People & Peoples

Martha James, 21, left Wales in 1882 and came to Wyoming as maid to an upper-crust English bride. The next year Martha married a cowboy and came to the Bighorn Basin. Decades later, she told her stories. Her stories illuminate the contours of change in Wyoming at the time.

On the morning of September 6, 1870, Wyoming women prepared themselves for a momentous day—the first election since the Territorial Legislature had passed the world’s first woman suffrage bill. Among the voters were women from Wyoming’s Black communities. They were the first Black women in U.S. history to vote.

William H. Zindel took a gamble on Wyoming when he moved to the territory six years before statehood. He boosted two Wyoming towns, earning a reputation for his cleanliness, opulence, and shrewd business sense. Read more about Zindel and his enormous diamond ring in Nancy Tabb’s "William H. Zindel: Wyoming’s Immaculate Pioneer."

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.

Sam Gebo, a brilliant capitalist and con man, developed coal mines in Montana, Alberta and Wyoming in the early 1900s. But his methods were fraudulent; he and seven of his partners were charged with crimes. But a new system of leasing federal coal grew out of the controversy—a system still in place today.

Preston Plumb of Ohio, Kansas and, briefly, Wyoming was forthright, honest, tireless and fair. He founded an abolitionist newspaper. He smuggled rifles into Bleeding Kansas. As an army officer he served on the Kansas border and the Wyoming frontier. And as a U.S. senator, with great skill and persistence, he championed the interests of the West.

The history of Japanese people in Wyoming is most often connected with the World War II internment camp at Heart Mountain. Yet Japanese railroad laborers were in Wyoming as early as 1892—and some may even have helped lay the tracks that delivered the internees to Heart Mountain two generations later.

The Rawlins to Baggs wagon road was a primary freight route from the Union Pacific Railroad south to Colorado. Freighters first supplied Ute people at the White River Agency and later, after the Utes were forcibly removed to Utah, freighters supplied the Euroamerican settlers who took up the Indian lands.

Before Frank Canton became notorious in Wyoming in connection with the Johnson County War, he lived an outlaw’s life as Joe Horner in Texas. Discover more about Canton’s reputation as a sheriff, his time as a stock detective for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and his role in the invasion of Johnson County.

One of three major roads across the mountain West, the Cherokee Trail ran from the Cherokee Nation—present Oklahoma—to the California gold fields. It served as a principal route for people from the South to lands of their dreams—and it crossed what’s now Wyoming on the way.