I really enjoyed reading “Powder River Country: The Movies, the Wars, and the Teapot Dome” in the April issue of American Heritage. It’s so much a part of Wyoming’s history.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
As editor of The Powder River Journal , the publication of the 91st Infantry Powder River Division Association, I found Oakley Hall’s article quite fascinating. The Powder River has been associated with our outfit ever since 1917, when a first sergeant asked a bunch of recruits where they hailed from. They answered in unison, “From Wyoming!” and then cut loose with a thunderous “Powder River, let ’er buck!” That famous cry sounded across many a battlefield in World War I and through the mountains of Italy during World War II, and it is still being sounded by the oldtimers who attend our division reunions. Members of the present 91st, stationed at Fort Baker, California, continue the Western traditions of the division begun more than seventy years ago.
Casper, Wyoming, is my birthplace. I was pained that American Heritage spells it Caspar in April’s article on the Powder River Country, although the accompanying map spells it correctly.
Perhaps Oakley Hall, the writer, spelled it Caspar because that is what it should be—but isn’t. The town is named for Lt. Caspar Collins of the 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry. He was killed in a skirmish with Indians on July 26, 1865. The military post was renamed Fort Caspar. It was rebuilt in 1936 on the original site. It exists today as Fort Caspar, west of the town.
The town was incorporated in 1889, when it had a population of a few hundred and had eight saloons on five-hundred-foot-long Main Street. Town fathers at their first meeting outlawed the discharge of firearms, but the mayor himself won a pistol duel on Main Street within the following year. Maybe relaxed attitudes had something to do with it, but the town became Casper early in its colorful history, and it remains Casper today.
I read with considerable interest John Steele Gordon’s piece “The Problem of Money and Time” in your May/June issue. By a happy coincidence I gave a lecture recently to a group of visitors on the history of Cartier. In the course of my remarks, I of course told the story of the swap—the house for the pearls—and, in an effort to hammer home the accuracy of the story, I concluded with the comment “If you don’t believe me, read page 57 of this month’s American Heritage!”
Regarding Professor John Lukacs’s article “America’s True Power,” I will keep his thoughts in mind.
New York throbbed with the usual breakfast-hour bustle on September 19, 1862, apparently undisturbed by the recent Confederate invasion of Northern soil. But when a bunch of newsboys burst from Park Row’s Tribune building, barking “Extra!,” the response revealed the tension on the streets. Weary of newspaper rumors about a great battle in Maryland, New Yorkers crowded about the newsboys, hoping for some real information. They got it. Here were no vague claims of “Great and Glorious Victory” or “Great Slaughter of the Rebels.” Instead, the Tribune offered six columns of accurate, forceful prose about the Battle of Antietam, fought two days before.
It can be done” was the motto of both the Foshay Company of Minneapolis and its founder, Wilbur B. Foshay. In 1896, as a boy of fifteen, he visited the nation’s capital with his father, there to be deeply impressed with the simple but powerful design of the Washington Monument. So moved was Foshay by the sight that when it came to celebrating his success as a founder of a vast empire of public utilities, banks, newspapers, and miscellaneous industries, he decided to erect his own monument in the contemporary mode: that is, an office building.
“It can be done” and it was. Seen at near right, about a year before the building’s completion in August of 1929, the tapering walls of the Foshay Building soared 447 feet to become the first skyscraper west of Chicago. Foshay was proud of his name—he traced his ancestry back to Joseph Fouché, minister of police under Napoleon—and it blazed from all four sides of his building in letters ten feet tall.
by Drew R. McCoy; Cambridge University Press; 376 pages.
In 1772, when he was twenty-one, James Madison wrote, “My sensations for many months past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life.” He glumly proclaimed himself “too dull and infirm now to look out for any extraordinary things in this world.” Yet the morbid young man went on to lead an indisputably extraordinary career as a framer of the Constitution, as a co-author of The Federalist Papers , and as a two-term President of the United States. After leaving office in 1817, Madison enjoyed a long and productive retirement until his death in 1836 at the age of eighty-five.