We are planning a quick weekend getaway to Wyoming. It is one of only a few states that Mr. Jones has not visited. I have visited Wyoming twice but both of those trips were nearly 30 years ago. We did a little research to learn more about this doubly landlocked state in the western United States.
58 Fun Facts About Wyoming
1. The state of Wyoming is one of only three states in the U.S. that has straight lines for each of its borders. Can you identify the two other states*?
2. Wyoming covers 97,813 square miles including land and water, making it the 10th largest state by land area in the U.S.
3. The federal government owns nearly half (48.19%) of Wyoming’s land, 30,043,512 acres out of 62,343,040 total acres. Federal lands include two national parks—Grand Teton and Yellowstone— plus national recreation areas, national monuments, national forests, historic sites, fish hatcheries, wildlife refuges and a single military base.
4. Wyoming is the least populated of all 50 U.S. states with only 578,759 residents in 2019. By comparison, California has 39.51 million residents, Texas has 29 million, New York has 19.45 million, and Colorado has 5.759 million residents.
5. Those 578,759 Wyoming residents get representation by two U.S. Senators in Washington just the same as the 39.51 million Californians do; Wyoming, however, has only one representive in the House of Representatives while the state of California has 53.
6. Wyoming has 23 counties. There is only one area code (307) throughout the entire state, all of which is in the Mountain Time Zone.
7. The climate in Wyoming is drier and windier than most of the U.S. with greater temperature extremes. The state averages only 14.5 inches of precipitation a year.
8. The Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. Gannett Peak, at 13,804 feet, is the highest point in Wyoming while Belle Fouche River valley in the state’s northeast corner is the lowest point at 3,125 feet above sea level.
9. Today’s Wyoming has been inhabited by Paleo-Indian people for at least 12,0000 years.
10. In north central Wyoming, a mysterious pattern of stones sits at an elevation of 9,642 feet near the crest of the Bighorn Mountains. The Medicine Wheel is an ancient shrine of stone with 28 spokes and a circumference of 245 feet. This prehistoric relic remains one of Wyoming’s unsolved puzzles.
11. Once populated by numerous nomadic tribes of Plains Indians, today there are only two federally recognized Indian tribes in Wyoming: the Shoshone and Arapaho. These two tribes share the 2.2-million-acre Wind River Reservation located in central-western Wyoming.
12. The bulk of the land making up the state of Wyoming was acquired by the U.S. from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
13. The remaining southwest corner of Wyoming was claimed by the Spanish Empire and then as Mexican territory until it was ceded to the U.S. at the end of the Mexican American War in 1848.
14. John Colter, a member of the 1804–1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition, set off on his own exploration during the winter of 1807–1808. Colter became the first person of European descent known to see the Teton Mountains as well as the hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone. Few people believed his reports of gushing geysers, bubbling mud pots and steaming pools of water.
15. In 1865, Ohio Congressman James Mitchell Ashley introduced a bill to Congress to provide a “temporary government for the territory of Wyoming”. Congressman Ashley suggested the “Wyoming” name as he was familiar with the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania.
16. In 1867, the Union Pacific Railroad – started in Omaha, Nebraska, reached the town of Cheyenne, Wyoming. This was part of the first transcontinental railroad to the Pacific; the railroad was the main reason behind the growth of Cheyenne.
17. On July 25, 1868, President Andrew Johnson signed the Wyoming Organic Act creating the Wyoming Territory using lands from the Dakota, Idaho, and Utah territories.
18. On April 15, 1869. John A. Campbell, the first governor of Wyoming Territory, took his oath of office. Two days later, the Wyoming Territory government was organized, and Cheyenne was chosen as the capital.
19. The Territory of Wyoming existed for 22 years until July 10, 1890, when it was admitted to the Union as the 44th state. The boundaries for the state of Wyoming were identical to those of Wyoming Territory.
20. Fifty years before the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, women in Wyoming were granted the right to vote on December 10, 1869. Louisa Swain was the first woman to vote on September 6, 1870 in Laramie.
21. Wyoming also welcomed women into government and politics. In 1870 in South Pass City, Wyoming, Esther Hobart Morris became the first female justice of the peace in the United States.
22. As a pioneering state for women’s rights, Wyoming’s official state motto is “Equal Rights.” One of Wyoming’s state nicknames is “The Equality State.”
23. In 1894, Estelle Reel became one of the first women in the United States elected to a state office, that of Wyoming State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
24. In 1924, Wyoming became the first state to elect a female governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross. Ross succeeded her husband, William Bradford Ross, who died just prior to the 1924 election. She served as the 14th governor of Wyoming from 1925 to 1927.
25. In 1933, Ross became the first female Director of the United States Mint. Ross served five terms as Director, from May 3, 1933 until her retirement in April 1953. Appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ross also served under presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
26. Most of the Yellowstone National Park lies in Wyoming with small portions in Idaho and Montana. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act in 1872, creating the world’s first national park. In 2019, Yellowstone National Park attracted 4.02 million visitors.
27. A red granite monument– located ten miles south of Lusk, Wyoming — marks the grave of Charlotte “Mother Featherlegs” Shephard, the only known monument to a prostitute in the United States. Charlotte had — in 1876 — established a saloon and a “house of ill-repute” along the Cheyenne-Black Hills trail along with “Dangerous Dick” Davis. In 1879, Dick killed “Mother Featherlegs,” making off with the money and jewels she was holding for local bandits.
28. The outlaw Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, a.k.a. The Sundance Kid took his nickname from the town of Sundance, Wyoming, where he was jailed in 1887 at the age of 15 for stealing a horse, a saddle, and a gun. He later became a member of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch.
29. The town of Cody, Wyoming is named after the man who helped establish it, William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
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30. In September, 2019, rapper, fashion designer and businessman Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian West reportedly bought the $14 million Monster Lake Ranch outside of Cody, Wyoming. Two months later, West purchased Bighorn Mountain Ranch, which covers 6,713 acres just outside of Greybull, Wyoming.
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31. James Cash Penny opened his first store in Kemmerer, Wyoming on April 14, 1902. Opened as a Golden Rule Store, Penney later changed the store’s name to “JCPenney” as it is known today.
32. Kemmerer, with a population of 2,734 (2019), is also known as the hometown of Jerry Buss — the extraordinarily successful owner of the Los Angeles Lakers NBA basketball team from 1979 until his death in 2013. At age 12, Buss moved to Kemmerer with his mother. After graduating from high school in Kemmerer, Buss earned a scholarship to the University of Wyoming, graduating in 1953 with a B.S. degree in two and a half years.
34. President Theodore Roosevelt declared Devil’s Tower in Crook County, Wyoming the nation’s first National Monument as a part of the Antiquities Act of 1906.
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35. The 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was filmed on location at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming.
36. The jackalope — a mythical creature — was created in Douglas, Wyoming in the 1930s when Douglas Herrick and his brother Ralph decided to add antlers to a dead jackrabbit they had taxidermized. They sold the creatures—and their tall tale—to anyone willing to buy. You can still get a jackalope hunting license in Douglas.
37. Yolo the jackpotalop is the mascot for the The Wyoming lottery — branded as WyoLotto. Modeled after the legendary jackalope — part hare, part antelope — the jackpotalope was created to convey that it is fun to chase a dream.
38.”Old Steamboat” — the bucking horse on Wyoming license plates — was named after a bronco that could not be ridden in the early 1900s. In 1936 the state of Wyoming trademarked the Bucking Horse and Rider. The image also shows up in the University of Wyoming logo, and on Wyoming state highway signs and the state quarter.
Brokeback Mountain
39. Writer Annie Proulx, whose works range from “Brokeback Mountain” to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Shipping News,” formerly lived in Saratoga, Wyoming.
Brokeback Mountain
40. The 2005 Oscar-winning movie Brokeback Mountain, based on Proulx’s short story, was set in the mountains of Wyoming, but it was filmed in Alberta, Canada.
41. There are only two escalators the entire state of Wyoming: both in Casper– one at First Interstate Bank in downtown Casper, and the other one at Hilltop National Bank out on Country Club Road in Casper.
42. Author Ernest Hemingway once said, “there are two places I love; Africa and Wyoming.” In July 1928, Hemingway first visited Sheridan, Wyoming, staying at the Folly Ranch and the Sheridan Inn, before finding the quiet he needed to write at the Spear Family Ranch, called Spear-O-Wigwam, to work on finishing his A Farewell to Arms novel.
43. Hemingway returned to Wyoming many times, often to the L Bar T Ranch near Cody, where he worked on writing Death in the Afternoon in 1930 and then To Have and Have Not in 1936.
44. On November 21, 1940, Heimingway wed his third wife, New York Times reporter Martha Gellhorn at the Justice of the Peace office in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
45. In 2020 Wyoming once again topped the Tax Foundation’s list as the #1 best tax-friendly state for business. Wyoming has no individual income tax, and it is one of only two states that does not levy a corporate income tax or a gross receipts tax.
Rocky IV
46. Rocky IV (the fourth movie in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky series) was filmed in Wyoming. Rocky’s training scenes were shot at a farm in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; scenes set in the frozen landscape of Russia were actually in Grand Teton National Park.
47. Wyoming was the last state in the union to raise the legal drinking age from 19 to 21. The change occurred on July 1, 1988 – the last day for Wyoming to change the law or lose $8.2 million in federal highway funds.
48. The University of Wyoming — a land-grant research university in Laramie — is the only public four-year and post-graduate educational institution in the state. It was founded in March 1886, four years before Wyoming Territory was admitted as the 44th state.
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49. The Cowboys and Cowgirls sports teams at the University of Wyoming play in NCAA Division I in the Mountain West conference. Their stadiums in Laramie are about 7,200 feet above sea level, the highest in NCAA Division I.
50. White Hall, on the University of Wyoming’s campus in Laramie, is the tallest building in the state. The 12-story dormitory is 200 feet high.
51. A person in Wyoming is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $750.00 if he opens and neglects to close a gate or replace bars in a fence which crosses a private road or a river, stream or ditch.
52. Jackson Hole is a valley between the Teton Mountain Range and the Gros Ventre Range in Wyoming. The city of Jackson, often mistakenly called Jackson Hole, derives its name from the valley in which it is located. Jackson is a popular tourist destination due to its proximity to three major ski resorts as well as Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.
53. Wyoming possesses the world’s largest deposit of trona, a compound that is processed into soda ash, used for manufacturing glass, paper, soaps, textiles, water softeners, and pharmaceuticals. Baking soda and baking powder both come from soda ash.
54. In 2018, Wyoming mines produced 17.4 million tons of trona and employed 2,225 people while supplying about 90% of the nation’s soda ash.
55. The Powder River Basin — covering an area about 120 miles east to west and 200 miles north to south in northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana — is known as the world’s most productive coal field.
56. Seven of the 10 largest coal mines in the United States operate in the Wyoming part of the Powder River Basin. Coal is mined at a rate of 12 tons per second, filling between 50 to 70 coal trains per day.
57. In 2019, Wyoming produced 277 million short tons of coal, almost 40 percent of U.S. coal production.
58. Wyoming’s large surface coal mines are also the most efficient in the nation, with an average recovery factor of 92 percent. Statewide, the average production of coal per employee is 26 short tons per hour. This is the highest productivity in the U.S., and more than double the productivity of the next highest coal-producing state.
*The other two states with only straight lines for borders are Colorado and Utah.
What fun fact about Wyoming can you add to this list?
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