In 1979, Wyoming sent three men to Washington just as Iran’s revolution was setting in motion a chain of events that would define American foreign policy for decades. Senator Alan Simpson, Senator Malcolm Wallop, and Congressman Dick Cheney were all present for the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, the Lebanon hostage crisis, and the Iran-Contra investigation—and the crisis they witnessed never really ended.

Wyoming is a small town with very long streets—but a new digital map is making it smaller. The Wyoming Literary Map, launched in May 2025 by Jackson Hole Writers in partnership with literary organizations across four counties, is a crowdsourced, interactive resource connecting the state’s authors, bookstores, presses, libraries, writing residencies, and literary landmarks. With more than 100 entries already, the project invites writers, readers, and literary organizations to find each other across Wyoming’s wide distances. Keona Blanks, the project’s coordinator, explains how it works and why it matters.

Adam Reynolds has spent nearly a decade documenting sites of historic conflict between the U.S. government and Native American peoples, photographing each on or near its anniversary. In Wyoming, his large-format camera finds two contested grounds—the Grattan Fight (1854) and the Fetterman Fight (1866)—and asks what their shifting names and monuments reveal about the societies that named and built them.

In the 1890s, USGS geologist Thomas Jaggar documented the remote Absaroka Mountains of northwest Wyoming through a remarkable series of photographs. More than 130 years later, Brian Beauvais set out to find those locations and rephotograph them—revealing a landscape that is both strikingly unchanged and quietly transformed.

In 1943, a 19-year-old Nebraska farm girl with two months of telegraphy training volunteered to staff one of the highest railroad stations in the country—and ended up earning equal pay with men while doing it. Myrtle Forney’s story of life at Wyoming’s remote Sherman Station, told through her own words and her daughter’s memories, is a remarkable window into the women who kept America’s railroads running during World War II.

"Annals of Wyoming" is one of the West’s longest-running state history journals. Now published under the Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources, the journal continues more than a century of chronicling Wyoming’s rich past. The latest issue features Buffalo Bill’s life on stage and screen, with a feature by award-winning historian Paul Andrew Hutton, plus essays on the Buffalo Bill Papers Project and a tribute to the late historian Jeremy Johnston.

DeMarge Toliver was a charter member of Cheyenne’s Searchlight Club in 1904 and served as its president by 1920. Despite personal tragedies including the loss of both her children, she dedicated more than 40 years to building institutions that sustained Wyoming’s small African American community across multiple generations.

By Lilla Beaulier

I didn’t know my Wyoming History Day project would start at a museum I’d already visited, but that’s exactly what happened.