Photo #1 - Roll call for detained Coxeyites in Green River, Wyoming, May 16, 1894, awaiting transport under army escort to Idaho
Photo #2 - Under guard by federal troops, Coxeyites boarding the train in Green River for the return to Idaho to stand trial
(Sweetwater County, Wyo. - June 4, 2022) A little-known chapter of Sweetwater County history is the subject of a new article at WyoHistory.org, the Sweetwater County Historical Museum said in a special release on Saturday.
“The Wyoming March of Coxey’s Army,” by Brigida (Brie) Blasi of the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center and the museum’s former Executive Director, is the story of the movement / protest that came to be known as “Coxey’s Army,” named for its leader, an Ohio businessman and labor activist named Jacob Coxey.
By the spring 1894, the four-year nationwide economic depression that became known as the Panic of 1893 was well underway. Unemployment was extremely high, and many protesting workers from around the country, loosely organized by Coxey and others, began traveling east by rail in what would become the first political march on Washington, D.C.
Most “Coxeyites” were peaceful and often welcomed by sympathizers as they traveled, but others were not. One contingent, numbering about 250, stole a train in Montpelier, Idaho, and wound up in Green River in May of 1894, where they were detained under guard in a tent camp by U.S. Marshal Joe Rankin and local law enforcement volunteers until troops could arrive to escort them back to Idaho, where all were found guilty and given minor sentences.
Coxey himself made it to Washington, but his demands that the federal government assist workers by employing them in public works projects were refused and he was arrested, charged with trespassing on public property. When he was taken into custody, his “army’ dispersed.
WyoHistory.org, an outstanding resource Wyoming history, is the online platform for the Wyoming State Historical Society. Blasi’s article can be found at
https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyoming-march-coxeys-army .
The Sweetwater County Historical Museum is located at 3 E. Flaming Gorge Way in Green River. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and there is no charge for admission.
Photo #1 - Corporal Michael Chockie, United States Marine Corps
Photo #2 - The German merchant raider Cormoran, which was interned on the Pacific island of Guam in 1914 and scuttled by its own crew when the United States declared war on Germany on April 7, 1917
Photo #3 - Marines on Guam after the Cormoran incident. The men with them are laborers from German New Guinea who’d been working aboard the raider. Later they were returned to their homeland aboard a Japanese ship, Japan having been on the side of the Allies in World War I. (Guampedia photo - used with thanks)
(Sweetwater County, Wyo. - June 2, 2022) In 2020 the Sweetwater County Historical Museum published an account about Marine Corporal Michael Chockie, a Rock Springs native, who fired the first American shot of World War I. At the time the museum was unable to locate a photograph of Chockie.
An independent researcher recently provided a link to a 1922 article in The American Legion Weekly describing the incident in Apra Harbor, Guam, in 1917, that included a photograph of Corporal Chockie, shown here.
The museum is reproducing its 2020 article. The 1922 American Legion Weekly piece can be found online at https://archive.org/details/americanlegionwe413amer/page/4/mode/2up .
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A Rock Springs Man Fired the First American Shot of World War I
On Sunday morning, June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, setting off the Great War, later called World War I. On one side were the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire; on the other was the Allies - at that time Great Britain, France, and Russia, among others.
The United States would not enter the war on the side of the Allies for nearly three more years, and when it did, the first shot an American serviceman fired at an enemy in that colossal conflict was not in the trenches in France or on the battlefields of the eastern front, but in the harbor of a Pacific island over 6,000 miles from his birthplace. The staff of the Sweetwater County Museum reported that Corporal Michael Chockie, United States Marine Corps, the man who fired that shot, was a native of Rock Springs, Wyoming, the son of Austrian immigrants.
The German merchant raider Cormoran, armed with eight 4.1-inch guns, put into Apra Harbor, Guam, on December 14, 1914. Guam was American territory and the United States was still neutral at that time. Nearly out of coal, the Cormoran and her crew were interned by American naval authorities and remained in Apra for the next two years.
On April 7, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and boarding parties of sailors and Marines led by Lieutenant W.A. Hall, USN, moved toward the raider in boats to seize the ship. When a boat from the Cormoran was seen headed for shore, Hall ordered Corporal Chockie to fire a shot across the boat’s bow - the first American shot of World War I. At first, the Germans ignored the warning, but after Chockie and another men fired several more shots into the water near the boat, its crew hove to.
Moments later, the Cormoran’s captain blew the ship up to keep her falling into American hands. Seven German sailors drowned as she sank quickly in 120 feet of water; the survivors - about 300 men - were pulled from the water by sailors and Marines. The Cormoran remains on the bottom today, a popular site for scuba divers.
As described in the archives of the Naval History and Heritage Command, “This brief encounter at Guam was resulted in the first violence of the war, the first Germans killed in action with the United States, the first German prisoners of war captured by the United States forces, and the first shots fired between the U.S. and Germany. Despite this, it was an incident marked more by kindness and humanity than hostility and carnage as American Navy personnel acted quickly and labored hard to save their new enemies rather than to destroy them.”
As of this writing, [in 2020], the Museum has been unable to locate a photograph of Corporal Chockie, but is continuing its search. A video about the Cormoran incident can be found online on YouTube at
Photo #1 - Frances Stark and her son Jimmy in Reliance, 1926
Photo #2 - Jim and Annie Stark, 1943
Photo #3 - Sweetwater County Sheriff Jim Stark in 1987, the year he retired
(Sweetwater County, Wyo. - May 21, 2022) In the 1920s, garden contests were very popular in Sweetwater County coal camps like Winton and Reliance. Diane Butler, a Sweetwater County Historical Museum volunteer, recently discovered in museum archives a very special Reliance garden photo from 1926. Museum staff identified the two people in the photograph as Frances Stark and her nine-year-old son Jimmy; the occasion was Mrs. Stark winning second place for her Reliance garden that year.
“Jimmy” was Jim Stark, who went on to have a distinguished law enforcement career in Sweetwater County. He attended school in Reliance and Rock Springs, where he graduated high school. Stark enlisted in the U.S. Navy in May, 1941, and fought during the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7. He married Rosamond Annabelle “Annie” Paterson in Rock Springs in 1943. A champion boxer, he joined the Rock Springs Police Department in 1946, going on to serve with the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office first as a deputy sheriff, then undersheriff from 1955 to 1977, when he was appointed Sheriff of Sweetwater County after Sheriff John Zakovich retired. Stark served as Sheriff until 1987, with his own retirement at age 69.
Sheriff Stark died in 2000 and Annie passed away in 2014. Their son Stephen Stark, a Navy corpsman, was killed in action while serving with a Marine Corps unit in Viet Nam in 1968.
Stark’s badge, on loan from retired Sweetwater County Sheriff Gary Bailiff, is currently on display at the museum. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. There is no charge for admission.
Discover the rich cultural heritage of southwestern Wyoming at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum. Established in 1967 to preserve the history of Sweetwater County, the museum contains permanent and temporary exhibits, a large historical photograph collection, and local history research material.
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