Historic Spots & Monuments

Whoopup Canyon, a system of roughly 150 rock art panels along a four-mile stretch of Dakota sandstone in northeast Wyoming, is a special place. Its petroglyphs, mostly images of game animals, are among the most extensive and among the oldest in North America.

On the western edge of Wyoming’s Red Desert lie the remains of an informal campsite where, for about two decades, motorists on the transcontinental Lincoln Highway pulled off to spend the night. Inscriptions they left on rocks, and bottles and saucer shards they scattered in the sagebrush tell tales of earlier times.

The first fur trader to take wagons over South Pass, Capt. Benjamin Bonneville, on leave from the U.S. Army in 1832, seems to have been seeking information about British activities in the far Northwest as much as he was seeking beaver pelts.

“I knew we had to do something really quick. I was ready to lay down in front of a probably D17 [bulldozer] to stop that thing,” said George Frison, head of the anthropology department at the University of Wyoming. Read about the artifact-rich archaeological site Frison was prepared to defend: Powars II at Sunrise, Wyoming.

Historian, botanist, teacher and rancher Vie Willits Garber grew up in Big Horn and in 1910 earned a master’s degree in two disciplines from the University of Wyoming. She was the first person to carefully map and document the route of the Bozeman Trail—and she identified and listed 615 plants in the Little Goose Valley near her family’s home.

Alexander Gardner took some of our most important photographs of the Civil War and the 19th-century West. His images from the crucial 1868 treaty negotiations at Fort Laramie capture Sioux, Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mixed-race families and interpreters, government peace commissioners and vivid scenes of life at the fort.

Attracting tens of thousands of visitors annually, the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center opened in Casper in August 2002. Keeping history and memory alive, the center also serves school groups and offers interpretive exhibits, guest speakers, re-enactors and special events targeting people of all ages and interests.

Shortly after Congress gave him the power to do so, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 created the nation’s first national monument at Devils Tower. Wyoming’s lone congressman, Frank Mondell, fearing federal overreach and always in favor of developing, not protecting, public land was distinctly unenthusiastic about the move.

One summer morning in 1908, Sam Gibson rode horseback along Little Piney Creek near Sheridan County’s southern border. His companion, Charles Bezold, rode alongside, eager to hear the older man’s stories of an Indian Wars battle 40 years before. They knew they were near the site of the Wagon Box Fight ...

In 1859-1860 Capt. William Raynolds led scientists, artists and soldiers who mapped much of present Wyoming and Montana. Their maps show a West frozen in time, home to Native people. But the maps were tools too of the nation’s sense of itself and its Manifest Destiny—to dispossess people who already lived here.