It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Monday, April 14th. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by Wyoming Community Gas. The Choice Gas selection period ends on Wednesday April 23rd – This is your opportunity to select your Natural Gas Provider for the coming year. For more information, visit Wyoming Community Gas dot ORG.”
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Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman sent a letter to the federal transportation department Thursday, urging the removal of a regulation that keeps non-English-speaking commercial truck drivers on the roads.
Before the Obama-era memorandum, truck inspectors could put non-English speaking truckers out of service. And since its implementation, American large-truck fatalities have risen drastically.
Hageman’s letter challenges the 2016 memorandum. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that Hageman urged the Department of Transportation to consider whether that memorandum is now ripe to be rescinded.
“Back in February, I reported that Wyoming truckers are like, whoa… a lot of the truckers can't speak English. We can't help them on the road. They can't order fuel. Like, how does this affect their driving?... I pushed the delegation and pushed the White House to find out if anyone was pushing to remove that memo, to find out if anyone was actually advocating action on this.… So this past week, when Representative Hageman sent a letter to the Department of Transportation Secretary like, consider rescinding this Obama era memo. It does not seem like it fits Trump's administration. It was the first real action I'd seen, at least from Wyoming's corner of the world, where someone was actually trying to get that rule lifted.”
To Shannon Everett, co-founder of trucker advocacy group American Truckers United, Hageman’s letter came as a welcome surprise. He told Cowboy State Daily on Friday that his group has been trying to incite awareness and action of this exact issue in state legislatures and the federal government for nearly a year.
Read the full story HERE.
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Robert "Rob" O’Neill, the U.S. Navy SEAL who is credited with killing Osama bin Laden — at the time the most wanted man on earth — told Cowboy State Daily that in the moments before he put three bullets in the head of bin Laden, O’Neill thought he was the one about to die.
In an interview with Cowboy State Daily’s Jake Nichols morning radio show last week, O’Neill reflected on the secrecy, intensity and the precarious final moments of one of the most consequential missions in modern military history.
“This is why we all joined. And it was almost a Braveheart moment, like because anyone could have taken themselves off the mission at any time… So we went in the house. My guys were already there that killed three terrorists before I even entered the house… There was one guy in front of me at this point. I was number two… He moved the curtain. He tackled two people that he thought were suicide bombers. So he jumped on a grenade that didn't go off. And how he doesn't have a Medal of Honor yet, I'll never know… because he went one way, I went one way, I went the other. There's bin Laden standing there. He's three feet away. His hands are on his wife's shoulders, who's right in front of him. Her name is Amal… So I shot him three times, and then I moved Amal out of the way, because I know, because at that point, I was the only seal there, but other seals are right behind me, and I don't want her to get hurt, right? I even looked down and his two year old son, Hussein, was standing there. And I'm a father, and my first thought was, this poor kid has got nothing to do with this. He shouldn't have seen this.”
Despite their composure, from the start the mission was tinged with a sense of fatalism, and everyone aboard understood their chances of returning alive were small. Their mission would later be venerated in a wave of television and film tributes, including movies like “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Read the full story HERE.
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Anna Cobb will always remember the kindness that her nephew Liam possessed, and his curiosity about how all things worked in the world.
19-year-old Liam Cobb died Wednesday while working on a wind turbine near Medicine Bow in Carbon County. Anna Cobb told Cowboy State Daily’s Leo Wolfson that her nephew fell while working his job as a wind turbine technician.
“Liam Cobb is really best known for being very talented hockey goalie, very quiet young man, but with a lot of deep kindness in his heart, he had a incredible curiosity about the world and how things worked inside it. I talked to his aunt about him and his life, and he was just fascinated by the intricacies of how things worked, and that's probably what led him to end up being working as a win technician, which is where he ended up losing his life. But a ton of people outpouring expressing their condolences on social media for his death, and yeah, he'll be sorely missed, for sure, by the Douglas community.”
Anna Cobb said Liam brought a constant light to his family, a smile almost always etched across his face. He leaves behind five siblings and his mother and father.
Read the full story HERE.
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Dire wolves went extinct between 12,500 and 13,000 years ago. They were bigger and stronger than modern gray wolves, built to prey on such lumbering behemoths as giant ground sloths. So there was a worldwide buzz last week when it was announced that a bioscience company had managed to “de-extinct” dire wolves.
But wildlife biologists told outdoors reporter Mark Heinz that reintroducing dire wolves to Wyoming would probably be a terrible idea.
“The landscape has changed. The prey base has certainly changed. I mean, these were animals that were playing on things like giant ground sloths and things like that, so that the you know, the odds of elk would even stand a chance against them probably aren't too great a gray wolves themselves would probably get bullied pretty hard by the dire wolves. Dire wolves worse. They weren't significantly huger than gray wolves, but they were a little bit bigger and quite a bit stronger than gray wolves, so they probably end up dominating the gray wolves.”
If dire wolves came back, gray wolves would likely be knocked down a peg. Their relationship to dire wolves might be like coyotes’ current relationship to them.
Read the full story HERE.
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Big Horn Mountain Farms in Buffalo was voted Wyoming’s best-tasting beef at last year’s annual Rendezvous City Beef Roundup in Riverton.
But if that farm wanted to sell some of its tasty, free-range, 100% organic, wagyu beef to Australia’s luxury, high-end market, it can’t get there from here.
That’s not because of any outright ban on American beef. Rather, Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports, it’s a convoluted set of biosecurity rules that are keeping American beef away from the Australian market.
“Since that mad cow disease outbreak in 2003 American beef hasn't been able to find its way to the Australian market. That's because even though Australia cleared American beef to come in to the country, they didn't clear Mexico or Canada… a lot of producers, especially the ones on the border their cattle. They may source cattle from Canada or Mexico, and they might cross the border a few times, so that Canada and Mexican beef is in our supply. And that is what Australia is objecting to. They don't want beef from those countries. And so that has amounted to a de facto ban on American beef.”
Wyoming Stock Growers Association Vice President Jim Magagna said American beef has faced challenges in other markets that aren’t playing fair, including China, and said he believes that the “back and forth” over tariffs could eventually evolve to the benefit of Wyoming’s beef producers.
Read the full story HERE.
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For the second time in less than a month, a wolf that was captured in British Columbia, Canada, and transplanted in Colorado, wandered into Wyoming and died here.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials reported Friday that Wolf 2513, a male, apparently died in Wyoming on Wednesday. Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that there’s not much information available right now.
“What we know is that a second Wolf from Colorado, and again, this wolf was also from the group that was reintroduced from British Columbia. Second one under those wolves came into Wyoming and died on April 9. We don't know how it died. We don't know where it died. Again, the significant detail here is that the wolf that died here on March 15. It was actually killed by Wildlife Services on March 15. March 15 was also from that group that originated in British Columbia.”
The wolves from British Columbia were the second batch to be brought into Colorado as part of that state’s wolf reintroduction program. Colorado wolf reintroduction began in late 2023, with the release of wolves brought in from Oregon.
Read the full story HERE.
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When the Kay family stopped in Hays, Kansas, after a ski vacation at Alta’s Grand Targhee Resort, they made a heart-wrenching discovery: Dog was gone.
A small, brown stuffed animal, Dog would be an unassuming toy to most people, but it means a lot to 8-year-old William, who was devastated when his soft buddy disappeared from the family vehicle.
But Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that there’s no job too large or too small for the Carbon County Sheriff’s Department, who sprang into action.
“I think we can all relate to a time when we were attached to a particular toy or stuffed animal, and the parents were anticipating that this was going to be a lesson in loss for their son, because Wyoming's wins picked up dog, his stuffed dog, and carried it away, and they didn't think there was any hope of getting it back, but they contacted the carbon County Sheriff's Office, and they decided that if they could do something, they would do something. And sure enough, they went to the spot where the dog was lost and the dog was found. So it's a really empowering sort of story that shows law enforcement is there to help however they can.”
William was reunited with Dog on March 31. The stuffed animal arrived snuggly packed in a Carbon County Sheriff’s Office care package Bakken put together for the family.
Read the full story HERE.
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And Cowboy State Daily’s own Wendy Corr shared a stage with country music legends like Reba McEntire and Brooks & Dunn during the 64th Western Heritage Awards on April 12 at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Corr received the Wrangler Award for Outstanding Western Lifestyle Program for her interview with Longmire author Craig Johnson that was featured on Cowboy State Daily’s weekly podcast, The Roundup.
During the ceremony, which Corr described as “fancy dresses and tuxes, billionaires, and beauty queens contrasted with country folks and blue jeans,” Corr said “The Roundup,’ is meant to focus on and highlight the most interesting people in the Cowboy State, and who better to highlight than Craig Johnson, one of Wyoming's favorite sons,” a statement that was met with rapturous applause.
“I am thrilled to accept this Wrangler award, which to me recognizes the importance of these conversations with the people who keep the cowboy culture alive for audiences around the world.”
Western Heritage Awards are awarded to people and projects that have significantly contributed to Western heritage through creative works in film, television, literature and music.
Everyone at Cowboy State Daily sends their congratulations to the Wrangler Award-winning voice of Cowboy State Daily News, Wendy Corr, for this momentous achievement.
Read the full story HERE.
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And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on Cowboy State Daily Dot Com - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our YouTube channel, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for tuning in - I’m Wendy Corr, for Cowboy State Daily.
