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Indigenous People in Wyoming and the West

Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights

The New Deal and Wyoming Agriculture, Part 1: Drought, Depression and Despair

When the stock market crashed in October 1929, Wyoming’s farms and ranches were already struggling. What followed—collapsing markets, failing banks, and years of devastating drought—pushed the state’s agricultural economy to the breaking point. The Franklin Roosevelt administration’s New Deal offered relief, but it also brought federal power directly into Wyoming’s rangeland in ways that would permanently reshape the relationship between ranchers and the land they grazed.

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James W. Byrd: Wyoming’s Pioneering Police Chief

In January 1966, James W. “Jim” Byrd became the first Black police chief in Cheyenne—and in Wyoming. Over a 25-year career he helped modernize the Cheyenne Police Department and went on to serve as a Wyoming highway safety director and U.S. Marshal. Read more about this quiet trailblazer in Wyoming public life.

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The Life of Alan K. Simpson

On a freezing New Year’s Eve in 1978, a handful of friends gathered at Christ Episcopal Church in Cody, Wyoming, to watch Alan Simpson sworn into the U.S. Senate by candlelight. Only about twenty people attended the midnight service, but the moment vaulted Simpson ahead in seniority and launched a career that would make him one of the most recognizable—and quotable—political figures in Wyoming history.1

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“Little Switzerland:” Star Valley and its Dairies

A long, slender valley lies in western Wyoming along the Idaho border. Four to six miles wide and twenty-one miles long, Star Valley drew its first settlers, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because it was hard to get to—and it wasn’t in Idaho.

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Wyoming and the Texas Ranching System

How did a subtropical cattle ranching practice make it into Wyoming? Wyoming’s cattle ranching industry has deep roots in the Tamaulipas area of Mexico, the Carolinas, and Texas. Read more about how this system got established in Wyoming, who profited from it, and what happened when it met the harsh reality of Wyoming winters.

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The New Deal and Wyoming Agriculture, Part 1
James W. Byrd: Wyoming’s Pioneering Police Chief
The Life of Alan K. Simpson
Star Valley and its Dairy Business
Wyoming and the Texas Ranching System

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Memories of a 1990 Girl Guard

Modern military women, trained by one of the most sophisticated armed forces in the world, marching in 19th-century caps and ankle-length skirts with wooden rifles in white-gloved hands. That was the Wyoming Girl Guard, organized in the late 1980s for the 1990 statehood centennial and still active more than 30 years later. In this sidebar from Cowboy Soldiers: The History of the Wyoming National Guard, Volume 1, 1870-1945, Rosalind Routt Schliske remembers the contrasts, the parades, and the day she stood near the Esther Hobart Morris statue with a front-row view of history.

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three lines of young women dressed in dark skirted military uniforms and caps, holding with swords or rifles, looking left while posed on the steps leading into a large building. An inswet at the upper left is a portrait of a man with a moustache

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