An Introduction To Wyoming

  Well, I had said in the previous edition of this blog that I was going to change themes and not write about the upper portion of the Texas Panhandle anymore. Well, that is true, but my teaser was that I was going to start writing about Idaho again, even though I never mentioned 
the state's name. I will get to Idaho eventually(I could write about that state forever), but, in the meantime, it has occurred to me that I have never written about Wyoming. I lived in that state for about one month, in 1988, working at Yellowstone National Park. After one month living in the park, I got a job just outside the northeast entrance of the park in Cooke City, Montana, where I spent the rest of that summer and part of fall, until I headed home to Texas in mid-October, just barely beating a snowstorm out of the area. I still have vivid and fond memories of the area and have visited several times since then. I guess the logical place to start in my writings about Wyoming is the most visited part of that state, Yellowstone National Park.
  When I worked at Yellowstone,  I worked at Lake Lodge, which is very near the north shore of Yellowstone Lake. In my writings about Yellowstone, I will fuse together things I saw when I lived in the area in 1988 with things I have seen on subsequent trips to the nation's oldest national park.
  Yellowstone National Park covers 2, 219,791 acres, or 3,468 square miles. This area makes it slightly larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. 96% of the park is in Wyoming, in the northwest corner of that state, 3% is in Montana and 1% is in Idaho. Until approximately  15 years ago, Yellowstone had a unique distinction. It was not part of any county. It was, in a sense, its own county, or county equivalent, except that it had no county seat. I guess you could say the county seat was the Mammoth Hot Springs area in the northern part of the park, because that is where the administrative offices are and where the federal court is that deals with issues that occur within the park's boundaries.  
A legal issue issue was raised in 2005 that involved a man shooting an elk outside the park, in Montana, and dragging the elk inside the park. He wound up pleading guilty, but the park's special status was revoked shortly thereafter. All the county boundaries that had once run through the park were restored. Now, the park, once again, covers portions of Park and
Teton Counties, in Wyoming; Park and Gallatin Counties, in Montana and Fremont County, in Idaho.  When I started to see the county boundaries going through the park appearing on maps, I assumed it was a mistake, but it wasn't. Prior to the dissolution of the park's special status, each state was treating its portion of the park as a "county equivalent,"
 sort of a Yellowstone National Park County. The Census also treated each state's portion of the county as a "county equivalent," but that is no longer the case. If Yellowstone was a
"county equivalent," it was the only county-type unit in the United States that crossed state borders, covering parts of three states.
  The dissolution of the park's special status shortly after the legal issue came up about convening a jury from residents of the Montana portion of the park and holding the actual trial in Wyoming, at Mammoth Hot Springs, is very interesting to me and I don't know if it is coincidental or a direct result of the legal issue.  Even though the county boundaries through the park have been restored, there is still  a looming legal issue because Yellowstone is still its own federal district and this federal district still crosses state borders. If a crime were to be committed in the Idaho portion of the park, the Constitution of the United States requires that a jury be empaneled from Idaho residents that live within the district and that the trial be held in Idaho and, as I said earlier, no one lives in the Idaho portion of the park. It is basically the perfect crime waiting to be committed because, if a jury cannot be empaneled from the Idaho portion of the park, the charges would have to be dismissed, even if the crime is murder. So far, any crimes committed in the Idaho section of the park, or the Montana section, have been minor, such as poaching.  The solution to this jurisdictional nightmare is to make the Idaho portion of the park part of the Idaho Federal Judicial District and the Montana portion part of the Montana District. Yellowstone Judicial District was created when the park was created, in 1872, and Wyoming, Montana and Idaho were not even states yet, but territories. This situation has never been rectified. Even though the county boundaries through the park have been restored, the federal court district boundaries remain the same. The Wyoming portion is technically part of the Wyoming District, but it is the Yellowstone Division.

The "Feel Good" Story of the Year

    In March of 2012, the boys basketball team from Texline High School, in the far northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle, made a very impressive run to the state semi-finals, which were played in Austin at the Frank Erwin Center at the University of Texas. They lost the semi-final game, in overtime, to Roxton, a team from northeast Texas, in Lamar County. Roxton is a team that was completely destroying every team they met in the playoffs. Roxton was an extremely talented team that played like a well-oiled machine. Yet, the Texline Tornadoes, from an obscure town in the northwest corner of the Panhandle, took Roxton to overtime and almost won the game.
  Texline High School has only 36 students and only 14 of them are boys. 11 of the 14 boys were on the basketball team and this unlikely team came close to winning the state championship.
   At the "Final Four" in Austin, a lot of people were asking "Where's Texline?" The Texline Tornadoes became the "media darlings" of the state Final Four when it was learned how far they had to travel to get to Austin and the fact that 11 of the 14 boys in the school were on the basketball team. Texline had to travel 627 miles to get to Austin! That is the farthest anyone has ever traveled to get to the state Final Four in Texas high school basketball history.
  Towns in the upper Panhandle waved the Texline bus through their town as the bus made its long trip to Austin. Many farmers and ranchers in the area, in both Texas and New Mexico, held fund raising activities to raise money to send the Texline Tornadoes and many of their fans to Austin.
  This is what high school sports is all about, the only thing missing is the fact that Texline did not bring home a state championship. Stories like this are what I like to see. This is truly a "feel good " story and one that needs to be told.
   Begging my readers' indulgence, in the next edition of this blog, I am going to write about a different part of the country and abandon my project about the upper part of the Texas Panhandle. My mind wanders a little too much for my own good and I think it is probably best for me to keep "jumping around' and write about what is most interesting to me at that time. I want to write more about this state that I often daydream about, but have only been there a few times. I hope to visit this particular state some more in the future, but for now, I want to write about this state some more because it is at the forefront of my thoughts now.