Vignettes from Wyoming's Past

Click on a link below for true narratives from Wyoming history. These were prepared for the American History Cowboy Coalition, a federally funded Teaching American History program in the Natrona County School District in Casper, Wyoming. Each topic relates directly to the topics in Wyoming Voices, a three-hour video on Wyoming history produced in 2002 by Deborah Hammons for Wyoming Public Television. The show takes up three DVDs and is available at most Wyoming libraries.

I wrote the narratives first for students and their teachers, but hope anyone curious about Wyoming and the West will find them interesting. Each is well illustrated, and full of links to other resources. Primary and secondary sources are cited. There will be 28 vignettes by the time the project's finished.

• Pictures on Rock: Wyoming's Petroglyphs, Pictographs and what they tell us about the people who made them
• Road to Rendezvous: The Rocky Mountain fur trade in 1834
• Gathering the Tribes: The Cheyennes come together after Sand Creek
• A Kid in Hell on Wheels: Laramie as the Railroad Arrived
• Peace, War, Land, and a Funeral: The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868
• Something out of Nothing: John A. Campbell and the Invention of Wyoming
• Right Choice, Wrong Reasons: Wyoming Women Win the Right to Vote
• The Death of Crazy Horse
• The Rock Springs Massacre
• A Detective Gets His Man: The Capture of Rustler Clabe Young
• Dueling Newspapers: Versions of the Watson-Averell Lynching, 1889
• Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express
• Thunder under the House: The Hanna Mine Disasters
• Boom, Bust, and After: Life in the Salt Creek Oil Field
• A Man and His Mansion: J.B. Okie, Sheep King of Central Wyoming
• Bob David's War: A Wyoming Soldier Serves in France

Last updated June17, 2008.