WYWyoming History

On December 10, 1869, Governor John Allen Campbell signed a bill giving women in Wyoming Territory the right to vote and to hold office, fifty-one years before the Nineteenth Amendment. There were fewer than 9,000 non-Native people in the territory at the time and the motives of the legislators who passed it were a mix of publicity-seeking, factional politics and genuine conviction. What matters is what happened when it was tested. Congress, debating admission in 1890, pressed Wyoming to drop the provision. The territorial delegation wired back that Wyoming would stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without the women. Congress blinked, and Wyoming was admitted on July 10, 1890 as the forty-fourth state, the first place in the world with permanent votes for women written into its constitution.

Shoshone, Arapaho, Lakota, Crow

The high basins and the eastern plains had been hunted for at least twelve thousand years, and the arrival of Spanish horses in the early 1700s reorganised everything. The Eastern Shoshone under Washakie held the Wind River country and the passes; the Crow, or Apsaalooke, ranged the Bighorn basin; the Northern Arapaho and Northern Cheyenne moved across the Powder River grasslands alongside Lakota bands pressing west. Wyoming's clearest surviving monument to that world is the Bighorn Medicine Wheel on Medicine Mountain, a stone circle roughly eighty feet across with twenty-eight spokes, still used in ceremony. The Fort Bridger Treaty of July 3, 1868 set aside the Wind River Reservation for Washakie's Shoshone. Ten years later the army placed the Northern Arapaho there as a supposedly temporary measure, and two nations that had been enemies have shared the reservation ever since.

Four purchases, one rectangle

No other state was assembled from as many separate acquisitions. The bulk of Wyoming, everything drained by the Missouri, came with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The northwestern corner arrived through the Oregon Treaty of 1846. The southwestern corner came from Mexico in the 1848 cession. A strip in the south had been claimed by Texas and passed to the federal government in the Compromise of 1850. Congress then ignored all of it and drew the territory as a rectangle between the 41st and 45th parallels, one of only three states bounded entirely by straight lines. Fort Laramie, built as a fur post in 1834 and bought by the army in 1849, sat where the Oregon, California and Mormon trails converged before threading through South Pass, the broad saddle over the Continental Divide that made the overland migration possible at all. Half a million emigrants crossed Wyoming in the 1840s and 1850s and almost none of them stopped.

The railroad makes a territory

What made people stop was the Union Pacific. Surveyors platted Cheyenne in July 1867 and the rails reached it that November, followed by Laramie, Rawlins, Rock Springs and Evanston, a string of towns strung along one line across the southern edge of an otherwise empty map. Wyoming Territory was organised on July 25, 1868 largely to govern them. The railroad also brought the coal that powered it and the labour disputes that came with it: on September 2, 1885, white miners at Rock Springs attacked the Chinese quarter, killing at least twenty-eight men and driving hundreds out of town. Federal troops escorted the survivors back and stayed for thirteen years. Meanwhile Esther Hobart Morris took office as justice of the peace at South Pass City in February 1870, the first woman to hold judicial office in the country, and a Laramie court that March seated the first women jurors. Nellie Tayloe Ross was sworn in on January 5, 1925 as the first woman governor of any state.

Cattle, a park, and a private army

The open range boom of the 1870s and 1880s made the Cheyenne Club one of the wealthiest addresses in the West, filled with British and eastern investors running cattle on public grass. The winter of 1886 to 1887 killed the herds and the business model together. What followed was a fight over what remained. In April 1892 the Wyoming Stock Growers Association financed a party of about fifty men, including hired Texas gunmen, who rode into Johnson County with a list of names, killed two men at a cabin on the Powder River, and were then besieged by several hundred local settlers at the TA Ranch until cavalry from Fort McKinney rescued them. Nobody was convicted. During the same decades the federal government was drawing lines of another kind: Yellowstone became the world's first national park on March 1, 1872, its case made by Ferdinand Hayden's 1871 survey, William Henry Jackson's photographs and Thomas Moran's paintings. Devils Tower became the first national monument under the Antiquities Act on September 24, 1906.

Oil, scandal, barracks, and coal

Wyoming supplied the name for the defining corruption case of the 1920s. Interior Secretary Albert Fall leased the Teapot Dome naval petroleum reserve north of Casper to Harry Sinclair in 1922 without competitive bidding, took roughly $400,000 in loans and cattle, and in 1929 became the first cabinet officer sent to prison for conduct in office. During the Second World War the government built the Heart Mountain Relocation Center between Cody and Powell, where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated; sixty-three men there refused induction while their families remained behind barbed wire, and were convicted in 1944 in the largest draft resistance trial of the war. The last transformation was geological luck. When the Clean Air Act of 1970 penalised high-sulphur coal, the thick low-sulphur seams of the Powder River Basin became the cheapest fuel in America, and by 1988 Wyoming was producing more coal than any other state, a position it has never lost even as the market has shrunk. Fewer than 600,000 people live here, the smallest population of any state, in the tenth largest area.

Neighbouring states' history

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