Let's Talk Wyoming - Winter Sports Update, Tribute to Bobby Knight, Tracing Lora Webb Nichols' Journey, and Mapping Your Perfect Day

Ready for a riveting journey through Wyoming's winter weather and sports updates? Brace yourselves as we share the inside scoop on the Cowboys' recent loss to Boise State and recap the high school playoffs. We'll also dive into the significance of the Wyoming/Colorado border war and pay a heartfelt tribute to basketball legend Bobby Knight. Expect a thrilling ride as we bring you the most up-to-date news from the Cowboy State.

Ever wondered about the lives of women pioneers? You don't want to miss our exploration into the intriguing life of Lora Webb Nichols a woman of grit and talent, from WyoHistory.org, by Lori Van Pelt. Discover how her diary entries from the tender age of thirteen, her marriages, and her career as a photographer shaped her life journey. We'll follow Laura's trail as she votes for the first time, documents her social events, and amasses a collection of 24,000 negatives, now an invaluable treasure at the Grand Encampment Museum.

Finally, we’ve got a treat for you. Learn how you can map out your perfect day and align it with your future goals with our Average Perfect Day exercise. We throw in a Treasure Mapping exercise too for that extra dose of motivation. You’ll also hear from our guest, Marcy, as she shares her love for all things Wyoming. From the weather to the available activities, she's got you covered. So, gear up for an episode that's all about self-awareness, personal growth, and, of course, Wyoming!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:22

Good morning and welcome to let's Talk Wyoming. I'm Mark Hamilton, your host, and today we'll be talking about our first winter weather. We'll also have cowboy sports, we'll talk about the loss of the general, we'll talk about an encampment Wyoming photographer and we'll have our mental health moment. Thanks for joining us today and I hope you enjoy the show. Take a look at Wyoming weather here at the end of October.

Speaker 1: 1:05

Today, recording here on the 30th, just had some really cold weather, had a taste of winter hit Wyoming and around the area. It's kind of amazing how cold it was and we didn't get large amounts of snow, but it was two degrees. One night, thursday, friday night, we did get pretty cold. Some areas got around six inches of snow. Well, it's got a little bit icy but it's cleared off. And today we're here on Monday, we're at 44 sunny and it just feels absolutely great out there, just a beautiful day. And I did see some posts on Facebook about winter and they posted this is from Montana and up in Montana, helena and some of those places got 12 14 inches of snow. It just varied through the state of Montana, but they talked about this is the first winter that we just got hit with and now we're at the last fall and then we'll be back to the second winter and then we'll have our first spring and then finally third winter and then second spring, but it does seem that way where our weather is. But here in Wyoming we got a nice taste of of the weather. I've cold weather, a little snow, just what we have to do to get bundled up. The trees now definitely are going to start shedding some leaves. There was a pretty heavy frost and so it's going to be time to do some of that last minute leaf removal. But definitely winter decided to give us a little preview. But hopefully we'll have a couple more weeks of nice weather before that second winter shows up.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Taking a look at Wyoming sports Of course we always have to start off with our Wyoming Cowboys, and I don't really know if I want to after the way I talked last week about the Boise State, bronx. Of course I didn't call them Boise State. I was calling them Boise last week. But they came out and just put a weapon on the Cowboys 32 to 7 and it really wasn't even that close the Cowboys. One score was from a muff punt. They had a short field and scored the rest of the game. They just couldn't move the ball or do anything. It was just hard to watch. It was hard for us Cowboy fans to watch but I guess as a Cowboy fan we've seen these before. But it's just a little disheartening. Coach Bowl, after the game didn't know what happened. I thought they had a good week. And I go back to sports psychology. Been a coach, sometimes people respond different ways. The mind is rather different. It's pretty contagious when things start going bad. I guess Misery loves company. Cowboys just didn't have it together. Something just didn't click for that team and it just snowballed. If anybody could figure that out where. That's why we have the upsets that we do a team that is really good one week and suddenly have a bad week and just kind of happens. But for the Cowboys it was a brutal loss. Now they've got to try to regroup.

Speaker 1: 4:14

Friday, on the 3rd of November, friday night in Laramie they take on the CSU Rams in the border war. That's always a fun and interesting game. The Cowboys have the bronze boot. Their fans aren't familiar with the game, the two teams. Of course they're not very far between the two places and of course it's like night and day between the Fring Laramie and Fort Collins, colorado, but they play for the bronze boot and right now the bronze boot is residing in Laramie, wyoming. It's important for everybody here in the state of Wyoming Kind of little bragging rights for the people in Colorado for each side. So Friday night they'll be taking on CSU and it'll be a question. I know Coach Boll and his news conference talked about challenge and the players about wanting to keep that and brought up why that's so important and it is important to A lot of people here in the state of Wyoming to have those bragging rights. But we'll see what happens. We hope the Cowboys can get it back together.

Speaker 1: 5:11

Csu has not had a great year. I think the best game now I guess they did beat Boise State but they lost last week to Air Force and I guess one of the games that they had a pretty fair game was earlier in the year when they took on Colorado, colorado, boulder and CSU. Coach Primestime went into overtime and ended up losing that. But they have not had a really great season. But for both teams it always makes their year if they can say they won the Board of War and bring that Bronze Boot home. So Friday night is going to be a lively night at the war.

Speaker 1: 5:46

Look forward to the game and just keep in good, positive thoughts for the Cowboys. We'll have a report next week on how everything turns out In high school sports. We're right now in the middle of our playoffs. Football had their first round of playoffs last week. Now they're down to their final four in each division for teams getting ready to play that championship games next weekend at the War Memorial Stadium, which has started years ago with the championship games. So it will be interesting and right now the weather looks good for games throughout the state of Wyoming On our high school volleyball girls will all be moving on to Casper. It'll be a busy weekend in Casper. All the games are at the event center, all classifications, top four teams from the regional tournaments. So it'll be a fun weekend for everyone.

Speaker 1: 6:40

And finally, and some sad news in the sporting world for basketball fans like myself and everybody, this fall is college basketball. Bobby Knight has passed away at the age of 83. Coach Knight was a legend. He was definitely a coaching legend, a different person. He was definitely from a different time and place, back to Oliver and Anthony and Old Soul, and he was definitely one of a kind in his coaching style. He was a one over 900 games in NCAA Men's basketball. Majority of those games were at Indiana University in Bloomington In the mid 70s 75, 76, they had outstanding teams. He won three national titles. He was just an all around great guy. He has since retired. He had retired before his death and I know he liked to do a lot of different things before his health got bad, but he was definitely an avid outdoorsman. I know he liked to fly fish and do a lot of different things. But it's a sad day in the collegiate sporting world we lose an icon like Bobby Knight, and I know the people in Indiana are feeling the same way as he was somebody that everybody looked up to and even though he might have had some bad moments, he had way more good moments and when you look at a coach and you see how his players responded, he was definitely a person that cared about his players and probably more after they got out of playing for him as they graduated and moved on in life. He was always there for him and did a lot of things for those players. So another person that we've lost. Coach Knight, rest in peace.

Speaker 1: 8:36

Today we were looking at a story by Lori Van Pelt, and it's Laura Webb Nichols and I on the early Wyoming and I thought this was pretty appropriate where she was a photographer talking about capturing Wyoming. A beau gave Laura Webb Nichols a camera for her 16th birthday in 1899, but her father forbade her to use it. At first he didn't much care for the man, who was 14 years older than Laura. Eventually, though, he softened and allowed not only her to take photographs but gave minor Bert Oldman permission to marry his youngest daughter. The Nichols family lived on a homestead about a mile away from encampment Wyoming. Then, in the midst of a great copper boom that many thought would transform the town into a western industrial stronghold, though that turned out not to be the case. Laura's love of photography, coupled with her fateful diary keeping and her penchant for saving things, resulted in a rich collection of historical items that continued to provide information and insight into the upper North Platte Valley at the turn of the 20th century.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Laura Nichols was born on October 28th of 1883 in Boulder, colorado, the youngest child of Horace and Sylvia Wilson Nichols. Her grandfather, david H Nichols, had participated in the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and later would serve as the 8th Lieutenant Governor of Colorado. Laura had two siblings, guy Clifford and Lizzie May. Her father worked at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Canyon City. When he was on a break from outdoor patrols he sat on a wooden box that once held Colorado's best laundry soap. Most of the letters were worn off, but he liked those that remained, laura, and gave his daughter that name. The club was named of a teacher in the Boulder Schools. The family moved to Wyoming upper North Platte Valley in 1884 after his brothers encouraged Laura's father to ranch there.

Speaker 1: 10:39

Laura began keeping a diary as a school project in 1897 when she was 13 years old. She was a close friend of Nichols' family and author of Laura Webb. Nichols' homesteader's daughter, miners Bride, relyed on Laura's diary and her later manuscript. I Remember A Girl's Eye View of the Early Days in the Rocky Mountains. She referred to Laura as a self-directed learner and explained that her daily diary contained innumerable poems and excerpts from longer works which were to guide her improvement. Laura loved to read and mention Luisa May, alcott and Charles Dickens. In her diary she recorded social events like dances and personal information as well. Laura considered May 20, 1897 a red letter day because the Nichols' returned to the ranch during campment after a four-year absence. Their arrival coincided with the staking out of the town site. Anderson in her book noted Laura was essentially an outdoor girl. In the absence of her older brother, cliff, she was her father's compatriot on the ranch. Cliff had remained in Colorado to attend school In 1893, her father had sold his cattle and left the ranch in a relative's care.

Speaker 1: 12:00

The nation was in one of its worst ever repressions at the time and economic reasons may have contributed to the move. Laura recalled that the cattle sold for $12 per head and nothing under a yearling counted At that time. Her father took his family to Colorado where he worked again at the state penitentiary. After returning to Wyoming, laura met Bert Oldman, a minor who came from the Colorado Springs area in March of 1899. He turned 30 in August and gave her the special gift of a camera in October for his 16th birthday, but her father didn't allow her to use it until November, after he had gotten to know Bert a little better. Laura recorded in her diary that Bert took her picture with a Kodak on November 19th of 1899. A few days later she took a photograph of her mother and one of her beloved pony nibs and her cat Yankee. Laura wrote later in her diary that the camera was the best fun. Her father ordered her a developing outfit and by January of 1900, laura was taking photographs and printing them as well. The couple married at her parents' house on October 15th of 1900, a few days before her 17th birthday.

Speaker 1: 13:16

Anderson explained that Laura's professional years are difficult to pinpoint, being paid for taking photographs. When she married Bert Oldman, prospectors asked her to take photographs of their prospect holes. The Oldman's had a son, albert Horace, born November 21st of 1902. Laura noted that the local doctor had given her a chloroform and wrote of childbirth. I tell you it was a snap. Even so, she had to stand bed for five days. Daughter Sylvia was born two years later. Laura also recorded a diary of November 4th 1904, that she voted for the first time. I felt very important, being a voter. She wrote.

Speaker 1: 13:55

Laura divorced Bert in 1910. Many years later, her daughter-in-law, vera Oldman, speculated that perhaps the difference in their ages, a matter that had caused Laura's father much concern, may have been a factor in the breakup. On July 23rd of 1914, laura married her cousin Guy H Nichols at the courthouse in Walden, colorado, about 50 miles south of Encampment. The pair traveled there by horse and buggy. The next year her son, ezra, was born, followed by Clifford in 1917, frank in 1919, and Dick in 1921.

Speaker 1: 14:33

Although she was the editor and publisher of the Encampment Echo from 1925 to 1930, anderson said that there is very little of Laura revealed within these pages. She operated her Rocky Mountain studio mostly during the decade from 1925 to 1935, taking photographs and printing them. She also developed photographs taken by others. However, she liked the scenes as she referred to them. She would pay for them and use them in her postcard business. Laura also commissioned local cowboys who worked on the early-day dude ranches in the area to take photographs when they went on a pack trip. In 1929 and 1930, a number of Laura's articles appeared in the short-lived Wyoming Literary Magazine, the Pepper Pot, which was published in Casper.

Speaker 1: 15:21

According to Vera Oldman, laura worked hard to supplement her family income. She always did photograph work. She worked in the post office, owned and published the Encampment newspaper, owned and ran the Sugar Bowl, a local restaurant, and cooked a dude ranch at the A-Bar A. She was also active in community groups, serving on the District 18 School Board, as well as in organizations including the Order of the Eastern Star, the Rebecas and the Presbyterian Church. She also enjoyed history and was active in both the state and county chapters of the Historical Society.

Speaker 1: 15:59

A woman said she considered Laura Sugar Bowl 1930 portraits of civilian conservation corpsmen one of the most wonderful parts of the collection of 24,000 negatives that she accumulated Now housed at the Grand Encampment Museum At the Sugar Bowl. The man hammed it up for her, sitting on the stools at the counter, pretending that their soft drinks were beer. The very complex negative collection included photographs taken by Laura as well as some of her mother and her sisters and other family members. I don't know if she ever threw a negative away, anderson said Laura also brought some scenes she liked from others that had taken the pictures and perhaps also paid the cowboys of the dude ranches for the photographs they took. Anderson admits that she did not know why Laura and her family saved so many items, but thinks it may have been because Laura was looking forward to the eventual creation of a facility that housed her photographs and possibly just that she was personally driven to keep things. All Laura's negatives are nitrate and acetates, anderson said, although some glass plates which Laura literally found behind a building and encampment are included. According to Anderson, laura never used a camera that required glass plates. Her photographs include many portraits, anderson said, explaining that Laura's work actually documented the life of the town, the area, ranchers and the coming of the railroad. The photographs together were their diary and the local newspaper that Laura saved, as well as her memoirs, I Remember, which, concluded in 1905, created a vivid picture of every aspect of the Upper Platt River Valley from the early days until Laura's departure in the 1930s.

Speaker 1: 17:44

When Laura left for California for health reasons in 1935, she discontinued most of her encampment studio work, but she kept snapping on throughout her life. Anderson said she went to stay with a friend in Stockton. There she took a job as a domestic at the Stockton Children's Home and eventually rose to the position of superintendent. Still, she made frequent visits to encampment. All four of Laura's and Guy's sons served in the armed forces during World War II. Guy had stayed in encampment after Laura moved to California. He died there in 1955. As for Laura, she retired from her position in Stockton in 1956 and returned to encampment about a year later. She died at her home on August 31st of 1962. Both she and Guy are buried in the Mountain View Cemetery a few miles east of encampment.

Speaker 1: 18:35

Anderson recalls that during the last six or seven years of Laura's life she usually carried at least two cameras with her everywhere she went. Her son Dick, however, traveled with her on hunting and fishing outings. Laura carried the extra cameras because she said you never know what. There's going to be an elephant down the street Another great story and it is amazing you see so many of the women of that period that really made an impact here in our state that they seem to have a little bit tougher hide to them in certain ways. I admire all these ladies that what they did for the early part of Wyoming and especially somebody that's doing photography they recorded a lot of our history and made an absolute impact on our early Wyoming In our mental health moment for the month of November. We'd like to welcome back Marcy. What do you got for us here on November, marcy?

Speaker 2: 19:33

Hey, mark. So we're getting to the end of 2023 and I know it's been an interesting year for many, so I wanted to go over a few different ways to set goals and to get the most out of this last bit of Q4.

Speaker 1: 19:48

Okay, what are some examples of this goal-setting exercise?

Speaker 2: 19:53

So I want to share the average perfect day exercise. So I want you to take a journal or a blank piece of paper and I want you to focus on what would you do in your ideal day, how would you spend it? What type of tasks would you do? How would you start it? Would you be going to work? Would you be hanging out with your family Kind of writing down how you would want to spend an ideal day. And then I want to take from the ideal day. I want you to start to develop things that you can do every day that are more meaningful and more aligned with your values and your goals.

Speaker 1: 20:31

Oh, that sounds pretty good. I was just thinking about it. A perfect day, I guess, is waking up, I guess would be a good start to the day and at a good time. A lot of people might like to sleep in, but what else can we be looking for? That reason to get out of bed and get going.

Speaker 2: 20:48

Well, I think too, it's looking at those periods of time in our day. Are we spending them in a meaningful way? Are we just zoning out on Netflix? How can we maybe integrate some exercise or a nutritious lunch, spending it with people that make us feel better? So, going through your perfect day and then comparing it to your average day and see how maybe you can tweak a few of those habits to have it more match up with that perfect day.

Speaker 1: 21:19

Yeah, that is kind of an interesting scenario when you really think about what is your perfect day that is. I think everybody would probably have a totally different answer on that. How about looking down the line after we come up with what a perfect day is? What would we do, say for a year from now, or how would we keep that going?

Speaker 2: 21:41

So I think this you could enlist maybe a friend or a partner to determine what's your life going to look like a year from now. So you know it's down the road, but it's not too far down the road, it's something that we can manage. So I want you to start asking yourself questions and using a family member or trusted friend to kind of bounce ideas off of what would your work look like? What would your home look like? What about those finances? What about your relationships and, lastly, yourself, how do you want to feel about yourself a year from now, mark?

Speaker 2: 22:17

What kind of job or work do you want to be doing? Are you going to be maybe doing that home project you've been putting off for years? What about your budget? Maybe, with your finances, there's something that you can start doing saving for a home or maybe cutting out the extra costs. I think it's just good to look at every aspect of your life and determine hey, here is where I am right now and where do I want to go and what can I do in the meantime to get to those goals.

Speaker 1: 22:46

You know, I think one that I'm thinking about right away is finances. Right now, with the way everything is going in the economy and with the high prices of everything out there, with everything going up, everything that we do daily, as this seems to be going up, I think that's one that I want to make sure, looking at what's ahead and hoping that down the line that things might change a little bit, we might get a little relief. So finances is big and your home, maybe some of us are a little unsettled. Again, back to everything going on and where we're going to live. So those are some good points, marcy.

Speaker 2: 23:25

And Mark, when you think of finances and home, a lot of people I know there's been a big push to declutter Going through your home maybe a room a week, determining, hey, can I sell this on Facebook Marketplace or maybe I need to cancel this membership I never use. Or, you know, there can be small tweaks that we can do on our day to day and the whole idea of the one year is stuff that you want change but you don't want to be unrealistic. For example, I want a Lamborghini, so, realistically, someone to go to that goal. It's great to have a big goal, but we also want to have smaller goals to build momentum and kind of get us moving forward.

Speaker 1: 24:10

You know, I see on the stuff that you shared with me, this treasure mapping exercise. Talk about that for everyone.

Speaker 2: 24:19

So first you're going to clarify a goal you want to work towards. You're going to visualize what that looks like, what that feels like. Is this, for example, running a marathon or paying off debt? Now you're going to write in detail, using your visualization as you build a clear picture of your goal, what the outcome is, how would you feel, how would you celebrate, what would your friends and family say.

Speaker 2: 24:43

So once you've written all this down, you want to be as descriptive as possible. It's time to get very creative. You're going to make a picture of a treasure map. So the steps to take let's say, marathon, so maybe your couch potato, maybe that first step is to start walking for 20 minutes a day. So you're going to slowly draw, maybe use magazines or pictures and slowly set goals for yourself, and then the end goal would be to run the marathon or the 5k or whatever race. So you want to put actual steps and things you can check off visually, because they've told us that when we write things down and we put things in front of us, we're going to achieve those more likely than if we just keep them kind of in a pipe dream or something that we just kind of talk about.

Speaker 1: 25:32

Now, when we're setting all these, do we need to have a lot of them or just really concentrate on a couple of things to do? What's your recommendations there?

Speaker 2: 25:43

You know, I think, a few milestones so it might be easier to think of hang off, let's say you have a medical bill. For each $500 of the medical bill you're going to check off a box or maybe have a different indicator. So a few, you know. You don't want to have like a hundred different things, but you know some big milestones that help build that momentum and kind of keep you motivated.

Speaker 1: 26:08

Oh wow, this is really good, Marcy. Anything else you want to add on this?

Speaker 2: 26:13

I just want to say that often when we think of goals, we think of huge life events or these huge things that seem very hard to imagine, and I think sometimes we miss out on achieving things that could be very small and they build a lot of self-esteem marks. You know that if you, a good way to build self-esteem and to feel better about yourself is holding yourself accountable and achieving the things that you set out for yourself. So I just want to encourage people to think of the last two months not as something to skate by and just kind of push off to the next year, but let's start working on things now, because think of how far ahead we'll be by January 1st if you start working on things today.

Speaker 1: 26:56

That's very good, you know, marcy, for our next episode. I was just sitting here thinking we're coming up into that stressful time of the year for a lot of people. The holidays ahead We've got Thanksgiving and Christmas or just right around the corner, and so that involves a lot of stress and a lot of activities and it can be a trying time for a lot of people. So we look forward to talking to you later on in November, early December, about the holidays and what we can do to cope with the holidays. Anything else you want to share with us before we go.

Speaker 2: 27:32

Yeah, mark, in the next episode I plan to kind of focus maybe on some more Wyoming focused resources and places that you can seek out and just kind of describe ways to connect with mental health services in your community, even if you live in a tiny town or a bigger city. I kind of want to focus more on what Wyoming has currently to offer that we might not be aware of.

Speaker 1: 27:55

Very good. Well again, marcy, thanks for coming on board and we appreciate everything you do.

Speaker 2: 28:01

All right, thanks, Mark.

Speaker 1: 28:06

Thanks for joining us today and we hope you enjoy our podcast. As per the code of the West, we ride for the brand and we ride for Wyoming.