Barbara Smith of Rock Springs, Wyoming’s current poet laureate, a longtime teacher and writer of poems, essays and stories, has held the laureate position—poet lariat, people sometimes call it in Wyoming—only since last fall.

Wyoming fans of Masters of the Air, a new television series on Apple TV+ about U.S. Army Air Force combat over Europe in World War II, may have been surprised in the first episode to hear Austin Butler’s character, Gale Cleven, introduce himself as being from Casper. He points to Casper on a map. In a later episode, a second Wyoming character shows up, George Niethammer, played by Josh Dylan. Both men in fact were students at the University of Wyoming and college friends before the war.

The Civil War drew nearly all the Army’s attention and troops to the East, yet emigrants continued flooding west, many of them to escape the war. And the tribes resisted. Emigrant Tales of the Platte River Raids: An 1864 Trail Diary Companion gives background and context for the accounts of nearly 70 diarists who traveled the trails in 1864.

The old saw, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush” has to do with procuring food. But when you are banding, you’re giving rather than taking.

If ever three children could be said to be “raised in isolation,” they were Allan, David and Phoebe Love on their family’s ranch on Muskrat Creek.

Last week in this space we detailed visits to Wyoming by presidents. Thanks to some alert readers, however, we’ve learned how wrong we were when we claimed those were the only ones.

Recently, we got a question from people who work at the Wyoming State Capitol: Is it true that Teddy Roosevelt once gave a speech from the second-floor balcony on the front of the building?

Sometimes history surprises us. We think of it as full of things and people long ago that maybe don’t matter much. But then comes a whisper from somewhere unexpected, and history comes right up, stands next to us and we feel its presence, local and close.

How Thomas Paine’s political ideas and contributions to the American Revolutionary period connect to Benjamin Bonneville and his career in the early American West.

After finishing a book about 1960s Wyoming and the Black 14, author Phil White began to wonder how the state’s reaction to those events compared to how people here responded to the King assassination, just a year and a half earlier.