Shortening Wyoming’s Long Streets: A Literary Map for the Whole State

Wyoming is a small town with very long streets—but a new digital map is making it smaller. The Wyoming Literary Map, launched in May 2025 by Jackson Hole Writers in partnership with literary organizations across four counties, is a crowdsourced, interactive resource connecting the state’s authors, bookstores, presses, libraries, writing residencies, and literary landmarks. With more than 100 entries already, the project invites writers, readers, and literary organizations to find each other across Wyoming’s wide distances. Keona Blanks, the project’s coordinator, explains how it works and why it matters.

When is a Massacre a Massacre?

Adam Reynolds has spent nearly a decade documenting sites of historic conflict between the U.S. government and Native American peoples, photographing each on or near its anniversary. In Wyoming, his large-format camera finds two contested grounds—the Grattan Fight (1854) and the Fetterman Fight (1866)—and asks what their shifting names and monuments reveal about the societies that named and built them.

Rephotographing Thomas Jaggar’s Images of the Absarokas

In the 1890s, USGS geologist Thomas Jaggar documented the remote Absaroka Mountains of northwest Wyoming through a remarkable series of photographs. More than 130 years later, Brian Beauvais set out to find those locations and rephotograph them—revealing a landscape that is both strikingly unchanged and quietly transformed.

A Woman’s Place Was on the Railroad: Myrtle Forney in WWII Wyoming

In 1943, a 19-year-old Nebraska farm girl with two months of telegraphy training volunteered to staff one of the highest railroad stations in the country—and ended up earning equal pay with men while doing it. Myrtle Forney’s story of life at Wyoming’s remote Sherman Station, told through her own words and her daughter’s memories, is a remarkable window into the women who kept America’s railroads running during World War II.

Letter from the Editor of Annals of Wyoming

"Annals of Wyoming" is one of the West’s longest-running state history journals. Now published under the Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources, the journal continues more than a century of chronicling Wyoming’s rich past. The latest issue features Buffalo Bill’s life on stage and screen, with a feature by award-winning historian Paul Andrew Hutton, plus essays on the Buffalo Bill Papers Project and a tribute to the late historian Jeremy Johnston.

Why AI Can’t Write History

John Clayton asked an AI to write about Yellowstone history—and the results were worse than bland. The errors were subtle, easy to miss, and deeply revealing about what AI can and can’t do with the past.

“Lifting as We Climb”: DeMarge Toliver and the Searchlight Club

DeMarge Toliver was a charter member of Cheyenne’s Searchlight Club in 1904 and served as its president by 1920. Despite personal tragedies including the loss of both her children, she dedicated more than 40 years to building institutions that sustained Wyoming’s small African American community across multiple generations.

The Whirlwind Romance of Will and Lulu

In spring 1865, Louisa Frederici met William F. Cody after accidentally slapping him—mistaking the handsome stranger for her prankster cousin. Their whirlwind romance led to marriage a year later, but frontier life tested the bond formed during their passionate courtship in St. Louis.

Revisiting Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: A Wyoming History Day Journey

By Lilla Beaulier

I didn’t know my Wyoming History Day project would start at a museum I’d already visited, but that’s exactly what happened.

Contexts of Wyoming History

By Gwendolyn Kristy

Most historians, archaeologists, and others will argue that there is an indisputable connection between the past, present, and future. As former Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal recognized in 2004, “Our past is the foundation on which the future is built” (Wolf 2016).

Over the coming months, WyoHistory.org will be publishing “historic contexts.” So, what are they?