When the New Deal arrived in Wyoming, federal policy divided the state in two. In the west, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 brought the public range under federal regulation for the first time, creating grazing districts and permit systems that permanently reshaped who could graze and how many animals. In the east, a more disruptive transformation was underway: federal programs concluded that much of the land homesteaded on the Great Plains should never have been farmed and set about moving the people who lived there off the land, returning it to grazing.
Skiing for fun began on Casper Mountain in the 1920s. People cut a few scattered slopes, added rope tows, started a ski patrol and held races. Hogadon Basin Ski Area was founded in the late 1950s. Today, Hogadon, 26 miles of Nordic trails and a world-class biathlon course lure skiers from everywhere.
During World War II, the U.S. Army operated two large and 17 smaller prisoner of war camps in Wyoming. Prisoners worked on farms and in the camps, often for private employers, who paid a going rate for local wages. Some prisoners became friends with their supervisors, others with the farm families they worked for.
In 1904, when the Old Faithful Inn opened in Yellowstone Park, it was seen as a treasure: rustic and luxurious, breathtaking yet casual. It came to be a symbol of Yellowstone, and its building style, called parkitecture, spread quickly to other national parks, dude ranches, state parks and small museums.
A sudden, hot wind one August afternoon in 1937 blew a small fire into an inferno that rushed for ridgetops above Blackwater Creek, in the Shoshone National Forest west of Cody, Wyo. Fifteen firefighters died; 38 more were burned in the fourth deadliest wildfire in the nation’s history.
Begun as a jobs program in the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps—“Roosevelt’s Tree Army”— employed more than 1,000 men in Wyoming building roads, improving parks, fighting fires and boosting local economies. The CCC legacy includes the classic, rustic stone-and-log buildings at Guernsey State Park.
Lora Nichols of Encampment, Wyo., got a camera for her 16th birthday in 1899 and kept snapping photos until her death at age 78. Her work leaves a vivid record of her time and place, and of her clear-eyed vision of the lives of her neighbors and kin.
One of Wyoming’s early large-scale irrigation projects dates to the 1880s in what’s now Platte County, Wyoming and the county, organized in early 1913, still is perhaps best known for its reservoirs and recreation areas. The Oregon Trail ruts and Register Cliff near Guernsey serve as reminders of the pioneer heritage of the area and a coal-fired power plant near Wheatland provides jobs and economic stability.
Guernsey Dam on the North Platte River lies between historic Fort Laramie and Laramie peak and just a few miles from some deep, sandstone ruts on the historic Oregon Trail. The dam was completed in 1927, for hydropower and flood control. In 1934, crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps located camps near the reservoir. With design help from the National Park Service, they built the handsome stone-and-timber shelters and buildings at Guernsey State Park, in what became a showplace of state park design.
Guernsey State Park, near Guernsey, Wyo., boasts an elegant group of stone, timber and iron buildings built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and overlooking scenic Guernsey Reservoir.