western wyoming community college

Fort Bonneville

Built in 1832 near the Green River, Fort Bonneville was Wyoming’s first trading post, though mountain men mocked it as “Fort Nonsense.” Its real legacy was proving wagons could cross South Pass.

Adam LeRoy Strausner: Educators Are “Merchants of Hope”

LeRoy Strausner served as the fourth president of Casper College from 1991-2004. In September 2013, Dana Van Burgh interviewed him at the facility’s Western History Center about his life and his long career at the college.

Rock Springs, Wyoming

Rock Springs, Wyo. traces its origins to a coal mine established there in 1868 to serve the still-building Union Pacific Railroad. Ever since, the town has been enriched by the people who came from around the world to live and work there—in coal mines, on the railroad and, in recent decades, in trona mines to the west and the oil and natural-gas fields to the north. Rock Springs boasted 56 nationalities by the 1920s. Its political and economic fortunes have closely followed all these industries’ cycles of boom and bust.