In the lean and mean years of the Great Depression, the New Deal still found a way to support writers and artists through Federal Project Number One. One of the programs under its umbrella was the Federal Writers’ Project, which—among other endeavors—paid writers (including some big names like Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty) as little as $20 a week to write a series of travel guides about America. Now coming online, these guides are revealing a great deal about the frontier spirit that still prevailed in those days.

An interesting example of the series was covered by the New York Times earlier this week under the headline A State That Never Was in Wyoming. The piece explores the strange, if short-lived, saga of Absaroka:

In early 1939, as talk of war in Europe clouded the horizon and hard economic times gripped the nation, a group of business and political leaders in this northern Wyoming city hatched an audacious, if not quite ridiculous, plan to break off huge chunks of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana and form a new state.

Editors at the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project, which happened at the time to be combing the country for local color (and for writers as well, for a series of travel guides about the United States that are now coming online and enjoying a public revival of sorts), included the story in the Wyoming guide, published in 1941, as an example of ten-gallon cowboy eccentricity.

The tale of the would-be rebels, who called their new state Absaroka (pronounced ab-SOR-ka), from the Crow word meaning “children of the large-beaked bird,” then faded into the mist. Details were forgotten — how a baseball-player-turned-street-commissioner in Sheridan named A. R. Swickard appointed himself governor and began hearing writs of grievance, and how license plates were distributed along with pictures of Miss Absaroka 1939, the first and apparently last of her breed. There was even an Absarokan state visit, when the king of Norway made a swing through Montana.

This is the second story in a series that the Times will run on the little known works created under the Federal Writers’ Project. You can find the first here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 4:34 pm and is filed under *William's Posts, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.