“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.

“I got a letter today,” Cecilia Hennel noted in her diary in 1911, “from someone who signed himself John Hendricks, asking me if I would consider a proposal of marriage from him. . . . I should like to know who he is, and how he got my name . . . [he must be] somebody pretty ‘fresh.’”

In 1890 Confederate veteran Frank Nevin established a small, 160-acre homestead southeast of Rawlins. As the old open-range system was fast disappearing, he and his family grew vegetables and ran small herds of cattle and sheep. Archaeological excavations at the site have provided provide rich information about these changing times on the range.