wipes out his first, but for modern American voters who are members of the Apostolic churches, this election is a grim one, if they take their Faith seriously.  Maybe that's true for a lot of American voters in general this go around.

Doris Stevens, Congressional Union, August 10, 1916.

Doris Stevens of the Congressional Union on her way to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to attend the national conference of the Woman's Party, August 10-12, 1916, published on August 10, 1916, by the Detroit Free Press.  The Congressional Union would merge with the Woman's Party the following year.

The local weather, August 10, 1916

Because its in keeping with the focus of this blog, and because I just realized another way to find it.

Lander, WY 

High of 69.1°F and low of 28.9°F.

Cheyenne, WY
High of 73°F and low of 51.1°F.

Sheridan, WY
High of 75°F and low of 48°F.

Nice temperatures during the day,and in Lander and Sheridan, cool temperatures at night.

The Cheyenne State Leader for August 10, 1916. One battalion to be ordered to the border.

One battalion of the Wyoming National Guard looked to be deployed.  The Guard was nearly one soldier short, however, due to an elopement, one of quite a few that these papers reported on.

And, the World War One homesteading boom was really on.

Mid Week At Work: They also work who dance. August 12, 1916.

Caption from Library of Congress:  Caption on verso of copy print in LOT 7212: Ballet girls arrived to dance with [Anna] Pavlowa, [New York City], Aug. 12, 1916.

Lassen Volcanic National Park established

Park established on this day in 1916.  It had earlier been declared a National Monument by Theodore Roosevelt.

Of interest,the vulcanism was in an active phase at the time it was declared a park.

The Cheyenne State Leader for August 9, 1916. The Inglorious Reappearance of Pvt Dilley?

It seems that Pvt. Dilley's circumstances were not quite as tragic as reported yesterday.

A person has to wonder a bit about his fate, assuming he was tracked down and arrested.  His desertion came at that point in time at which the Army was evolving from the Frontier Army practice, in which 1/3d of the enlisted men went AWOL or deserted annually, and which the offense was not too seriously worried about unless the departing troops took equipment with them, to one which would regard this as a much more serious matter.  And, to add to it, when conscription came for World War One public sentiments were so strong that in some areas a man of military age could not walk for more than a couple of blocks without being accosted by citizens wondering if they were shirking their duty.  Young women, in fact, were particularly zealous in offering offense to men who appeared to be less than enthusiastic about military service.  Pvt. Dilley's actions may have had implications he didn't consider at the time.

Assuming, of course, that he had deserted.  Which perhaps, he had not.  He never reappeared, in spite of having family and friends in the state.  His father was certain that he'd been murdered, which he may very well have been.

If he left service without discharge, he certainly wasn't the only one to attempt it.  Disciplinary problems were a huge factor with the Wyoming Guard, including desertions, which were not all that uncommon.  As we've seen, going AWOL was fairly common as well, at least in the context of briefly leaving to marry.

On other matters, 2ar was in the air, with the Guard being inspected and the paper contemplating what war with Mexico might mean, which apparently meant war with Japan.  Odd to see that speculated on in this context.

Love was also in the air, and yet another Guardsman went AWOL to elope, something that seems to have been a regular occurrence.