Thursday, January 8, 2009





































Continuing on a northerly route we come to Wyoming (we've been to Thermopolis in the past). Let's find out a little bit about Cheyenne.

The photos are: 1) Capitol Avenue in downtown Cheyenne; 2) the Wyoming State Capitol Building; 3) the "Big Boy" steam locomotive in Holliday Park; 4) the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo Sign; 5) bronc riding at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo; 6) Lions Park; 7) bison on the Terry Bison Ranch; and 8) the Warren-Nagle Mansion (serves as a Bed and Breakfast).

Cheyenne is the capital of the U.S. state of Wyoming. It is the principal city of the Cheyenne, Wyoming Cheyenne Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Laramie County, Wyoming. The population was 53,011 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Laramie County and the largest city in Wyoming.

On July 4, 1867, General Grenville M. Dodge and his survey crew platted the site now known as Cheyenne (Dakota Territory, later Wyoming Territory). There were many from a hundred miles around who felt the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad through the area would bring them prosperity. By the time the first track was built into Cheyenne four months later (November 13), over four thousand people had migrated into the new city. Because Cheyenne sprang up like magic, according to newspaper editors visiting from the East, it became known as "Magic City of the Plains".
Those who stayed and did not leave with the westward construction of the railroad were joined by gamblers, saloon owners, thieves, opportunists, prostitutes, displaced cowboys, miners, transient railroad gangs, proper business men, soldiers from "Camp Cheyenne," later named Fort D.A. Russell (now F.E. Warren Air Force Base), and men from Camp Carlin, a supply camp for fifteen northern army posts on the frontier.
The city was not named by Grenville Dodge as his memoirs state, but rather by his friends who accompanied him to the area Dodge called "Crow Creek Crossing." It was named for the Native American Cheyenne nation ("Shay-an"), one of the most famous and prominent Great Plains tribes closely allied with the Arapaho. The Cheyenne were among the fiercest fighters on the plains. Not pleased with the changes brought about by the railroad, they had harassed both railroad surveyors and construction crews.
As the capital of the Wyoming Territory and the only city of any consequence, as well as being the seat of the stockyards where cattle were loaded on the Union Pacific Railroad, the city's Cheyenne Club was the natural meeting place for the organization of the large well-capitalized ranches called the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. (See Johnson County War of 1892, the largest of the "range wars" of early Wyoming history). The newspaper offices of Asa Shinn Mercer's Northwestern Livestock Journal were burned down when the paper, which was founded as a public relations vehicle for the moneyed cattle interests, began to write scathing accounts of the events that were unfolding on the open range. His account is told in his book The Banditti of the Plains,.
As a town created by the railroad, Cheyenne fittingly preserves one of the eight surviving Union Pacific Big Boy locomotives ("4004"), some of the largest steam locomotives ever built, designed for hauling freight over the Rocky Mountains at high speeds. These engines typically hauled 100 freight cars up ruling grades between Cheyenne and Ogden, Utah, at 50 miles per hour. The locomotive now resides in Holliday park in central Cheyenne. The Union Pacific's last live-steam engines still reside in Cheyenne. The Challenger 3985 and the Northern 844, UP's last steam passenger engine, are maintained there. They are used for display and excursions across the county.
Alferd Packer, the only American ever convicted of cannibalism (though the official charge was murder since cannibalism is not a crime in the United States), was apprehended north of Fort Laramie and was taken to jail in Cheyenne, March 11, 1883.
Tom Horn, the notorious Pinkerton's agent who had been operating as a hit man for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, was hanged in Cheyenne for a murder that he probably did not commit on November 20, 1903, the day before his 43rd birthday.
The Wyoming Telephone and Telegraph Company published the first telephone directory in the United States in Cheyenne in 1881. Due to a shortage of white paper, it was printed on yellow paper instead which started the tradition of the "yellow pages" phone directory.
Several ships of the United States Navy have been named USS Cheyenne in honor of this city as well as a couple of tug boats working around New York City.
Bill O'Neal, a historian of the American West based in Carthage, Texas, published Cheyenne, 1867-1903': A Biography of the Magic City of the Plains in 2006.
Cheyenne was named the top western town for 2008 by the True West Magazine, in the January/February 2009 issue.

Today's Jumble (01/08/09):
SPAWM = SWAMP; TREHB = BERTH; TOAPIE = OPIATE; GALEGH = HAGGLE
CIRCLED LETTERS = WPERTPIAHGE
How he kept their bills down.
"(A) PAPERWEIGHT"

Today is Bubble Bath Day and Elvis' Birthday. It is also Midwife's Day, National Joy Germ Day (a day devoted to spreading joy and cheer), National English Toffee Day, Man Watcher's Day, and Show and Tell at Work Day.

Other things on this day in history:

871 - Battle of Ashdown - Ethelred of Wessex defeats a Danish invasion army.
1297 - Monaco gains its independence.
1499 - Louis XII of France marries Anne of Brittany.
1734 - Premiere of George Frideric Handel's Ariodante at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
1746 - Second Jacobite Rising: Bonnie Prince Charlie occupies Stirling.
1790 - George Washington delivers the first State of the Union Address in New York City.
1806 - Cape Colony becomes a British colony.
1811 - An unsuccessful slave revolt was led by Charles Deslandes in St. Charles and St. James, Louisiana.
1815 - War of 1812: Battle of New Orleans - Andrew Jackson leads American forces in victory over the British.
1835 - The United States national debt is 0 for the only time.
1838 - Alfred Vail demonstrates a telegraph using dots and dashes (this is the forerunner of Morse code).
1863 - American Civil War: Second Battle of Springfield
1867 - African American men granted the right to vote in Washington, D.C.
1877 - Crazy Horse and his warriors fight their last battle with the United States Cavalry at Wolf Mountain (Montana Territory).
1900 - President William McKinley places Alaska under military rule.
1906 - A landslide in Haverstraw, New York, caused by the excavation of clay along the Hudson River, kills 20 people.
1912 - The African National Congress is founded.
1918 - President Woodrow Wilson announces his "Fourteen Points" for the aftermath of World War I.
1926 - Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud becomes the King of Hejaz and renames it Saudi Arabia.
1940 - World War II: Britain introduces food rationing.
1956 - Operation Auca: Five U.S. missionaries are killed by the Huaorani of Ecuador shortly after making contact with them.
1959 - Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution is completed with the take over of Santiago de Cuba.
1961 - In France, a referendum supports Charles de Gaulle's policies in Algeria.
1962 - Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is exhibited in the United States for the first time at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
1962 - The Harmelen train disaster kills 93 people in The Netherlands.
1964 - President Lyndon B. Johnson declares a "War on Poverty" in the United States.
1973 - Soviet space mission Luna 21 is launched.
1973 - Watergate scandal: The trial of seven men accused of illegal entry into Democratic Party headquarters at Watergate begins.
1975 - Ella Grasso becomes Governor of Connecticut, becoming the first woman to serve as a Governor in the United States who did not succeed her husband.
1979 - The tanker Betelgeuse explodes in Bantry Bay, Ireland (The Betelgeuse incident).
1982 - The break up of AT&T: AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions.
1989 - The Kegworth air disaster. British Midland flight 92 crashes into the M1 motorway killing 47 people out of 127 onboard.
1989 - Beginning of Japanese Heisei era.
1994 - Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov on Soyuz TM-18 leaves for Mir. He would stay on the space station until March 22, 1995, for a record 437 days in space.
1996 - An Antonov 32 cargo turboprop powered plane crashes into the central market in Kinshasa, Zaire killing more than 350 people.
2002 - President George W. Bush signs into law the No Child Left Behind Act.
2004 - The RMS Queen Mary 2, the largest passenger ship ever built, is christened by her namesake's granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II.
2005 - The nuclear sub USS San Francisco (SSN-711) collides with an undersea mountain at full speed south of Guam. One man was killed, but she surfaced and was repaired.
2006 - A magnitude 6.9 earthquake with its epicenter just off the Greek island of Kythira hits much of the country and is felt throughout the entire eastern Mediterranean Sea.

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