WYWyoming Famous People

South Pass City, 1870, and three women who went first

The territorial legislature gave women the vote on December 10, 1869, twenty one years before statehood and half a century before the 19th Amendment, and when Congress hinted that the provision should go before Wyoming could join the Union the delegates wired back that they would stay out for a hundred years rather than come in without their women. In February 1870 Esther Hobart Morris was appointed justice of the peace at the gold camp of South Pass City, the first woman anywhere in the country to hold judicial office, and her statue stands for Wyoming in the United States Capitol. On September 6, 1870, in Laramie, Louisa Swain, a grandmother of 69 on her way to buy yeast, became the first woman to vote in a general election under an equal suffrage law. Fifty five years later, on January 5, 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross was sworn in as governor after finishing her late husband's term, beating Texas by fifteen days to become the first woman governor in American history. Franklin Roosevelt later made her director of the US Mint, where she stayed twenty years.

Jackson Pollock was born in Cody

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on a farm outside Cody on January 28, 1912, and the family sold up and left before he turned one, which is why almost nobody connects the drip paintings with Wyoming. Curt Gowdy, born in Green River in 1919, called World Series and Super Bowls for NBC and hosted The American Sportsman for two decades; the state park between Cheyenne and Laramie carries his name. Gerry Spence was born in Laramie in 1929, wore a fringed buckskin jacket into court, and won the Karen Silkwood case against Kerr-McGee in 1979. Buffalo Bill Cody came from Iowa but founded the town of Cody in 1896 and named the Irma Hotel for his daughter. And Edgar Wilson Nye, the humorist the whole country read as Bill Nye, started the Laramie Boomerang in 1881 and named the newspaper after his mule.

A vice president from Casper, and no president at all

Wyoming has never produced a president, and with three electoral votes it is rarely asked to. It did produce a vice president. Dick Cheney was born in Nebraska in 1941 and moved to Casper at thirteen, held the state's single at large House seat from 1979 to 1989, ran the Pentagon during the Gulf War, and served as vice president from 2001 to 2009. His daughter Liz Cheney held that same lone seat from 2017 to 2023 and lost the 2022 Republican primary by 37 points after vice chairing the January 6 committee. Alan Simpson grew up in Cody, where his father Milward had been governor and then senator, and sat in the Senate himself from 1979 to 1997. The Teapot Dome bribery scandal that brought down a cabinet secretary in the 1920s takes its name from a rock formation in Natrona County.

Washakie, Colter and the people who were here first

Washakie led the Eastern Shoshone for roughly sixty years and negotiated the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868, which set the Wind River Reservation on land his people picked themselves rather than land assigned to them. He lived to about a hundred and was buried at Fort Washakie in 1900 with full military honours, said to be the only Native American chief given them. A grave on the same reservation is marked for Sacagawea, though historians are split, with the competing account placing her death in 1812 in what is now South Dakota. John Colter left the Lewis and Clark expedition on its way home in 1806, walked through the geyser basins in the winter of 1807 and 1808, and was disbelieved so thoroughly that the country got called Colter's Hell. Butch Cassidy, born Robert LeRoy Parker in Utah, served eighteen months in the territorial prison at Laramie and hid out at the Hole in the Wall in Johnson County.

A dairy farmer beat the unbeatable wrestler

Rulon Gardner grew up the youngest of nine on a dairy farm at Afton in the Star Valley and in Sydney in 2000 beat Aleksandr Karelin, a Russian who had not lost an international match in thirteen years. Two years later Gardner lost a toe to frostbite after a night stranded in the Wyoming backcountry, and he still defended his world title. Kenny Sailors worked out a running one handed jump shot in a farmyard trying to score over a taller brother, took Wyoming to the national college championship in 1943, and is one of the players credited with putting the shot into the game. Chris LeDoux won the world bareback riding title in 1976, sold his own cassettes out of a horse trailer, and ranched near Kaycee until his death in 2005.

Matthew Shepard, Casper to Laramie

Matthew Shepard was born in Casper in 1976 and was a first year student at the University of Wyoming in October 1998 when he was beaten, tied to a fence outside Laramie and left overnight. He died six days later in a Fort Collins hospital at 21. The case ran through years of hearings in Cheyenne and Washington, and the federal hate crimes act signed in 2009 carries his name alongside that of James Byrd Jr. of Texas. His ashes were interred at Washington National Cathedral in 2018.

Notable people from bordering states

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