Lex Anteinternet: On starting a 37th Year I will not finish.

Lex Anteinternet: On starting a 37th Year I will not finish.: I was admitted to practice 36 years ago today. Back when the Rocky Mountain News was still a thing, they used to run columns by Charley Ree...

On starting a 37th Year I will not finish.

I was admitted to practice 36 years ago today.

Back when the Rocky Mountain News was still a thing, they used to run columns by Charley Reese.  I didn't always agree with them by any means, Reese was a dyed in wool Confederate Gray Southerner, but they were often quite interesting.  I can recall his final column when he noted he was going to retire.  On the timing he said something like "when you know, you know".

I'm at that point.

My wife, however, definitely isn't at that point for me, an ongoing source of conflict.

In Wyoming, and maybe in most places, lawyers are admitted to the bar in August for the most part. A second, smaller crops, is admitted in March or so.  I was admitted in August, 36 years ago.

Back in September 2025 I started a thread about having passed the 35 year mark but never published it.  I was angry about something at the time, pretty clearly, and it was a very bitter posts.  I thought better of it and didn't post it, but I didn't wipe it out until recently.  I reread it and then did so, even though much of what I wrote in it is still true.

All careers are individual, of course which is what makes career advice so dangerous.  I've known people, for instance, who served in the military and absolutely hated it.  The entire film M*A*S*H and the television series is, in no small part, based on a hatred of military service, although the book's author, a conservative, ironically did not hate his. The same is true, for what it's worth, of Catch 22.  Heller actually admired the military he lampooned.  Both books were hugely successful, however, as they not only tapped into the oddities of military life, but also into a hatred of it in some quarters.

In contrast, I've known people who loved it, and I myself liked it.

I note that as I suppose that the law is the same way, maybe all careers are.

That aside, the law is unique and is well known for being so.

The law has an alcoholism and alcohol abuse rate that's far higher than other professions.  That isn't the only abusive trait in it, however.  It's estimated that something like 60% of lawyers have had in the office sexual infidelities and while I haven't tried to add up percentages, and that percentage seems high, there are indeed a lot of them.  The law also has some really screwball personalities in it, although I'm at the point where I now wonder if those personalities became that way due to the law, or entered the law because of it.  In my current Gen. Jones stage of life, I'm amazed by the number of burnt out husks of people who won't retire from the law as that's all they have.

I'm not the only one who's noticed that, and a recent conversation is part of what brought me back to this thread.  In speaking to an opposing lawyer I've known a long time by phone, on a holiday, he brought up the very things I've noted, this included.  Indeed, he noted that for a lot of people, they'd become lawyers, that's what they now were as part of their personality. That's all that's left.

That should never happen, but the law is an all consuming job.

He was actually a bit angry about it.  I'm not angry, but I don't want to become one of those people.  My friend noted that what he "is", is a hunter and mountain climber.  What he "does" is be a lawyer.  That's pretty much true for me as well, although I'd substitute outdoorsmen for climber.

He also had the observation that after working years at the law, late nights, early days, weekends, that he and his wife did things together rarely.  The pressure of work brought that about.  That's pretty much the same story in my own life.  Another lawyer I know just had his wife of about 30 years just up and leave him, leaving him wondering why.  It seems a "therapist" suggested that, and frankly I have a dim view of most therapist or counsellors, but what I suspect is that the same thing was at work.  That fellow had told me not all that long, before the disaster came, that he was never going to retire, because he enjoyed the fellowship of the lawyers.

Well, nothing that we do at work is something "enjoyed" by our spouses, except for perhaps the money.  If the lawyer is really one of those ones who enjoys the courtroom combat, or the intellectual challenge, the spouses don't participate in that at all.

Money can matter, however.  Yet another lawyer I know, about my same age, is trying to retire but is upset as his wife just can't grasp that the funding burn rate has to stop.  I think a lot of lawyers who keep on keeping on face that with a family member or perhaps themselves. From the outside, you know they'd be fine.  But to them, or a loved one, the fear of no further income will just drive them into the grave, working.  Fears of that type, and not my own, have kept me working for the past four years.

The law is not only an all consuming occupation, it's one that's soul destroying.  Many "plaintiffs' lawyers" have really lost their humanity.  Not all by any means, but quite a few. They really don't care about the people they represent in many instances.  It's one of the thing that makes practicing law so dispiriting and damaging to your own soul.  Most of the propaganda that lawyers and law firms of a certain type being there to help people is pure crap.  They don't mean it, and everyone inside the law knows that.  Simply practicing law, at some point, or perhaps more accurately being in litigation, is participating on a fraud on the public.

I'm told I'm really good at the law.  If that's true it's proof you can be good at something that you really don't love.  I'm beyond the point of not loving it anymore.

I entered the profession for the same reasons a lot of people do.  My earlier career had not worked out and I didn't seem to have any other place to go.  I had started off obtaining a very difficult science degree only to graduate into an economy where I was unemployable.  This is, I'd note, more common than a person might suppose.  There was no family business to step into.  What I really wanted to do, and still do, wasn't open to me.  Even at that, I hesitated and I chose not to enter the law school class I was admitted into.  I waited a year hoping to find work, and didn't.  Soldiering was the work that year.  I guess I could have chosen to make that a career, and in some ways I"m surprised I didn't.

The last year of my undergraduate degree I tried switch to a different field:

The road not taken.

Sigh. . . 

I'd be offered a summer position with them, but not until years later, at which point I was already practicing law and engaged.  I've posted on that before.

If 'd had my druthers, which hardly anyone does, I would have have been a rancher.  I have been around agriculture which is to say that I would have ranched full time.  I came close it without really realizing it after law school right as my father was looking at retiring.  We came close to the two of us starting a place, and then he died.  I abandoned that particular effort in order to help my mother, who had no such interest.  Laster I found she was baffled why I hadn't let her know.

My wife and I have always had cattle, but it's never been a full time thing.  Sometimes it's promised to almost be that, but it never has.  Now I'm 63 and time has moved on.  It's something I'll never recover from.  It was one of the goals that kept me at my desk job, and now the goal can't be met.  

Time and effort wasted.

There are some things that are quite scary about time moving on, I'll note.  Fear of death is not one of them.  I constantly hear that people are supposed to be afraid of death, but I've lived pretty close to death my entire life and I'm not.  If death arrives before my plans play out, well, so be it.  Nobody knows the day nor the hour.  Momento mori.

But what has moved on is the opportunity to complete a bunch of things I used to do and be engaged in before I started practicing law.  That must show something about my own character, as other lawyers take long vacations and the like, but I don't really seem capable of devoting time to vocations and avocations.  I'll leave it to the reader to decide which is which.  The interest in those pursuits remains, however.

Gone is interest in the law itself.  I'm not interested nor fascinated in it.  I never loved it in the first place, but I have had over the years a reputation as being a legal scholar.  I still get calls from various lawyers about legal situations which are rare or difficult. The difference is that I no longer find them interesting at all.

At one time, seeing as I was a lawyer, I really wanted to be a judge, which is a position for legal scholars, and I've applied within our system a bunch of times, and been encouraged to do so by judges.  Now I'm too old, as mandatory retirement is at age 70 and the committee isn't going to appoint somebody at age 63 for a single term.  Or I suppose not. To my surprise, they recently almost in fact did that in a district in which very few people were applying for the position. The past two Governors and the Judicial Nominating Committee have pretty much wrecked the process for successful lawyers, so applications are way down.

Indeed, one of my frustrations with the practice of law has been watching the decline of the judicial nominating system, which has grown much more political over the last few decades. When I started out you could really see why various judges got appointed to their positions.  When Matt Mead became Governor, however, he had an agenda of appointing women and that's what he was going to do.  That was a politically motivated bias and it meant if there was a man up for the same position, he wasn't getting it.

Governor Gordon has had a very strong bias towards prosecutors, although there are some exceptions. 

The oncoming Governor, Barlow, will be interesting to watch in this regard.  He's a professional himself (veterinarian) and perhaps he'll take a more informed and balanced view.

Anyhow, after 36 years of this, it's time to move on, so I'm moving on.  I'll complete this year, but I'm not starting another one.

Indeed, on the topic, I'm capable of reading the signs.  The American dream is that you live to age 100 and die in your sleep.  You probably aren't going to.  

Over the last couple of years I've watched some of the lawyers who are older than me decline pretty seriously in some ways.  And I'm declining too.  I had colon surgery out of the blue, something that probably could have been averted if I'd had regular colon checkups like you are supposed to.  Going through that process I ended up having an odd thing on my thyroid discovered.  Half my thyroid ended up coming out, although I probably could have avoided that if I was willing to risk it being nothing, which didn't seem to be a solid risk at the time.  Now I have to take pills every day for the first time in my life.

A year ago the eye doctor noted something peculiar in my eye.  Last week, on my follow up exam, it was clear it was a tiny cataract  It's not a problem yet, but it probably will be in "ten years".  I'm young for a cataract, but it's due to an injury.  

I've endured a lot of injuries over the years.

I'm considerably more tired than I used to be, and my physical stamina, still pretty good, has declined.  I could probably address this as people ought to at my age by exercise, but my schedule is incredibly burdened.  

I don't handle stress anywhere near as good as I used to, however, and stress is a killer.

So, in four months, I'm done.

The big challenge now is letting everyone know, and getting my wife to accept it.  That part isn't going to be easy at all.  

It's not going to be easy as at least my long suffering spouse doesn't want to believe I'm at this point.  I've been mentioning it, but when retirement comes up, it's always "you can't".  Retirement is, she suggests, a year further in the future than I imagine it.

A year isn't much, but it's a year.  I hear all the time that somebody retired and then died, as if retirement killed them.  Really, they just hang on too long.

And again, that hanging on is a funny thing.  I've watched one lawyer who has no family (divorced) and who has no faith keep on going to work.  I guess it's his identify . I mentioned retiring to him once and he scoffed, saying "good luck".  Of course, I don't have to pay alimony and I don't take expensive trips.

I've also watched a couple of very ill lawyers hang on after their illness set in. It provided a distraction I guess.  Indeed, on the very odd occasion I mention this to anyone people always suggest a law job I could take in retirement, which isn't what I have in mind at all.

In contrast, one lawyer who experienced a health care scare recently, one year younger than me told me that next year was definitely the date.  When I expressed doubt, the reply was "watch me".

What you are supposed to say, like Edith Piaf, is that you have no regrets about your career as a lawyer.

I can't say that.

I probably should feel that way.  Just yesterday, once again, thinking over the past 36 years I came to the conclusion that with the box I was in, I did the only thing I could do.  True or not, and it's probably true, hindsight being 20/20, I'd have avoided the law like the plague if I'd known what it was like.  As noted above, I'm sure there are people who look back and say they loved every second of it.

I'm not one of them.

To compound  things, I've been in litigation the entire time.  That was a mistake, as I'm not well suited for it internally.  I'm an introvert and I don't like being in extroverted situations.  I just couldn't find a way out of it.

Well, anyhow, page one of the concluding chapter.

So now, I have to start informing people.  This isn't going to be fun at all, but knowing myself, if I don't, it won't become real.

I've never liked doing trials.  Some lawyers claim to love them, and I suppose they do. There's something in their personalities, a defect really, which requires them to test their wits against other people.  Most lawyers don't like doing them, and most of the lawyers who say they do, are lying.

Like baseball players before a game, most lawyers have some sort of ritual before they try a case.  At one time, as late as the early 90s, that ritual for quite a few involved heavy drinking.  I don't think that's the case so much anymore.  Frankly, while conservatives are all worked up about it in some quarters, I think that's one of the things that the massive introduction of women into the law changed, and for the better.

When I get close to trials, I usually rewatch The Wild Bunch.  I know that's odd, but I love that movie and I find it very engaging.  Part of the reason that I watch it in this context is that the protagonists in the move are basically all mercenaries of a sort.  Yes, I know that they're criminals, but still.  And there's not one redeeming person in their whole contest.

Everyone who likes movies is familiar with the famous concluding gunbattle of the movie.  But that's not the last scene.  Former gang member turned bounty hunter Deke Thornton is waiting outside the town gate as evening arrives, having sent the dead bodies of the gang back with the other bounty hunters.  Elderly gang member Skyes rides up with Mexican Indians and  the following exchange occurs.

Sykes: I didn't expect to find you here.

Deke Thornton: Why not? I sent them back. That's all I said I'd do.

Sykes: They didn't get very far.

Deke Thornton: I figured.

Sykes: What are your plans, now?

Deke Thornton: Drift around down here. Try to stay out of jail.

Sykes: Well, me and the boys got some work to do. You want to come with us? It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do.

That's how I feel about things.  I intend to hunt, fish, work cattle, write and put in a garden.

But even if I only do a faction of that stuff, it'll be okay.

It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do.

Lex Anteinternet: A few minor observations.

Lex Anteinternet: A few minor observations.: Cosmetic surgery, save for genuine restorative purposes, or genuine medical reasons, ought to be banned. People who claim to be "Consti...

A few minor observations.

Cosmetic surgery, save for genuine restorative purposes, or genuine medical reasons, ought to be banned.

People who claim to be "Constitutional Lawyers" are no such thing, unless they are public defenders. Anyone claiming that title, who isn't, should be sentenced to a term of being a public defender in Dayton, Ohio for their natural lives, plus twenty years.

Seriously, that's a flaming bullshit claim. Ain't no such thing.

If you look like you are 30, when you are 60, due to cosmetic surgery, you are a deeply insecure weenie.

If you are male, and live in a rural area, and don't hunt or fish seriously, you are an insecure weenie and should move to Greenwich Village.

Boxing is a brutal sport, but it's beautiful.

Fleetwood Mac seriously sucks.  Of their songs that suck, Landslide sucks the most.

A twenty something single man giving a lecture on "the fertility crisis" is a freakin' joke.  Geez man, get married and get a real job.

If you have to think about the hairstyle a man is evidencing, he's a weenie.

If a man has perfectly combed hair at all times (think Mike Johnson), he's a weenie.

Courthouses of the West: A Broken Profession

Courthouses of the West: A Broken Profession: 

A Broken Profession

This is a follow-up to something I posted here just the other day, taking the blog away from its comfortable place of depicting courthouses, into the nature of the contemporary practice.

Courthouses of the West: Things in the air. Some observations with varying ...: This blog is supposed to be dedicated to architecture, basically, although matters pertaining to the law do show up here.  Very rarely is th...

Here, I'm doing it again.

The CLEs above were on my mind to such an extent, and indeed they still are, that I've discussed them with several other lawyers I know.  Turns out some of them are on meds for anxiety.  I would never have guessed it.

There's something about this that really disturbs me,. although I don't fault them any one of them a darned bit.  Some of them seem to love their careers and are really good at what they do.  What bothers me, however, is that we seem to have developed a profession that has to heavily rely upon chemicals just to get by.

Just going back to the earliest of human mind altering chemicals, it's reported that between 21-36% of lawyers engage in problem drinking at hazardous, harmful, or potentially alcohol-dependent levels.  That's pretty disturbing, as that's between 1/5th up to a little over 1/3d of all practicing lawyers.  Some studies suggest that 36% of Minnesota's lawyers and judges drink at a dangerous level, and if that's not disturbing enough, some studies suggest that 41% of Canadian lawyers do.  Around 10% of lawyers have a drug abuse problem, but that probably includes a lot of them who have an alcohol problem.

Not good.

There's really no way to know how many lawyers are on anti anxiety medications.  Probably a bunch.  It's obviously much, much, better that people dealing with anxiety inducing situations seek medical help than crack open a bottle of Henry McKenna and poor yourself several shots.*  It's also better than smoking a joint or whatever else people are doing in the illegal drug categories, although obviously these days marijuana is sort of in a weird still illegal but not enforced much category.**

The laws approach to all of this has been to reach out to lawyers and offer "help".  But perhaps what should be obvious, but doesn't seem to be, is the profession itself needs the help.  If this percentage of its professionals, including its best and brightest, need chemical help just to get by each day, there's something existentially wrong in the profession.  All the CLE's on mindfulness in the world aren't going to fix that.

Footnotes:

*Henry McKenna is an Irish Whiskey named after lawyer and distiller, Henry McKenna.

**Marijuana is still a scheduled illegal drug in Federal law and students imbibing in it can risk admission to their State bars.  Likewise this can be true for people seeking a career in law enforcement.

Lex Anteinternet: Roads not taken.

Lex Anteinternet: Roads not taken.: 

Roads not taken.

I've noted here before that I'm highly introspective.  Given that, I can't help but look at the road not taken, particularly when I'm oddly reminded of it.

Brian Nesvik was just confirmed as the Trump administrations head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Brig Gen. Brian Nesvik.  His Class A uniform here (the horrible blue one that the Army has since ditched) shows him with a 1st Cavalry Division combat patch on his right pocket and what I think is a Combat Action Badge.

I'm not sure when most people start contemplating a career.  I sometimes hear people say the most unlikely things, such as "I always wanted to be a lawyer" or "I always wanted to be an actuary".  When I hear those things, I don't believe them unless the person is downright weird.

Existential occupations, however, are different, and I can imagine a person always wanting to occupy one of them.  I've defined existential occupations in this way:

Existential Occupations are ones that run with our DNA as a species.  Being a farmer/herdsman is almost as deep in us as being a hunter or fisherman, and it stems from the same root in our being.  It's that reason, really, that people who no longer have to go to the field and stream for protein, still do, and it's the reason that people who can buy frozen Brussels sprouts at Riddleys' still grow them on their lots.  And its the reason that people who have never been around livestock will feel, after they get a small lot, that they need a cow, a goat, or chickens.  It's in us.  That's why people don't retire from real agriculture.

It's not the only occupation of that type, we might note.  Clerics are in that category.  Storytellers and Historians are as well.  We've worshiped the Devine since our onset as a species, and we've told stories and kept our history as story the entire time.  They're all existential in nature.  Those who build certain things probably fit into that category as well, as we've always done that.  The fact that people tinker with machinery as a hobby would suggest that it's like that as well.

Indeed, if it's an occupation. . . and also a hobby, that's a good clue that its an Existential Occupation.

Being a soldier is, I think, an existential occupation, but only for men.  I'm not sure what to say about being a policeman of any kind, but I think that's likely the case for that occupation as well.

Growing up as a boy, one of the occupations I really wanted to do was to be a soldier.  It wasn't the only one I contemplated.  As noted here, I've always been really strongly attracted to agriculture.  Most days find me at my office practicing law, but that was never a childhood dream and it didn't occur to me at all until I was in college.  Law is the great middle class reserve occupation, truth be known.

At some point I began to struggle with my childhood desire to be a soldier.  It'd take me away from the state, which I didn't like the idea of.  I knew then, when I was more realistic about life choices than I am now, that I really couldn't hope for a career in agriculture, which is what I'd have done if I could have.  And the days of Wolfers and other professional hunters were long over, of course.  So around about that time, probably 13, 14 or 15 years old, I started thinking about becoming a Wyoming Game Warden.

I didn't give up the soldiering idea right away.  But it occured to me that I could become a National Guardsman, and stay here in the state.  So I hit upon the idea of going to university, then doing a hit in the Army as an officer, and then coming back out and becoming a Game Warden while staying in the National Guard.  This idea was so formulated in my mind at the time that I imagined myself entering the Air Cavalry, which at the time was a really cool branch of the Army, and the serving with the Army National Guard Air Cav Scout Troop in Cheyenne.

I was still on this track when as a junior in high school my father and I spoke about my career plans.  By "spoke" I mean a conversation that probably had three or four sentences in it.  My father wasn't big on career advice for reasons I understand now, but didn't really grasp then.  My mother was much more likely to voice an opinion about education and what I should do than my father, but I tended to flat out ignore my mother, particularly as her mental status declined with illness.  She'd have had me enter one of the hard sciences, which I in fact did (I guess I listened to her some) and go to a school like Notre Dame.

Anyhow, I told my father that I was going to study wildlife management.  He only mentioned that "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees that can't find jobs". That was enough to deter me from pursuing that degree right then and there, so rare was his advice in this area.

As it happened, I pursued another field of science but I did join the National Guard, doing so right out of high school as soon as I turned 18 years old.  One of the reasons I did that was that I also was contemplating being a writer, and I thought I'd probably write on history topics. As a lot of history involves armed conflict, being in the Army in some fashion seemed like a good thing to do in order to understand the background.

I was right.

Indeed, joining the Guard was the last really smart career decision I made.  I'm clearly not very good at career decisions.

To play the story out, I was a geology major.  I graduated with a degree in geology, and couldn't find work as the oilfield and coal industries collapsed (sound familiar, Wyoming?).  While at Casper College law was suggested to me by a history professor (I have so many credits in history that I coudl have picked up a BA in it with little effort) and it seemed like a good idea as I didn't know any lawyers and had no idea what they did.

Lots of people become lawyers that way.  Indeed, I know one other lawyer who became one due to the exact same advice from the exact same fellow.

But even at that, when I knew that I wasn't going to get a job as a geologist, I entertained picking up a BS in wildlife management. By that point, my father was supporting me in the goal.  Evan so, his advance five years prior stuck with me, and I didn't do it.  I ended up going to law school, and I ended up letting myself ETS out of the Guard, as I thought, in error, that law school is hard.

Law school, as an aside, isn't hard. Any idiot can graduate with a JD and pass the bar.  And while I only have experience with one law school, I dare say that this is true of any law school  Harvard JD? So fucking what?

Still, the idea resurfaced one more time.  A friend of mine and I went down to the Game Warden exam and I was offered a temporary summer job, the usual introductory way into the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at the time.  At that time, usually those who picked up summer work did it for a few years before being offered a full time job.  My wife and I had just gotten engaged, so I ended up declining the job.

Yes, I'm an idiot.

Well, not really.  But as noted, I'm not good at career decisions.

Brian Nesvik is a Casper native.  He  decided to become a Game Warden when he was fourteen years old and met a game warden on his first big game hunting trip as a licensed hunter.

He's 55 years of age now.  He's a graduate of the University of Wyoming where he received a bachelor's degree.  He was a member of the Wyoming Army National Guard from 1986 to 2021 and rose to the rank of Brigadier General.  Sources say he graduated high school from Cheyenne East in 1988, but I can't make that make sense.  I can accept it was 1987 and he was definitely in the Guard in 1986, the year I got out.  He's a 1994 graduate of the University of Wyoming, which would suggest that he did something else for awhile as even with the late 1988 date, that would have been six years after graduating high school.  I somewhat wonder if he had military service prior to going to university, but I don't know that.  He wears a 1st Cavalry Division DI as a combat patch, as noted, which is interesting.

His career as a game warden was very notable, and he became the state's chief game warden, the pinnacle of the game warden chain of command.  His military career is also impressive, noting the following:

Apr 18 Dec 21 Assistant Adjutant General, Cheyenne, WY

Jan 16 Mar 18 J3/7, Joint Fore Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Sep 15 Jan 16 G1, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Feb 15 Sep 15 Chief Facilities Maintenance Officer, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Jun 10 Feb 15 Commander, 115th Fires Brigade

Apr 09 Jun 10 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Camp Virginia, Kuwait

May 07 Apr 09 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 06 May 07 S-3, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Oct 05 Oct 06 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Feb 04 Oct 05 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery (FWD), Baghdad, Iraq

Oct 03 Feb 04 Executive Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Jul 02 Oct 03 S-3, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Aug 01 Jul 02 S-4, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Jun 00 Aug 01 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 97 Jun 00 Commander, Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Worland, Wyoming

Jul 97 Oct 97 Fire Direction Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming

Oct 96 Jul 97 Platoon Leader, Battery A, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Gillette, Wyoming

Jul 94 Oct 96 Executive Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming

Jul 93 Jul 94 Fire Support Officer, Headquarters Battery, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Laramie, Wyoming

Jul 90 Jul 93 Fire Direction Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming

Dec 86 Jul 90 Flight Operations Specialist, 920th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), Cheyenne, Wyoming

His time in the National Guard and my own would have overlapped, but only barely.  My Guard service concluded in August, 1986, 39 years ago this month.

Shoot, by this time in 1986, I was probably just about to do my last Guard drill.

I wonder if Nesvik went to Korea with us?

Anyhow, it's interesting how something you thought of doing yourself, worked out for somebody else.

Indeed, frankly, I've known several for whom it did. Was I wrong in my analysis, way back when?

Well, maybe.  I was an indifferent high school student and sort of figured I would be as a college student too, which turned out not to be the case at all.  Externally, I look like a real success.

But then, we always have the backdoor view of ourselves, don't we?

 

This is an interesting article:

Catholic Parents: Free the Hearts of Your Daughters

The author of it, Leila Miller, had to know that she was really swimming against the tide with this one.

Indeed, I'm reluctant to even post on this, as there are a lot of pronatalist nutjobs out there right now that immediately latch on to such things.  But, here goes anyone.

Almost every Sunday I go to Mass at the same Catholic Church.  The celebrant there is an absolutely excellent homilist.  Probably most Priests give homilies that are good from time to time, but his are consistently great, which is rare in the extreme.  So much so, really, that I'd put him alone in this particular class in regard to those which I've personally experienced.

He's very orthodox, which doesn't keep a wide number of parishioners to attending his Masses.  In fact, for the first time last week, I could barely find a place to sit. I was attending with my daughter, who is about to go back to grad school.

Lots of weeks this parish features a fair number of young women wearing mantillas.  Not every week, however.  It's interesting . Some weeks they're all missing.  I don't know for sure, but I suspect that those are the weeks the Byzantine Catholic Church has Divine Liturgy in town.  The Byzantine Catholic service is conservative by default.

These are not the only young women there.  There are quite a few, but most dress like young women in this region do, if a little nicer.  My daughter, for instance, would never consider wearing a mantilla.  I know a few of  them, but only a few. There's the recently married nurse, whom I've known for a long time.  There's the young lawyer and her family.  And there's the girl working in the sporting goods shop.

The latter is particularly interesting as she just graduated high school about a year ago.  She's been working there for about a year as well.  Her concerned grandmother told me that she's been hoping that she goes to college and that she's very smart.  Apparently, she has no desire to do so.

Most of the young women I know, and I know them only barely, are either newly minted lawyers or friends of my daughter.  My daughter, as noted, is in grad school. Some of those young women are as well. Some have graduated from school already and are in the early stages of careers of one kind or another.  Because we live on the shores of jello belt, a few are Mormons, who are already married (Mormons tend to marry young) and have children.

There are a lot of misperceptions about Catholics, including Catholics and marriage.  Catholics do not, and never have, tended to marry young.  The opposite is actually the case.  My parents were in their late 20s and early 30s when then married.  My mother's parents were about the same.  I think my father's parents were in their early 20s, which isn't up there, but it's not as if its a teenage wedding either.    Anyhow, most Catholic women fit in to the general demographics for American women in general on these topics, although not strictly so.  The mantilla women are outliers.

What do they all hope for?

That's hard, if not impossible, to say. Each person's hopes and dreams are personal to them. . . but. . . well, within the confines of the nature of our species.

So perhaps they're more determinabel than we might think.

Non existential careers, which are most careers, are not really something that makes anyone fulfilled.  For that matter, they don't really make anyone actually happy.  But people are sold in the idea that they do.  Indeed, the way that comes in up in the subversive movie Office Space so frequently is what makes the movie actually profound:

Peter, most people don't like their jobs. But you go out there and you find something that makes you happy.

Joanna, in Office Space.

What feminist who yearned for careerism failed to grasp is that men didn't really want it either.  It was foisted upon them.

One of the things about the existential occupations is that they all existed when we were in our aboriginal state, t hat state not really being grasped by a lot of people.  People like to look back and think that we were "cave men" at that point, but that was never actually true for our species.  For most of our time here on Earth we lived as hunter/gatherer/farmers.  Interestingly, the farming aspect of this, which was t hought to have been a revolutionary development, was with us when we were still hunting and gathering, which should have been obvious as modern hunter/gatherers tend to also farm.  Those occupations have stuck with us in one form or another all along.

What also was with us was our basic natures.  No matter how you conceive of our species coming about, we've always paired up, male and female, and we've always had children.  Everything, in fact, centered around that.  While we imagine ourselves to be very complex, we really aren't.  That remains our basic natures and for most of us, defines, if you will, what we really want.  The existential occupations served that purpose.

Things began to become unhinged from that as we developed more complex societies, as once we do, something always goes amis.  Greed has a lot to do with it. Somebody will get into a position where he, and its usually a he, wants more of everything, food, resources, women, than anyone else.  Wealth always corrupts.

Still, even with more and more advanced societies over the centuries, it wasn't really until the Industrial Revolution that the basic nature of life started to be wrecked.  We should not idealize pre Industrial Revolution societies, which had plenty that were wrong with them, but something that wasn't wrong with them is that men and women tended to work close to the land, and close to each other.  A 17th Century English farmer, for example, might not be farming a farm he owned, or tending sheep that were his, but he was working close to nature and probably normally saw his family throughout the day.

The Industrial Revolution changed all of that.

Industrial capital needed labor and it took male labor, at first, out of the village and into the factories.  It's not that simple, of course, but the reasons that it was mostly male is.  Originally most industrial jobs required a fair amount of physical strength and endurance, which men have more of.  Where this was not true, it might be recalled, children and women were in fact employed, although that always meant, at first that they were poor.  

And, additionally, two other things were at play, one of which we've already touched on.

The first one is that biology worked against the conscription of women into the workforce at first.  There was noone to take care of children other than women and almost always those women taking care of the children were the children's mothers, for host of additional biological reasons.  The second one was that domestic life required female employment in the home.  There were exceptions to all of this, of course, but they were exceptions proving the rule.

None of this, however, goes against industrial employment being unnatural in and of itself.  Men whose fathers had come and gone throughout the day now left for industrial employment early in the morning and came back at night.  They didn't see their families throughout the day, and indeed, as time went on, teh gruelling nature of industrial work created a sort of mateship amongst blue collar workers that previously had really only been seen amongst servicemen.  When that occurred, it came to often be the case that when they got off work after a long day, the first thing they did was to hit a blue collar tavern, and then come home.   One lawyer's site on the net notes how the author's father worked a schedule like this, hit a blue collar bar every night, and cheated on his wife with the women found there, who would largely have been working there.

White collar and professional employment followed the pattern.  

If you look, for instance, at the practice of law prior to industrialization, lawyers usually worked out of their houses. Doctors did as well.  Indeed, almost anyone who "ran a business" outside of farming did.  John Adams, for instance, practiced out of the same farmhouse that he farmed from.  Once again, this meant that people were not really separated from their families much.

This even shows with some of the occupations that we regard as the wildest, or perhaps the freest.  Trappers in the American West, for instance, were married into native families at a high rate and took their spouses with them.  Career soldiers who made it to the upper NCO ranks, or who were officers, tended to bring their families to frontier posts with them.  

But as industrialization developed, the workplace industrialized.  Lawyers moved out of offices and into firms that moved into houses used only for that purpose, and then into downtown office buildings.  Doctors moved out of their houses into a professional building.  Every male began to leave early in the morning, and come home at night.

None of that was natural on a day to day basis.

The introduction of domestic machinery made much of the formerly necessary female labor surplus. AS that happened, they too began to be available for out of the home employment.  Between World War ONe and World War Two domestic machinery was revolutionized, but its introduction was retarded by the Great Depression, and then World War Two.  After the war, the new domestic machinery flooded the markets and female labor was released from the home at an enormous rate.

The only thing that kept a greater expansion of female labor in the workplace, and by this we mostly mean the office, heavy industry was still off bounds, was biology.  The pill took care of that.

The results were nearly inevitable, even if never expressly stated as desired.  Now that women could be free of biological reasons not to work, they soon had to work.  First generation feminists took up the cause in publications like Coso, which was basically the flipside of Playboy, with the same evolved message.  Joy and meaning was found in the (white collar) work place.  Sex was for entertainment. Your value is your work, and nothing else.  The same line of crap that men had been force fed for years wsa now force fed to young women.

Problem is, it's all a lie.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not stating that women should not work.  What I'm saying, really, is that men have to.  We have no other choice in the world, and most of us will occupy jobs that are just jobs, and nothing more., even when they are well paying.  But the basic nature of our species, that cries for the home to be the focus of our existence, and in which the old occupations still cry out, is unchanging.  And for women, part for that basic nature is to be mothers. For men, part of it is to be fathers.  

Being a mother remains a more demanding role than being a father, when children are young.  When they get older, this is less the case, but the entire "let's warehouse the children" nature of modern life is existentially immoral and we know it.  We managed to come around, in a capitalist society, to the same position the early communists did, and for the exact same reason, warehousing kids means the mother must work.

Not can, but must.

And the pressure to do so remains massive.  Nobody really advocates for women in this area, as it would men the actual return to a pre pill, pre first generation feminist, world outlook.  That'd be bad for capitalism as there would be fewer workers, and worse yet, consumption would decline.

But, frankly, that's' the way it ought to be.

I've already noted it once, but I was recently at a legal event in which there was a huge number of lawyers.  One thing that was noted was how many Catholic lawyers were there, which was in fact quite a few (Catholics here, however, are a minority).  Something I observed, however, is how many older lawyers there were.

On that, there was in fact a comment, from lawyer in his early 70s (maybe very late 60s) to another in his very late 60s.  "Lawyers don't like retirement".

If that's true, it's phenomenal.

I typed most of this entry out a while ago, but after I did it, Jerry Spence passed away, and I noted it here on the blog.  I'm not sure why I even did.  I guess it's just because he was a notable Wyoming figure.  After I did it, it occured to me that I don't think I noted the passing of former Wyoming Senator Al Simpson, who was also a lawyer from a long established family of Wyoming lawyers who have played significant roles in the state's history.  I should have.  He was quite a character.

One of the reasons that I'm a bit surprised that I noted Spence's passing is that I'm not a Spence fan.  I'm not a Spence enemy either, but the extent to which a certain group of people simply worship him astounds me.  Since he died, those close to him, semi close to him, and others who simply know his name have engaged in near hagiography about him.  I actually had somebody stop me just yesterday to related how they were deposed by Spence and his crew back in the day as a defendant in a case in which he represented a plaintiff.  You could tell he was proud of that fact, and obviously thought I would be really impressed.

I'm not.

I knew of Spence way back when I was in grade school, actually, which means back into some date in the early 1970s and I just don't get it.  I guess I don't get worshipping any lawyer.

I particularly feel that way as I am a lawyer.

Daniel Webster noted that “Most good lawyers live well, work hard, and die poor.”  I think there was a huge amount of truth to that.  There's still an element of true to it, but the "live well" part is pretty questionable..  

Working hard as a lawyer brings in less money than a person supposed, usually, and at any rate, lots of lawyers. . . and lots of other professionals for that matter, spend money as quickly as they make it.  As an oddity, right now, I drive the oldest vehicles of any lawyer I know.  I don't regard them as old, but the newest one I've had for twenty years.  The point is, a lot of people just burn through cash, and at a certain point, they have to keep working.

A bigger factor is, however, that the practice of law just burns out the core of a person's personality until, in many instances, there's nothing left.  Lawyers who have left the law often joke about being a "recovering lawyer", but at a certain point, there is no recovering from it.  All forms of work, if engaged in for a long time, or indeed any human endeavor you engage in for a while, changes you permanently.  It's part of your experience, and you are hardwired to react according to your experience.

I was going to go on and say more about this, but my original draft was extremely harsh, so I took it out.

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again.

Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything - or if it made any difference at all, really. Particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!

Col Nicholson in The Bridge On The River Kwai. 

Related threads:

Work with meaning and the meaning of work.

Labels: Commentary, Daily Living, Distributism, Existential Occupations., Mid-Week at Work, Retirement, Subsidiarity, The Practice of Law, Women, Work

A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.

Labels: Agrarianism, Christianity, Death, Existential Occupations., Health, Hobbies, Introspection, Killetarianism, Medieval Europe, Mid-Week at Work, Old Age, religion, Retirement, Work

Lex Anteinternet: Pioneer Myths, Imported Politicos. Public land sales, part 2. The historo-religious motivation for some (but certainly not all) of the backers.

Lex Anteinternet: Pioneer Myths, Imported Politicos. Public land sal...: 

Pioneer Myths, Imported Politicos. Public land sales, part 2. The historo-religious motivation for some (but certainly not all) of the backers.

Indians attacking a wagon train, Frederic Remington.

Recently we posted this, arguing that Mike Lee's background and religion informs his views on grabbing Federal lands in the West:

Lex Anteinternet: Pioneer Day. Pie & Beer Day. Public land sales, ...: Flag of the putative State of Deseret. Church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact - religion and politics should not be...

In that, we noted this:

One of the Salt Lake newspapers has started a series on this, noting basically what I just did (I actually started this tread prior to the paper).  This doesn't cover it all, however.  It'd explain none of what we see in Wyoming backers like Harriet Hageman.  We'll look at that next.

Now we're taking that look.  More specifically, we're looking at the question of how Harriet Hageman, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis can look at the people who voted them in, and say, basically, "screw you and the horse you rode in on".

We'll note first that we don't think the answer is the same for all three of them.

Let's start with Hageman.

Hageman, unlike Mike Lee, is not a Mormon. For that matter, neither are Barrasso or Lummis (although we'll note that Barrasso's religious history should inform our views on him.  Indeed, it's difficult to learn much about Hageman's religious background at all.  Sometimes she's listed as a "Protestant", which she no doubt is, but that doesn't mean much in this context, as that category includes such things as Anglo Catholics and Missouri Synod Lutherans, to liberal Episcopalians.  It also includes the vast numbers of various small Protestant churches that often ignore vast tracts of American Christianity while being either very conservative or very liberal on things they pay attention to.  Hageman never really says what her Protestantism is allied to, or where she attends church, or if she even does.  One biography says she's a "non denominational" Christian, which fits in well with the far right she's part of.  A slight clue of her views is that she's married to a Cheyenne lawyer who is much older than she is with nearly twenty years on her age and who had a prior marriage.  They have no children.  Those last two items pretty much take her out of the Apostolic Christianity category, and out of those Protestant churches that are close to Apostolic Christianity.

If Hageman has no children, what she has is the weak tea of a career, the thing feminist sold on women as the fulfillment of their testimony and which, just as with men, turned out to be a fraud foisted upon them, and which continues to be each year at high school graduation.  I'm not saying having a career is bad, but the focus on it as life defining is pretty much living a lie.

What Hageman also has is a history.

Harriet Maxine Hageman was born on a ranch outside of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in the Wyobraska region of Wyoming, a farming dominated portion of the state that lacks public lands and which is unique in many ways.  Her father was  James Hageman, who served as a longtime Republican member of the Wyoming House of Representatives until his death in 2006.  She is a fourth generation Wyomingite, descending from James Clay Shaw, who moved to Wyoming Territory from Texas in 1878.  Harriet is one of six siblings.  Her brothers are Jim Hageman, Dewey Hageman, and Hugh Hageman,   Her sisters are Rachel Hageman Rubino and Julie Hageman.  Rachel Rubio passed away in 2024, shortly after Harriet was elected to Congress.  One of her kids is a lawyer. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was read at her funeral.¹

When Harriet ran for Governor, all three of her brothers, but not her sisters, were included in a video talking about how much she loved people, and how family was central to her.  Maybe all that is true, but here's where the story, from our prospective, gets a bit interesting.  

Hageman went to Casper College on an ag scholarship.  Indeed, she was at CC at the same time I was.  From there, like me, she went on to US, and ultimately on to law school.

She didn't go on to the ranch, or a career in agriculture.

I guess I didn't either, but my story is the story of early death, which intervenes with our desires and which determines our path in life more than we care to admit.  I don't know what Harriet's story is, but I would note that as a rule, from her generation, daughters of ranchers weren't going back to the family ranch after high school graduation.  It wasn't that they would not, it was that they could not.  Those that retained a role in agriculture did so through the result of marriage, often knowing men who were farmers and ranchers.  Indeed, off hand, the few daughters of farmers or ranchers I know who ended up in agriculture ended up in it in just that fashion.

Hugh Hageman ended up in ranching.  Dewey Hageman seems to has well.  Jim Hageman seems to have as well, or at least he's still in the Ft. Laramie area.  In the video, all three really look like ranchers.

When I was growing up, as noted, women didn't end up in ranching except through marriage.  Usually no effort was made whatsoever to try to incorporate them into a ranching future.  Quite a few times, quite frankly, they were expected to marry into a ranching family, but even by the 1980s things had turned to where that was no longer the case, and many started to move into other careers.  Law has always been a really popular career for ranchers and farmers to send their children into, as basically farmers and ranchers don't believe that lawyers work.  Indeed, for the most part, they don't believe people in town actually work either.

Jim Hageman, the father of the family, himself came from a large ranching family in Converse County.  In the near hagiographies written about his daughter, it's noted how he built the ranch from nothing, but frankly, that's just not true.  He was born in an era in which the younger sons of ranchers could still secure ranch land, with help through loans and loan programs.  Now that's impossible.

But that puts Harriet straight into the Wyoming agricultural family myth.

I love ranching, as anyone here can tell.  But I'm a realist, and perhaps a cynic.  My own family has been in the region since at least 1879.  Hageman's, apparently, since 1873.  People who came out here didn't do so because, usually, they were wealthy, although some did, which is another story.  Rest assured the progenitor of the Hageman family in Wyoming, a Clay, wasn't.

What they were, however, were beneficiaries of one of the largest social welfare programs in American history, maybe the largest.  In 1873 the genocidal aspect of that program was still well under way.  Basically, the US used the Army to remove, at gunpoint, the native inhabitants and corral them into largescale concentration camps and then gave the land away to those willing to engage in agriculture.  Most of those who took up the opportunity were dirt poor.   The program was kept up and running until 1932, at which time the Taylor Grazing Act was thankfully passed and the land preserved.  

Homesteading was very hard and difficult work and the majority of homesteads failed.  But still, it wasn't as if homesteaders came into "virgin" lands and tamed it with their own two bare hands.  The government removed or killed the original inhabitants.  In many areas, the government built large-scale irrigation projects for the new ones, at government expensive.  Homesteaders were admirable in many ways, but they weren't without assistance.

James Hageman was born in 1930, which means when he was first starting his ranching life, land was still affordable, something that ceased to be the case in the 1980s but which would still have somewhat been the case when Harriet's brothers were entering their adult lives.  Most men from ranch families tried to stay in ranching, if they could.  Most still do.  When you meet somebody who talks about having grown up on a ranch, but isn't in ranching, it's because the "ranch" was a 20 acre plot outside of town (not a ranch) or because they were left with no alternative.

What those left with no alternative were given, so that their older brothers could carry on without trouble, was what English "Remission Men" were given in earlier eras. . . something else to do.  In a lot of cases, that something else was a career in law or medicine.

That's what Harriet got.

Well, what does that tell us?

Well, quite a lot.  A girl from a ranching family who had nowhere to go, she had to marry into agriculture or pursue a career.  While I knew her when she was young, a bit, I don't know if there was every a ranching suitor.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if there had been, as the tobacco chewing young Hageman was quite cute and very ranchy.

Well, whatever the case was then, she ended up with what lawyers call a boutique firm and made it the focus of her life, seemingly.  She ultimately married a lawyer twenty years her senior, more or less, and they didn't have a family for whatever reason.  Frankly, it's sad.

She was also left with a heritage that focused on the frontier pioneer myth.

Lots of ranch families have that, and in their heart of hearts believe they should have been given their public lands they were leasing by right, even though they couldn't afford it then, and they couldn't now.  They often don't believe that other people really work, as they falsely believe that their own work is exceptionally hard.  Many believe, at least in the back of their minds, that they are the population of the state, and those who aren't in agriculture are only able to get by as agriculture supports them.

It's a false, but deeply held, narrative.

And hence Hageman's, in my view, desire to transfer public lands from the Federal Government.  In her  mind, I suspect, those lands somehow, magically, go write to farmers and ranchers who, in her view, probably, rightfully deserve them.

That's not, of course, what would happen.  It'd actually destroy ranching.  But being from the  Wyobraska wheat belt, where most agriculture is farming, and the land is already publicly held, she doesn't realize it.

And she hasn't been on the farm, really, since sometime in the late 1970s or early 80s, at least in the sense we're talking about.

The whole thing is really sad, quite frankly.  But personal grief shouldn't make for bad public policy.

What's the deal with Lummis and Barrasso.

Let's take Barrasso up first.

Barrasso isn't a Wyomingite and its an open question to what extent he identifies with the state or its people at all. He's from Reading Pennsylvania, and the son of an Italian American cement finisher who had left school after 9th grade and an Italian American mother.  He was born in 1952, putting him solidly in the Baby Boomer generation. The beneficiary of a Catholic education, he came here as a surgeon.  

He's nearly the archetypical Baby Boomer, and in more ways than meets the eye. But to start off with, he was the child of hardworking blue collar Italians from the Catholic Ghetto who were probably bound and determined not to see him suffer they way they had, so they aimed for the blue collar mid Century minority's dream. . . send your kids into a profession and they'd really be something.  Hence why there were so many Irish American, Italian American and Jewish American lawyers and doctors.

But a lot of that dream really went awry.

Dr. Barrasso and his first wife Linda had two children.  His ex wife has had a local public life, but remains pretty quiet about their marriage.  She remarried to a local lawyer.  

Barrasso remarried too to a widely loved local woman who had been to law school, but who was not barred. She's since tragically died of brain cancer.  I knew her before their marriage.

None of this is facially surprising or atypical, but in context, its' revealing.  Barrasso's early connection with Wyoming was professional.  That's why he came here.  And his early life has the appearance of being very Catholic. That is significant.

It's significant in that when Barrasso was growing up, Catholics did not divorce easily and bore the brunt of having done so for the rest of their lives.  In my family, back before World War One, or around it, one of my mother's uncles divorced and remarried and the relationship with the family was completely severed.  Apparently it was later somewhat repaired, but only somewhat.  Leaving a spouse and leaving the faith was a betrayal.  It's still not taken lightly by serious Catholics.

But seriousness was not what the Baby Boomer generation was about.  It was about "me".   The couple divorced, for some reason, and he remarried.  The whys of the topic were never raised in his political career as post 1970s, that isn't done.

It probably should be.

Barrasso has pursued his political career the way it seems he pursued his life.  He compromised.  He compromised on his faith (he's now a Presbyterian) and he's compromised in his political views.  He was a moderate, but now is Trump's lap dog.  His views change when they need to change.  Apparently here, he thought it better to side with Lee and stay as quite as possible.

What about Lummis?

I know very little about Cynthia Lummis, which frankly is fairly typical of Wyomingites.  He website says she was born on a Laramie County ranch, but Wikipedia just states Cheyenne.  Her father was active in Republican politics and she, a lawyer, was elected state treasurer at one point.  Like Hageman, she has an agricultural degree.  She's a Missouri Synod Lutheran, which puts her in a very conservative branch of the Lutheran faith, but that appears to have no bearing on this matter.

She tends to stay out of public view for the most part.

On the public lands matter, her connection with a southeast Wyoming ranch may indicate something. As noted here, there's very little public land in the eastern part of Wyoming.  But overall, we just don't know very much about her.  She's basically a legacy of an earlier era in Wyoming when we didn't feel it was important to really know too much about a person.

Maybe we should.

Footnotes:

1.  Blessings on the hand of women!

Angels guard its strength and grace,

In the palace, cottage, hovel,

Oh, no matter where the place;

Would that never storms assailed it,

Rainbows ever gently curled;

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

Infancy's the tender fountain,

Power may with beauty flow,

Mother's first to guide the streamlets,

From them souls unresting grow—

Grow on for the good or evil,

Sunshine streamed or evil hurled;

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

Woman, how divine your mission

Here upon our natal sod!

Keep, oh, keep the young heart open

Always to the breath of God!

All true trophies of the ages

Are from mother-love impearled;

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

Blessings on the hand of women!

Fathers, sons, and daughters cry,

And the sacred song is mingled

With the worship in the sky—

Mingles where no tempest darkens,

Rainbows evermore are hurled;

For the hand that rocks the cradle

Is the hand that rules the world.

Related threads:

Pioneer Day. Pie & Beer Day. Public land sales, part 1. The historo-religious motivation for some (but certainly not all) of the backers.

Labels: 1838 Mormon War, 1840s, 1847, 1890s, 1896, Fr. Hugh Barbour, Harriet Hageman, Mormon, Pioneer Day, polygamy, religion, Second Great Awakening, State of Deseret, Third Great Awakening, Utah War, WASP