Tom Rea

Tom Rea is the editor of WyoHistory.org. After many years as a reporter and editor on the daily Casper Star-Tribune, he left the paper to write books on Wyoming history and work on other projects, like this one. He lives with his family in Casper, Wyoming.

In March 1866, when whites and Indians together at Fort Laramie mourned the death of Mni Akuwin, daughter of Spotted Tail, chief of the Brulé Lakota, a colonel at the post hoped it was a sign of peace between the peoples. Peace hopes were shattered later that spring however, by the arrival of hundreds of troops to build forts on the Bozeman Trail, and two more years of bitter warfare followed. Finally in 1868, the tribes of the northern plains gathered at the fort and signed a treaty, ending the war—for a while.

Essay : April 14, 2013 - 8:50pm

The Ambition of Nellie Tayloe Ross

Nellie Tayloe Ross, a Democrat, was elected governor of Wyoming a month after her governor husband, William Ross, died of appendicitis in the fall of 1924. She ran because of respect for her husband’s Progressive ideas and also as a result of her own ambition. She lost her bid for re-election in 1926, but went on to figure prominently in the leadership of the national Democratic Party. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to direct the U.S. Mint after he took office in 1933, a job she held for 20 years. She died in Washington in 1977, at the age of 101.

Essay : December 11, 2012 - 10:17pm

Bob David’s War: A Wyoming Soldier Serves in France

Bob David, an adopted boy reared by a well-to-do Wyoming family, never felt he truly belonged until he joined the military and went to France during World War I. He served in an artillery unit and survived numerous onslaughts during battle as well as a severe bout of the flu during the 1918 pandemic, which occurred as he was returning home. He recounted his experiences in a long manuscript and other items that became the core of the Casper College Western History Center. Bob David died in 1968.

Essay : April 16, 2012 - 2:53pm

J. B. Okie, Sheep King of Central Wyoming

The vivid, charismatic J. B. Okie raised sheep near Badwater Creek at the turn of the last century, and was so successful he was called “Sheep King.” A businessman with great vision, he soon owned half a dozen stores in small towns in central Wyoming, and eventually an equal number in Mexico. Lost Cabin, Wyo., named for the legendary Lost Cabin Mine, was his base. Okie built an opulent mansion there, a big bunkhouse for employees, bungalows for guests, an office building, a roller rink, a golf course and an aviary full of birds of paradise (left), cockatoos and macaws.

Essay : March 20, 2012 - 11:05am

The Rock Springs Massacre

On September 2, 1885, long-simmering tensions between white and Chinese coal miners in Rock Springs, Wyo. boiled over into a massacre in which whites murdered 28 Chinese, wounded 15 more, and looted and burned all 79 shacks and houses in Rock Springs’ Chinatown. Though the remaining Chinese miners wanted desperately to leave Wyoming, the Union Pacific Railroad, which owned the mines, refused to grant them railroad passes or the back pay owed them. The Chinese finally had no choice but to return to work, which kept wages low and the coal flowing from the mines.

Essay : May 4, 2011 - 11:43pm

A Kid in Hell on Wheels: Laramie as the Railroad Arrived

Billy Owen never saw a railroad until he was eight years old. His mother had told him about railroads. But in his mind as he traveled east by wagon train across Wyoming in the spring of 1868, he had imagined railroad wheels that looked something like wagon wheels. They rolled in grooves. Each groove was made by two rails. That meant it took four rails, as he imagined it, to make a track.

Essay : September 23, 2010 - 4:48pm

Gathering the Tribes: The Cheyennes come together after Sand Creek

The Tongue River in northern Wyoming must have been as beautiful as it is now when George Bent saw it in 1865, with big, lazy curves under cottonwoods, the grass thickening on its banks and the trees sending out their first green shoots in early May. Nowadays, irrigated hay fields and the tiny towns of Dayton and Ranchester lie along the river. In May of 1865, however, one stretch of it was packed with human beings. That month, there was as large a town on the Tongue as that river has ever seen.

Essay : September 23, 2010 - 1:53pm

Pictures on Rock: What pictographs, petroglyphs say about the people who made them

The earliest people appear to have come to Wyoming from Asia about 11,000 years ago and archaeologists now think there’s a good chance the people were direct ancestors of Shoshone people who live in Wyoming now. In recent years, the mostly white archaeologists have realized it makes sense to ask Shoshone people for help understanding the pictures and carvings their ancestors left on the rocks.

Essay : September 22, 2010 - 5:50pm

Road to Rendezvous: The Rocky Mountain Fur Trade in 1834

As soon as Europeans came to the coasts of North America, they began trading for furs with the people who already lived here. On the first of June 1834, about 60 men and a caravan of horses and pack mules splashed across the Laramie River. They were headed for rendezvous in the mountains — the big summer fur-trading fair — and they were late.

Essay : September 17, 2010 - 4:39pm

This Date in Wyoming History

Peace, War, Land and a Funeral: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868