Darcee D. Barnes, an independent researcher and stay-at-home mom of 8, is originally from Lovell, Wyo. and lives in Sandy, Utah. She has BA and MA degrees in history from Brigham Young University. This is her first published article.
Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin was still largely unsettled in 1900 when irrigation-minded Mormon colonizers from Utah established the towns of Byron and Cowley, expanded Lovell and began digging the Sidon Canal on the Shoshone River. Their influence settled and stabilized a previously lawless part of the state.