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Indigenous People in Wyoming and the West

Botanist, Historian and Teacher

Historian, botanist, teacher and rancher Vie Willits Garber grew up in Big Horn and in 1910 earned a master’s degree in two disciplines from the University of Wyoming. She was the first person to carefully map and document the route of the Bozeman Trail—and she identified and listed 615 plants in the Little Goose Valley near her family’s home.

National Parks, Science and the 1963 Leopold Report

After Yellowstone rangers slaughtered 4,300 elk in 1961 to try and control overpopulation, hunters, outfitters and the public were enraged. In response, zoologist Starker Leopold, son of famed naturalist Aldo Leopold, wrote a groundbreaking report for the National Park Service that advocated systematic, scientific management of natural areas—a revolutionary approach at the time.

Silent Man of the Plains

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.

A Treaty in his Lens

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.

Tracking the Past

Attracting tens of thousands of visitors annually, the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center opened in Casper in August 2002. Keeping history and memory alive, the center also serves school groups and offers interpretive exhibits, guest speakers, re-enactors and special events targeting people of all ages and interests.

Protecting Public Land

Shortly after Congress gave him the power to do so, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 created the nation’s first national monument at Devils Tower. Wyoming’s lone congressman, Frank Mondell, fearing federal overreach and always in favor of developing, not protecting, public land was distinctly unenthusiastic about the move.

Botanist, Historian and Teacher

National Parks, Science and the 1963 Leopold Report

Silent Man of the Plains

A Treaty in his Lens

Tracking the Past

Protecting Public Land

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Managing Wildlife—with Science

The Leopold Report, as it’s known, is more famous within the National Park Service than in the general population. That’s because Leopold’s solution was to ask bigger questions.

Keep Reading

Starker Leopold was an avid hunter himself, and as a scientist, continually called for game managers to make more animals available to hunters, usually by improving habitat. Here, he pauses with gun, dog and three dead chukkar partridges in the Tremblor Range in California, November 1955. Leopold collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison archives.

To Mr. Henry Ford from W. F. Cody, 1916

An Afghan Exchange

The Closet of History

Two Days in One

Florence Blake Had Grit

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November 2023