The party maintained a checking account at a Rock Springs bank. Frysinger of Healdsburg, Calif., which pointedly notes socialism “Is Not” communism, backs property ownership and eschews violence. But also shelved was “Socialism: The Plain English of It,” a 1915 publication by W.M. The national headquarters of the Socialist Party in Chicago furnished the dues ledger to the local party, which also met at the Dom and stored materials there, including a thin paperback titled “Kommunisticni Manifest,” in Slovene. They also brought robust, left-radical politics, mixed with accordion music and wine, to the Dom, where lodge members could buy health and life insurance. The Slovenes in Rock Springs formed a social and fraternal lodge and built a meeting hall, the Slovenski Dom, exactly a century ago. My grandmother never learned English, resolutely expecting to return to the “old country.” This dirt-street, makeshift town where nothing grows isn’t for me, she must have thought. Both sets of my grandparents immigrated to Wyoming, part of a human stream that fueled industry from Butte to Trinidad and Price to Pueblo. Rock Springs was a Union Pacific Railroad coal camp in the early 1880s, attracting an adventurous and economically desperate brew of nationalities: Balkans, Italians, Irish, Mexicans, Asians, African-Americans, all lured to the hard edge of the Red Desert. But now, as the 2012 election suggested, and President Obama outlined at his inaugural, working collectively is the new political normal – solving our problems “together.” Back then, anything that hinted of leftist leanings raised suspicions. It’s because my grandfather’s name on my mother’s side is Putz, a version of “Puc.” The name originates from Slovenia, which was once a part of Yugoslavia and achieved independence following the upheavals of the 1990s.Ī “socialist” in the family? Nobody uttered that word when I was growing up, a third-generation Slovene in gritty Rock Springs. 136, startled me - “Putz.” I glimpsed it not long ago in old documents at the “Slovenski Dom” in Rock Springs, Wyo., a town where politics once mingled with lodge fraternalism in the Old West. The last name of a man in the dues ledger of the South Slavic Socialist Organization, No. Like Tweet Email Print Subscribe Donate Now

Wild west: new frontier horseshoes