Westward Ho the Wagons

I can remember many years ago watching or listening to  various programs that ended with some form of the phrase – “and the rest is history.”

 In 1841 when the Bidwell-Bartleson party headed west the rest was indeed history. This first great wagon train heading west not only made history, but it also led to the populating of the West and later the middle of the country. The next year, 1842, Dr. Elijah White led a group of more than 100 on the all new Oregon Trail. Two years later four wagon trains carried more than 2,000 hopefuls West.  The next year the numbers more than doubled. By 1869 more than half a million people had traveled along the trail to Oregon, California, and later to the Salt Lake Valley of present-day Utah. 

Trail Ruts cut deep from thousands of wagons - Guernsey Wyoming

The goal for all of these travelers was the same. Make the 2,000 plus mile trip in 150 days taking along enough food and finding enough fresh water along the way to make it.  Taking a day a week off, as most trains did, this would mean the wagons needed to average about 15 miles each day six days each week for five months. Today if we drove for eight hours each day for 130 days averaging 60 miles per hour we could circle the earth two and a half times. What does all this mean? The west coast was a long way to travel, farther than anywhere on earth in today's world. Once the new would-be settlers started west, in all likelihood, they could never go back. What a commitment these people were making. 

A view down the trail. When the first wagons came there were not nearly
as many trees along the North Platte River as today

All of the above are my thoughts as we get ready to take off on a 4,000-mile vacation next week,  and we will only be gone 16 or 17 days. My, how times have changed.

Fall at Fort Laramie, the most famous, and most welcome stop on the trail.

Wyoming Newspapers

Wyoming’s first newspaper was published in 1863 in Fort Bridger. The paper, the Daily Telegraph, was one small sheet, two columns printed on one side. The paper printed on 6 ½ by 10 ½, a bit smaller than most of today’s 9 by 11 computer stock paper, contained mostly news of the great war in the east.

Hiram Brundage was the editor, writer, owner and likely also the printer of the one-sheet newspaper.  According to Douglas McMurtrie’s, Pioneer Printing in Wyoming, there was only one advertisement which read, “Job work of all kinds done at this office.” A job advertising the newspapers, job printing, availability to the locals.

Douglas McMurtrie

Within four years, six more newspapers were started in what would become Wyoming, three in Cheyenne. By the time statehood reached Wyoming in 1890, dozens of newspapers had start-ups in the state. Many were short-lived, others combined forces and a few continued for years. But it was not until Edgar Wilson (Bill) Nye arrived that the Wyoming newspaper business took off.

Nye had read for the law before and after reaching Cheyenne in 1876, but it took his friend and mentor in law John Jenkins, the United States attorney for Wyoming Territory, to get Nye into his true calling, the newspaper business. Jenkins sent Bill Nye over the hill to Laramie, and as I hope they never say in the Newspaper business, the rest is history.

Bill Nye went to work for Laramie’s morning newspaper, The Sentinel, as an editor for $12 a week. According to Nye, “We printed it before sundown and distributed it before breakfast, thus it had the appearance of extreme freshness and dampness.” After five years, Nye left the Sentinel and started his own paper, The Boomerang, still going strong today

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Nye named the paper after his mule, Boomerang, and started the paper in the loft of a livery barn. Nye hand painted a sign, placing it at the bottom of the stairs leading to his office and the press upstairs, it read, “Twist the gray Mule’s tail and take the elevator.” The first issue came out on March 11, 1882, and the rest, well, the rest really is history. 

Buffalo Bill the Actor

Buffalo Bill was an actor long before he came up with the idea of his Wild West show. 

 From 1872 until 1886 Cody led a troupe of traveling actors, a "Combination," through much of America presenting frontier melodramas. It was during this period that he honed, what would become, his Wild West Show. Bill Cody’s acting debut was in dime novel writer Ned Buntline’s, The Scouts of the Prairie.

In his 14 years with the traveling troupes, he tired of the same dull presentations of the west and wanted to offer a more real show of the west. It was during this time that he added shooting marksmanship exhibitions, and Indian dancers, and started to use animals onstage.

Cody started his, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in 1883 and three years later acted only in his show. Interesting that it was not Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, but only Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

Cody’s portrayal of the Wild West toured widely in the United States and was so popular that eight different years the group visited Europe, putting on shows for commoners and crowned heads alike. Cody's show lasted for three decades, an excellent run by anyone's standards. 

Cody had two homes, one in North Platte, Nebraska and another in Cody, Wyoming. To most historians, this was the setting for his version of the west, central Nebraska through all of Wyoming.

How famous was he because of his show? Writer/western historian, Larry McMurtry says he was the most recognizable person in the world during the last part of the 1800s – pretty famous!

Have a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving.

Tim McCoy

Tim McCoy’s, 1938 version of a Wild West show didn’t last long, bankrupt in less than a month. McCoy’s version was more of an anthropological look at the way the west once was, instead of a Wild West thrill show. With Buffalo Bill, whose show went bankrupt in 1913 after a 25 year run, and others long gone, McCoy had hoped to get Americans and then Europeans interested in the old west once again. But moving pictures and by 1938, talking ones, were enough to satisfy people’s old west cravings. McCoy seemed to be the old, too little, too late.

McCoy grew up in the east but moved to Wyoming and became a cowboy as a young man. He joined the Army during WW1 and again in WW2. He rose to the rank of Colonel in the Army Air Corps and Army Air Force. He was the Adjutant General for the state of Wyoming between the wars and given the brevet rank of Brigadier General at age 28. At the time he was the youngest Brigadier General in the history of the U.S. Army.

In 1942, McCoy ran for the Republican nomination for the open US Senate Seat from Wyoming. He lost in the primary and immediately entered the army again.

McCoy became an honorary member of the Arapaho tribe and was given the name of, High Eagle, by the tribe on the Wind River Reservation.

Tim McCoy continued making movies and touring with other wild west shows after the war ended but never had either the money or the inclination to try his own Wild West show again.

 

What's In a Name

 

Seventy, or so, years ago, The Wyoming Game and Fish Department did a study, trying to identify all bodies of water in the state. They found 38 Spring Creeks, 30 Cottonwood Creeks, 29 Beaver Creeks, 25 Bear Creeks, 23 Dry Creeks, 21 Horse Creeks, 18 Sand Creeks, 17 Sheep Creeks and 17 Lost Creeks. Makes me wonder if they didn’t have much imagination or if they only had a short book entitled, Best Names for Rivers and Streams, I would have named one after myself, Old Guy River, now that has a ring to it!

 How anyone found their way through the state, or all of the American West, before roads and railroads might be one of the great mysteries of American history. Hope they didn’t tell people to hurry along Spring Creek, turn left when they reached Sand Creek and follow it to Lost Creek, seems they could have ended up about anywhere in the state with directions like that. But the state did have some names for streams that were unusual enough to remember. Dry Donkey, Robbers Gulch, and Nameit are my favorites.

But then again we name towns mostly after people, or maybe people named towns after themselves. Guess that’s why we have towns like Bill, Aladdin, Patrick, Elwood, Merna, and Rosie’s Ridge in Wyoming.

Oh, we also have Jackass Pass up in Fremont and Sublette County, (yep, named after explorer John C. Fremont and trapper William Sublette) but that is another story for another time. Early trappers said the ancient Indian trail was so steep that only a Jackass could make its way on it.

Crazy Discovery Tail

Not sure if every state has a tail of discovery, but Wyoming does. I would rather call it, the, who was here first story. The answer is, of course, Indians, several tribes. But much like Columbus discovering America, when there were already a million, or so people here, Wyoming, for years taught about who the first, non-Indian to enter Wyoming was, and like Columbus often said they were the discoveries of Wyoming.

Many texts tell us that a brother duo, the Verendrye’s were likely the first non-natives to visit the cowboy state. Nice, but this is based on the fact that school children in South Dakota found a lead plate in 1913 that was buried by Chevalier de la Verendrye dated March 30, 1743. This is a fine tail, and likely true, with a few details filed in, but it was a long way to Wyoming from Fort Pierre, South Dakota.

Historical speculation seemed to get carried away. Some would be historians assumed the Verendrye’s must have journeyed on to the Black Hills from Fort Pierre and then might just have gone on to Wyoming. Maybe just to say they had been there, just kidding.

Fort Pierre is some 200 miles from the Wyoming border; believe I will stick with my belief. John Colter, who traveled west with Lewis and Clark, left the ‘Corpse of Discovery’ on the west coast and made his way back east, stopping in what is today Yellowstone. No one believed him when he told tales of Yellowstone wonders, but later they were proved true, and I have been there to see them.

Historical facts are just that, they can be proven; historical speculation belongs in fiction, not textbooks.

Buffalo Bill - He Earned the Name

William F. Cody had to win his famous nickname and by doing it he proved he was indeed Buffalo Bill. Cody had already proved his worth and his nickname to the railroad as legend or facts say he killed nearly 4,300 buffalo over a period of 18 months to feed hard working and hungry railroad crews. But Bill Comstock, chief of scouts at a Kansas plains Calvary fort, challenged the legend of Cody, saying he was the real Buffalo Bill, and Cody needed to prove he was the better hunter.

The game was on and the stakes were $500 per side, pretty steep in those days, and pretty steep in this day for guys like me. Each man was to hunt one full day from eight until eight, the winner being determined by who killed the most buffalo. News of the coming contest brought a special train of fans to watch the action.

As you might have guessed, Cody won, killing 69 buffalo while Comstock killed a very respectable 46.

NOTE – Cody never referred to his breach loading buffalo rifle as a rifle or a gun, instead always as, “Lucretia Borgia,” might sound odd innless you already knew his horse’s name, “Old Brigham. He liked fancy names, as for me I once had a dog named Spot, my dog now is named Bear, think I will name my next one, “Old Brigham,” maybe not.

Wanted: Enterprising Young Men

To enterprising young men. The subscriber wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one two or three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry near the lead mines in the county of Washington who will ascend with and command the party; or of the subscriber near St. Louis, signed William H. Ashley.

 The Missouri Republican, St. Louis Mo., March 20 1822

And so begin the tails of the great American West, set in the area of the Louisiana Purchase.