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Indigenous People in Wyoming and the West

The Gallows That Hanged Tom Horn

Although James Julian is likely not a household name for many, his invention intertwines with some of the biggest names in Wild West legend. Julian’s invention of the hydraulic gallows impacted the way capital punishment was meted out in Wyoming for more than five decades. Read more about this gruesome invention.

With the Pride a Monarch Might View His Kingdom: Martha Waln, Bighorn Basin Homesteader

Martha James, 21, left Wales in 1882 and came to Wyoming as maid to an upper-crust English bride. The next year Martha married a cowboy and came to the Bighorn Basin. Decades later, she told her stories. Her stories illuminate the contours of change in Wyoming at the time.

“Then I breathed freely:” Black Women Vote in Wyoming, 1870

On the morning of September 6, 1870, Wyoming women prepared themselves for a momentous day—the first election since the Territorial Legislature had passed the world’s first woman suffrage bill. Among the voters were women from Wyoming’s Black communities. They were the first Black women in U.S. history to vote.

The Outlaw and his Lawyer: Butch Cassidy and Douglas Preston

He was a member of Wyoming’s Constitutional Convention of 1889, a signer of Wyoming’s State Constitution, a member of the Wyoming House of Representatives and served two terms as Wyoming’s attorney general, but Douglas A. Preston is remembered for being the lawyer for Butch Cassidy, the outlaw.

Wyoming Grasshoppers Then and Now

“Why not eat insects?” Jim Wangberg asked this in 1987, and it set off more than a classroom discussion. At the time, Wangberg was department head of plant, soil and insect sciences at the University of Wyoming. His question was particularly pressing following Wyoming’s big grasshopper years in 1985 and 1986, with densities of up to 100 grasshoppers per square yard in some locations. That many grasshoppers can devastate an agricultural based economy.

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February 2025