It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, August 17th. I’m Mac Watson.
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Political groups spending millions of dollars on Wyoming's primary election are attacking U.S. House and gubernatorial candidates with fliers and commercials. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that some of their claims are exaggerated and some are downright false.
“The most startling of the political ads that we've seen this cycle is a flyer against Senator Eric Barlow, who's running for governor, which claims that he sponsored legislation to drive up fuel taxes. The instances it cites from 2020 and 2013, Barlow was actually fighting to keep fuel taxes low in both those instances. So if you follow the citations, they actually show him fighting to keep fuel taxes low, which makes those outright falsehoods. We see lesser degrees of, I guess, skewed information.”
Attack ads, even if their assertions are exaggerated or flatly untrue, is big business.
PACs are spending hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars to do it.
Read the full story HERE.
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Nearly 23 years after Clifford “Russ” Haux vanished in the Red Desert near Wamsutter, his daughters are still haunted. Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher reports the 42-year-old husband and father of three had gone out with a co-worker to free a stuck vehicle and never returned.
“Clifford ‘Russ’ Haux was out in the oil field, and his suburban got stuck, and he came back to free his suburban with his rigmate. Then he was trying to cross with his pickup truck to get to the other side, and he was unable to do so. So he took off and drove along the draw, and that was the last time anybody saw him again. Two years later his vehicle was found. His purple Ford Ranger pickup was found six miles directly down the draw where he was trying to cross. So that was the first time anybody found any trace of him. And inside of his vehicle, they found a suitcase with a couple of shirts. That's it. There's been no sign of him whatsoever in the 23 years since.”
The Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office can’t speculate about what might have happened to Haux after he left the vehicle. But there’s no evidence to date to suggest Haux was a victim, said Jason Mower, public information officer with the department.
Read the full story HERE.
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Two Sheridan golfers won the lottery on New Year's Eve when they were selected to play at the toughest place to book a tee time in the U.S. Cowboy State Daily’s Jeff Welsch reports that all 11,000 tee times were booked in one hour and they played last week.
“What makes it exceptional is the size, the scale, the scope. Gigantic fairways, the size of football fields. You've got bunkers that'll swallow a golfer whole. They're huge, but the greens, more than anything else, some of the largest greens in the world are on this 18-hole course, which at 600 acres is four times larger than the average American course, and and and one of these greens is one of the largest in the world. So right away you've got something extraordinarily unique, and then on top of it they just charge $175 for a round.”
Sheridan’s Josh Gardner and Jared Stiver have played courses of all shapes and sizes, in all types of environments, foreign and domestic, but they say nothing could prepare them for Landmand.
Read the full story HERE.
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Saratoga 19-year-old Jerahleigh Johnson can weld a roll cage, rebuild an engine, and smash a Cadillac with the best of them. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports that her dad is proud of her demolition derby talent.
“Her dad said that he's had grown men come up to him after a derby, and say that they haven't been hit that hard in years. She's doing so well. In fact, she got her first sponsor this year when Grumpy Diorio, who owns the Grumpy Italian in Saratoga, decided he wanted to support her. So they sponsored her car this year. She rebuilt a 1982 Cadillac and competed in Rawlins last week.”
Jeraleigh’s latest machine is a hulking early-1980s Cadillac painted red, white, and blue, with white stars scattered across its rear quarter panels and two exhaust stacks punching through the hood.
Read the full story HERE.
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I’ll have more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.
Cowboy State Daily News continues now….
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Ann Simpson was remembered by family members Friday as a "grace giver" who lived a "an idyllic life" in the Bighorn Basin. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that hundreds gathered at the Christ Episcopal Church in Cody to celebrate Simpson, wife of the late Sen. Al Simpson.
“Anybody in Wyoming knows that Ann Simpson was as integral to Al Simpson's success as Al was. I think one of the comments that was made during her funeral on Friday, in which hundreds of people attended and several 100 more were watching online, was that Al Simpson wasn't a self-made man. He was an Ann-made man, and that really speaks a lot to her character. People talked about how she could be pretty blunt and frank with her opinion, but she always did so with compassion and empathy.”
94-year-old Ann Simpson was married to the late U.S. Sen. Al Simpson for 72 years. They had three children and a growing number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, in addition to a tight-knit extended family and a vast community of friends.
Read the full story HERE.
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Raising show pigs is a huge commitment for Wyoming 4-H and FFA kids working toward the Wyoming State Fair. Cowboy State Daily’s Jackie Dorothy reports then comes the bittersweet part — tearful goodbyes when the pigs are sold to become dinner for the less fortunate.
“They have what they term an extra pig or an extra hog, and these animals have either the option of going to a private buyer or now there's a new program in Wyoming started by our first lady Ginny Gordon, where you can take your pig and give it to a charity of your choice in your community. And this program is just great because not only do they raise these pigs, they get $750 for the one that is donated. They get to choose the charity, and they actually get to see all of their summer's work put to good use.”
Not only do the young owners have to ensure they keep their pig healthy and bring them to full weight, they also must train them. Show pigs must learn to prance around a ring with their heads held high to show off their assets. The goal is a grand-champion title.
Read the full story HERE.
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This is the fifth year Sam Husted and Sam Rollins have gone to Sturgis to work at The Buffalo Chip. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports that the Casper bartenders are known as 'The Sams' and they can make $1,500 per night.
“For them, this is a huge contribution to their annual savings, and they look forward to it every year. The pair says that the rally's rowdy reputation hasn't exactly matched their experience. They said they have not had a single bad interaction with customers, and that the experience so far has been overwhelmingly positive. Their only negative critique was that they had already run out of two cans of glitter one week in, so they had to go the rest of the rally without their sparkle.”
This year, ‘The Sams,’ bought a camper, friends came along and the two-week money-making marathon doubled as a strange sort of working vacation. They can make in a night what might otherwise take days or weeks, then step outside into one of the biggest parties in the world.
Read the full story HERE.
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A slew of fossils from Earth's earliest primates have been discovered in southwestern Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that scientists say the tiny primate fossils, around the size of a mouse lemur, is evidence something strange was going on in Sweetwater County 55 million years ago.
“Several new fossils found at this spot called Smiley Draw in southern Wyoming, have revealed a lot of interesting things. They're similar to what we find elsewhere in Wyoming, but they're also different. You have species coexisting that would have been extinct or would have never coexisted in other spots where we're finding the same types of animals, so it just goes to show that even though we've learned so much from the early Eocene primate fossils recovered in Wyoming, there's still more out there and still more to learn.”
Wyoming has been a hub of primitive primate paleontology since the 1880s. The first fossils of lemur-like primates were discovered in the Bighorn Basin around that time.
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 watching - I’m Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.
