Women of Wyoming

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.

On the morning of September 6, 1870, Wyoming women prepared themselves for a momentous day—the first election since the Territorial Legislature had passed the world’s first woman suffrage bill. Among the voters were women from Wyoming’s Black communities. They were the first Black women in U.S. history to vote.

The first woman to serve in the Wyoming legislature, Mary Godat Bellamy laid the groundwork for future generations of women in politics. Inspired by the first generation of Wyoming’s suffragists—such as her childhood babysitter Esther Morris—Bellamy devoted her life to women’s rights and reform movements. Read more about Bellamy’s remarkable life.

“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.’”

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.

One summer morning in 1908, Sam Gibson rode horseback along Little Piney Creek near Sheridan County’s southern border. His companion, Charles Bezold, rode alongside, eager to hear the older man’s stories of an Indian Wars battle 40 years before. They knew they were near the site of the Wagon Box Fight ...

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.

Fearless, determined Lizabeth Wiley served three terms in the 1920s as Greybull mayor. During her first, she opposed the Ku Klux Klan so successfully that by the term’s second half, she wrote, her job had become “tame.” Later, she weathered a bootlegging scandal and led relief efforts after a devastating flood.

“WOMAN MAYOR IS JAILED, CHARGED WITH BEATING MAN,” read the headline following 1922’s Fourth of July in tiny Cokeville, Wyo. How had the town’s new mayor, elected just a month earlier on a Prohibition and law-enforcement ticket, found herself in the middle of a street brawl?

A few people in Wyoming know the secret behind their state flag. They will give a knowing smile, as they nod, yes—that bison wasn’t always hitched to the staff, he used to survey over the mountains and prairie. But the flag holds more secrets in its weave . . .