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Women's Suffrage in the Wyoming Constitution
Published: July 29, 2019In September 1889, delegates from across Wyoming Territory gathered in Cheyenne to draft a state constitution. Article VI, Section 1 readsThe rights of Citizens of the State of...
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Wyoming and the Equal Rights Amendment
Published: July 29, 2019First introduced to Congress in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution was proposed to ensure that the rights of women were equal to those of...
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A List of Firsts for Wyoming Women
Published: July 29, 2019Not only was Wyoming Territory the first government in the world to pass a law allowing women unrestricted voting rights—the territory and state can claim a number of other...
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To 'Hold a More Brilliant Torch:' Suffragist and Orator Theresa Jenkins
Published: August 29, 2019“Barthold’s Statue of Liberty enlightening the world is fashioned in the form of a woman and placed upon a pedestal carved from the everlasting granite of the New England...
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Esther Hobart Morris, Justice of the Peace and Icon of Women's Rights
Published: September 4, 2019In late 1869, the territory of Wyoming was ahead of the rest of the United States in its strides for gender equality. Fifty years before the passage of the 19th amendment to...
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Modernizing National Park Facilities: Mission 66 in Wyoming
Published: September 18, 2019In the economic and patriotic boom that followed World War II, the national park system became overwhelmed. Annual Yellowstone visitation, for example, increased from a...
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Wyoming Ratifies the 19th Amendment
Published: September 30, 2019More than seventy years of action and organizing in the women’s-rights movement in the United States came to a head on June 4, 1919, when Congress passed the 19th Amendment...
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Wyoming's First Woman Mayor
Published: October 23, 2019Early press reports after Susan Wissler was elected mayor of little Dayton, Wyo., on May 14, 1912, attributed her victory to the women’s vote. She was the first woman mayor...
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Watering a Dry Land: Wyoming and Federal Irrigation
Published: October 28, 2019Partly to further Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of America as a nation of small farmers who own their own land, Congress passed the original Homestead Act in 1862. The law offered...
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Wyoming Ratifies the Equal Rights Amendment
Published: December 3, 2019On Jan. 24, 1973, when the Wyoming Senate voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, supporters in the gallery cheered and rushed out to crown the nearby statue of Esther...
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Feminist Orator Wows Territorial Cheyenne
Published: December 16, 2019In September 1869, 10 weeks before Wyoming’s territorial legislature passed a law allowing women to vote, a celebrity women’s-rights speaker drew a crowd of 250 people to a...
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Women on the Jury: Wyoming Makes History Again
Published: January 23, 2020In 1868 and 1869 six pioneering women arrived in the rough and tumble town of Laramie, Wyoming Territory. Some were married, some single and they included businesswomen and...
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Wyoming and World War II
Published: February 4, 2020One of the first Wyoming men killed during the Second World War was also one of the last to return home.Navy Machinist’s Mate First Class George Hanson died on Dec. 7, 1941,...
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James Hayford of the Laramie Sentinel
Published: February 21, 2020“He could sling more mud with a teaspoon than I could with a scoop shovel.” So said a colleague of Laramie’s early newspaper editor, Dr. James H. Hayford.In a 1902 eulogy...
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Minnie Fenwick, Nellie Tayloe Ross and the Presidential Campaign of 1928
Published: February 28, 2020In Wyoming as around the nation, Prohibition was central to the 1928 presidential campaign. Was the ban on alcohol successful or a failure? Should it continue or be done...
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The Cheyenne Homecoming
Published: April 25, 2020The Northern Cheyenne were among tribes attacked by Custer and his ill-fated command at the Little Bighorn in June 1876—a great victory for the Northern Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux...
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Sherman Coolidge: Arapaho Priest in a Changing World
Published: June 21, 2020When the Episcopal priest and Native rights activist Sherman Coolidge died in 1932, the Wyoming State Tribune’s obituary noted that the “solution of the Indian problem” had been...
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From Slaughter to Law: Wyoming Protects Big Game—Slowly
Published: June 28, 2020Most who know about the history of the American frontier are familiar with the demise of the buffalo. By the mid-1880s, herds that had once numbered in the millions on the Great...
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Milward Simpson and the Death Penalty
Published: July 15, 2020On March 27, 1957, when Governor Milward L. Simpson commuted the death sentence of Herschel Clay “Tricky” Riggle, he did so because the Wyoming Constitution gave him that power....
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Ed Cantrell, Rock Springs and Boom-time Crime
Published: July 28, 2020It was Old-West-style: A clean-up-the-town, fast-draw lawman acting to save his life. Or was it an in-the-trenches undercover drug cop, about to blow the whistle on small-town...
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