Good morning and welcome to Let's Talk Wyoming. I'm Mark Hamilton, your host, and today we'll be looking at our crazy Wyoming weather. We'll be taking a look at some events here in the state of Wyoming, and maybe just a little of that and a little of that. And also we'll talk about Walcott regulators in our history section. Thanks for joining us today, and we hope you enjoy the pod. Taking a look at Wyoming weather here on the fifth day of October. Boy, it's been a change in the weather. Friday here in Hot Springs County. It was up in the low 80s and it was warm, and then that night it started clouding up and banged and boom. By the next morning, we had rain. Inch and a quarter all day Saturday. That's all it did off and on is rained. And then a little bit of a let up, but it still stayed cloudy. A little bit of rain coming down here on a Sunday. I think we are nearing that point. Slowly but surely, we're going into fall. We have a freeze warning out for tonight, tomorrow. Tomorrow night it looks like a better chance, depending on the cloud cover. Our first freeze is actually pretty late this year. And guess what? We're getting closer and closer to what we know is coming winter, but the days are getting shorter, but the rain will be appreciative. I was glad I finally quit irrigating everything and have taken all my timed uh irrigation equipment out and got everything to that point. So just a matter of doing kind of some draining here and there. I need to shut a couple more valves, and I'll be blowing out the sprinkler system here pretty quick just in case something does change. But good moisture here in the state of Wyoming. I saw down in Laramie last night, down at War Memorial Stadium. If you've ever been to Laramie, Wyoming or spent any time there, I went to college there. Let's say the weather is always interesting in Laramie, Wyoming. At that elevation where it's located, anything can happen. And they've had some really good weather. And I don't think anybody expected the extent of what the weather did last night. They had homecoming. Five o'clock kickoff against UNLV. And guess what happened? It rain was forecast, but it kind of rained and then turned into a sleet snow hail. And that kickoff, that field was totally white. It was a mess. And it kind of reminded me back in the 2000s, probably about 2011, 10, probably 10, 9 or 10. The first year that the Bobcats were at the state uh championship game. They had just switched over to games down at um Laramie War Memorial, and same thing happened. A big snowstorm hit. Of course, that was in October, a little later. Um might have been right at the uh first part of November, and that whole stadium looked was a mess. But last night I felt so sorry for those people that were in Laramie. I don't know how many people, unless you've been there before, or carrying enough of the proper weather gear to be able to take that on. But um the game um came out a little bit on the not well for the cowboys, but seeing that field, it was just uh I've seen so many things. I remember one year back in a long time ago in May, finals week, we got totally buried with snow down there. So you just never know in Laramie. But again, that's the way it is in our state of Wyoming, and that's the kind of weather we're starting to see. Yep, I did see the bighorns got snow overnight. There were some warnings for some of these higher elevations. That's always an issue with hunters out. You know, you're out there and the weather's warm, and then all of a sudden overnight, here come here it comes. And if you're up there stand, you can get into some pretty precarious situations. So right now, the weather is changing here in Wyoming. I saw next week I did see it's gonna slowly, surely get back up. I think by Friday it's gonna be 70 here in Hot Springs County. But those days of a lot of heat and such are slowly but surely behind us. Now we're really gonna get into fall weather. I had to go out the this morning and haven't fired the heater up yet, and always have to clean that flame sensing rod. I had that trouble last year where it wouldn't come on. So this year I decided just to do it before we even started it. So got the heater fired up, ready to go. Have not officially fired it up yet. Got it set for 62 degrees, it was 64 degrees. So it's getting to that point, you're gonna wear a little bit of a jacket. You always want to wait as long as you can before you fire that heater up because you know what's coming, you're gonna come to winter. And you don't like to invite winter that early. In other happenings around here in Hot Springs County, we are we've always had this issue with uh our state park. If you've been here, it's just a beautiful place and have used it and used to go all the time, take the dogs for walks at the state park, and spend a lot of time at Hot Springs State Park and the world's largest hot springs, and there's a lot of stuff going on in the park. There was a shutdown of the Star Plunge at the first of the year, and it's been shut down since then. It's really had an impact. Um, there is a concessionaire that's gonna come in and take over the park and all the activities here in the park, and they have been working. I went down, I have not been down there at all this summer. Park is a mess. They have been working on the lower boat dock to put a new dock in, and they've been working on it for some time, and they have roads shut down, and they've been working on the 8th Street Bridge. So when you come into Thermopy, you've been here before, you have to go under the railroad, down under the railroad, and that trestle there, and it is limited by the footage, and they had to put up a sign out there so people wouldn't get their motorhomes stuck in there. So you'd have to go around to 8th Street Bridge and come into the park the other way. Well, they've guess what decided to start working on 8th Street Bridge. So it's been under construction. So when you go to the park, it's they've got a couple roads blocked off, it's just a total mess. And last week they did pour the new 8 Street Bridge. They did a continuous pour on that, and so I can't wait to go down and take a look at the 8 Street Bridge. But a lot of changes coming to Hot Springs County and to the park. It's going to be interesting to see what happens, where things will end up. I'm just waiting to see how they're going to handle this transition and with the construction. Are we looking at another year of total chaos down in the park? It's had an impact on the community as far as visitors and stuff. A lot of people, that star plunge, a lot of people came to the Star Plunge, and with no star plunge, that's just people not coming here and spending money. So another economic impact here in the state. I see that there was a vote here in the state of Wyoming with renewables. They voted for releasing some state leases, and I see in a three-to-two vote that they went ahead and renewed those. And I'm not a proponent of renewable resources, I will tell you that. It's been a sham from the get-go. All it is is a way for certain people to make money on the government kickbacks. And all it's done is raise our electrical rates here in the state. And so they got renewed. And every time we put in another windmill, uh, our electrical rates are going to go up, and somebody has to shut off this money that's going into this stuff. It's just destroying our infrastructure. And we talked about earlier, I've said to keep your eye on these data centers, which are just nothing but taking all the electrical power. Well, the biggest thing the renewable does, it screws up our electric grid because the coal fired plants end up having to supplement all the power. Now they can supplement and come on pretty quick and take care of it. But if the renewable suddenly the wind isn't blowing, sun's not out, or it's nighttime, don't have much power, they've got to make up the load. And so we have a lot of up and down and swings and around, and it just destroys the electric grid. So again, as I said, with that data center they're building down in Cheyenne, it's going to use more power than the whole state does. You start adding this up across the country, and I don't know what we're going to do with our electrical power, but we've got more windmills that are actually causing more problems in our state. And I just hope that someday we can end these scams and get back to generating power the way we were meant to be. And we don't need any nuclear plants. We don't need Bill Gates to be involved in our electrical power. Every time I turn on the TV, Bill Gates is involved in something else. He's a medical doctor. He wants to grow artificial food or fake beef, which I had commented before that now we don't want any of uh that fake beef here in the state of Wyoming. We raise beef here in our state, and we don't need to eat fake beef. We actually have the real thing. And keep that out of our stores. Don't feed that to our kids here in the state of Wyoming. We raise beef. We're not going to buy a bunch of phony beef. So a lot of things going on out in the world. Charlie Kirk is the trial, it's an interesting situation. What's going on there? There's still a lot of questions on the that day on the events surrounding that. If you really look at it closely, there are just some really strange things that are going on there. And there's a push to try to get people off that. And I've just gotten older at my age. I just know that have kind of figured it out. Took me a long time, that man, sometimes what they're telling us isn't the truth. So but here in the state of Wyoming, we're getting to that point. Hunting season is starting. And good time of year here in our state. I love this time of year with the weather and such going. It gets a little bit cooler, but boy, I'll tell you, these Wyoming falls are just gorgeous. So if you're wanting to come and see the state, now's as good a time as ever before the leaves all start falling off. Crowds are definitely dwindled down as far as tourists. Of course, there's some hunters out, but they're in certain areas. But a good time to come visit and see what we have here in our state of Wyoming. It's a beautiful place and a great place to visit. And we sure invite you here anytime. In Wyoming Sports, just wanted to touch base again. I had mentioned the Cowboys, homecoming game. They came out on the short end of that game. UNLV came up with a two-touchdown win. Cowboys will be back in action again next Saturday night at 5 o'clock. They'll take on San Jose State. I think the Cowboys will have a little better chance of winning that game. Also here in the state of Wyoming. High school football is really starting to heat up. We're getting down to that end of the season, it's right around the corner, three weeks left. And then we'll get into the playoffs. And for the first time in quite some time, the Thermopolis Bobcats are looking like they are a contender. They were victorious on Friday against Cokeville. They are home for homecoming as they take on Lyman. And then the big game in the state will be the following Friday afternoon. They'll be back in Bridger Valley as they'll take on Mountain View. And that'll probably be the decider on who's the number one seed is out of the East and 2A 11-man football. So exciting times here in Hot Springs County. But as far as the rest of the sports, everything else is winding down. The golf and all the other sports are getting to that point. Volleyball is the same. They are getting down to a couple more weeks. They will at the end of the month of October will start their regionals. So everything is winding down as we prepare for that fun part of the year when we get into playoffs and these tournaments here in our state. And then around the corner after Thanksgiving, we'll start in on our winter season. So sports are active here in the state of Wyoming. If you're a fan here in the state of Wyoming, make sure you get out and support your local schools.org, and this was written by John W. Davis of Worland, Wyoming. On April 5th, 1892, 52 armed men rode a private secret train from Cheyenne just outside of Castle, Wyoming. They switched to horseback and continued north towards Buffalo, Wyoming, the Johnson County seat. Their mission was to shoot or hang seventy men on a list carried by Frank Canton, one of the leaders of this invading force. The invaders, as they came to be known, included one of the most powerful cattlemen in Wyoming, their top employee, and 23 hired guns. The invasion resulting from longstanding dispute between these cattle parents who owned herds, numbering in the thousands, and the small operators, most running just enough cattle to support their family. The event came to be called the Johnson County War. Longtime Wyoming historian T. A. Larson ranked it the most notorious event in the history of Wyoming. Numerous court records contain valuable information on the invasion, as do other government documents, especially land files. Most significantly, after the invasion, sometimes as many as forty years later, Cattlemen and their allies published writings containing emissions that suddenly shone a bright light on the contested issues. From this data, clear facts emerge from which the truth about the invasion and its cause can be determined. Johnson County newspaper date back to August of 1883 when no one in Johnson County conceived of future astonishing events, and those newspapers are full of candid appraisals of the community. A reading from the Johnson County newspaper quickly dispels the notion, stated in other Wyoming newspapers and others around the nation, that Buffalo was the most lawless town in the country or a haven for range pirates who mercifully sold big cattlemen's livestock. The cattle barons planned and organized and financed the invasion, declaring beforehand and afterwards that they had no choice but to take drastic actions to protect their property. They said they were the victims of massive cattle stealing in Johnson County, and local authorities were doing nothing to protect their herds. They further declared that Buffalo was a rogue society in which wrestlers controlled everything, politics, courts, and juries. Those juries, the cattle, Baron said, refused to convict on cattle wrestling charges, no matter how strong the evidence. Johnson County people, on the other hand, largely believed that the real reason for the invasion was the cattlemen's determination to drive competitors off the open range and that the stockmen illegally monopolized to stop those who might legally take up public land under the homestead and desert land acts. And Johnson County residents said that cattle rustling was greatly exaggerated, as were difficulties with prosecution for livestock crimes. The year of the invasion, 1892, was a time when many towns in Wyoming had two newspapers and a big town like Cheyenne had several, including three dailies. Two of those influential Cheyenne papers, however, were owned by cattle interest, as all Cheyenne papers were just a short while before 1892. Still the newspapers of the time were full of revealing information. Contrary to the cattle barons' portrayal, Buffalo was a town full of ambitious young people who worked hard to build up their community and make better lives for their families. Johnson County people were not saints, but they bore little resemblance to the picture of criminality later forwarded by big cattlemen. In 1880, the cattle barons in Johnson County and across Wyoming territories ruled their customary ranges like private fiefdoms. Most had little concept of the true carrying capacity of those ranges, however, and overstocked them. Cattle prices peaked in 1882, drawing more money to the business and more cattle to the land. Soon there was a beef glut. Prices began to fall, yet no one could think of anything to do but bring in even more cattle, weakening the ranges further and driving prices further down. Then a bad drought in 1886 was followed by the terrible winter of eighteen eighty six through eighty seven. Johnson County's newspapers show that the harsh winter, the Wyoming cattle industry, was in bad financial trouble, and that the owners of the big herds deeply resented those who might challenge their unfettered right to run their cattle on public land. Such a challenge could become deadly. That was the eighteen eighty nine fate of two homesteaders lynched near Sweetwater River in Carbon County by six cattlemen on july twentieth, eighteen eighty-nine. Ellen Watson and Jim Averell had homesteads in the middle of the cattle industry. Ellen Watson was known as Cattle Cade. Sensational newspaper articles appeared immediately after the lynching, betraying Watson as a prostitute, accepted cattle for her favor. These articles, however, were written by an employee of one of the Cheyenne's Dailies owned by cattle barons, and recent authoritative writings show they were false, created out of whole cloth. That same year of 1889, Johnson County juries acquitted suspects in five cattle theft cases. Big cattlemen reacted in fury, stating publicly and in private correspondence that the acquittals proved it was impossible to present evidence in Johnson County to a jury, no matter how compelling, that would produce a conviction. A close review of contemporary newspaper articles and court documents, however, show the case brought against the accused man to be deeply flawed, seemingly motivated by huge reward money and a frenetic determination by owners of big herds to punish owners of small herds who claim rights to grazing on public land. In 1891, several of the cattle barons resolved to take action against their tormentors. The first step was the formation of an assassinated nation squad of employees of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. This small group of men included Frank Canton, who we talked about last week, a former Johnson County Sheriff and a stock inspector of the association. Their first action was to hang a man from Newcastle, Wyoming, Tom Wagoner, who traded horses. They followed this with an attack upon Nate Champion. Champion was a small man with a reputation as a formable fighter. He ran a herd of about 200 cattle on one of the forks of the Powder River. Champion stock grazed on public land, exactly as did the animals of the big cattlemen. He insisted that his cattle had as much right to graze on public range as to the herd of the cattle barons. Legally, Champion was absolutely right, but the big cattleman did not take well to his defiance. He was declared king of the cattle thieves by a newspaper reporter sympathetic to the cattle barons, although no charges had ever been brought against him. Indeed, after the invasion, Willis Van Devanter, the astute attorney for the invaders, stated there was no evidence at all to substantiate charges of cattle theft against Champion. Still the prominent cattleman wanted to punish Nate Champion. In the early morning of november first of eighteen ninety one, members of the assassination squad burst into a cabin occupied Chapman and another man. The cabin was a tiny structure located next to the middle fork of the Powder River in the hole in the wall country, about fifteen miles southwest of what's now KC, Wyoming. Only two members of the five man squad were able to squeeze into the cabin. Those two, however, held pistols on the two captives and demand that Champion give up. Champion, he told the Buffalo Bulletin the next month, stretched and yawned while reaching under a pillow for his own revolver, and the shooting started. Intruders fired shots at point blank, so close that powder burns were left on Champion's face. Amazingly, all the shots missed were fired at him. Champion returned fire, however, did not. One of the squad members was hit in the arm and the other was shot in the belly, a mortal wound. The assassination squad fled, but not before Champion got a good look at one of them. Private and public investigations followed, and one of the assassination squad members was forced to admit the names of all the members before two witnesses. Those two witnesses were Powder River Rancher John A. Tisdale and perhaps Orley Ranger Jones of Johnson County authorities. They filed an attempted murder charge against Joe Elliott, the attacker identified by Nate Champion, and local newspapers pushed for charges against the wealthy and prominent cattlemen, I believe the employers of the assassination squad. About december first of eighteen ninety one, both Tisdale and Jones were assassinated. The killings created an uproar in Johnson County, and the movement to charge the higher ups became the whole trust of the community. The means to arrest and charge complicit cattlemen were at hand. If Johnson County could obtain a conviction against even one of the assassins, he would probably name his employers to avoid a long prison term. On February eighth, eighteen ninety two, a preliminary hearing was held in the case of State versus Elliot for the attempted murder of Nate Champion. Champion gave dramatic testimony and Joe Elliott, a stock detective of the Wyoming Stock Growth Association, was bound over for trial in the district court on the attempted murder charge. Johnson County attorneys had amassed a great deal of evidence against Elliot and, with Champion's testimony, seemed likely to convict him when his case came to trial. The big cattlemen promptly resolved in early March of 1892 to go north and invade Johnson County. One month later, the invaders left Cheyenne and traveled to Johnson County. When they arrived in the southern tip of the county, one of their local spies told him that rustlers, including Champion himself, were holed up in a cabin at the KC Ranch just a few miles north. The invading cattleman knew that with Champion's testimony, Johnson County had a strong case against Elliot, and upon Elliot's conviction, the trail would lead back to his employers. If Champion was not killed, these invaders would probably land in the penitentiary. After a long argument, the invaders took a vote. The decision was to go on to the Casey Ranch and kill him. They surrounded Champion. For hours he fought the fifty men, wounding three. Finally, during the middle of the afternoon of April 9th, 1892, the invaders torched the cabin, forcing him out and shooting him down. By then, however, the countryside had been alerted, and the men from all over the area rushed to confront the invaders. The invaders holed up south of Buffalo at the TA Ranch. There, they were surrounded by local citizens, a posse that eventually grew to more than four hundred men. The posse conducted a formal siege, no doubt led by the Civil War veterans among them. Over three days the posse slowly closed in on the invaders. On the morning of the third day, fourteen posse members started to move towards the TA ranch house using a ponderous, movable port called a Go Devil or Ark of Safety made of logs on the running gear of two wagons. The idea was then when the posse got close to the invaders' fortification, they would use dynamite to force invaders out into the open. The running gear came from the captured supply wagons of the invaders, which contained dynamite intended for use against the people of Johnson County. But the posse never got the chance to use these weapons. In the nick of time, soldiers from nearby Fort McKinney rode into the scene and took the invaders into custody. The governor of Wyoming, Amos Barber, had summoned the soldiers. Barber, according to accounts written years later by the invaders and their sympathizers, was thoroughly knowledgeable about and supportive of the invasion. When he learned that his cattlemen friends were in deep trouble, he telegraphed President Benjamin Harrison in Washington, D.C. When the telegram, for reasons that are unclear, failed to go through, Barber asked the two senators from Wyoming, Joseph Carey and Francis E. Warren, to go to the White House and pay a personal call on the president. Harrison was quickly convinced that there was an insurrection, as Barber's first telegraph had termed it, in Wyoming and agreed on a call to Fort McKinney's troops to suppress it. Once the invaders were taken into custody, however, Governor Barber assumed control over them and refused to even allow them to be questioned. The governor completely frustrated the investigation and prosecution of the invaders by Johnson County authorities. The costs were feeding and housing the prisoners, though still had to be paid by Johnson County, not to mention the substantial charges for preparation and presentation of criminal cases. The state provided no financial assistance, however. Predictably, a travesty of justice was played out eight months later in a Cheyenne courtroom. The charges against all invaders had to be dismissed because a jury could not be seated to try their case, and Johnson County did not have the funds to pay the continuing expenses of prosecution. The cattle barons were protected by their friendly judicial system, but that system would not protect these men from the Wyoming voters. The Republican Party was closely associated with the cattlemen and their principal organization, the Wyoming Stock Rowers Association. One of the two state U.S. senators, Republican Joseph Carey, had recently served as president of the association. Many Wyoming people were offended by the spectacle of the senator's late night personal visit to President Harrison to rescue the wrongdoers. The senator had rousted the president out of bed. The invaders and their supporters did everything they could in the months after the invasion to suppress Johnson County and its advocates, including mounting a feverent attempt to have martial law declared in the state. President Harrison, however, apparently made cautious when a great number of Wyoming people protested in the early actions refused to do that. In the eighteen ninety two election, it was a landslide in favor of the Wyoming Democratic Party. A Democrat was elected governor, another was elected to the U.S. Congress. At the time, U.S. Senators were still elected by state legislatures. Enough Democrats were elected to the Wyoming State Legislature that no Republicans could be selected for the U.S. Senate. Senator Francis E. Warren lost his seat. Still, the 1892 election hardly proved to be good to the Wyoming Democrats. Because of fears and resentment stirred up by the invasion, the eighteen ninety-three legislative session was as bitter and partisan as any in the history of the state. Democrats now controlled the Wyoming House, but Republicans retained control of the Senate. But the state's Democrats had made the mistake of running fusion tickets with the Wyoming Populist Party, and in the crunch found that the two parties could not operate well together. No Republican was sent to the U.S. Senate. But because of the political incompetence of the fusion coalition, no Democrat was either. For two years, Wyoming only had one senator during the U.S. Congress. In eighteen ninety-four, following the nationwide panic of eighteen ninety-three, Wyoming voters threw out the Democrats, the party in power during the economic catastrophe. Francis E. Warren was returned to the U.S. Senate in 1895 and served there for the next thirty four years. Despite mixed electoral results, there were permanent and positive changes in response to the Johnson County War. Wyoming people had made it abundantly clear by their votes and by their strong resolution to public officials reported in newspapers that they would not tolerate abuses like the invasion of Johnson County. Perhaps most significantly, the organization primary responsible for the Johnson County War, the Wyoming Stock Grocery. Association was changed forever, plagued by continued economic woes, the cattle barons in the association permanently altered this organization in 1893 when they opened their group to all stock growers in Wyoming. And what was a galling but necessary action, the small cattlemen of Wyoming vilified such a short while before were invited to join. This action abruptly halted the overwhelming hostility of the big cattlemen towards the smaller operators and stopped such programs as a compensation at the point of sale of suspected rustlers' cattle by the Wyoming Livestock Commission. After 1893, a measure of peace descended upon the Wyoming Range, although it wasn't until sixteen years later that armed economic vigilanteism was finally stopped in Wyoming. Cattlemen raiders, killing sheep and sheep herders, were convicted of serious crimes after the 1909 Spring Creek Raid south of Tinsleep, Wyoming, and were sent to the Wyoming Penitentiary. Wyomingites could finally claim to have put frontier mob rule behind them. Another outstanding story from wildhistory.org and well done by Mr. John Davis, it was a scarred time in our country and in our state, and I was watching yesterday on the new series 1923 that takes place in Montana. They had the same type of a situation in that series, but it was a difficult time in the West, but ultimately the people prevailed. We ended up with a actual functional Wyoming Stock Growers Association. 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.