Conflict

For nine days in March 1939, the nation was spellbound by news of a skilled Park County woodsman leading lawmen on a lengthy manhunt. The “huge, shaggy, young Earl Durand,” as Time magazine described him, finally died of his own hand after a failed bank robbery and shootout in downtown Powell, Wyo.

Crossing what’s now Wyoming in sub-zero cold, Elizabeth Cumming suffered a badly frostbitten foot in November 1857. She and her husband Alfred—the new governor of Utah Territory—and about 2,000 U.S. troops were unsure if they’d be welcomed in Salt Lake City—or faced with armed resistance.

In 1909, Percy Metz, 23 years old and recently elected Big Horn County attorney, helped prosecute five men for their murderous roles in the Spring Creek Raid. The case made his reputation; he became a district judge at 29 and spent a long and successful life in the law.

The 1880s cattle boom seemed to promise a rich future for Alexander Swan, who amassed 4.5 million acres in southeastern Wyoming to graze 100,000 head. His extravagant tenure ended quickly—but the ranch lasted generations.

On Oct. 5, 1857, a band of Mormon militia attacked U.S. Army supply wagons at Simpson’s Hollow west of what’s now Farson, Wyo., burning 26 wagons and stampeding army mules. The army was advancing on Utah to enforce federal law there, and the Mormons resisted—all part of the bloodless Utah War.

Wealthy artist, hunter and conservationist A.A. Anderson was named superintendent of the new Yellowstone Forest Reserve in 1902. His love for wildlife habitat clashed with local timber and grazing interests, however, and, after much controversy, he lost his job. Wyoming and the nation might have benefitted if he’d found a way to bridge that gap.

Out of nearly 200 people who died from murder or other homicides on the Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s, only one lies in a grave with a known location. Missourian Ephraim Brown, a leading figure on a wagon train bound for California, was killed near South Pass in 1857 in what appears to have been a bitter family dispute. Details, however—who killed him, why and how—are frustratingly sketchy.

No logging, no grazing—even no trespassing? The Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve, the first land to be set aside in what evolved into today’s National Forest system, had a distinctly different character from its successors. Here’s why.

In a U.S. Army career spanning three wars and four decades, Paul Kendall, of Sheridan, Wyo., never forgot the moment when his platoon, guarding a Siberian rail link, was attacked one night at 30 below—by an armored train full of Bolshevik partisans.

Turning heads and changing minds, Inez Milholland helped galvanize women nationwide in their long campaign for the vote. Years of persistent demonstrations—sometimes violently opposed—climaxed in 1916, just weeks before her early death, in a final speaking tour across Wyoming and the West.