Standard Oil No. 1 locomotive returning to Casper

The Nightcrawler. The train from Denver, Colorado, to Billings, Montana.

 

I had no idea that this is what this train was called.  Thanks go out to MKTH for letting me know!

I've been looking into local passenger train travel as part of my efforts with a novel.  What I found is that I knew very little about it.  Probably more than your average bear, but that's about it.  I'd long assumed that a person could board a train in Casper in 1916 and take the train to Douglas or Cheyenne, and then return that evening, but the more I looked into it, that was just an assumption.

I'm not the one who figured out how it really worked. That goes to MKTH.  the result is fascinating.

It turns out I was right sort of. The Burlington Northern ran a train from Denver Colorado, to Billings Montana, and vice versa, daily.  This article takes a look at it.

What I imagined, for novel purposes, was boarding in Casper, and traveling to Douglas.  I may, as I work at it, make it Cheyenne.

Union Station, Denver Colorado

Union Station, Denver Colorado

Union Station as viewed from in front of Denver's Oxford Hotel.

 

 

Anyhow, this is a really interesting article and give a really good look at what traveling on the Denver to Billings night train was like, complete with stops for food, which is something I hadn't considered.  It also picked up mail, and my source indicates, cream, something I also hadn't figured, but that may explain why the creamery my family owned was just one block from the Burlington Northern.  In fact it probably does.

Jersey Creamery Inc.

The trip took 19 hours.  It take 8 hours today by car, assuming good weather conditions, and not figuring in stops for food, etc.  The train moved about 34 miles an hour.

We'll look at the return trip first.  The train having come up from Cheyenne boarded there at 12:49 in the morning.  Uff.

It got to Casper at 6:20 in the morning, having made a couple of stops along the way.

Burlington Northern Depot, Casper Wyoming

What I imagined?  

Not really.  And I also had no idea that there was a major cafe right off the railroad.  This article deals with the early 1960s, but I can see that some variant of it was there decades prior.  That makes piles of sense, really.  Of course there would be.  How else would people eat if they were making the long journey?  

It simply hadn't occurred to me.

In my imaginary trip., that'd be it.  If I stuck with the Douglas variant of this, my protagonist would be boarding the train in the early, early morning hours and get in a couple of fitful hours of sleep, probably interrupted by a stop in little Glenrock.  Indeed, this train stopped everywhere to pick up mail, and a few passengers.

What about the other way around?

Well that was a day trip, but as we can see, the 19 hours the train traveled in total meat that it took a good 6.5 hours to travel just from Cheyenne to Casper.  Going the other way would mean the same thing, and likely a bit in reverse.  The 6.5 hour trip from Cheyenne to Casper was the second major leg of the trip (it'd still stop in numerous small towns in between), the first being Denver to Cheyenne.  Going the other way around meant that the Cheyenne to Denver leg was about five hours.  The article notes that the train actually arrived from Billings 40 minutes before its 7:00 p.m. departure.  So it arrived, more or less, at 6:00 p.m. and changed crews.  That would have meant that it left Cheyenne, on the way to Denver, at about 1:00 p.m. or so, which makes sense.  Passengers traveling all the way to Denver would have eaten lunch there.

By extension, however, that meant that the train left Casper at about 6;00 in the morning, approximately.

These times are almost unimaginable now.  When we had good air travel to Denver I'd frequently board United Express here about 6;00 a.m. and be in Denver about 8:30, and take the train downtown and be to work by 9.  I'd be back in Casper on the redeye about 10:00, or if I was lucky, 6:00.

And when I go to Cheyenne, I drive.  Normally that takes me a little under three hours.  I haven't stayed overnight in Cheyenne for years, although I recently had an instance which should really cause me to.

Anyhow, if I'm looking at 1916, why not just drive?

Well, in 1916 most Americans, including most Wyomingites, didn't own automobiles, and those who did, didn't normally make long trips with them.  They frankly weren't that reliable, even though they were simple.  Roads also tended to be primitive, and not really maintained for weather.  Could a person have driven from Casper to Cheyenne in a Model T, the most likely car they would have had?  Yes, but it wouldn't have been any faster.  It may well have been slower, quite frankly, as well as much riskier.

Lex Anteinternet: September 27, 1923. Disaster at Cole Creek.

Lex Anteinternet: September 27, 1923. Disaster at Cole Creek.: 

September 27, 1923. Disaster at Cole Creek.

Today In Wyoming's History: September 27: 1923  Thirty railroad passengers were killed when a CB&Q train wrecked at the Cole Creek Bridge, which had been washed out due to a flood, in Natrona County.  Attribution:  Wyoming State Historical Society.

It was a horrific event.

Flooding had taken out the railroad bridge over Cole Creek near Casper Wyoming, which was unknown to the railroad.   The night train to Denver approached the bridge on a blind curve, and the headlights detected its absence too late to stop the train.  Half of the people on the train were killed.

It's the worst disaster in Wyoming's railroad history.

Friday, September 28, 1923. The terrible news.

The news of the prior day was in the paper, much of it horrific locally.

Saturday, September 29, 1923. Mandates and Floods.

The British Mandate for Palestine went into effect, as did the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon.

With this, the British Empire, and I'd guess French Empire reached their maximum territorial extents.

The grim news kept coming in on the recent Cole Creek disaster.

Apparently the floods occured almost everywhere in Wyoming, and into Nebraska.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, July 15, 2023. Harding drives a golden spike.

Lex Anteinternet: Sunday, July 15, 2023. Harding drives a golden sp...: 

Sunday, July 15, 2023. Harding drives a golden spike.

Harding drove in a golden spike on the Alaska Railroad at Nenana, a town near Fairbanks.

Harding was really putting in the miles, and saw a great deal of Alaska during his trip, at a point in time at which it was fairly difficult to do so.

The most dangerous major airline in the world, Aeroflot, saw its birth when its predecessor, Dobrolet, began operations with a flight from Moscow to Nizhny.

Egypt banned its citizens from making the Hajj in reaction to the King of Hejaz barring an Egyptian medical mission which was part of it.  The latter was done as an assertion of sovereignty by the Kingdom, which was not long to remain.

Saturday, January 20, 1923. Canadian Northern Railway merged into Canadian National Railway.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, January 20, 1923. Children singing, rai...:   

The Canadian Northern Railway and the Canadian Government Railways merged into the Canadian National Railway.  The merger of the CNR and the CGR was forced by the government due to the financial failure of the CNR, although at one time the railroad had steamships as well as trains.

The CNN is one of the world's great railways, spanning all of Canada and the Eastern United States.

You'll note that the creation of this system is either an application of the American System of economics, albeit in Canada, or of Socialism. At one time the nationalization of railroads was not the controvery it would be now.

South Torrington Railroad Station, Torrington Wyoming (Homesteader's Museum).

Above is a fisheye view of the South Torrington Railroad Station.  I used this view as its a long station, and to get the entire station in otherwise I would have had to walk across the highway, which was busy.

This station is unusual in that it was designed by noted National Park lodge architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood in the Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival Style.  Originally built in 1926, it was extended in order to accommodate both passenger and freight service, with its original purpose being reflected in the fact that it remains right across the street from a sugar refinery.

As with so many other depots, this one is no longer used by the Union Pacific, but it's well-preserved and now used as the Goshen County Homesteader's Museum.

May 25, 1921. Road construction.

 Locomotive pulling cars, possibly during road construction.  May 25, 1921.

Lex Anteinternet: April 12, 1921 International hands off, and hands...

Lex Anteinternet: April 12, 1921 International hands off, and hands...:    This railroad disaster was photographed in Alaska:

Lex Anteinternet: November 23, 1920. Empires

Lex Anteinternet: November 23, 1920. Empires: 

November 23, 1920. Empires

* * *

Anchorage Alaska, which had been founded in 1915, was incorporated.

Anchorage was, and is, as the name indicates a port city.  And today its a large one, much like any other large port city, all of which have a certain universal character.  It was also, however, right from the onset a railhead, which made it all the more important.

Lex Anteinternet: October 5, 1920. World Series begins, Russo Polish War ends, Railway reopens

Lex Anteinternet: October 5, 1920. World Series begins, Russo Polis...: 

October 5, 1920. World Series begins, Russo Polish War ends, Railways reopen.

 The 1920 World Series started on this day, in 1920.

Crowd in Ebbets Field.

Cleveland won the first game, 1 to 0.

New York City Mayor John Hylan throws ball to open World Series at Ebbets Field

Poland and the Soviet Union signed an armistice to end the fighting between their countries.  Fighting would stop on October 18.

In Egypt, the American University in Cairo opened.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, a new railroad opened up.  Or rather a rebuilt raiilway.

The opening of the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway was attended, as all such things were, by the senior British official.

The line had originally been a narrow gauge railway, but  the British reconstructed it to a new, more useful, wider gauge.

While it has been closed from time to time, updates and reconstructions have meant that the rail line remains in use today.

Lex Anteinternet: August 1, 1920. Denver Tramway workers go on strike.

Lex Anteinternet: August 1, 1920. Denver Tramway workers go on strike.:

August 1, 1920. Denver Tramway workers go on strike.

Denver Tramway Building in Denver, which now houses the giant Denver REI outlet.

Workers for Denver Tramway, the cities streetcar company, went on strike on this day in 1920.

Founded in 1886, Denver Tramway had expanded aggressively and become a monopoly in the city.  Its workers founded a union in 1918 and were demanding fare increases in order that their wages could be raised.  Denied their goal, they went out on strike on this day.

 Cable car barn on 14th and Arapahoe.

The company responded by bringing in strike breakers, with the first street car piloted from the cable car barn at 14th and Arapahoe by strike breaker John "Black Jack" Jerome, whom the company had hired to organize strike breakers.  The strike would soon turn violent and up to 1/3d of the cities police reported by August 6 to have received serious injuries.  Denver's mayor called for armed citizens to enforce the peace on that day and Federal troops arrived later that day and restored order.

Cheyenne State Leader from August 1, 1920, noting that strike breakers were being brought in.

The net result was that the union was broken and would not be reorganized until 1933.  Seven Denverites were dead, all of whom were in the nature of bystanders to the violence.

Jerome, who was born Yiannis Petrolekas in Greece, would go on to have a successful career in his dangerous profession.  A poor immigrant to the US who had arrived in 1905, he had first sought his fortune in aviation but in 1917 he changed his name and founded the Jerome Detective Agency.  Having worked in the streetcar industry, he offered its services to strike and union breaking, which made him a rich man.  His company expanded during this time and at one time even employed Dashiell Hammett, prior to his becoming famous.

He invested in real estate and, during the depression, in horse and dog racing.  In 1933 he returned to Greece a rich man, while still retaining business interests in the United States.  He died in San Francisco in 1953, his funeral delayed as an undertakers union went on strike in protest over his having broken a strike of theirs in prior years.

Lex Anteinternet: June 2, 1920. Ships and faraway places.

Note hte engine on the far left:

Lex Anteinternet: June 2, 1920. Ships and faraway places.:

June 2, 1920. Ships and faraway places.

Workmen posing before the launch of the USS Neches, Boston Navy Yard, June 2, 1920.  The ship was an oiler that would serve for 22 years until sunk by the Japanese submarine I-72 on January 23, 1942.

On the same day a Shia revolt commenced in Iraq.  Known as the Great Iraqi Revolt, the revolution would run its course for months before the British were able to put it down.  The British would deploy aircraft using air delivered poisonous gas during the war and at least 8,000 Iraqi lives were lost during the conflict, as well as 500 British lives.

The United States Congress rejected the proposal that the country engage in a League of Nations mandate over Armenia.

Lex Anteinternet: May 29, 1920. Good Roads Week.

Lex Anteinternet: May 29, 1920. Good Roads Week.:

May 29, 1920. Good Roads Week.

First East Bay Ship by Truck Tour, May 17-22, 1920, Robert W. Martland, Train Commander.  Copyright deposit, May 29, 1920.  Not juxtaposition next to railroad. . . a sign of things to come.  The five day tour, which included military and civilian trucks, was part of Good Roads Week.

Lex Anteinternet: March 1, 2020. Railroads Revert To Civilian Control.

Lex Anteinternet: March 1, 2020. Railroads Revert To Civilian Contro...:

March 1, 2020. Railroads Revert To Civilian Control, Caroline Lockhart hits the Screen.

On this day in 1920, the railroads, which had been taken over by the U.S. Government during World War One reverted to civilian control.



The country's rail had been nationalized during the war and then run by the United States Railroad Administration as the system was proving to not be up to the tasks that were imposed upon it due to the crisis of World War One.  Additionally, concerns over pricing and labor unrest called for the action.  Following the war there was some serious consideration given to retaining national control over the lines, which labor favored, but in the end the government returned the system to its owners.

While U.S. administration of the railroad infrastructure was a success, it was not repeated during the Second World War when the rail system was just as heavily taxed by an even heavier wartime demand.  There proved to be no need to do it during World War Two.



Not too surprisingly, the news featured prominently on the cover of Laramie's newspapers, as the Laramie was, and is, a major Union Pacific Railroad town.

Union Pacific Depot in Laramie, Wyoming.

On the same day a movie featuring Wyoming as the location (which doesn't mean it was filmed here), was released.

The 1916 vintage Burlington Northern depot in Casper, Wyoming.

Likewise, the reversion was big news to the double railhead town of Casper.

Former Great Northwestern Depot in Casper.

The Fighting Sheperdess was the story of just that, a fighting female sheep rancher was was struggling to keep her sheep ranch against raiding cattlemen.

In reality, the sheep wars in Wyoming had largely come to an end by this time, although it was definitely within living memory.  The Spring Creek Raid of 1909 had only been a decade prior, and there had been two more raids in 1911 and 1912, although nobody had been killed in those two latter events.  The peace was, however, still an uneasy one, perhaps oddly aided by a massive decline in sheep, which still were vast in number, caused by economic conditions during the 1910s.  By 1914, the number of sheep on Wyoming's ranges had been cut 40% from recent numbers. World War One reversed the decline, and then dumped the industry flat, as the war increased the demand for wool uniforms and then the demand suddenly ended with the end of Germany's fortunes.  Colorado, however, would see a sheep raid as late as this year, 1920.



The novel the movie was based on was by author, Caroline Lockhart, a figure who is still recalled and celebrated in Cody, Wyoming.

Illinois born Lockhart had been raised on a ranch in Kansas and was college educated.  She had aspired to be an actress but turned to writing and became a newspaper reporter in Boston and Philadelphia before moving to Cody, Wyoming in 1904 at age 33, where she soon became a novelist.  During the war years she relocated to Denver, but was back in Cody shortly thereafter, until she purchased a ranch in Montana, showing how successful her writing had become.  She ranched and wrote from there, spending winters in Cody until she retired there in 1950.  She passed away in 1962.



The Fighting Shepherdess was her fifth of seven published novels, the last being published in 1933.

Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...

Linked in due to the reference to rail transportation, and in case I'm wrong on that and can otherwise be corrected if so.



Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...:

Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

The last garden I put in, 2017.

Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago.

The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

I've touched on this here in the past, but one thing that's very much different from our current, refrigerated, freezer, grocery store frozen food, transportation directly from Mexico, world, is the way we eat.



And by that I don't mean the latest wacky food fetish (you know, don't eat that, eat this, no don't, no do, um,. . . ).



No, I mean that it varied seasonally, by necessity.  And beyond that the seasons dictated to a certain extent what you ate at all.



On prior entries here you'll find photographs of  grocery stores with signs painted on them noting that they "bought vegetables".  Indeed, at the courthouse in Sheridan Wyoming there's a great photograph of downtown Sheridan in its early days with a store painted on its side with that it "buys and sells" vegetables.  I.e, it was doing the locavore thing by necessity.



Indeed, that local produce history, dimly remembered and somewhat inaccurately recalled, is one of the founding mythic memories of the Locavore movement, that movement which, as an environmental ethos, demands that you "eat local".

Pueblo Indian, 1890, living the lifestyle I would, were it an option.

I'm not dissing this.  Indeed, in my imaginary world in which I get to live just the way I'd want to, I'd be one of those guys who ate local as much as possible.  I'd put in a big garden every year and for meat I'd eat the fish, fowl and game animals I shot during the year.  Yes, I'd go full 1719 if I had the option.

Shoot, I might even brew my own beer.



My wife, who doesn't want to live in 1719, and prefers 2019, keeps this from occurring, although in years past I have put in a big garden (I'm on year two right now of a well failure I haven't addressed) and as we raise beef, we have a lot of grass fed beef that appears on our table.  But the idea remains attractive.



Anyhow, one thing about having in the past having sort of lived that lifestyle, first by necessity and then by design, and because I'm a student of history as well as everything else, I know that the concept of "eating local" isn't quite what a person might suspect, if they really apply it.



That's because you have to eat local, based on where you live.

"Modern Street Market", 1920s.

And that's at least partially what almost everyone did, in varying degrees, up until the 1950s.



Put another way, people had fresh vegetables in the summer and fall, as that's when they were available.

Let's consider the humble cabbage.



Cabbage probably isn't your favorite vegetable (I like cabbage, but my wife really dislikes it).  But cabbage doesn't keep all winter.  Planted in the spring, it's ready to eat about 80 days later. So that makes it available sometime in late spring or early summer depending up where you live.  And a lot of places it would be available all summer long into the fall.  But once it started to frost, that would be it.



So here, if you planted it, it would be first available in June, and last in September.  That's it.



You can't keep it after that.



And this would be true of most fresh vegetables.  You'd have them when they first matured.  If they are a crop like cabbage, lettuce or spinach that you can keep growing, you'd have them all summer.  If they were a crop like corn, peas, green beans or peppers, they'd be ready and fresh just once.  In some places, you'd get a second crop in, in others, not.



Well what about after that?



Just truck it in, right?



Well, not so much.



In 1919 the road system, as we've seen, did not allow for transcontinental transportation of fresh produce.  Indeed, an irony of the road system in the country is that it had deteriorated as the railroad system was so good.



Of course that would mean that shipping by rail was an option.  It had certainly been done for meat, and beer, in refrigerated rail cars dating back to the mid 19th Century.  I can find no evidence, however, that it was done with vegetables, and there's probably reasons for that.



If it was done, it was apparently not done much, but I'll take correction on that.



So no vegetables in the winter?



No, that was not the case at all.  It's just that they were not, as the item noted, "fresh".

1918 poster urging people to turn their backyards into gardens.

For one thing, canning was already a thing, both commercial canning, which was common, and home canning, which was also common. So you could buy canned vegetables all year around.  And this time of year thousands of people. . . mostly women, were busy canning their own garden produce.

Poster urging home canning from World War One.

The process for canning had been worked out in the mid 1800s, and it spread fairly quickly, in part due to armies picking it up to feed their troops in the big wars of the 19th Century.  One thing armies did, I'd note, is to can meat as well, in British parlance "potted meat", which few average people do, but the mother of my father in law did in fact do just that, the only individual person I've ever known to do that.

Famine was a real specter in World War One and World War Two. This Second World War urged home canning to combat it.

I'll be frank that home canning scares me and my family never did it, for which I'm thankful.  I'm not afraid of canned anything at the store, and I'm rather fond of some canned items, but home canning always makes me a bit queasy.  Too many stories, perhaps, that I heard as a child.  Anyhow, home canning was still widely practiced when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, again all by women.  I know very few people who do it now.

This World War Two era poster urged growing more at home and canning.

My parents always froze some of their garden crop.  But this wasn't an option for people a century ago.  People didn't have home freezers like so many do now.  For that matter, the overwhelming majority of people had an ice box.  Refrigerators weren't a common thing at the time.

Exceptionally nice ice box.  Most homes didn't have one this large or elaborate.

We've dealt with this before, but ice boxes kept stuff cool, not frozen, and had to be regularly replenished with ice for that purpose.  People were still using ice boxes into the 1950s although their days were rapidly waning then.  At any rate, suffice it to say, if you could only keep things cool at home, you clearly had no means of keeping things frozen. No frozen vegetables at any time of the year in 1919.

Some vegetables keep a long time, however, if kept correctly.  Potatoes, for example, keep a really long time.  I've kept potatoes that were harvested in September or October all the way through until late February or March, when I was nearly ready to plant the next crop.  

That emphasizes why a crop like potatoes was such a big deal at one time.  They keep.  And a potato that's kept isn't much different in February, if kept properly, than it was in October.  "Meat and potatoes" weren't a staple as people lacked imagination or something.  You could have potatoes with your meat pretty much all year long.  And there's a few other crops in this category.

Additionally, some crops dry well. Beans are one, and so do peas.  Cowpeas (Cow Peas) were an 18th Century staple.  You probably know them by the name "Black Eyed Peas". Still a popular food in the United States, particularly  the South, they are a food staple in some parts of the world.



Other legumes and beans keep dried really readily as well.  The old jokes you hear associated with cowboys and soldiers about repeatedly eating beans are based on the fact that they keep and transport readily.  If you are on the trail, flour and beans are easy keepers. So "biscuits and beans" and "bacon and beans" would have been common foods out of necessity.



So during the summer you'd eat fresh heart vegetables, right?



Well, yes.  At least they were available during the summer most places.  If you were far enough south, they'd be available all year long.



But that's only part of the story.