The talking lasted 12 hours. Several times, the Ute negotiators returned to their camp; the soldiers could do little but wait. Each time negotiations resumed, the Utes absolutely refused to return to their reservation. Civil officials were frantic. The Utes were positive about one main thing: They would not go back.
Laramie-born attorney Thurman Arnold became head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in 1938. Later he served as a federal judge in Washington, D.C. Earlier, Arnold had practiced law in Laramie, served in the Wyoming House of Representatives and helped found the University of Wyoming College of Law.
Democrat Lester Hunt, a charismatic wartime governor in heavily Republican Wyoming, won a U.S. Senate seat in 1948. There, he clashed with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. After Hunt’s son was convicted for soliciting homosexual contact, Hunt was blackmailed by Republican senators and committed suicide—circumstances that remained largely unknown for three decades.
As mass production of automobiles increased the demand for better roads, federal highway funds became available to states and “good roads” committees pioneered the identification, improvement and naming of likely tourist routes. Among the first of these, from the Black Hills to Yellowstone, was the Black and Yellow Trail.
Through some of Wyoming’s roughest terrain in 1874, future Gov. William A. Richards surveyed the western boundary of the territory. Felling trees, clambering through canyons, dodging lightning bolts and watching mules flip from cliffs were only a few of the privations he and his party endured.
In 1904, a Laramie mob hanged African-American Joe Martin from a light pole near the courthouse, drawing a crowd of 1,000 people or more. Despite having called several witnesses, a grand jury brought no indictments. And lynchings of Black men became more and more frequent in Wyoming in the coming two decades.
Stephen Leek’s efforts to save the starving elk of Jackson Hole came at a time when survival of the species was very much in doubt. The founding of the National Elk Refuge in 1912 was one result—a huge achievement. But feeding wildlife in herds leads to disease, we now know. And Leek himself was a decidedly complicated man.
When Enzo Tarquinio surrendered to U.S. Rangers in Sicily in 1943, he didn’t know he’d end up at Camp Douglas, Wyo. While other POWs worked at farms and ranches, Tarquinio and at least two fellow artist-prisoners painted murals in the officers’ club. Their subjects? Cowboys, Indians, wagon trains and mountain goats.
After Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, newspaper editors across the nation expressed varying degrees of shock and outrage. Wyoming joined in, but some editorials hinted at mixed sentiments about the killing and its aftermath.
