Jim Bridger’s skills as guide, mapmaker and businessman were unmatched. After 20 years trapping beaver in the northern Rockies, he co-founded Fort Bridger in 1843. In the 1850s and 1860s he guided important government exploring expeditions and guided troops on Indian campaigns. In 1868 he retired to Missouri, where he died in 1881.

Recurring oil theft on the Wind River Reservation in the 1970s eventually led to better practices that focus on preventing such losses and protecting American Indian tribes’ oil and gas revenues. 

News stories published about the July 20, 1889, hanging of Ella Watson and Jim Averell contained inaccuracies that historians and others accepted as fact for more than 100 years, leading to a variety of misunderstandings and resulting in questions about truth and history that haunt researchers today.

Train robber and confessed murderer Big Nose George Parrott was lynched in downtown Rawlins, Wyo. in 1881, after he tried to break out of jail. Later, local physician and future Wyoming Gov. Dr. John Osborne had a pair of shoes made from the outlaw’s skin.

In 1909, Elinore Pruitt answered Burntfork, Wyo. rancher Clyde Stewart’s Denver Post ad for a housekeeper. She soon married Stewart and achieved her dream of becoming a homesteader. Her vivid letters about her experiences were published in the book Letters of a Woman Homesteader, bringing her nationwide fame. 

The highly controversial ETSI coal slurry pipeline, proposed in the 1970s to move millions of tons coal from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin to power plants Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, was never built, due to falling 1980s energy prices and stiff opposition from railroad companies.

Trained in Paris and Rome, Baltimore artist Alfred Jacob Miller attended the 1837 fur-trade rendezvous in what’s now western Wyoming. Miller sketched and painted all aspects of the fur trade for his patron, the Scottish adventurer William Drummond Stewart, and later reworked much of this material into oil paintings for a wider audience.

Rural electrification brought welcome changes to farms and ranches throughout Wyoming in the 1930s and 1940s, despite numerous early challenges—including opposition from existing utilities— that threatened to thwart the effort.

Natrona County’s Salt Creek Field is best known of Wyoming’s early oil fields, but five others—two in Park County and one each in Hot Springs, Niobrara and Converse counties—played important roles in the state’s 20th century transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy.

Toomey’s Mills in Newcastle, Wyo., began operations as Newcastle Milling Company and Electrical Light Plant in 1905, producing flour by day and generating electricity at night. In 1919, D. J. Toomey purchased the business and it remained in the family until 1965. In 1974, new owners converted it into a restaurant, the Old Mill Inn. In 1995, current owners, Doug and Larita Brown bought the property, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, in 1995.