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Title Article Type Author
Arapaho tribe, arrival of on Shoshone Reservation, 1878 Encyclopedia WyoHistory.org

The first fur trader to take wagons over South Pass, Capt. Benjamin Bonneville, on leave from the U.S. Army in 1832, seems to have been seeking information about British activities in the far Northwest as much as he was seeking beaver pelts.

Hundreds of Cheyenne warriors charging a group of U.S. soldiers along a creek named Bonepile fulfills several Hollywood clichés. But these events on a hot August morning in 1865, 10 miles south of present Gillette, Wyoming, were very, very real.

Frank Grouard lived with Hunkpapa and Oglala Lakota bands as captive, adopted brother and champion hunter. Later he re-entered the world of White men as an army scout in the Indian Wars. He told his life story to Buffalo, Wyoming journalist Joe DeBarthe, who published it—and made some of it up.

Alexander Gardner took some of our most important photographs of the Civil War and the 19th-century West. His images from the crucial 1868 treaty negotiations at Fort Laramie capture Sioux, Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mixed-race families and interpreters, government peace commissioners and vivid scenes of life at the fort.

One summer morning in 1908, Sam Gibson rode horseback along Little Piney Creek near Sheridan County’s southern border. His companion, Charles Bezold, rode alongside, eager to hear the older man’s stories of an Indian Wars battle 40 years before. They knew they were near the site of the Wagon Box Fight ...

In 1859-1860 Capt. William Raynolds led scientists, artists and soldiers who mapped much of present Wyoming and Montana. Their maps show a West frozen in time, home to Native people. But the maps were tools too of the nation’s sense of itself and its Manifest Destiny—to dispossess people who already lived here.

U.S. Census taker James Clopper counted 366 people with military connections at Fort Laramie in 1860, and another 300 civilians outside fort boundaries. It weas a diverse group: Soldiers, Indians, traders and freighters lived there; stagecoaches carrying people and mail, westbound young families and a few handcart-pulling Mormons were all passing through.

A major route for emigrants, freighters, the military, stagecoaches and mail, the Overland Trail across present southern Wyoming saw heavy traffic in the 1850s and 1860s. At different stations along the way, coach drivers obtained fresh horses, the wives of station masters fed dusty travelers and soldiers fought attacking warriors.

Thomas Twiss, West Point class of 1826, came to Fort Laramie as a civilian in 1855, tasked with keeping government promises to tribes and keeping peace in all directions. He had an Oglala family on Deer Creek in addition to a family back East—and lived in two worlds for decades.

During World War II, the U.S. Army operated two large and 17 smaller prisoner of war camps in Wyoming. Prisoners worked on farms and in the camps, often for private employers, who paid a going rate for local wages. Some prisoners became friends with their supervisors, others with the farm families they worked for.