Politics & Government

After years of political activity and serving on many commissions, Clifford P. Hansen was elected Governor in 1963. Governor Hansen was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1967.

Evanston lawyer Clarence Clark became Wyoming’s first congressional representative in 1890. In 1895, the legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate. Sen. F. E. Warren, Rep. Frank Mondell and Clark made an all-Republican congressional triumvirate for more than two decades until Clark lost to John B. Kendrick in 1916.

Elected to fill out the unexpired term of Gov. DeForest Richards in 1904, Bryant B. Brooks was re-elected to another term in 1907. He was also the first governor to live in the newly complete governor's mansion.

Elected Secretary of State in 1946, Arthur Crane became acting Governor in 1949 at the age of 72. After his term as Governor he wrote many articles on education and was active in many education organizations.

Anchor Dam was built in the 1950s on upper Owl Creek in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin. The bedrock under the reservoir site is porous, and the reservoir has never held much water. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation more than doubled its initial costs with subsequent mitigation efforts, which proved unsuccessful. The dam stands today high above a small pool of water.

After joining the Republican Party, Amos W. Barber was elected Secretary of State in September 1890 and served until January of 1895. Secretary Barber's term was interrupted while he served as Acting Governor from November 24, 1890 until January 2, 1893.

In 1871, Amalia Post of Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, became one of the first women to serve on a jury in the United States. Soon, she began advocating for women’s rights on a national level. She was an independent businesswoman from the time her first husband abandoned her in Denver in the early 1860s, through her marriage to her second husband, Cheyenne banker and politician Morton Post and up to the time of her death in 1897.

Alonzo Clark was elected to the office Secretary of State in November of 1926 and served two terms. He took office as acting Governor to complete the first half of the late Governor Emerson's term.

From 1942 through most of 1945, about 10,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast of United States lived behind barbed wire in tarpaper barracks at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center between Cody and Powell, Wyo. in Park County—one of ten such camps around the nation during World War II. The center was briefly Wyoming’s third-largest town. When hundreds of young men in the camp were drafted into the U.S. military, 63 resisted, feeling they had been denied their constitutional rights. They and seven more leaders of the group were sentenced to federal prison. In the 1980s, Congress passed a law granting an apology and $20,000 to every survivor of the camps.