In January 1913, 110 years ago this month, old and new political animosities in Wyoming’s House of Representatives exploded into an actual fistfight. Blows were swapped, chairs were thrown and glass was broken when, reportedly, a framed picture smashed over the head of a lawmaker. At issue was a crucial question—who was the rightful speaker of the House?

It began when the elected speaker left the chair at a tense moment to join the debate. When he tried to regain it, the speaker pro tempore (the temporary speaker) refused to give up the gavel. The elected speaker dragged the speaker pro tem and his chair from the dais, the chair fell on top of the speaker pro tem—and that’s when the fighting really began.

Lighted candles warmed what may well have been Wyoming’s first decorated Christmas—before there was a Wyoming. The candles are a German tradition—they’re part of the winter warmth and light that the carol “O Tannenbaum” recalls. At Christmas 1859, a lighted tree filled most of a small log building on Deer Creek, about two miles upstream from creek’s mouth at present Glenrock, Wyo. 

Packed closely around were some army officers, a Native family and a few German Lutheran missionaries. Missionary Moritz Braeuninger read from the scriptures. Capt. W.F. Raynolds, his officers and the Indians, at least as shown in a sketch by one of the missionaries, all listened closely. The Oregon Trail ran nearby. Downstream at the mouth of Deer Creek on the North Platte was a busy stage station and trading post.

Government exploration, Indian business and high hopes had brought these people together. Raynolds was leading a small, two-year expedition of soldiers and civilian scientists from the U.S. Topographical Engineers to explore regions drained by the Yellowstone River, and had come down to the North Platte from the Yellowstone as winter was closing in. In 1857, a group of Mormons had begun building a stage and freight depot on the site for a planned West-wide operation to be owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Later that year, as the U.S. Army marched toward Utah to re-establish federal control there, the Mormons abandoned the place.

By Brian Beauvais
When I first read about the open-range cattle ranchers of the Bighorn Basin, Otto Franc’s name always came up. Usually, however, details were frustratingly few. The same facts were batted about, largely devoid of insights into who the man actually was and how he lived his life.

Primary sources relating to the activities of folks in the Bighorn Basin rarely mentioned Franc, unlike some of his neighbors. It seems some of the early ranchers on the Wyoming frontier could be as flamboyant and showy as any of their urban counterparts. But it appears Otto Franc mostly kept his head down and focused on his ranch. This made him hard to truly pin down.

By James H. Nottage
The Lowery Music Studio in Laramie during the late 1950s and early 1960s was actually our living room on 15th street. There, our mom offered player pianos and organs for sale and gave music lessons on piano and accordion. I remember stacks and stacks of sheet music hidden under the hinged lids of piano benches. The music and its colorful covers represented all kinds of styles and tastes from the greater American song book. As a child, I was fascinated.

If we could explore the layers of sheet music in any piano bench of the past, what could we find? They’d surely tell something of the pianist’s household. What composers, styles of music and performers are present? What tastes are here? Does some of the music appear well-worn and is some seemingly untouched? Are there clues to who promoted the music or maybe where it was bought? Does any of the music come from other cultures? Can we imagine someone playing the music for recitals, family gatherings or just plain fun?

By Kylie McCormick
Last Saturday, I led a conversation about race at the Campbell County Library in Gillette, Wyo. The conversation occurred in the context of a three-part workshop focusing on the preconditions of the Holocaust and the bystanders during the genocide, but conversations like this often reach beyond that specific history and into our own personal experiences. I was fortunate to have a generous audience, among them one Native American man who shared his agreement with me about the intrinsic value in connecting with people who share something with you—like a culture, language or history.

This month is Native American Heritage Month. It seems to me, when I look at the history of these national celebrations—Black History Month, for example—I find the people who started them did so because they saw value in celebrating a group’s distinct cultures and history. The idea behind Native American Heritage Month started in 1912 when Dr. Arthur C. Parker of the Seneca Nation convinced the Boy Scouts of America to celebrate a “First Americans” Day. Soon, the idea of celebrating all their diverse cultures and shared history gained support among other American Indians. In 1912, the Congress of the American Indian Association began petitioning the federal government for the day to be nationally recognized. Finally, in 1990, President George H.W. Bush designated November to be National Native American Heritage Month, and since then each president as kept the tradition.

Weather can kill: Anyone living in tornado or hurricane country knows this. Blizzards, too, can kill, as ranchers know well from Wyoming’s spring snowstorms. But when city people drive reliable cars on the highway in the wintertime, perhaps we are somewhat less attuned to the dangers of cold and snow.

By Kylie McCormick
Dick Blust’s latest WyoHistory.org article, “Three Photos, a Murder and a Murky Outcome,” opens with a scene familiar to anyone working in the museum and visitor center field: a visitor’s question, shining a light down a research rabbit hole just begging you to follow along. The story uncovered by the staff at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum started with a simple question, “Who are the women in this photograph?” 

I’ve been lucky to work behind the front desk of an interpretive center. Some questions you get every day, and you share the answers like you are walking a visitor down a well-worn trail. Other questions lead to unfamiliar trails that have been well worn by others, and still other questions lead to rabbit holes. Blust’s rabbit hole led him to a story of a difficult marriage set against the backdrop of difficult reservation politics. Was George Terry murdered for how he treated his wife, Kate Enos, or was he assassinated for helping to open Indian lands to white settlement? 

By Rebecca Hein
Impractical decisions, made by men thousands of miles away from the relevant location, are a feature of the history of the American West. So it was with surveying the land in a grid. Government surveyor Billy Owen, working in the 1880s, found the country in central Wyoming “generally rolling with some hilly and mountainous land.”

Not the simplest job to survey, perhaps, and an issue I didn’t think about for many decades. In the 1980s, flying between Chicago and Denver, I saw a mostly flat grid below, stretching for miles, and thought vaguely about an orderly network of county roads. The consequences of laying a grid over the rugged mountains of the West didn’t occur to me.

Heavy stones set in concrete may seem permanent, yet as I’ve been researching Wyoming’s historical markers and monuments, I’ve found they can surprise you—by jumping rivers, say, or clinging to bygone roads.

When I first started to investigate the story around Wyoming’s Oregon Trail Commission (1914-1923), I assumed the placement of monuments would be obvious: on the Oregon Trail. But debates that emerged in the correspondence I read proved me wrong. The initial placement of a monument or marker depended on old-timers locating certain forts or battle fields or how close a road or access point was to the trail being marked. Typically, they attempted to put the marker right next to the trail or historic site. Occasionally, though, I would find a marker located off the trail but close to the highway for those just passing through to take notice. After all, what good is a marker that no one stops to see?

By Rebecca Hein
Why would a man portrayed as respectable participate in a lynching? For years I didn’t think about this, although the question had been floating in front of me since childhood, when I read and re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series.

In 2014, at age 58, I read lawyer/historian John Davis’ WyoHistory.org article on the 1909 Spring Creek Raid, a bloody episode in which seven cattlemen killed three sheep ranchers, kidnapped two others and slaughtered sheep and sheep dogs near Spring Creek south of Ten Sleep, Wyo. This led me to Davis’ book, Goodbye, Judge Lynch. In this book I learned that White-on-White lynchings were common on the American frontier, sometimes even after a criminal justice system had been established.