WYWyoming State Symbols

Wyoming's nickname and its motto say the same thing, and both point at one piece of legislation. In December 1869 the territorial legislature at South Pass City passed a bill giving women the vote and the right to hold office, the first government anywhere to do so on a lasting basis. Twenty years later, when Congress hesitated over admitting a state that let women vote, the territorial delegates sent word that Wyoming would stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without them. Congress gave way in 1890. "Equal Rights" went onto the state seal, and the Equality State is the nickname Wyoming has used ever since.

Official state symbols

The Indian paintbrush beat out several rivals in 1917 after a long campaign by Dr Grace Raymond Hebard, the University of Wyoming librarian and historian who also had a hand in fixing the flag design that same year.

What is on the Wyoming state flag

A red border, then a narrower white border, then a blue field with a white bison silhouetted in the centre. The state seal is set on the bison's flank, placed there deliberately in the way a rancher brands stock, which is the detail that makes this flag unlike any other. Verna Keays, an art student from Buffalo, won a Daughters of the American Revolution design contest with it in 1917. Each colour was assigned a meaning: red for the blood of the Native peoples and the pioneers, white for purity and uprightness, blue for the sky and the mountains and for fidelity and justice. Keays had the bison facing the fly. Grace Raymond Hebard, who ran the contest, argued it should face the staff so the animal looks toward the flagpole, and the legislature adopted the reversed version.

The seal and its four pillars

The seal at the centre of the bison was adopted in 1893 and revised in 1921. A draped female figure stands on a pedestal holding a staff from which hangs a banner reading "Equal Rights," a direct reference to the 1869 suffrage act. Two men flank her, one a rancher and one a miner, standing for the two industries that carried the territory. Behind each man is a pillar wrapped with a scroll, and the four scrolls read Livestock, Grain, Mines and Oil. Two dates appear at the base: 1869, when the territorial government was organised, and 1890, when Wyoming entered the Union. The number 44 on the star records Wyoming as the forty-fourth state admitted.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state dinosaur was chosen by children. Wyoming schoolchildren voted for triceratops over the alternatives and the legislature made it official in 1994.
• The state fossil is a small fish. Knightia comes from the Green River Formation in the south-west of the state, where the shale splits into slabs holding whole schools of them.
• The state reptile is not a toad. The horned toad is a short-horned lizard, adopted in 1993.
• Wyoming has an official state code. The legislature adopted the Code of the West in 2010, ten plain principles such as riding for the brand and finishing what you start, taken from a book by James P. Owen.
• Rodeo is the official state sport, designated in 2003, and Cheyenne Frontier Days has run since 1897.
• The state gemstone is jade. Nephrite jade found in the central part of the state set off a prospecting rush in the 1930s and 1940s, and it was named the state gemstone in 1967.

Neighbouring states' symbols

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