Agriculture

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.

When the New Deal arrived in Wyoming in the 1930s, federal agents fanned out across the state buying and slaughtering cattle and reducing crops to combat the Depression-era crisis of overproduction. This article examines how the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s production controls played out on Wyoming’s ranches and farms.

When the stock market crashed in October 1929, Wyoming’s farms and ranches were already struggling. What followed—collapsing markets, failing banks, and years of devastating drought—pushed the state’s agricultural economy to the breaking point. The Franklin Roosevelt administration’s New Deal offered relief, but it also brought federal power directly into Wyoming’s rangeland in ways that would permanently reshape the relationship between ranchers and the land they grazed.

How did a subtropical cattle ranching practice make it into Wyoming? Wyoming’s cattle ranching industry has deep roots in the Tamaulipas area of Mexico, the Carolinas, and Texas. Read more about how this system got established in Wyoming, who profited from it, and what happened when it met the harsh reality of Wyoming winters.

In the 1870s and 1880s, the cattle ranching industry in Wyoming operated mostly on neglect with one exception: the roundups. For most of the year, cattle were left to roam and graze untended. But twice a year, they were rounded up—sometimes as far as 100 miles away from their home ranch. Read more about the roundups on Wyoming’s Open Range.

Lucretia Marchbanks experienced her first gold rush as an enslaved woman on the California Trail—it wouldn’t be her last. After the Civil War, gold rushes again brought her west, to Colorado and finally Deadwood, where she found fortune and fame. Learn more about a self-made woman’s journey from slavery to ranch life in Wyoming’s Black Hills.

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.

“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.

“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.