Samuel H. “Doc” Knight taught geology at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo. from 1916 until his retirement in 1963. For a decade he was the only geology teacher, but as his classes began to grow in size and popularity the geology department expanded into a nationally recognized program. He established the university’s science camp in the mountains west of Laramie and revitalized the university’s geological museum. Knight taught an estimated 10,000 students throughout his career and was known to many “Mr. Geology of Wyoming.”

The history of Niobrara County, Wyo., organized in 1913 and Wyoming’s smallest by population, includes early-day dinosaur discoveries, successful oil drilling and agricultural activities. The county seat, Lusk, earned that status only after extended controversy. The Wyoming Women’s Center, the state’s only prison for women, is located in Lusk.

Grass was free and profits enormous in the cattle business in Wyoming Territory — for a while. The business dates to the 1850s, but the boom came after the Union Pacific Railroad connected Wyoming ranges to eastern markets. For a time it seemed as if every investor got rich. Finally, a weakening market and the overstocked range could not withstand two years of drought followed by a terrible winter. The big boom busted, following an economic pattern repeated many times since in an economy still based heavily on natural resources.

Although the Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s was named for a Wyoming rock formation resembling a teapot, the wrongdoers were not from the state. During the administration of President Warren G. Harding, oilmen Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny bribed Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall to gain access to the naval petroleum reserves located at Teapot Dome in the Salt Creek field north of Casper in northern Natrona County. Fall was the first Cabinet official to be imprisoned for crimes committed during his time in office. Sinclair also served a jail sentence.

Converse County, Wyo., lists Triceratops discoveries and the annual Wyoming State Fair among its claims to fame. As happened with many of the state’s counties, the economic commerce created by the arrival of the railroad brought more people and more possibilities to the area.

On April 2, 1909, seven cowmen attacked a sheep camp near Spring Creek in the southern Big Horn Basin. The raiders killed three men, kidnapped two others, killed sheep dogs and dozens of sheep and destroyed thousands of dollars of personal property. It was the deadliest sheep raid in Wyoming history. Unlike many previous incidents after which raiders went unpunished, however, prosecutors this time were successful and five raiders were jailed, marking the end of 15 years or more of violence between cattle- and sheepmen.

Lucy Morrison Moore, “The Sheep Queen of Wyoming,” was a leading sheep producer during the heyday of public-land sheep ranching from the 1880s to 1920s. Smart, tough and slightly eccentric, she and her family survived brutal, isolated conditions and attacks from cattle ranchers.

The railroad hailed once as the “only line to the great Wyoming copper mining district” in the upper North Platte Valley failed to arrive in time for the copper boom—but still carried passengers and cattle for decades, and lumber for nearly a century.

Fenimore Chatterton was born in Oswego County, New York on July 21, 1860. Chatterton was raised in Washington, D.C. where he attended public schools. After attending Columbian University (now George Washington University) Chatterton graduated from Millersville State Normal School in Lancaster, PA. He moved to Wyoming in 1878 and became a clerk in a general mercantile and banking concern.

A childhood love of adventure eventually led the Belgian Jesuit priest Father Pierre-Jean De Smet to become a missionary to the Indians of the Rocky Mountains. He traveled throughout the northern Rockies, along the way celebrating the first Catholic Mass in what’s now Wyoming on July 5, 1840, during the Green River Rendezvous. In 1851, members of his party named Lake De Smet for him as they traveled from the Missouri River in present Montana to assist in treaty negotiations with the plains tribes near Fort Laramie.