Holiday observances across Wyoming Merry or subdued, depending on the year
Laramie parents are no doubt trying to promote a merry 2020 holiday season, particularly for the children in the family who have been especially deprived with separation from classmates and missing out on school holiday events.
We may think that this year will be a “downer” but compared to the difficulties of being cheerful in some holidays past, there may be more room for optimism for us. In my sample of Wyoming December newspapers, editors try to be upbeat for the holidays, no matter what the circumstances, but some years are exceptions.
Early observations
Santa Claus was first mentioned in the Cheyenne Leader of Dec. 11, 1868, along with a list of toys that included “toy whips, china doll heads, rubber babies and harmonicas.” Chanukah was also first mentioned in the Leader, with a December 13, 1906 story from New York that spelled it “Hanukah.” In 1911 another Leader Chanukah story appeared on Dec. 16, reporting that “nearly the entire Jewish population of Cheyenne will observe this holiday during the next week.”
In 1876, the Leader also made first mention of the Chinese New Year, by saying that the “Cheyenne Celestials” would be observing it along with their “brethren and sisters throughout the world.” Notably, no mention of the Chinese New Year occurred in the Rock Springs newspaper until March of 1903. The infamous Rock Springs Massacre resulting in the deaths of 28 Chinese people had occurred there in 1885, which was “symptomatic of a much wider racist sentiment in the U.S. at the time,” as described in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
On Christmas Eve, 1867, the Leader observed: “Our Dakota Territorial Legislature [in Yankton, S.D.] has unanimously passed a bill striking ‘white’ from the school laws of this Territory.”
In 1870, The Laramie Daily Sentinel of December 22 reported that ”The officers and ladies from the Fort [Fort Sanders], Mrs. Ivinson and others have done an incredible amount of work, as well as spent money freely to fix up a Christmas holiday treat for the children here.”
Weather issues
December is not the best time in Wyoming for a celebration that includes holiday travel. Practically every Wyoming newspaper through the 1950s lists who is visiting whom and from where. Trains usually got through—but there is an intriguing note in the Evanston News-Register of December 30, 1905 from the watch inspector for the Oregon Short Line Railway that on January 1, all “railroad men must have their first quarterly inspection of watches.”
Those in Saratoga dependent on stagecoaches could take comfort in the fact that “Joe Cassiday has put a light cutter on his stage line, and is making good time over the snow.” So reported the Saratoga Sun on December 22, 1892, also saying that there has been “very disagreeable weather during the past week.”
A frequently heated rivalry brewed between the Laramie vs Cheyenne newspapers. The Cheyenne paper blamed “Laramie men” for personifying the westerly wind that wreaked havoc on Cheyenne by saying on December 19, 1876, “When Laramie men visit Cheyenne they amuse themselves by going down to the railroad yard, unbuttoning their ears, and blowing cars off the track.”
Traveling between cities by automobile was dicey in December especially before roads were improved. One of the boosters was Cody businessman Jake M. Schwoob, who was reported to be agitating for the state to “get more serious in establishing and completing its program for state highways.” Schwoob had also led the Wyoming “automobile license plan,” as reported in the Shoshoni Enterprise on December 20, 1929.
Roads were better in the winter of 1948/1949 but the weather brought one of the worst storms of all time to southern Wyoming over the holidays. Everything came to a standstill, even the trains, let alone the newspapers. The Warren Mustang reported, “The record blizzard which descended upon Wyoming required all hands to dig hard to extricate the personnel of Ft. F.E. Warren,” (whose name would shortly change to Warren AF Base).
Epidemics and Pandemics
“Infantile paralysis” was first mentioned in Wyoming on November 18, 1910 in a Laramie Daily Boomerang editorial debunking the disease as a money-maker for the medical profession. The article describes it as “anterior polimyelitis” and says it was described “thirty or forty years ago” and aroused little notice until doctors started their scare tactics. But by 1916, the Thermopolis Independent ran a column from New York under the headline “Infantile Paralysis has long been a puzzle to scientists.”
When Franklin Roosevelt was afflicted and became president, the “March of Dimes” began and newspapers like the January 20, 1943 issue of Slip Stream, the newspaper of the wartime Casper Air Base, urged readers to send their dimes to the president at the White House. The Laramie Daily Bulletin of October 20, 1954 announced Wyoming’s “222 cases for the year” had health officials concerned, though the Salk vaccine was undergoing trials including Wyoming children in 1954 and preliminary orders had been placed by the Polio Foundation in hopes that it would be approved by 1955.
In 1918, the Hulette Inter Mountain Globe reprinted a long story from the London Times on December 12 under the headline “The Mystery of Spanish Influenza.” It refuted the argument that “the pandemic is something new. . . There is no evidence which directly connects the visitation with the war at all,” said the story. “Its spread is not due to [poor] nutrition, for America is not underfed, yet the pandemic is having a paralyzing effect upon the activities of the United States and Canada.”
The Lusk Free Lance stated on January 5, 1933 that they wished for better times in the coming year, and the Christmas Eve play had to be canceled because too many were sick with flu. Then a year later, on January 11, the paper said that free tuberculosis screening had been extended a day because of the number of people who showed up. Screening was “made possible through the sale of Christmas Seals, the little stamp which for years has played an important part in the fight against tuberculosis,” the paper explained.
War!
In 1914, WWI broke out in Europe and lasted until the 1918 armistice (no victory for either side). America entered the war in 1917. News of relief efforts was covered in Wyoming papers. Typical was a note in the Sheridan Enterprise of December 6, 1914 about the nearly 1,000 sacks of flour being sent to Belgium, accompanied by questions about whether the Germans would allow the relief shipments to be delivered without steep taxes.
On December 30, 1916 the Gillette News published a long article under the headline: “Christmas ‘Over There’ This Year.” The subtitle was: “Depths of sacrifice reached since first eager throb of war spirit in Europe two years ago. Few bright spots relieve the gloomy picture.” Paragraph after paragraph of the story recounts the plight of refugees, the number of war dead, suffering of the wounded, and holiday feasts and festivities that did not happen across a war-torn Europe.
WWI was called the “War to End All Wars,” but then WWII began in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. America entered the war in 1941 after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. There was a military draft, and on December 1, 1943, the entire front page of the Hot Springs County News in Thermopolis was devoted to listing the mothers of all local servicemen. Flags with a blue star for every serviceman in that family were hung in windows; “Gold Star Mothers” were those whose son(s) had been killed in the war. That practice had begun in World War I, as the Green River Star of October 29, 1920 reported.
Ethnic Japanese, whether they were U.S. citizens or not, were forcibly removed from the west coast and relocated into 10 internment camps, one of which was the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. The internees there published their own paper, the Sentinel, which on November 11, 1944 reports that many of the young men of the camp had volunteered for the Army and were serving.
The Slip Stream of Casper reported on December 22,1944 that about 300,000 individual packs of relief supplies for prisoners of war had arrived in Japan, each weighing about 11 pounds and containing food, medicines, clothing and recreational supplies.
WWII ended in August of 1945 and soon after the G.I.s started returning to their homes. In Cheyenne, “In spite of an acute shortage of Christmas light bulbs and high labor costs, Cheyenne will decorate this year when so many soldier boys would be home, reunited with their families for the first time in many years,” said the monthly newsletter of the Wyoming Jaycees, published on December 1, 1945.
So that war ended, but five years later, in 1950, another began, the Korean War, which lasted until fighting ended in 1953 without a treaty, again with young men being called up by their local draft boards for service. The newspaper Chinook, by the students of what was then Casper Junior College, published a poignant editorial on December 8, 1950, about the uncertainty of students and friends who might be called to battle.
The Chinook editorial states: “The United States faces an entirely new war. Twenty-one men leave for physical examinations. Truman says: ‘Bombs ready.’ Chinese Red drive cuts off one marine and two army units. The war news is steadily pushing Christmas off the front page . . . The stores aren’t quite as crowded as they should be; party plans are dulled by other thoughts. Somehow almost all the material elements connected with Christmas have dwindled. This year the utmost concern is war and all hope centers upon a plan for peace. We need this plan. We need this hope.” It concluded with: “Pause at least for a moment to contemplate what Christmas truly means and what war truly is. Pause and raise your voice in the plea for peace on earth, good will toward men.”
Entertainment
Though WWI had ended, the Casper Herald of December 30, 1919, reported that the American Legion opposes performances of German opera and concerts by German or Austrian artists.
In 1922 the Casper Daily Tribune of December 20 admonished all high officials not to drink alcohol during the holidays. If they do, the paper said, they are “supporting bootleggers, while at the same time they are denying the privilege to ‘the poor devils’ among the masses.“ Thus the Tribune hinted that prohibition was being ignored by those with the means to get liquor.
The Wyoming Reporter of Rawlins announced on December 7, 1926 that the twelfth annual dance of the Cooks and Waiters, Local 862, will be held with prizes for the best dancers. On December 28 that year the paper sadly announced that 1,000 rabbits sent to the Elks from Medicine Bow for the needy couldn’t be used because they were found to be in no condition to be eaten. However, the Elks did host 700 children on Christmas Day with Santa arriving in a sleigh drawn by two elk.
It was big news in Rawlins on December 4, 1930, that the John Wayne movie, The Big Trail, which had been filmed around Jackson, would be coming to the local Fox Strand Theater. “Many Wyoming people are shown, especially in the crowd scenes,” said the Republican newspaper, adding that the film used “20,000 extra players, five tribes of Indians, and 2,500 head of horses, cattle and buffalo.”
A somber 2020?
True, the story of holiday 2020 will be different than it was in 2019 and many other years, but with a vaccine on the way, things are looking up. As this random trip through Wyoming newspapers online revealed, even in gloomy years the newspapers usually found some good news, especially who was coming back to Wyoming for the holidays.
By Judy Knight
Source: Laramie Plains Museum, Boomerang Collection
Caption: A crew installs Christmas lights at the corner of Grand Avenue and Fifth Street, Laramie, with the Courthouse in the background; this photo dates from the 1950s. The Standard sign is where Suntan USA is located now; the old diagonally-placed service station building dates back at least to the 1920s when it was Aero Gas.