WYWyoming Fun Facts

Wyoming has fewer residents than Washington DC and not a single city over 100,000 people. Cheyenne, which is both the capital and the largest city, sits around 65,000. The state is tenth in area and last in population, and the gap between those two numbers explains almost everything else about the place.

Facts most people get wrong

• Yellowstone is not entirely in Wyoming. About 96 percent of the park sits inside the state, with narrow strips crossing into Montana on the north and Idaho on the west.
• The 1869 suffrage vote was not pure idealism. The territorial legislature granted women the vote on December 10, 1869, partly to attract attention and settlers, and some members expected a veto that never came. When Congress objected during the statehood debate in 1890, Wyoming replied that it would stay out of the Union for a hundred years rather than join without women voting.
• The Tetons are young, not worn down. The range is less than 10 million years old, the youngest in the Rockies. It has no foothills at all, so the peaks rise roughly 7,000 feet directly off the floor of Jackson Hole.
• Devils Tower has no apostrophe. The punctuation was dropped in the original paperwork, and the Board on Geographic Names, which avoids possessive apostrophes as policy, never restored it.
• Wyoming is not flat prairie. Its mean elevation is about 6,700 feet, second only to Colorado, and its lowest point, 3,099 feet on the Belle Fourche River, sits higher than the highest point of more than a dozen states.
• There is a legal gap in the Idaho strip of Yellowstone. A 2005 law review article by professor Brian Kalt argued that the Sixth Amendment requirement of a jury drawn from the state and district where a crime occurred cannot be satisfied in that uninhabited 50 square mile sliver. Congress has never closed the loophole.

Records and firsts

• Yellowstone became the first national park in the world on March 1, 1872, decades before the National Park Service existed to run it.
• Devils Tower became the first national monument in the United States on September 24, 1906, under the newly signed Antiquities Act.
• Wyoming was the first government anywhere to grant women permanent voting rights, in 1869, seated the first women jurors in Laramie in 1870, and appointed Esther Hobart Morris as the country's first female justice of the peace the same year.
• Nellie Tayloe Ross took office on January 5, 1925 as the first woman to serve as a governor of a US state.
• Wyoming produces more coal than any other state, roughly 40 percent of the national total, almost all of it from open pits in the Powder River Basin.
• Yellowstone contains around half the world's active geysers, more than 500 of them. Steamboat Geyser is the tallest active geyser on Earth, throwing water as high as 300 feet.
• Wyoming wrote the first modern limited liability company statute in the United States in 1977, the template most other states eventually copied.
• The state charges no personal income tax and no corporate income tax, funding itself largely on mineral severance taxes.

Geography that surprises

• Wyoming and Colorado are the only two states whose borders consist entirely of lines of latitude and longitude. Nineteenth century survey error left small jogs in Wyoming's supposedly perfect rectangle.
• In the Great Divide Basin the Continental Divide splits into two arms and wraps around a closed basin. Rain that falls inside it drains toward neither ocean and simply evaporates.
• Gannett Peak in the Wind River Range reaches 13,809 feet, the highest point in the state and the source of some of the largest glaciers in the American Rockies.
• The Path of the Pronghorn, running about 150 miles from the upper Green River Basin into Jackson Hole, is the longest land mammal migration in the lower 48. Wyoming has more pronghorn than people.
• The Yellowstone caldera measures roughly 30 by 45 miles, large enough that visitors drive across the crater floor without noticing they are inside a volcano.

Where the name comes from

Wyoming is named after a valley in Pennsylvania, about 1,700 miles away. The Wyoming Valley near Wilkes-Barre took its name from a Munsee Delaware word meaning roughly at the big river flat.

The word traveled by literature. Thomas Campbell's 1809 poem Gertrude of Wyoming, about a 1778 battle in that Pennsylvania valley, made the name widely familiar, and Ohio congressman James M. Ashley proposed it for the new western territory in 1865. Nothing about it is local. The nickname, the Equality State, and the one line motto, Equal Rights, both point back to the 1869 suffrage law.

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Bordering states

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