Speaker 1: 0:23

Good morning and welcome to let's Talk Wyoming. I'm Mark Hamilton, your host. Today. We'll be taking a look at weather and a little bit of sports and some other news here in the state of Wyoming and finally, in our history section, we'll be talking about Jim Bridger and a map in his mind. Thanks for joining us and we hope you enjoy the show.

Speaker 1: 1:01

Taking a look at Wyoming weather here on the 25th day of March when has the month of March gone? I really can't figure that out. It just seemed like we were in February and now we are looking at April right around the corner. Here in High Springs County, weather's been mostly cold, cool. We've had some snows and a little bit more of wet snow and a little bit of wet snow, a lot of wind, a lot of wind over the weekend. Now, here today on the 25th, on Tuesday, we're at 65 degrees plus. Looks like we're going to have a couple more days of this warm weather, just out of the ordinary At 65, it's hot and that looks like we're going to have a little bit of cool and rain on the weekend. And who knows what April is going to bring. But we've had just up and down weather, a lot of wind getting ready to head into April and before we know it that's going to be some green grass and I saw some poking out here and there. When it starts to warm up we're going to start having all those summer chores going on here in the state of Wyoming In sports.

Speaker 1: 2:12

I just want to put a quick close on our sports for the year. I always talk about sports. The state high school basketball tournaments just concluded. The big story here in Hot Springs County was our Thermopolis Bobcat boys in the 2A. Last year they'd been in the 3A but they moved down to 2A due to enrollment numbers and they went from one of the smaller 3A schools to one of the two largest 2A schools. But long story short, the boys won the state title First time since 2004,. They won Just a note on that they had won back-to-back grounds there in those years Up to 2004,. They won. The previous year also, that was in 3A with that group, and then the third year when they were trying for the three-peat they ended up in second place. So right now the boys are kind of taking a little bit of a break, but they're already talking. They lost a couple of seniors and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't contend for the state title next year. Most of that talent is coming back, so we'll see if the Bobcat boys can go back to back Our girls team.

Speaker 1: 3:30

They finished third in the state and that's a good result for them. They had a great season and in 3A, lovell and Douglas both won. On the boys side Lovell won Lovell Bulldogs and on the girls side, douglas won. And it's amazing story that douglas lady bearcats they are had won four straight and they would have won in 2020. But covid derailed that when they shut down the state tournament that year or else they would have had a five feet and they are just a machine.

Speaker 1: 4:04

In Douglas. They lost their coach this year. He took a job up at the Northwest Community College girls team kind of a late hire for him up there and he went up and so one of the players that had played there from years before and won state titles. He came back and was the head coach and they ended up beating a really good Cody team in a game that went down to the wire and a foul on a three-point play or a three-point shot, I should say just before the buzzer. Douglas is all everything, all state, all everything. Top scorer here in the state. Everything, all state, all everything. Top scorer here in the state. Lauren Olson went to the line and made two of three free throws. Ended up that Douglas did get that crown.

Speaker 1: 4:51

And that's what happened to the Cody boys. They were kind of snake bit. They were playing level and one point game late and then they had an issue with a substitution. They ended up with six players on the floor. Somebody forgot to go out and as a coach I've always make sure that we check in and check out. But in the heat of the battle sometimes things happen with kids. So Lovell it was a technical foul. Lovell got to shoot two free throws and then additional free throws and then got the ball back and ultimately they won that game.

Speaker 1: 5:24

So 2A, 3a, 1a the previous time and the 4A are all in the books. Now we're getting into that springtime year with our sports soccer track here in Hot Springs County. Most of the 1A, 2a just have track. The larger schools have the soccer also and some of the schools now are getting into softball. So again, the winter season is over. It just comes and goes so fast. But congratulations to all those players and all the kids that went out for sports in everything in wrestling and all the other sports. It takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of time and thank you to all the coaches.

Speaker 1: 6:14

Other people that are unsung heroes in the state of Wyoming are the activity drivers that drive those yellow school buses across the state of Wyoming. They're always driving at uptune times. They have to go early in the morning, late at night. They're coming back after those kids get done and they've been sitting around. They have to drive that bus back and got a lot of pressure on them with that many kids on that bus. But they always get the teams through a lot of times in some bad weather. So hats off to all the people that are involved, especially those activity drivers and all the people that are working at these events helping support the athletics, and also our officials. There's always that push for more officials. Officials take a lot of grief. We never miss a call from the stands, even though those refs miss a lot on the floor. So great ending the season with spring right around the corner.

Speaker 1: 7:03

On the college side, the Wyoming Cowgirls ended up losing in the semifinals of the Mountain West tournament. They went overtime against San Diego State and that was an upset-prone tournament. Nevada UNLV, I should say. They got beat in the semifinals and so did the Cowgirls. They lost in overtime. So the Cowgirls, they lost in overtime. So the Cowgirls got a bid for the first round of the NIT. They got a host of the game in Laramie, but a good Texas Tech Lady Raider team came in and soundly beat the Cowgirls, so their season is over. So all the sports is done.

Speaker 1: 7:41

As we get into that time of year, legislature concluded, with a lot of activity going on in the state, We've been hit here recently on the political side with Harriet Hageman, our congresswoman. She was doing town halls, of course. She did one in Douglas and Laramie and in Wheatland. That I saw. And the one in Douglas excuse me, douglas, I have on my mind the one in Jackson, they had quite a few people bust in and also at Laramie it got pretty rowdy and just a it didn't go very well with a lot of people coming in from Colorado and such. And then I did see, before she went to Wheatland there was an ad by the Wyoming Democratic Party telling people about her having this event, and so it's a trend that's going on across the country with the people showing up, these agitators showing up at these events, and then when you see the posts on Facebook, you see a lot of them. The posts are from bots. They don't have any type of history. They've always got a Ukraine flag and the same comments. So kind of divisive time.

Speaker 1: 8:58

And this fiasco with the Teslas, with these crazy people. I mean that Crazy people. They need to go to jail and I hope that the current administration, that the law enforcement attorney general, us attorney general this is an act of terrorism what they're doing to Tesla and I don't know. We've gotten to the point where we are lost our way as human beings when we're acting like the way we are. So I don't know, I think I might buy a Tesla if it keeps going like this. With the attack, it's pretty amazing that the Democrats were the ones that were really pushing electric cars. Everybody should drive an electric car. Now they're getting rid of their electric cars. Don't really like them, want to burn them down or destroy them. It just never ceases to amaze me the stupidity of people in our world today. And one final note, kind of interesting A year and a half ago we had a young lady go missing over in Washakie County.

Speaker 1: 10:05

It was on a Sunday night, if I remember right. She was out by the airport if anybody knows where the airport is in Worland outside of Worland out by the golf course. Girl was out there. Car broke down, stuff happened and they never did find this young lady. They searched, had search teams and such out. Then there was a report yesterday that didn't say where a remote part of Washakie County that they found some human remains. Easy for you to say, and so it's going to be interesting to see they're going to take and do an analysis and see if they have any type of records, anything they can find, and whether that might be this young lady. So just another part of the mystery of what happened to her, because she just disappeared into thin air.

Speaker 1: 10:56

Just a quick update today here, on the 27th day of March. I talked just previously on the missing young lady in Washakie County and about the game warden finding some remains. They have been identified that they are Breanna Mitchell, the girl that had been missing back in July of 23. I guess it gives a little closure for the family. They are in the process of determining if there was any type of foul play, but she was found about a mile north of where the car broke down. And I remember and I have to look at the reports that she did make a report to her boyfriend at 5 am that morning that her car broke down and when he went out to look for her he couldn't find her. So it was in some pretty rough area but about a mile from where her car broke down. So thoughts and prayers go out to her family but they do have a little bit of closure with finding her, with finding her In our history section.

Speaker 1: 12:04

Today we want to look at a story from wildhistoryorg, a map of the West in his head. Jim Bridger Guide to Plains and Mountains. This is by James A Lau and the Wyoming State Historical Preservation Office. Jim Bridger already had more than 30 years experience in the West as a trapper, mountain man and Indian fighter before he became the premier guide for the US Army in the mid-1850s. In 1822, at 17, bridger enlisted in the Ashley Henry Expedition, sent from St Louis to trap beaver in the Rocky Mountains. He worked first as an employee and later became a partner in the famous Rocky Mountain Fur Company. He mastered wilderness lore and accumulated an astonishing mental map of western North America when nearly all of it was still unsettled by whites. It was this geographical knowledge that aided many US Army topographical expeditions to successfully complete assignments. Bridger provided for memory accurate maps of the Rocky Mountains to US military commanders leading exploratory expeditions. He possessed an intimate knowledge of western geography and natural transportation routes. Bridger was also well known among the American Indian tribes of the Rockies, especially the Shoshone. He was a personal friend of Shoshone chief Washakie and was married three times to native women a Flathead, a Ute and a Shoshone.

Speaker 1: 13:36

As a result of his experience, pritchard played an integral role in the initial geographical discoveries in the West, which in turn helped foster early Euro-American immigration and settlement. Pritchard's experience had few limits. He quit the dying fur trade in 1842 and in 1843, where his partner Luis Vazquez established a trading post along the Black Fork of the Green River in what is now Wyoming and in what then was still a corner of Mexico. At the time, bridger recognized that the overnight migration to Oregon was a sign of changing settlement patterns and that Fort Bridger could not help but become a profitable economic concern. For 15 years the post was a key supply point for the Oregon-Mormon-California Trail, immigrants needing provisions, livestock and repair of their wagons. The Stansberry Expedition to the Great Salt Lake in 1849-1850 was the first federally funded government exploration guided by Bridger. It was fully designed to acquire geographical and geological data from the west that would help facilitate a future route for a transcontinental railroad and telegraph and to locate coal deposits. On the return, bridger guided the Stansbury party east along ways that later became familiar as the Overland Trail and the Union Pacific Railroad Routes.

Speaker 1: 15:04

Bridger's unequaled knowledge of the northern Rocky Mountain region and the upper Missouri River Basin aided two expeditions searching for transportation routes between 1856 and 1860. He served as a guide for Lieutenant Governor Kay Warren's 1856 expedition to recoiter the region surrounding the Black Hills and the Yellowstone River. He led Warren's party from Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone on the Missouri, near the present Montana-North Dakota border, southwest up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Powder River. Warren's explorations revealed a great deal of geological information was still lacking to Euro-Americans. In his report on the Dakota region, warren recommended further reconnaissance of the Upper Yellowstone and Powder River Country regions that were still classified as terra incognita. As a result, captain William Reynolds was ordered to explore the region in 1859. Bridger was the logical choice to guide this important expedition as well when the Army resumed operations against the Sioux after the Civil War, the Warren and Reynolds reports formed the only existing body of information pertaining to the Dakota-Wyoming region. Whenever the mission was important, the government's choice was inevitably the same Jim Bridger. Along with other expeditions, he spent part of his year of 1857 guiding Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, who was sent with 2,500 troops to escort the new federal governor and restore the presence of the US government in the Utah Territory during the bloodless Utah Mormon War.

Speaker 1: 16:45

Bridger served in 1861 as a guide for an expatriate party under the command of Captain E L Bertoud, searching for a route through the Colorado Rockies. In 1862, he served under Colonel William Collins and his son, lieutenant Casper Collins, on an expedition west up the Sweetwater, over South Pass, around the west end of the Wind River Mountains and back east over Union Pass. Bridger achieved the rank of major and was the chief guide, at $10 a day, assigned to Fort Laramie through the remainder of 1860 until his retirement late in 1868. In 1864, however, he spent the season guiding immigrant trains to the Montana territories. After obtaining a leave of absence from the fort on April 30th, on May 20th he began guiding his first train of immigrants along the Bridger Trail through the Bighorn Basin to the Montana Goldfields near Virginia City. He led a second party along the trail. In the fall Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux.

Speaker 1: 17:50

Opposition to immigration and military activity along the Bozeman Trail intensified and Bridger's services as guide were needed more than ever. He guided the lead column of the US Army's Powder River Expedition under the command of General Patrick E Connor, which was ordered into the Powder River Basin to find and punish the Lakota and their allies. The campaign failed. In an attempt to curtail Indian aggression along the Bozeman Trail, bridger served his last commission in 1868 on the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty which closed the Bozeman Trail and the forts built in a vein to defend it. He guided the Army to the Powder River Basin to remove the properties from the forts. When he returned he was paid and discharged from the Army at Fort DA Russell near Cheyenne. He retired to his farm in Westport near Kansas City, missouri, and died on July 17, 1881, at the age of 77. General Greenville M Dodge, serving in the Civil War and later commander of the Department of the Missouri, before going to work in 1866 as the chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad, bridger guided Dodge on railroad surveys and Indian campaigns.

Speaker 1: 19:06

Unquestionably Bridger's claims to remembrance. Dodge wrote 40 years later rest upon the extraordinary part he bore in the explorations of the West. As a guide he was without equal and this is the testimony of everyone who ever knew him. He was born a topographer. The whole West was mapped out in his mind and such was his instinctive sense of locality and direction that it used to be said of him that he could smell his way where he could not see it. He was a complete master of planes and woodcraft, equal to any emergency, full of resources to overcome any obstacles, and I came to learn gradually how it was, for that once such man could live without food, except what the country afforded him in that wild region.

Speaker 1: 19:54

Bridger was not an educated man. Still, any country that had ever seen him would fully and intelligently describe and he would make a very correct estimate of the country surrounding it. He could take a map of any country he had ever traveled over, mark out its streams and mountains and the obstacles correctly, so that there was no trouble in following it and fully understanding it. He thoroughly understood the Indian character and their superstitions. As a guide. I do not think he had equals upon the plains In 1904, on the 100th anniversary of Bridger's birth, dodge had Bridger's remains reinterred at a select spot in the Mount Washington Cemetery in Independence, missouri, with a seven-foot monument depicting Bridger's principal achievements, celebrated as a hunter, trapper, fur trader and guide, he discovered Great Salt Lake in 1824, the South Pass in 1823, visited Yellowstone Lake and geysers in 1830,. He founded Fort Bridger in 1843,. He opened the Overland Route by Bridger's Pass to the Great Salt Lake. He was a guide for the US exploring expeditions, albert Sidney Johnson's army in 1857, and GM Dodge in the UP Survey and the Indian campaigns of 1865 to 1866. Quite a legend, jim Bridger, and it's amazing his abilities.

Speaker 1: 21:28

And now we need our phones and Google Maps to try to figure out where we are. We really just needed Jim Bridger. 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. We'll be right back. Come on, come on, come on. © BF-WATCH TV 2021.