Wyoming’s coal mining industry was secure until the early 1950s, when the Union Pacific switched to diesel-powered locomotives. Laid-off miners and their families struggled; little company towns disappeared. Eventually, trona mining expanded and replaced many of the coal jobs—and in the 1970s, coal came roaring back.

From April to November 1868, two ex-Confederate brothers, Legh and Fred Freeman, published the strident, anti-Reconstruction Frontier Index, moving their offices ahead of the still-building Union Pacific Railroad. Rioters finally destroyed the newspaper’s office and presses in Bear River City, putting the paper out of business.

During the Civil War, varying companies of soldiers from five states served at Fort Halleck on the Overland Trail in what’s now south-central Wyoming. They defended stagecoach stations, passengers, freighters and emigrant trains. Some died in blizzards, some witnessed a legal hanging and some lynched an African-American ambulance driver.

In a saga of bitter hardship and resolve, 350 Northern Cheyenne led by Little Wolf and Dull Knife escaped the Darlington Agency in present Oklahoma late in 1878. Struggling north, they were imprisoned in Nebraska, broke out and, crossing a corner of Wyoming Territory, finally returned to their Montana homelands. 

When German-born August and Charles Trabing came to Laramie in 1868, they began selling goods and hauling supplies to settlers, mining camps and especially Army forts around Wyoming Territory. Their operations expanded for 15 years, with annual revenues sometimes topping $1 million in today’s dollars.

Guided by a pair of Kentuckians, four blindfolded investors rode south from Rawlins toward the Colorado border in June 1872. Their objective, they thought, was a vast, secret field of diamonds, but they lost nearly all the money they’d put in and the swindlers got away—for a time.

During the 1928 Smith-Hoover presidential race, WCTU activist Minnie Fenwick was quite clear where she stood on Prohibition. Former Wyoming Gov. Nellie Tayloe Ross, however, a ‘dry’ working hard for the ‘wet’ candidate, navigated a more complicated route.

Skilled editor and moral crusader James H. Hayford ran the Laramie Daily Sentinel from 1869 until the paper, by then a weekly, folded in 1895. Eliciting reluctant admiration even from his most bitter rivals, Hayford and his paper were colorful, blistering, tireless and articulate.

Nearly 1,100 Wyoming servicemen, representing every county, died in World War II. As in other states, Wyoming’s people gained a stronger sense of being part of the nation thanks in part to war bond drives, scrap metal drives, book drives, victory gardens—and their loved ones’ service at home and overseas.

In the cold winter of 1831-32, 21 fur trappers survived—in fact thrived—on the Laramie Plains, but it was another matter for their horses. One of the men was 22-year-old Zenas Leonard. He had left the family farm in Pennsylvania after announcing “I can make my living without picking stones.”