97 Fun Facts About Wyoming

Roughly how many people live in Cheyenne, Wyoming's capital and most populous city?

About 65,000 people lived in Cheyenne at the 2020 census, some 6,000 more than Casper; the city dates from July 1867, when a railroad's chief engineer picked a townsite beside Crow Creek.

Wyoming became a state in July 1890, a week after which neighbour?

Idaho was admitted on 3 July 1890 and Wyoming followed on 10 July as the 44th state; Utah, next door, had to wait until 1896, after it agreed to outlaw polygamy.

Wyoming ranks where among the US states by population?

Last: Wyoming has fewer people than Vermont or Alaska, yet it is the tenth-largest state by area, which leaves only about six people per square mile.

Wyoming's official nickname, the Equality State, comes from what 1869 decision?

Giving women the vote came first in Wyoming Territory: Governor John Campbell signed the suffrage act on 10 December 1869, and within months women were also serving on juries in Albany County.

Who became the first woman to serve as governor of a US state, taking office in Wyoming in January 1925?

Nellie Tayloe Ross won a special election after her husband William died in office, took the oath on 5 January 1925, and later directed the US Mint for 20 years.

Esther Hobart Morris became the first American woman to hold what office in 1870?

Justice of the peace in a Wyoming gold-mining district from February 1870, Esther Hobart Morris served for nearly nine months; the state later chose her as one of its two statues in the US Capitol.

Which president signed the 1872 act creating Yellowstone?

Ulysses S. Grant signed the act on 1 March 1872, but Congress voted no money to run the park, so its first superintendent served five years without a salary and rarely set foot in it.

Which state holds only 3 percent of Yellowstone but three of its five entrances?

Montana has only about 3 percent of the park, yet the road from its north entrance at Gardiner is the only one kept open to ordinary cars all winter; Wyoming holds 96 percent.

What lies beneath Yellowstone and heats its 500-plus geysers?

A supervolcano sits under the park: magma close to the surface heats groundwater until it bursts out, which is why more than half of the world's geysers are packed into this one corner of Wyoming.

Old Faithful, Yellowstone's most famous geyser, erupts roughly how often?

Every hour or two is right, and the faithful geyser is slowing: the average wait was about 66 minutes in 1939, and by January 2025 the median had stretched to 102.

Who ran Yellowstone for about three decades from 1886, before park rangers existed?

The US Army took over in 1886 because civilian superintendents could not stop poachers and vandals; cavalry troops patrolled from Fort Yellowstone until the new National Park Service was ready to replace them.

Devils Tower became the first US national monument in 1906 under which president?

Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Devils Tower the first national monument on 24 September 1906, three months after signing the Antiquities Act, which lets a president protect a landmark without waiting for Congress.

Which 1977 film used Devils Tower as the setting for its climactic scenes?

Close Encounters of the Third Kind made Devils Tower the landing site for its alien mothership; Steven Spielberg filmed at the monument, and his hero is so haunted by its shape that he sculpts it in his living room.

Which Wind River Range summit narrowly beats the Grand Teton as Wyoming's highest mountain?

Gannett Peak is higher by only a few dozen feet, but unlike the Grand Teton it stands deep inside roadless wilderness; its north slope carries the largest single glacier in the American Rockies.

Which philanthropist secretly bought about 35,000 acres of Jackson Hole through a front company to give to the public?

John D. Rockefeller Jr. hid behind the Snake River Land Company so that sellers would not learn who was buying; local ranchers then fought the plan for 15 years before the land finally passed to the government in 1949.

To fur trappers, what was a 'hole', as in Jackson Hole?

A mountain valley was a 'hole' to the trappers; this one, between the Teton and Gros Ventre ranges, took the name of David Jackson, who trapped beaver there in the late 1820s.

Which Federal Reserve bank, whose district includes Wyoming, hosts the annual August symposium at Jackson Hole?

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City brings central bankers to Jackson Lake Lodge each August, and Fed chairs have used their speeches there to signal shifts in policy.

The arches on Jackson's town square are built from what?

Elk antlers, shed each spring by the thousands of elk that winter on the neighbouring refuge; local Boy Scouts gather them every year for an auction, and most of the proceeds go back to the refuge.

Cheyenne Frontier Days volunteers serve more than 100,000 free what?

Pancakes: the free breakfasts date from 1952, and Kiwanis volunteers now flip more than 100,000 over three mornings on military cooking ranges at the celebration billed as the Daddy of 'em All.

Wyoming's official state sport is what?

Rodeo, which grew out of the contests ranch hands held to show off working skills such as roping and bronc riding, became Wyoming's official state sport in 2003.

Which animal is Wyoming's official state mammal?

The American bison, which wears the state seal like a brand on Wyoming's flag, became the official mammal in 1985; by 1902 poachers had cut Yellowstone's wild herd to about two dozen animals.

Which dinosaur is Wyoming's official state dinosaur?

Triceratops became the state dinosaur in 1994; fossil hunter John Bell Hatcher dug the first skull out of Wyoming's Lance Formation in 1888 and hauled out another 31 over the next three years.

The University of Wyoming's athletic teams go by which name?

Cowboys and Cowgirls: the name is said to go back to 1891, when a working cowboy turned out to help the university's football team; home games are now played above 7,200 feet, the highest stadium in top-division college football.

Wyoming takes its name from a valley on the Susquehanna River in which eastern state?

Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley was made famous by the poem 'Gertrude of Wyoming', and in 1865 Ohio congressman James Ashley proposed its name for a new territory some 1,500 miles to the west.

Which two other states, like Wyoming, are bordered entirely by straight lines?

Colorado and Utah are the other two; on a map Wyoming looks like a rectangle, but the meridians converge, so its north edge is slightly shorter than its south.

Which state borders Wyoming on the east, along with South Dakota?

Nebraska shares Wyoming's eastern edge with South Dakota; the North Platte River crosses that border, and Oregon Trail wagons followed it upstream into Wyoming.

Wyoming's official state coin is a golden dollar showing which figure, who may be buried on the Wind River Reservation?

Sacagawea is on the golden dollar Wyoming adopted as its state coin in 2004; a grave on the reservation bears her name, though a fur-trade clerk's journal records her death in 1812, far away on the Missouri River.

A Wyoming licence plate's first number identifies what?

County: Wyoming has 23 counties and each has its own plate prefix, so locals can tell at a glance which part of the state a car comes from.

Wyoming produces more of which fuel than any other state, mostly from the Powder River Basin?

Coal: Wyoming has led the nation every year since 1986, mining about two-fifths of US output in the 2010s; demand boomed in the 1970s, when clean-air rules made its low-sulphur seams the fuel power plants wanted.

Trona mined in southwestern Wyoming is turned into soda ash, a key ingredient in making what?

Glass, from windows to bottles, is made by melting soda ash with sand and lime; Wyoming's trona beds, the largest known deposit on Earth, were left behind when an ancient lake dried up.

Which broad, gentle saddle let Oregon Trail wagons cross the Continental Divide in Wyoming?

South Pass climbs so gradually to about 7,400 feet that explorer John C. Frémont had to watch closely to tell where the summit was; as many as half a million emigrants crossed it.

Fort William, the 1834 fur post whose later name is on two Plains treaties, stands where the North Platte meets which river?

The Laramie River joins the North Platte there; the Army bought the post, by then called Fort Laramie, in 1849, though the 1851 treaty that carries its name was actually signed 30 miles downstream at Horse Creek.

Wyoming's capital was founded in 1867 as a junction along which railroad?

Union Pacific surveyors platted Cheyenne in July 1867 as the railroad pushed west, and the town grew so fast it was nicknamed the Magic City of the Plains.

What did F. E. Warren Air Force Base, the Air Force's oldest active base, operate in 2025?

Minuteman III missiles are the whole mission of the 90th Missile Wing; the base began in 1867 as an Army fort built to protect railroad construction crews, which is how an Air Force base came to predate the aeroplane.

The Wind River Indian Reservation is shared by the Eastern Shoshone and which other tribe?

The Northern Arapaho were placed on the Shoshone reservation in 1878, supposedly only for a while, and the government never moved them on, leaving two historic enemies to share one home.

The Johnson County War of 1892 was a range conflict between which two groups?

Big cattle ranchers and small settlers clashed when Wyoming Stock Growers Association barons hired 23 Texas gunmen to kill alleged rustlers; President Harrison sent the cavalry, and the story became Heaven's Gate.

Butch Cassidy served 18 months in the Wyoming State Prison for what crime?

Horse theft: Cassidy was convicted in 1894 of stealing a horse near Lander and served 18 months of a two-year sentence before Governor William Richards pardoned him in January 1896; he went straight back to outlawry.

The 1920s bribery scandal over a naval oil reserve north of Casper is known by which name?

Teapot Dome, an oil field named for a teapot-shaped rock nearby, was leased without competitive bidding by Interior Secretary Albert Fall, who took bribes and became the first cabinet member sent to prison.

Which retailer opened its very first store, called the Golden Rule, in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 1902?

J. C. Penney started as a one-third partner in that Kemmerer shop, part of a small chain called the Golden Rule stores; he bought out his backers in 1907 and put his own name on the business in 1913.

Which northwestern Wyoming town is named after the Wild West showman who helped found it?

Cody was laid out in 1896 by William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody and his partners, who dug a canal to bring the new town water; in 1902 he opened the Irma Hotel there, named for his daughter.

Which abstract expressionist painter was born in Wyoming in 1912?

Jackson Pollock, later famous for dripping paint onto canvases laid flat on the floor, was born in northwest Wyoming on 28 January 1912; his family left when he was ten months old and he never went back.

Which future vice president represented Wyoming's single at-large seat in the House from 1979 to 1989?

Dick Cheney, who grew up in Casper, held the seat until becoming George H. W. Bush's defense secretary in 1989 and later served as George W. Bush's vice president from 2001 to 2009.

The Heart Mountain camp, which held over 10,000 Japanese Americans in World War II, briefly ranked as what?

Wyoming's third-largest town at its peak of 10,767 people, Heart Mountain also produced the state's largest mass trial: in 1944, 63 young inmates were convicted for refusing the draft while their families were confined.

Casper, Wyoming, is named, one letter off, for Caspar Collins, who was what?

A cavalry lieutenant, Caspar Collins was killed in 1865 leading a small detachment out of Platte Bridge Station to meet a supply train; the post was renamed in his honour, and the town later took its name from the fort.

The city that is home to the University of Wyoming is named after Jacques La Ramée, who was what?

A trapper who vanished in the 1820s, Jacques La Ramée was probably killed near the river that took his name; the city itself was founded in 1868 as an end-of-track railroad town.

The Great Divide Basin in Wyoming's Red Desert is unusual because its rainwater does what?

The Great Divide Basin drains to no ocean at all: the Continental Divide splits and runs around it, so its scant rain and snowmelt evaporate or sink into the sand of a closed basin.

What is the Colorado's chief tributary, which rises in Wyoming's Wind River Range and fills Flaming Gorge Reservoir?

The Green runs some 730 miles from the Wind River Range to the Colorado; in May 1869 John Wesley Powell pushed off down it from a Wyoming railroad stop and went on to make the first recorded run of the Grand Canyon.

Cairns at the Bighorn Medicine Wheel line up with sunrise on which day?

Summer solstice: astronomer John Eddy found that sighting from one cairn across another points to where the Sun comes up that morning, while other pairs mark the dawn rising of bright stars.

The 52-million-year-old lake beds at Wyoming's Fossil Butte are best known for finely preserved fossils of what?

Fish make up most of what Fossil Lake yields, with bats and insects beside them: the bottom water held so little oxygen that scavengers stayed away and carcasses lay whole until mud covered them.

Which Wyoming town bills its Big Spring as the world's largest mineral hot spring?

Thermopolis, Greek for 'hot city', bills the Big Spring in Hot Springs State Park as the world's largest mineral hot spring; when the Wind River tribes sold the land in 1896, the deal kept bathing there free to the public.

Although Brokeback Mountain is set in Wyoming, where was the 2005 film almost entirely shot?

Southern Alberta's Rockies stood in for a mountain that does not exist: Annie Proulx showed Ang Lee the Wyoming country behind her 1997 story, but he filmed around Kananaskis and Fort Macleod to save money.

The television series Longmire is set in which fictional Wyoming county?

Absaroka County is where Craig Johnson's novels put Sheriff Walt Longmire, but the Wyoming of the TV series was filmed in New Mexico, with an Australian, Robert Taylor, playing the lawman.

Wyoming Territory was created in 1868 from lands taken from which three territories?

Dakota, Idaho and Utah territories each gave up land when President Andrew Johnson signed the Organic Act on 25 July 1868, yet the new territory had no government of its own until the following April.

Which Hollywood star, a licensed pilot, has flown mountain rescues near his ranch at Jackson, Wyoming?

Harrison Ford has lived near Jackson since the 1980s and flew his own helicopter for the county's search-and-rescue team; in 2001 a lost 13-year-old Boy Scout flagged him down and got a lift out.

Which Lewis and Clark veteran first described the Wyoming region in English, in 1807?

John Colter left the Corps of Discovery in 1806 and crossed the Wyoming region alone in the winter of 1807-08; his tales of boiling springs and geysers were dismissed as 'Colter's Hell'.

Wyoming has fewer people than which neighbouring state's capital?

Denver had about 715,000 residents at the 2020 census against some 577,000 in all of Wyoming, a population so small that the state has only one seat in the House of Representatives.

Douglas, Wyoming, issues novelty hunting licences for which mythical creature?

The jackalope took off in the 1930s, when two Douglas brothers mounted deer antlers on a jackrabbit and sold it to a local hotel; the town's licences are valid on one day only, 31 June.

What is Wyoming's official state motto?

Equal Rights had already flown on a banner on the state seal since 1893, held by a draped woman on a pedestal, but the words were not adopted as Wyoming's official motto until 1955.

Which plant is Wyoming's official state flower?

Indian paintbrush became the state flower in 1917; its scarlet 'petals' are not petals at all but coloured bracts, leaf-like parts that half-hide the slender true flowers inside.

Which species is Wyoming's official state fish?

The cutthroat trout, named for the red slash under its lower jaw, became the state fish in 1987; native subspecies swim on both sides of the Continental Divide.

Which animal is Wyoming's official state reptile?

The horned lizard, often called a horned toad, became the state reptile in 1993; the spiny sagebrush dweller can squirt blood from its eyes to startle predators.

Where is Wyoming's lowest point, roughly 3,100 feet above sea level?

The Belle Fourche River valley, where the river leaves the state's northeast corner for South Dakota, is the low point, so even Wyoming's bottom is higher than the summits of Florida, Illinois or Ohio.

Energy-rich Wyoming is one of the few states without which tax?

Wyoming levies no personal income tax and no corporate income tax either; the state runs largely on a 4 percent sales tax, mineral severance taxes and federal mineral royalties.

Which state, like Wyoming, had three electoral votes in 2024?

South Dakota, like Wyoming, elects a single member of the House, and a state's electoral votes equal its House seats plus its two senators, which makes three.

As of 2024, which Democrat last carried Wyoming for president?

Lyndon Johnson took Wyoming in his 1964 landslide; the state had voted Democratic three times running from 1932, but it has gone Republican in every presidential election since Johnson.

What is the single telephone area code that covers the whole of Wyoming?

307 was one of the 86 original area codes handed out in 1947, and Wyoming's population has stayed small enough that, as of 2025, the whole state still shares it.

Which group ran the 1916 contest that produced Wyoming's state flag?

The Daughters of the American Revolution offered a $20 prize, won by art graduate Verna Keays; her animal originally faced the flag's free edge, until the group's state regent insisted it be turned to face the staff.

Which painter joined the 1871 Hayden survey whose images helped make Yellowstone a park?

Thomas Moran travelled as a guest of financier Jay Cooke alongside photographer William Henry Jackson, and his watercolours, shown to congressmen, helped persuade Congress to create the park.

Buford, an I-80 hamlet with one resident, was auctioned in 2012 to buyers from where?

Pham Dinh Nguyen, a businessman from Vietnam, paid $900,000, renamed the trading post PhinDeli Town Buford and sold imported Vietnamese coffee there.

What form does the Ames Monument, honouring two railroad financiers, take in southeastern Wyoming?

The monument is a granite pyramid 60 feet tall, designed by H. H. Richardson with Saint-Gaudens portrait medallions of Oakes and Oliver Ames; the railroad moved its tracks in 1901, leaving it alone on the prairie.

The 1885 Rock Springs massacre targeted immigrant miners from which country?

The miners came from China and were paid less than white miners, who resented them; at least 28 were killed and their quarter burned, and though sixteen men were arrested, a grand jury found nobody willing to testify.

Tom Horn, hanged in Cheyenne in 1903, had earlier worked for which detective agency?

Tom Horn tracked train robbers for the Pinkerton agency in the early 1890s before hiring out to cattlemen; convicted of shooting 14-year-old Willie Nickell, he was hanged on 20 November 1903, and his guilt is still disputed.

Governor John Osborne wore inaugural shoes made from what part of outlaw Big Nose George?

Osborne, then a young doctor, had the shoes made from his skin after the outlaw was lynched in Rawlins in 1881; they are now in the Carbon County Museum, and the skull cap is said to have served as an ashtray.

Outlaw Harry Longabaugh took his nickname from which Wyoming town, where he was jailed?

Longabaugh became the Sundance Kid after 18 months in the Sundance jail for stealing a gun, horse and saddle in 1887; he later joined Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch.

'Gillette syndrome', named for the Wyoming city, describes social problems caused by what?

Rapid boomtown growth is the cause: psychologist ElDean Kohrs coined the term in the 1970s for the rising crime, strained services and frayed community ties he saw as an energy boom swelled Gillette almost overnight.

Wyoming's Hell's Half Acre badlands played alien planets in which 1997 film?

Starship Troopers filmed its bug-planet battles there for six weeks in 1996, through blizzards and 80 mph winds; the 320-acre scarp lies about 40 miles west of Casper.

Jackson Hole Airport is the only US commercial airport located inside what kind of place?

It is the only commercial airport inside a national park: the 1950 expansion of Grand Teton National Park absorbed the airfield, and the park sets strict noise limits on the jets using it.

When it opened in 1910, Buffalo Bill Dam on the Shoshone River held what global distinction?

Tallest dam anywhere at 325 feet when completed in 1910, it began life as Shoshone Dam; the showman it now honours signed over his water rights in 1904 so the government could build it, and it took his name in 1946.

The Old Faithful Inn, opened in 1904, is billed as the world's largest building of what kind?

The Old Faithful Inn is billed as the world's largest log hotel, built of local lodgepole pine and rhyolite over a single winter; in September 1988 firefighters saved it when a firestorm swept through the geyser basin.

Which Yellowstone geyser is the tallest active one in the world?

Steamboat's major eruptions can top 300 feet, but they are wildly unpredictable: it sat dormant from 1911 to 1961, then fired more than 40 times a year in 2019 and 2020.

What gives Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring its rings of orange, yellow and green?

Heat-loving microbes grow in coloured mats around the rim, their pigments shifting as the water cools; the centre is too hot for them, so it shows only the deep blue of clear water.

What finally stopped the advance of Yellowstone's 1988 fires?

Snowfall did what thousands of firefighters could not: a quarter of an inch on 11 September halted fires that burned across about 36 percent of the park.

Which predator was brought back to Yellowstone in 1995?

The gray wolf returned when 14 animals trapped in Canada were held in Lamar Valley pens for about two months before being let loose; park hunters had killed the last native wolves by 1926.

Kelly, near Jackson Hole, was swept away in 1927 when what failed?

A landslide dam had blocked the Gros Ventre River since 1925, when a mountainside slid across it and backed up a new lake; two years later part of it failed, and the flood destroyed Kelly and killed six people.

The 1866 Fetterman Fight near Fort Phil Kearny, costing the Army 81 men, was part of what?

Red Cloud's War was the Lakota fight to close the Bozeman Trail; decoys said to include Crazy Horse lured the column into an ambush, and within two years the Army had abandoned the trail's forts, which were burned behind it.

The 1854 Grattan fight, which started the First Sioux War, began over what?

A stray cow belonging to a Mormon emigrant was killed and eaten by a visiting Lakota; when Lt. Grattan marched into the camp to arrest him, a soldier shot Chief Conquering Bear and the whole detachment was wiped out.

Which group took over Fort Bridger in 1855, claiming to have bought it for $8,000 in gold?

Mormon settlers took the fort over in 1855, saying they had paid $8,000 for it, two years after a Mormon militia rode out to arrest Jim Bridger for selling liquor and arms to the tribes; whether he really sold is still argued.

Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian, often called the first true Western, is set around which Wyoming town?

Medicine Bow is where the novel opens, as the narrator steps off the train; the line 'When you call me that, smile!' comes from its card game, and the town later built a Virginian Hotel that still stands.

Plains tribes link the deep grooves of Devils Tower to a giant animal's claws and call the rock what?

Bear Lodge is the name on the earliest maps; 'Devils Tower' dates from an 1875 expedition whose commander wrote that the tribes called it 'Bad God's Tower', a rendering many believe was a mistranslation.

Which NFL quarterback went seventh overall in the 2018 draft after playing for Wyoming?

Josh Allen, a junior-college transfer from Reedley College, had only two scholarship offers and the other was withdrawn; the Buffalo Bills took him seventh overall in 2018.

Afton-born wrestler Rulon Gardner won 2000 Olympic gold by beating which unbeaten Russian?

Aleksandr Karelin had won Olympic gold in 1988, 1992 and 1996 and had not lost internationally in 13 years when Gardner upset him 1-0 in the 130 kg final; Gardner credits his strength to the family dairy farm.

Singer Chris LeDoux won a 1976 world championship in which event?

Bareback riding was his event, the 1976 PRCA world title; he retired to a ranch at Kaycee and sold some 250,000 self-released albums from his truck before Garth Brooks name-checked him in a 1989 hit.

In 1969 Wyoming's coach cut 14 Black players for planning a protest against which rival?

The 'Black 14' wanted to wear armbands against BYU over the LDS Church's exclusion of Black men from its priesthood; the team was 4-0 when coach Lloyd Eaton dismissed them in October 1969.

Fort Washakie, in western Wyoming, was one of the few US military posts named for what?

The post was renamed in 1878 for Washakie, a Native American chief of the Eastern Shoshone who had long sided with the Army; when he died in 1900 he was buried with full military honours.

In 1920 the town of Jackson made national news for electing what?

An all-woman government took office when Grace Miller won the mayoralty alongside four councilwomen; they went on to appoint women as town marshal, clerk and treasurer as well.

Which billionaire founded TerraPower, the company behind the Natrium nuclear plant at Kemmerer?

Bill Gates founded TerraPower in 2006; its sodium-cooled Natrium reactor was sited beside Kemmerer's retiring Naughton power plant partly so that plant's workers could move across.

One theory says French trappers named the Teton Range les trois tétons, meaning what?

The three breasts is the usual reading: téton is French slang for breast, the shape trappers are said to have seen in the range's three main peaks, though a rival theory credits the Teton Sioux instead.