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.

He was a member of Wyoming’s Constitutional Convention of 1889, a signer of Wyoming’s State Constitution, a member of the Wyoming House of Representatives and served two terms as Wyoming’s attorney general, but Douglas A. Preston is remembered for being the lawyer for Butch Cassidy, the outlaw.

“Why not eat insects?” Jim Wangberg asked this in 1987, and it set off more than a classroom discussion. At the time, Wangberg was department head of plant, soil and insect sciences at the University of Wyoming. His question was particularly pressing following Wyoming’s big grasshopper years in 1985 and 1986, with densities of up to 100 grasshoppers per square yard in some locations. That many grasshoppers can devastate an agricultural based economy.

The first woman to serve in the Wyoming legislature, Mary Godat Bellamy laid the groundwork for future generations of women in politics. Inspired by the first generation of Wyoming’s suffragists—such as her childhood babysitter Esther Morris—Bellamy devoted her life to women’s rights and reform movements. Read more about Bellamy’s remarkable life.

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."

For Kansans, the Civil War began early. The era—Bleeding Kansas it was called—made the Civil War intensely personal when its Free Staters became Union soldiers. But when the Civil War ended, war wasn’t over for them. An Indian war waited for them along the North Platte River, far to the West.

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.

When, on July 9, 1867, James Whitehead pitched his tent on an empty plain next to Crow Creek, he became not only Cheyenne’s first resident but its first lawyer. The next day, lawyer W. W. Corlett stopped by. By afternoon, the two were partners: Corlett bought in with $5 greenback.

On the western edge of Wyoming’s Red Desert lie the remains of an informal campsite where, for about two decades, motorists on the transcontinental Lincoln Highway pulled off to spend the night. Inscriptions they left on rocks, and bottles and saucer shards they scattered in the sagebrush tell tales of earlier times.