Major news outlets announced this week that in passing 675,000 Covid deaths, the nation has now surpassed the death total from the 1918-1919 flu. That makes the current pandemic, still going strong, the deadliest the nation has ever seen. Wyoming Covid deaths passed the state’s 1918-1919 total, 780, during the first week of August this year.

By Rebecca Hein

Imagine traveling through a major Wyoming blizzard in a horse-drawn sled. You could die, and some people did. Stagecoach companies substituted sleds for coaches in bad weather, and in the January storm of 1883, four passengers froze to death on the route from Green River to South Pass City.

The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad through southern Wyoming Territory in 1869 facilitated travel through that part of the state. But to settlements north of the railroad, passengers and mail traveled by stagecoach. Freight went by wagon, and all roads were rough.

By Nate Martin, WyoFile

Lora Webb Nichols was a hard-working woman. Over the course of 50 years between the 1890s and the 1940s, she created a body of photography 24,000 images strong, most of which feature the life and times of her hometown, Encampment, Wyo. 

These images—which capture the town and its people with arresting grace—languished in obscurity for decades.

If you’ve ever driven through Sublette County, wedged west of the Wind River Mountains, south of Jackson Hole and east of the Wyoming Range, you’ve driven through the upper Green River Basin. That winding, silver stream, lined with greenery spring and summer, threads down the middle of everything. Homesteading and Ranching in the Upper Green River Valley, by Ann Chambers Noble and Jonita Sommers is the story of people who homesteaded on the upper Green and its tributaries during the last 150 years. They ran livestock, birthed babies, drove buggies through blizzards to deliver the mail, taught school, cut, hewed and floated railroad ties and raised gardens, chickens and families. 

After the Indian Wars, White people in the West seem to have found a number of ways to harass and kill Native people. In 1895, a posse of non-Indians, mostly outfitters, attacked a peaceful band of Bannocks hunting elk south of Jackson Hole; two native people died. 

In 1906, a large band of Utes left their reservation in Utah and crossed Wyoming, hunting and drying meat as they went—and causing great alarm among civil officials, the general public and especially in the newspapers. Eventually the Utes were met in southern Montana by 1,000 U.S. troops, persuaded to go to South Dakota for a while and after 18 months to return home.

Three years earlier, on Lightning Creek northeast of Douglas, Wyo., in 1903, a sheriff’s posse attacked a peaceful group of Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; two posse members and five Sioux were killed. The Oglalas had come to Wyoming to  gather herbs, roots and berries, and may have been hunting antelope as well.

In about 1936, a group of Oglala men from the Pine Ridge Reservation performed the astonishing feat of finding the graves of their dead on the site, going by an account dating from the time of the burials. But by the late 1920s, White ranchers had already moved the skull and bones of Black Kettle, a member of the band, to the Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum on the grounds of the Wyoming State Fair in Douglas.

By Rodger McDaniel

The wonderful thing about choosing to write the biography of a historian is that historians do what they do. They leave behind so much material with which to work. 

Gale McGee left thousands of files in hundreds of Banker’s boxes filled with speeches, letters, and personal reminiscences spanning his lifetime. When I first looked over the mountain of paper I thought to myself, “I’m sure I won’t need to scrutinize every piece of paper in every one of those folders.” Wrong!

Early on, I pulled a folder from a box, labeled “McGee Memoirs.” Inside was another file marked “Diabetes.” The former Senator was plagued by the disease his entire life. I opened the file thinking I’d find personal reflections on what it was like to be diabetic. What I found, instead, was a never before told story about the most prominent Senate spokesperson for the war in Vietnam. McGee served as U.S. senator from Wyoming from 1959 through 1977.

By Rebecca Hein

At the beginning of John McPhee’s fascinating 1986 book, Rising from the Plains, the author introduces geologist David Love, a great talker and thinker who spent a long, Laramie-based career with the U.S. Geological Survey. McPhee also introduces us to Love’s mother, Ethel Waxham Love and to Wyoming geology in general. Ethel Waxham was still single in October 1905 when she traveled from Denver by train and stagecoach to teach a winter term of school in Fremont County, about 30 miles south of Lander. McPhee weaves in background on David’s childhood and early education after Ethel married sheep rancher John Love, a Scot, in June 1910 and they made a home on Muskrat Creek, near the bone-dry center of the state.

Early in the narrative—geared for the lay reader—the author and David Love, about 70 at the time, are driving around in a Bronco and camping out a lot. Stopping near Rawlins, they get out to look at the rocks. Love says, “The rock that outcrop[s] around Rawlins …  contain[s] a greater spread of time than any other suite of exposed rocks along Interstate 80 between New York and San Francisco.”

Ernest Hemingway, if you haven’t noticed, is back in the news. Ken Burns’s and Lyn Novick’s new, six-hour documentary about the writer and his life debuts this week on PBS.

Given to broad, brief statements, Hemingway supposedly told Elsa Spear Byron of the Spear-O-Wigwam dude ranch in the Bighorns, “There are two places I love—Africa and Wyoming.”

Hemingway visited Wyoming many times, often for months at a stretch. He came to Wyoming to fish, hunt and write. But he never made a life here, or in Africa, either, for that matter. In fact, unlike other great writers of his time, writers with whom he’s often spoken of in a single sentence—Pound, Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Fitzgerald—Hemingway seems always to have been on the move. His life was full of travel, elation, work, drink, wrecks, despair and a great, sad love for the physical world as it is—or as he thought it was, or as close as he could make it in his paragraphs.

In Wyoming, with our small minority populations, it’s easy to feel morally distant from events like the Asian-spa shootings in Atlanta last week. Whatever mix of religion, armament, opportunity and virulent misogyny motivated the shooter, race hatred was in there, too.

Surely something like that wouldn’t happen here, right?  

Maybe. Still, this seems a good time to remember two events from Wyoming’s past.

By Tom Rea
(Editor’s note: Tom Rea’s article “The Flight of the Utes,” was published this week on WyoHistory.org)

The past may seem dusty, distant, even irrelevant at times, until you hear the voices of people who lived through it. Fortunately, those tones survive in the things people wrote down. Personal letters are full of the tones of people’s voices but so, sometimes, are more formal documents, even government reports—and so are newspapers.

In the last decade or two, thanks to publicly funded, state-level efforts like the Wyoming Digital Newspapers Collection and private subscription efforts like Newspapers.com, scholars and the public now have huge resources available to them, and can find in a day or two sources that earlier would have taken weeks of time and miles of travel to access in far-flung archives. It makes a big difference in the history that gets written.

A couple of years ago, Greg Nickerson, who has written for WyoHistory.org on a variety of Native American topics, mentioned to me a story I’d never heard of: A band of several hundred Ute Indians with a large horse herd left their reservation in Utah and came across Wyoming in 1906. They hoped to find welcome and a better life on the Crow, Cheyenne or Sioux reservations of Montana and South Dakota. Greg didn’t have time to research the topic further, but he did steer me to an article about it from the Utah Historical Quarterly in 1968. I thought, well, with that plus what we can now find in newspaper databases, maybe we could bring something new to a topic that still was not well known.

And that turned out to be the case.