People & Peoples

The first fur trader to take wagons over South Pass, Capt. Benjamin Bonneville, on leave from the U.S. Army in 1832, seems to have been seeking information about British activities in the far Northwest as much as he was seeking beaver pelts.

“I knew we had to do something really quick. I was ready to lay down in front of a probably D17 [bulldozer] to stop that thing,” said George Frison, head of the anthropology department at the University of Wyoming. Read about the artifact-rich archaeological site Frison was prepared to defend: Powars II at Sunrise, Wyoming.

Historian, botanist, teacher and rancher Vie Willits Garber grew up in Big Horn and in 1910 earned a master’s degree in two disciplines from the University of Wyoming. She was the first person to carefully map and document the route of the Bozeman Trail—and she identified and listed 615 plants in the Little Goose Valley near her family’s home.

After Yellowstone rangers slaughtered 4,300 elk in 1961 to try and control overpopulation, hunters, outfitters and the public were enraged. In response, zoologist Starker Leopold, son of famed naturalist Aldo Leopold, wrote a groundbreaking report for the National Park Service that advocated systematic, scientific management of natural areas—a revolutionary approach at the time.

Frank Grouard lived with Hunkpapa and Oglala Lakota bands as captive, adopted brother and champion hunter. Later he re-entered the world of White men as an army scout in the Indian Wars. He told his life story to Buffalo, Wyoming journalist Joe DeBarthe, who published it—and made some of it up.

Alexander Gardner took some of our most important photographs of the Civil War and the 19th-century West. His images from the crucial 1868 treaty negotiations at Fort Laramie capture Sioux, Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mixed-race families and interpreters, government peace commissioners and vivid scenes of life at the fort.

Chicago native Florence Blake risked her life in a bull pasture; traveled to Devil’s Tower and Yellowstone Park; and attended many all-night dances—all part of her life as a single woman homesteader in Campbell County, Wyoming in the early 1920s. She lived in Wyoming seven months each year.

Longtime University of Wyoming archaeologist George Frison’s thinking about ancient bison kill sites was deeply informed by his early life as a hunter and rancher. Over a long career Frison won the affection and respect of students and colleagues; his many awards included election to the National Academy of Sciences.

Contrary to legend, the sole purpose of the Pony Express was to secure a $1 million U.S. Mail subsidy by showing mail could be delivered on time between Missouri and California—even through winter. But in the contest between the Pony Express and Wyoming winter, winter won.

In 1859-1860 Capt. William Raynolds led scientists, artists and soldiers who mapped much of present Wyoming and Montana. Their maps show a West frozen in time, home to Native people. But the maps were tools too of the nation’s sense of itself and its Manifest Destiny—to dispossess people who already lived here.