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Saturday, September 29, 2007
740 - Indian casinos in Wyoming
A sea change is occurring in my home county when it comes to the world of casino gambling. The reverberations of it have bounced from one end of Wyoming to the other.
A year ago, the Northern Arapaho Tribe upgraded their Riverton casino to Las Vegas-style gambling. And the rest has been history.
Today their Wind River Casino is reportedly doing $22 million a year in business and they have opened a smaller casino in Ethete Meanwhile, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe just opened their 7,000 square foot casino north of Lander.
The Shoshones have announced plans to open two more casinos in Fremont County in the near future.
Perhaps the biggest shock to someone visiting a Fremont County casino is the lack of alcohol being served. Both tribes intend to operate without selling any booze. There is also a diminished presence of cigarette smoke with the Shoshone casinos offering a smoke-free area.
A second shock is the fact that the state of Wyoming derives no revenue from these operations.
Arizona, for example, will receive $92 million this year from the 22 Indian casinos in that state.
Indian tribes are sovereign nations and were in existence in Wyoming territory for 22 years before we became a state. When former Gov. Jim Geringer refused to negotiate with them on a gambling compact, the result was a financial downer for our state for the upcoming decades. The people of Wyoming backed Gov. Geringer, but hindsight shows that was not a smart business move.
The Arapaho Tribe went directly to the federal government for their compact, Wyoming has no claim on any of their funds.
When the Shoshones applied for a similar deal as their Arapaho counterparts, Gov. Dave Freudenthal said he would not fight it since that would be unfair.
Recent news accounts state the Wind River Casino in Riverton has far exceeded its projections when it comes to income. The casino now pays over $100,000 back to the Arapaho Tribe each month, which helps pay for tribal programs and other economic development efforts. It also employs almost 100 people.
The Shoshone Rose Casino is located just north of Lander on highway 287 and enjoyed big crowds in the nearly two weeks since it has been open. It employs 55 people.
Wyoming has a varied history when it comes to gaming.
Despite a few wild gambling halls in Hudson, Jackson and other out of the way places, Wyoming officially prohibited casino gambling in 1901.
Back then, the leaders of our young state, barely 11 years old, just felt casinos and gambling were not conducive to building the type of state they wanted.
After 105 years, all this changed with the news that the Northern Arapaho Tribe received court approval to proceed with their full-service, class-3 casino facility.
The tribe is nearing completion of a multi-million dollar facility on a pretty bluff overlooking the Wind River south of Riverton. Construction is progressing on the 44,000 square foot facility and an adjoining hotel is on the drawing board.
The question of whether gambling is good for Wyoming or the tribes is now moot.
From the tribes’ perspective, there are many good reasons for creating such a facility. If asked, tribal leaders will point out the following:
• It provides jobs for reservation residents.
• It provides a new source of income to the reservation. They feel they spend millions of dollars per year in the non-Indian communities of Lander, Riverton, Dubois, Casper and Jackson. This would be a way for the Indian people to get some of that money back.
• It would generate tourism dollars to the reservation.
• The economy of the reservation is among the worst in the state. Despite some bright spots in the energy sector, unemployment is the highest in Wyoming.
• The tribes arguably have a tradition of gambling. Anyone who spends some time with their culture will find that “games” have always been an integral part of their way of life.
As the former publisher of the Lander Journal and founder of the Wind River News (the newspaper serving the Wind River Indian Reservation), I have watched this project from its inception.
I always opposed gambling on the principle of the deep human cost it can create. But I always supported the tribes’ sovereign rights to have it.
Today, the reality is casino gambling has arrived here in Fremont County. It is going to be a big deal. A very big deal.
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
739 Wyoming`s wonderful empty and open spaces
The vast panorama of Wyoming stretched out below me as I took a commercial flight over our state. My trip was a flight that went from Riverton to Denver and Denver to Pierre, S. D. over much of Wyoming’s open country.
It always makes a unique impression to look down and see so much area. Wyoming has such vastness. Critics might call it empty spaces. We locals prefer to call it open spaces.
The U. S. Census Bureau does not consider Wyoming as rural, which is surprising. What they do consider it is “frontier.” Yes, that makes sense.
It’s difficult to write about Wyoming without talking about space and wind.
A survey of newcomers to our state recently indicated that our open space is one of the biggest attractions to people coming here from more populated places.
There are even documented cases of tourism buses full of Japanese pulling off the road between Gillette and Buffalo to take photos of “nothing.”
So much space with seemingly nothing in it is immensely impressive to the Oriental visitor who lives in such crowded conditions. There are reportedly also cases of those people suffering reverse claustrophobia where they became ill from the strange feeling of being in a place so open.
Last week, I joined a friend scouting for game animals on a 140,000-acre swath of BLM land he leased along with two other ranchers in eastern Fremont County. We traveled for 25 miles through “nothing.” The little canyons, the creeks, the nooks and crannies of that area were endless and fascinating. It was a great time.
Such a place as Wyoming can spawn writers who try to capture the essence of the area.
Following is “Wyoming Wind” by former state poet laureate Robert Roripaugh, a resident of windy Laramie:
Dead grass bends . . .
Dust clogs yellowish sky.
The hawks are down, dreaming in rock
We lie beside warped windows,
Hunt between seasons –
Something is eroding the screen.
Garbage cans roll off
Like huge wrecked drums
Banging fences, cowing children . . .
Shingles flutter, birds
Crash against windshields,
Drive-ins flower into paper seed.
Dry air takes the land,
Our mouths gray as solder
We listen to coyotes in bare trees,
Wire rivers. Outside is prairie
Obscured by dust and wind
Sound ghostly as screech owls.
We strain to hear, seeing
Curved horns . . . humped dark
Shapes swirling toward Medicine Bow
One of my all-time favorite Wyoming books is The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich that discusses our vastness. Some of her comments pulled from the 12 stories in the book include the following:
• In all this open space values crystallize quickly. People are strong on scruples but tenderhearted about quirky behavior.
• If anything is endemic to Wyoming, it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.
• The emptiness of the West was for others a geography of possibility.
• The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen; pulling their Stetsons into a steep dive over their eyes or pigeon-toeing one boot over the other, they lean against a fence . . . and take in the whole scene. These detached looks of quiet amusement are sometimes cynical but they can also come from a dry-eyed humility as lucid as the air is clear.
• Sagebrush covers 58,000 square miles of Wyoming . . . despite the desolate look, there`s a coziness to living in this state. There are so few people . . . that ranchers who buy and sell cattle know each other statewide.
• To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground. When I asked an older ranch hand to describe Wyoming`s openness, he said, “it`s all a bunch of nothing wind and rattlesnakes and so much of it, you can`t tell where you`re going or where you`ve been and it doesn`t make much difference.”
And now, back to my vantage point in that airplane. Wyoming didn`t look empty. It looked like a kaleidoscope of colors, as river-formed valleys, mountains and hills jutted and swirled along.
Furrows of moved dirt or rustling dust would indicate how fast or how recently the wind had been blowing. My favorite term for our constant breeze is from a Kevin McNiven song, which talks about “Wyoming’s cleansing wind.”
Yes, there is a lot to talk about when you are talking about our state.
Wyoming is not empty. It is full.
It is just a matter of knowing what you are looking at. And looking for.
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Thursday, September 13, 2007
738 A car, a check, a scam
This is a story about my favorite old car and how someone using modern Internet methods tried to steal it from me plus gain an additional $1,800 while doing it.
The car is a dark red 1981 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, of which reportedly just 136 were made.
Perhaps it would be good to start this story with how well I get along with old cars like this one.
You see, I may love old cars but they do not love me.
There are two kinds of car collectors in this world.
The first one should be called the “tinkerer.” This person just loves it when he hears some clinking sound or buzzing sound or worse, some thudding sound, when he is running his old car. “Oh goody, “ he will exclaim. “This will be fun trying to figure out what is wrong so we can fix it.”
The second one should be called, simply, the “collector.” He just hates it when he hears some clinking sound or buzzing sound or worse, some thudding sound, when he is running his old beater. “Oh s—t!” he will exclaim. “Why won’t this thing just run? It will cost me a fortune to have someone fix it!”
Count me as one of the latter.
So I decided to sell my old Caddy.
Craigslist is a huge international Internet web site where you can list cars for sale at no cost. My car was listed along with three photos at a sale price of $9,950.
On the first day, an email arrived from a doctor in Great Britain who raved about the car and said he wanted to buy it for his wife who lives Peoria, Ill. for her birthday.
Wow, this works great.
He said the deal needed to be done in a hurry and asked me to cancel the ad. He said he would line up a freight company to come pick up the car and he would have his finance man rush me a cashier’s check for $9,950 plus $1.800 for shipping the car.
Sure enough, the check arrived by UPS and an email arrived from the freight company directing me to wire them $1,800.
To Craigslist’s credit, they sent me an email warning of scams and oddball ways people can cheat you.
My banker looked at the check and said it was bogus. However, he also said they would have cashed it for me and then notified me a few days later that it was not good. And although it looked like a cashier’s check it most assuredly was not.
At this time, I am turning everything over to the state Attorney General’s fraud division. Am also waiting for someone to come by and pick up the car, too,
Thus, I would have been out the $1,800 that would have been wired to the bogus shipping company plus the car would have been long gone by the time the bank informed me that the check was no good.
Wyoming people are overly trusting and that is why I am sharing this story.
Also collector cars are a big deal in Wyoming for several reasons. First, is our apparent lack of rust. With no humidity or salt in the air, our cars will last forever if washed once or twice a year.
Secondly, we seem to have lots of free time for piddling around with pet projects.
Perhaps, third, would be the abundance of parades and car shows that are held around Wyoming throughout the year.
So, meanwhile, I am still driving my Cadillac.
One recent morning, the car would not start without a lot of stomping on the accelerator. Then the engine would quit running usually at an intersection. The gauge showed a quarter tank of gas and yet, it appeared starved for fuel.
While driving it over to my mechanics the engine died within view of the shop. Despite all my attempts, it would not start.
The mechanics finally came over and we got the car to the shop. Later, they told me the car was simply out of gasoline.
So, it looks like I am not going to sell it to some doctor in England and maybe I will keep it for a while.
So folks, be warned out there if you try to sell something like a car on the Internet, either with Craigslist or eBay. The scammers will come calling and it could cost you big-time.
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Wednesday, September 12, 2007
737 A Wyoming love story
“Go West, Young Man.” Famous admonition by New York Publisher Horace Greeley in the 1880s.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Wyoming in the daylight. It was in September when we awakened in Lander after arriving late the night before from a flight from Iowa to Denver and on to Riverton.
We looked out the window of the Holiday Lodge and saw the bubbling Popo Agie River below us. In the distance the Wind River Mountains soared. The air was clear and the sun was shining brightly. We could hardly wait to get going.
As we drove around town in our rental car, we marveled at the clean streets. And they had no patches in them. It was almost like this town had brand new streets. They were the widest streets we had ever seen.
Yes, they were new. Lander had only had paved streets for two years! No wonder they looked so good.
The town, with its unlimited water usage, featured the greenest yards ever. Back in Iowa, a lot of yards had burned up due to limitations put on sprinkling.
Wyoming was so unique to us. And Lander looked even more unique. This most unusual of small towns was a jewel with its manicured green lawns, its spectacular wide streets and its mountain valley setting. This looked like a place a person would want to move to someday. The sooner the better.
Neither Nancy nor I had ever been to the West before. We had never seen mountains or experienced the blue skies and low humidity, which make this part of the world so unique.
We visited Sinks Canyon and the beauty was just overwhelming. The Popo Agie sparkled as it bounced over the rocks. The images that I was seeing with my eyes were the same images that had been seen on magazine covers, never realizing that this is how it really DOES look in real life.
We kept looking at each other and thinking, “we could really live here.”
Our time in Iowa had been fruitful but it was time to move on. It was 1970 and we were itching to grow. Mr. Greeley’s famous admonition was a true guiding light for me. I was 24, Nancy was 23 and we had been living in Harlan, Iowa, her hometown.
Two things gnawed at me: a desire to move west and a desire to own my own newspaper. A man named Bruce Kennedy needed a publisher for the Lander newspaper and offered to fly Nancy and me out here to look it over.
So we visited Lander and liked it a lot. I would be the fifth publisher in two years and the job was a terrific challenge. The staff was virtually leader-less and although they worked hard, they really didn’t know the business very well.
One thing will always stick in my mind about how they produced the Lander paper. When the staff was done putting together section B, they would start on section A. And if they didn’t have enough news, they would just go back to Section B and pull out a few stories and re-run them again in Section A. I had never seen that done anywhere before and once we arrived, the Lander Journal never did it again.
After our three-day visit to Lander, we drove to Greybull to meet with Mr. Kennedy, where he lived. We told him we would probably take the Lander job.
He was also involved in the Gillette newspaper and wanted us to visit that town. After that visit, we looked at the map to see how far it was to Casper and although I had a half-tank of gas, I figured I could gas up at Pine Tree Junction.
Wrong.
The only thing at Pine Tree Junction was a Pine Tree.
We had to beg some gas from a construction worker in the camp called Bill so that we could finish our trip to Casper. We missed our flight and spent the night there before heading back to Iowa to give our friends, family and co-workers the news that we were heading west.
It’s been almost exactly 37 years since all that happened. And those first images Nancy and I had of our adopted state of Wyoming and our adopted hometown of Lander are just as vivid today as they were then.
We love it here and will always make it our home.
We weren’t born here. But we got here as soon as we could.
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