This month at WyoHistory.org we focus on some pioneering women and pioneering Mormon settlers. The first women to own a newspaper in Wyoming continued successfully in other professions after they sold the paper, and a working woman of more contemporary times who was born in a tar paper shack went on to build a more affluent life as an adult. Each in her own way took what she had and made more from it; much like the Mormon colonizers who created towns and irrigation canals on the land they settled.

State’s first women newspaper owners

Sisters Gertrude and Laura Huntington, the first women newspaper owners in Wyoming, bought the Platte Valley Lyre in Saratoga, Wyo., in 1890 and ran it for 12 years, competing all the while with the Saratoga Sun to inform and entertain their readers. Both women later led long professional careers in Carbon County.  Learn more in WyoHistory.org Assistant Editor Lori Van Pelt’s article “The ‘Lyre Girls:’ First Women Newspaper Owners in Wyoming.”

Mormon colonization of the Bighorn Basin

Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin was still largely unsettled in 1900 when irrigation-minded Mormon colonizers from Utah established the towns of Byron and Cowley, expanded Lovell and began digging the Sidon Canal on the Shoshone River. Their influence settled and stabilized a previously lawless part of the state. Read more in writer Darcee Barnes’ article “Mormon Colonizers in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin.”

A Salt Creek childhood and other memories

Edna Garrett was born in Salt Creek, Wyo., in 1926, and grew up with her eight siblings in a house with no running water in a boomtown going bust, where her parents ran a secondhand store. This interview was conducted two years before her death in 2013. Learn more in the oral history “Edna Garrett: Growing Up in Salt Creek, Wyo.,” which was conducted by student Dawn Moon and provided by the Casper College Western History Center.