In the 1820s and 1830s, what’s now western Wyoming was at the center of the fur trade of the northern Rocky Mountains. Indians, trappers and their suppliers met each summer at a big trade fair called rendezvous, where trappers exchanged their season’s beaver pelts for hardware, whiskey and supplies. By 1840, demand for beaver had disappeared and the species had been nearly rubbed out. But the rendezvous supply routes were already becoming the trails that would bind the nation together.

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.

Wyoming gets its name from a green valley in northeast Pennsylvania originally purchased from the Iroquois by a Connecticut land company. An Ohio congressman in 1865 first proposed the name—but later, after he saw our dry, wide plains, he wasn’t so sure he’d had the right idea.

Largely forgotten today is the stiff local resistance that arose in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the creation and later the expansion of a national park there. The story covers 31 years of controversy, and includes a Rockefeller, a movie actor and a group of armed ranchers trailing cattle illegally across a national monument, and some of the most beautiful scenery in North America.

In November 1876, about 700 cavalry and 400 Indian scouts led by Col. Ranald Mackenzie, burned the main village of the Northern Cheyenne to the ground near the Red Fork of Powder River about 20 miles west of present Kaycee, Wyo. Seven soldiers were killed and about 40 Cheyenne, but the economic and cultural loss to the tribe was devastating. The Northern Cheyenne surrendered to government authorities the following spring.

The earliest people appear to have come to Wyoming from Asia about 11,000 years ago and archaeologists now think there’s a good chance the people were direct ancestors of Shoshone people who live in Wyoming now. In recent years, the mostly white archaeologists have realized it makes sense to ask Shoshone people for help understanding the pictures and carvings their ancestors left on the rocks.

The T Cross Ranch north of Dubois, Wyo., on Horse Creek in the Absaroka Mountains was first homesteaded around 1900 by Ernest O. Hadden. In 1919, Henry Seipt acquired the property, named it “The Hermitage” and operated a dude ranch here. Robert Cox became the owner in 1929 and changed the name to “T Cross Ranch,” but continued the dude ranch. The ranch is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is still operated as a dude ranch.

The history of Sheridan County, Wyo., located at the base of the Bighorn Mountains, includes polo ponies, working ranches and farms, a prestigious sanctuary for artists and writers and an abundance of American Indian lore, outlaws, pioneers, miners and Old West dude ranches. Railroads, and the coal mines dug for fuel to run the locomotives running also played important roles in the area’s development.

In 1850, the U.S. Congress authorized a conference to persuade Plains Indian tribes to live and hunt within newly designated, separate territories, and to accept payment for the damage caused by emigrants crossing their lands. The conference in September 1851 drew 10,000 Indians to the confluence of Horse Creek and the North Platte River, 30 miles east of Fort Laramie. The treaty that was signed there, the Horse Creek Treaty of 1851, permanently changed the terms of Indian-white relations on the northern Great Plains.

Saratoga, famed for its hot springs, has often been called the place “where the trout leap in Main Street.” Treasured by fishermen, hunters and outdoor lovers, the town continues to thrive on the tourist trade. A sawmill, mainstay of the local economy from 1934 to 1983, recently re-opened.