Welcome And Today’s Lineup

Good morning and welcome to Let's Talk Wyoming. I'm Mark Hamilton, your host. Today we'll be taking a look at our weather, our windy, unusual weather. We'll be talking about data centers. We'll be talking about other happenings here in the state of Wyoming, maybe our state park. And today we'll finally close world history from a female perspective of a photographer that captured Wyoming. Thanks for joining us. Hope you enjoyed the show. Take a look at Wyoming weather. We are on the 13th day of April. Hope everyone had a joyous Easter. We are here in the state of Wyoming. We are, I would say this is exactly spring weather right now. Right now, today we were in the 50s and 60s, wind with clouds and wind and cool down and warm up a little bit, and just a regular spring day. The winds are what I keep to harping on those and keep bringing that up, but the winds are what has been the biggest issue at this point. I made a trip down to Cheyenne. Coming back, the last two times I've came back from Cheyenne, the winds have been just gale force, 75 mile an hour winds. And this time there were storms that were in the area, and there was these 40 to 45 mile an hour winds all the way. That's what it's been here in Hot Springs County, just a lot of wind. And a lot of wind. Every time they put it in the forecast for potentially a little bit of moisture, it just doesn't seem to happen. Waiting to see on the weekend. We are expecting some snow on Friday, Thursday, Friday. And I did see a temperature's getting down to 17 degrees overnight. That is just crazy. I'm gonna have to shut my water off so everything doesn't freeze up. But snow, nothing in the way of rain, and I'm waiting to see if that will actually materialize. The thing is, what little bit of moisture we do get with these winds blowing continuously, it's just really hard out there. Now my trees are what I'm worried about are getting these real cold temperatures. A lot of the fruit trees are been blooming. The lilacs have never looked better, but my cottonwood still acted like two months ago they were gonna bloom out, and they're acting like I don't know what they're gonna do. Has me a little bit of concern, and I'm just getting ready to start planting some stuff in the garden area. It is goofy, folks. It's goofy, but again, that's what we're here for with our weather. Right now, I didn't see any fires. We've been under red flag warnings across the state, with again with the wind and the dry conditions. So Wyoming weather looks like it's spring, and I guess all you can do here and think about, I guess, maybe go fishing and join the crowd here in Hot Springs County, the fly capital, fly fishing capital, I should say, of the state of Wyoming here in Hot Springs. I noticed that another new fly shop is opened up down by the stoplight. I don't know where all these guys are coming from. But boy, they're stacking up here, and everywhere you look there's a drift boat here in town. I never thought we'd see the day, but boy, it's happening. They're gonna wear those fish out in the river. The amount of times they're gonna catch those fish. Bighorn River. I've seen the fishing pick up in the canyon. Seems like more people are hitting that canyon, and maybe that's just from the issue with so many people on the lower portion. Canyon, you have to have a tribal permit to fish. Most people are fishing from along the bank and wading and stuff, and it's some pretty hard country to I don't know about country, but it's hard ground to get around in with all the rock, and it's it's kind of a difficult access there, but there are some big trout, and there people I've talked to have gone in there. So, but it costs you know the money, and so most of the people are coming in and going from the wetting of the waters through and around through Thermopolis, and even uh part of the river downstream of the state park is gets fished pretty heavy too. People say there's some pretty good trout on that end. So I know the state is busy, busy, busy stalking the river, keeping it up and going. So, but state of Wyoming, just like everywhere else around right now, just in spring weather, you never know from day to day what it's gonna be. We'll just wait to see what happens tomorrow. And other news we have talked about here in Hot Springs County, about Hot Springs County Park, the Hot Springs County Park. It's been a big tourist destination for quite a while with the mineral pools. We are the home of the world's largest mineral hot springs. And in the park, if you're not familiar with it, we did have two swimming pools that was strictly hot water. The bathhouse, state bathhouse, I should say. Now that is an agreement that was set up with the tribe back when they ended up uh selling the park, that they would always have a free bathhouse in the state. So that state bathhouse is free, but the other two with the mineral water. Star Plunge has been closed for over a year now, and did see the uh report come out, and the question's been what's going on, because it said that they're gonna have a loan concession there come in and redo everything in the park. And they did put the announcement in the paper that the state had approved and set aside three million dollars state to buy the star plunge and also the Hot Springs Hotel. The old holiday in Days In has changed its names, but to buy those facilities. So waiting to see what's going to happen there, but they have approved it, so I guess it's a matter I did see at the Motel Hotel Hot Springs Hotel, the Safari Club. If you're not familiar with that, the previous owner, Jim Mills, was an avid hunter and went overseas and and had quite a collection of mounts in there. And they were gonna have an auction on those that's coming up. That'll be interesting to see how that goes. A lot of things are happening, but they did confirm that they have$3 million set aside by the state to come in and buy those facilities. And then I guess the new concessionaire is gonna go ahead and run them. I don't know how that's gonna work, but it's gonna be an interesting time. But again, it's always a change we have. So fly fishing, and we'll see what happens with the state park. Teepee pool is still open, but it doesn't have, didn't have, I should say, as many uh clients that uh people that would actually go there on a regular basis. They always like the star better. So now with this, the one pool going. So there's always an article in the paper on Facebook about the star plunge and what's going to end up happening. I know there's a lawsuit that the current owner has with the state, so a lot of things are happening there. So we'll see what happens. Keep you guys up on that here in Hot Springs County. Other things that was down, I said, in Laramie County, which is Cheyenne, Wyoming. And it is, I didn't get haven't been around as much, and I've talked about data centers before. I know people have you heard me, I've I've told people to take a look at data centers. And if you start looking across the country, I've been doing a pretty good dive into this. And across the United States, there's communities that are rejecting these data centers and the impact that they're having on properties, the noise, the emissions, the just the overall cause of uh electricity rates to go up, water rates going up, having a pretty big impact on a lot of areas. And I'd said about the new one they're building in Cheyenne, I did not realize, and that's how they've snuck those things in here under the radar. There's 22 data centers of some form or another in Laramie County. And went south of Greeley Highway, and there's one that they're building there, and then they cut across over the interstate. There's another humongous one going up. And of course, they're putting in a big solar farm in that area. And of course, in that whole area, you can see the windmills everywhere. And it is, I don't know, I I think if I'm living down there, I always start having some concerns. I know they're gonna take and uh have to generate power. Uh tall gas is coming in and gonna generate um power. But you know, that's all gonna be turbine-driven of some variety. Got to have something to spin those generators to generate power. And I'm sure it's gonna be some type of a turbine um situation burning the fuel. And but that there's emissions on it no matter what, even though it natural gas is great. But I don't know how that's gonna impact this long term with all this natural gas going into these data centers. I did see a piece where a farmer was talking about in the panhandle of Texas down by Amarillo, big content country, was talking and that he was worried about the aquifer because those are just megalithic. Those are just unbelievable size data centers they're putting in. And down there they're talking about putting in a nuclear plant so they can generate enough power. And they a figure I heard across the country, there's been 47 of them that have been put to kibosh by the local city councils and just people protesting. So I'm just a little concerned. We're kind of sitting here in the state of Wyoming. I'm sure even the people in Cheyenne don't realize it, but you get around and they said that they have to get some low-cost or affordable housing, and what they're building down there is just apartments after apartments. They're everywhere and new construction of apartments. So who's living in those? And that's gonna be mainly the workers and people that are coming. They're probably gonna have crews down there putting in data centers from now until the end of time, the way they're acting. But the rest of the community, they are the the price of housing is just through the roof down there. It's comparable to Colorado now. And I don't really don't know who's uh buying these homes with the prices down there. And but again, of course, you get into a government area with the state government and all the offices there and the proximity to Colorado and such. I don't know. I'm a little concerned as a Wyoming resident. I really think that these data centers across the country, if you watch it, i i it's really concerning where they're going with these things. And I don't see like down there they've talked about jobs. And I did see one place where they said they might have 10 jobs, but there are probably gonna be people from out of state that would come work there full-time after they get it up and running. But we're spending and giving all this tax relief. We're we're gonna take and uh maybe affect our water, electrical power, emissions, and such. Is it gonna be worth it to what we're getting out of this? It's just kind of this high-tech running stuff over and running people over. So, data centers, I was just shocked. I'm gonna keep on top of it and report back to everybody as I come across this. Hopefully, I'm gonna try to get a little bit more information where I can come up with some hard figures for everyone. But data centers, again, I'm a broken record. Keep your eyes on them because they sure don't put a lot of information out. They'll put it out, but they'll put it in spots where you really don't catch it. And just like the data center, the one, the newest one that they've got, came out with another article, which I barely caught, that they're actually gonna double the size of it from what they originally said. And I'm sure this is a standard practice that they come in and say it's gonna be this size. No, it's gonna be great. Don't have to worry about water or electrical power, we're gonna generate it there, that type of stuff. But they're gonna have to have some type of electrical backup. They're not gonna be able to run the place without being tied into the grid. There's just no way that they're gonna be able to do that. So those turbines are gonna have to shut down, they're gonna have to have redundancy. If not, they're gonna have to have quite a quite a fleet uh overbuilt to be able to shut stuff down for maintenance to still continue the facility running. When you look out there, we're ruining our country, we're ruining our our beautiful state with windmills, windmills, solar panels, and data centers. Today we were looking at a story by Laura Van Pelt, and it's Laura Webb Nichols, an eye on the early Wyoming. And I thought this was pretty appropriate where she was a photographer talking about capturing Wyoming. Abo gave Laura Webb Nichols a camera for her sixteenth birthday in 1899, but her father forbade her to use it at first. He didn't much care for the man who was fourteen years older than Laura. Eventually, though, he softened and allowed not only her to take photographs, but gave miner 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 faithful diary keeping and her penchant for saving things, resulted in a rich collection of historical items that continue to provide information and insight into the upper North Platte Valley at the turn of the 20th century. 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 eighth 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. Webb 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. Laura began keeping a diary as a school project in 1897 when she was thirteen years old. Nancy F. Anderson, a close friend of the Nichols family, and author of Laura Webb Nichols' Homesteader's Daughter, Miner's Bride, relied 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, sayings, and excerpts from longer works which were to guide her improvement. Laura loved to read and mention Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens in her diary. She recorded social events like dances and personal information as well. Laura considered may twentieth, eighteen ninety-seven a red letter day because the Nicholas a red letter day because the Nicholas's returned to the ranch or encampment 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 eighteen ninety-three, her father had sold his cattle and left the ranch in a relative's care. 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 twelve dollars 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 a return to Wyoming, Laura met Bert Oldman, a miner who came from the Colorado Springs area in March of eighteen ninety nine. He turned thirty in August and gave her the special gift of the camera in October for his sixteenth 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 nineteenth, eighteen ninety-nine. 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's married at her parents' house on October fifteenth, nineteen hundred, a few days before her seventeenth birthday. Anderson explained that Laura's professional years are difficult to pinpoint because she was already being paid for taking photography being paid for taking photographs when she married Bert Oldman. Prospectors asked her to take photographs of their prospect holes. The Oldmans had a son, Albert Horace, born November 21, 1902. Laura noted that the local doctor had given her chlorophyll and wrote of childbirth. I tell you it was a snap. Even so, she had to stay in bed for five days. Daughter Sylvia was born two years later. Laura also recorded a diary of November 4, 1904, that she voted for the first time. I felt very important being a voter, she wrote. Laura divorced Bert. 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, 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. Although she was the editor and publisher of the Encampment Echo from 1925 to 1930, Anderson said that there was very little love. 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. 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 at 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 Rebecca's, and the Presbyterian Church. She also enjoyed history and was active in both the state and county chapters of the Historical Society. Anderson said she considered Laura Sugar Bowl 1930 portraits of civilian conservation corpse men 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 hemmed it up for her sitting on the stools at the counter and pretending that their soft drinks were bare. The very complex negative collection included photographs taken by Laura. Laura, as well as some by 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 who 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 to house her photographs, and possibly just that she was personally driven to keep things. All of 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 photo Her photographs include many portraits, Anderson said, explaining that Laura's work actually documented the life of the town, area ranchers, and the coming of the railroad. The photographs, together with her diary and the local newspaper that Laura saved, as well as her memoirs, I remember, which concluded in nineteen oh five, created a vivid picture of every aspect of the Upper Platte River Valley. From the early days until Laura's departure in the nineteen thirties. When Laura left for California for health reasons in nineteen thirty five, 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, 1962. Both she and Guy are buried in the Mountain View Cemetery, a few miles east of encampment. 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 Laura carried the extra cameras because she said you never know when there's gonna be an elephant down the street. Another great story. And it is amazing to see so many of the women of that period that really made an impact here in our state. 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.