Recently we received a note from a Frenchman now living in the U.S.A., with a link to a family-history blog he’s posted, rich in history and pictures. Philippe Boucher’s great-grandfather, Henri Lebreton, apparently an investor in Belgian- and French-owned oil companies, visited here sometimes for months at a time in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War I in Europe. By that time, oil was a fast-growing industry in Wyoming; the war brought on a boom.

We were interested to learn this week that the surviving members of the Black 14 and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are again teaming up to deliver free food to hungry people. In October 1969, University of Wyoming football coach Lloyd Eaton kicked 14 Black players off the team for asking, ahead of time, to wear black armbands when they suited up to play BYU, in protest against the Mormon Church’s racist policies. Eaton’s action deprived the athletes of their scholarships, sending them down far different paths in their lives than they would otherwise have followed. It also caused deep divisions in Wyoming, and decimated the football program for years.

By Tom Rea

Last summer we found ourselves for a couple of days in Valentine, Nebraska, on the Niobrara River 180 miles downstream from where it flows out of Wyoming. The town lies just over the state line from the Rosebud (Sioux) reservation in South Dakota. Early one morning we went for a walk on a path that runs through town on an old Chicago and North Western right of way. The color was faded, but you could tell someone years ago had spray painted on the concrete: “Your on Native Land.” 

Pretty good thing to keep in mind in North America, we agreed, especially here in the West where the transfer of control of that land is so recent. It’s a little over 150 years since the Shoshone, Arapaho, Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow and Ute tribes that roamed constantly through Wyoming were confined to reservations, and many of their children sent away from their families to White-run schools.

As a friend of ours likes to remind us, American Indians gave up more or less all the land in North America—for promises. How good a job have we done keeping those promises?

By Rebecca Hein

I was rolling around in bed, flipping my pillow and rearranging the blankets every few minutes. Finally, my husband turned over and put his arms around me.

“Becky. Settle down.” In Ellis’s tone and touch I recognized the calm authority that soothed our two preschool children when they became agitated.

“That’s easy for you to say,” I retorted. “You’re not facing potential humiliation in front of hundreds of people.”

“True; that’s a decision I made years ago … and so did you. Now go to sleep.”

For the past few days, I’d been waking up in the morning wondering why I felt like I was going to soon face a firing squad. Then I’d remember. The last Wyoming Symphony Orchestra concert of the 1996-1997 season was coming up in about two weeks, and I was going to be playing a duo with our guest artist, Mark O’Connor. A Grammy award-winning country fiddle player, he was ascending rapidly, and was already collaborating with many world-famous classical artists such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

My principal cello job required me to perform whatever solo parts that were required, and when I first ran through my part for “Limerock,” an old country tune in an arrangement by O’Connor and others, it seemed playable enough. Next, I listened to the recording he had provided, but I didn’t recognize the piece I’d just sight-read because the tempo was insanely fast. When I discovered this, I saw the magnitude of my task.

We were saddened to learn this week of the death of Utah historian Will Bagley, a great writer, speaker, talker and an important thinker with a big, true, rabble-rousing heart. Central to his many books was the Euro-American migration of the mid-nineteenth century. For Wyoming, that meant a book about South Pass and many articles for WyoHistory.org on the same and related topics. In the larger world, it meant many more books, including two big ones  of a planned four-book history of the Oregon and California Trails for the University of Oklahoma Press: Overland West.

Major news outlets announced this week that in passing 675,000 Covid deaths, the nation has now surpassed the death total from the 1918-1919 flu. That makes the current pandemic, still going strong, the deadliest the nation has ever seen. Wyoming Covid deaths passed the state’s 1918-1919 total, 780, during the first week of August this year.

By Rebecca Hein

Imagine traveling through a major Wyoming blizzard in a horse-drawn sled. You could die, and some people did. Stagecoach companies substituted sleds for coaches in bad weather, and in the January storm of 1883, four passengers froze to death on the route from Green River to South Pass City.

The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad through southern Wyoming Territory in 1869 facilitated travel through that part of the state. But to settlements north of the railroad, passengers and mail traveled by stagecoach. Freight went by wagon, and all roads were rough.

By Nate Martin, WyoFile

Lora Webb Nichols was a hard-working woman. Over the course of 50 years between the 1890s and the 1940s, she created a body of photography 24,000 images strong, most of which feature the life and times of her hometown, Encampment, Wyo. 

These images—which capture the town and its people with arresting grace—languished in obscurity for decades.

If you’ve ever driven through Sublette County, wedged west of the Wind River Mountains, south of Jackson Hole and east of the Wyoming Range, you’ve driven through the upper Green River Basin. That winding, silver stream, lined with greenery spring and summer, threads down the middle of everything. Homesteading and Ranching in the Upper Green River Valley, by Ann Chambers Noble and Jonita Sommers is the story of people who homesteaded on the upper Green and its tributaries during the last 150 years. They ran livestock, birthed babies, drove buggies through blizzards to deliver the mail, taught school, cut, hewed and floated railroad ties and raised gardens, chickens and families. 

After the Indian Wars, White people in the West seem to have found a number of ways to harass and kill Native people. In 1895, a posse of non-Indians, mostly outfitters, attacked a peaceful band of Bannocks hunting elk south of Jackson Hole; two native people died. 

In 1906, a large band of Utes left their reservation in Utah and crossed Wyoming, hunting and drying meat as they went—and causing great alarm among civil officials, the general public and especially in the newspapers. Eventually the Utes were met in southern Montana by 1,000 U.S. troops, persuaded to go to South Dakota for a while and after 18 months to return home.

Three years earlier, on Lightning Creek northeast of Douglas, Wyo., in 1903, a sheriff’s posse attacked a peaceful group of Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; two posse members and five Sioux were killed. The Oglalas had come to Wyoming to  gather herbs, roots and berries, and may have been hunting antelope as well.

In about 1936, a group of Oglala men from the Pine Ridge Reservation performed the astonishing feat of finding the graves of their dead on the site, going by an account dating from the time of the burials. But by the late 1920s, White ranchers had already moved the skull and bones of Black Kettle, a member of the band, to the Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum on the grounds of the Wyoming State Fair in Douglas.