Imagine a massive globe -spanning corporate monopoly
building entire tech cities from absolute scratch.
Right, like totally controlling the infrastructure.
Exactly. Imagine them importing this huge foreign
workforce just to maximize profits, maintaining
a very strict closed -loop economy, and then,
you know, violently suppressing any small independent
competitors with hired mercenaries. It sounds
like a dystopian sci -fi setup. It really does.
But now put cowboy hats on all of them because
that is the actual hidden history of Wyoming.
Yeah. And it's so wild because if you're like
most people, you probably picture. I don't know,
a solitary cowboy riding across an empty sagebrush
plain. Right, or maybe a geyser erupting in this
pristine, untouched wilderness. It's a very specific,
incredibly ingrained picture that we all have.
It's the ultimate American frontier myth. I mean,
we've been sold this idea of wide open spaces,
rugged individualism, and a landscape that is
just completely isolated from the complexities
of the modern industrial world. So today, we
are taking our sources, which is a really comprehensible
historical overview of Wyoming, and we are using
them to look completely past that heavily mythologized
Wild West. Yeah, the mission of this deep dive
is to discover how this sparsely populated, seemingly
isolated region didn't just passively exist.
No, it dramatically shaped modern America. I
mean, everything from global electrification
to women's suffrage. The contrast between the
myth and the reality we found in these documents
is just staggering. Like, this isn't just a story
about cowboys. It is a dense mechanical look
at resource extraction brutal pragmatism and
constantly shifting populations Okay, let's unpack
this because before we even get to the famous
pioneer trails or the railroad tycoons We have
to completely shatter the illusion that Wyoming
was some Untouched isolated wilderness before
Europeans arrived right the text shows evidence
of human habitation stretching back roughly 13
,000 years 13 ,000 yeah, we're talking about
the Clovis Folsom and Plano cultures And for
you listening, when we say Clovis culture, we're
talking about prehistoric people known for a
very specific, incredibly sharp stone spear point.
They were highly specialized big game hunters.
And to put that 13 ,000 year timeline in perspective,
that is thousands of years before the pyramids
in Egypt were even a concept. Oh, wow. Yeah,
these were highly active, culturally complex
societies. I mean, the Bighorn Mountains alone
have artifacts of human occupation dating back
10 ,000 years. And my absolute favorite detail
from the sources is actually up in those mountains.
There is this massive physical structure known
as the Bighorn Medicine Wheel. Oh, that site
is incredible. It really is. It features 28 spokes
made of stone just laid out on the ground. Functionally
structures like this often served as astronomical
calendars or you know shared ceremonial markers.
But what's fascinating here is that its design
is strikingly similar to the majorville medicine
whale up in Canada. Right a site dated to 3200
BCE. That is over 5 ,000 years ago, demonstrating
the shared cultural and scientific understanding
that spanned massive geographic distances. And
the physical evidence of that continental connection
goes even further. The source material highlights
large ceremonial blades chipped from obsidian
rock formations. The black volcanic glass. Right.
Exactly. And those specific formations are located
in what is now Yellowstone National Park, in
the far northwest corner of Wyoming. But those
exact Yellowstone obsidian blades were discovered
inside the Hopewell burial mounds in southern
Ohio. Wait, let me stop you there. How does a
fragile obsidian blade get from Yellowstone to
Ohio a thousand years ago? I mean, who is carrying
it? Well... It happens through an intricate relay
style continental trading network. It wasn't
just one person walking the whole way. Right,
that would be impossible. Yeah, tribes traded
with neighboring tribes who traded with the next
group, creating this massive supply chain. Goods,
technology, culture, it was all moving thousands
of miles across different nations. So if you
are listening to this, I really want you to reframe
your mental image of prehistoric Wyoming. It
was not some isolated outpost at the edge of
the world. Think of it more like a modern distribution
hub. Yeah, it was a bustling center of continental
commerce, which makes it fascinating to see how
completely early European explorers misunderstood
the region when they finally showed up in the
early 19th century. They had absolutely no framework
for what they were seeing, did they? None at
all. I mean, John Coulter was likely the first
American to enter the region in 1807 after leaving
the Lewis and Clark expedition. He sees the thermal
activity in the Yellowstone area, the boiling
mud pots, the shooting geysers, and he dutifully
reports back to the East Coast. And the East
Coast establishment basically laughs him out
of the room. Totally. They dismissed his factual
firsthand accounts as fictional tall tales. He
was openly mocked. And the exact same thing happened
decades later, right, in the 1850s to Jim Bridger.
Exactly. He explored the Yellowstone region,
reported the geological reality of what he saw,
and the establishment simply refused to believe
him. The physical reality of Wyoming was literally
too fantastic for the Eastern elite to comprehend.
Those tall tales eventually proved true, of course,
but what is striking about those early 19th century
European arrivals is that they weren't actually
looking to stay in Wyoming. No, they were just
passing through or extracting resources. During
the mountain man era, fur trappers flocked there
for beaver pelts, holding these annual rendezvous
starting in 1824. And Oranibu was essentially
an early pop -up trade city in the wilderness,
right? Where trappers, Native Americans, and
fur companies would meet for a few weeks to trade,
drink, and resupply before just vanishing back
into the mountains. Exactly. But by the 1840s,
the fur trade was dying out and Wyoming primarily
became an obstacle. It was just a massive expanse
of land you had to survive walking through to
get somewhere else. And that need to pass through
triggered massive geopolitical consequences.
This is the era of the Great Migration. trails.
Right. The route that became the Oregon Trail
was already in regular use by traders in the
early 1830s. It snaked right across Wyoming,
following the North Platte River, crossing the
Continental Divide at a critical geographic bottleneck
called South Pass, and exiting the western side.
Then in 1847, the Mormon emigrants blazed the
Mormon Trail, which kind of mirrored the Oregon
Trail, but split off at that same South Pass
to head south toward Utah. And the numbers are
just staggering. The text notes that between
1840 and 1859, over 350 ,000 immigrants follow
these trails. I need you, the listener, to visualize
the sheer logistical nightmare of this. Imagine
the population of a mid -sized modern city, say,
New Orleans, deciding to pack their entire lives
into heavy wooden carts and walk single file
through a semi -arid desert. Yeah, it's mind
-boggling. You wouldn't just have a difficult
journey. You'd have the world's longest, most
destructive traffic jam. 350 ,000 people, along
with their horses, oxen, and cattle, are all
walking through a very narrow, fragile ecosystem.
Oh, the environmental impact was brutal. They
are stripping the land of every blade of grass,
polluting the scarce water sources, and cutting
down all the available timber for miles in every
direction. It was a devastating environmental
shock. And it fundamentally upended the survival
mechanics for the Native American tribes who
called that region home, the Arapaho, Cheyenne,
Sioux, Shoshone. Crow and many others. Because
their resources were being obliterated by people
who were just passing through. Right. And to
protect these massive wagon trains from the inevitable
pushback, the U .S. military increased its presence
and established fortified posts like Fort Laramie.
That military presence leads to the treaties,
specifically the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.
The government essentially tried to map out the
plains, guaranteeing certain lands to specific
tribes in exchange for safe passage for the settlers.
But there is an incredibly bleak... recurring
historical theme in this text. Yeah, the promise
of gold always instantly vaporizes peace treaties.
Always. And we see the mechanics of that play
out perfectly here. The 1850s were relatively
quiet under the treaty, but in 1859, gold is
discovered in Montana. And suddenly, a new wave
of prospectors wants the fastest possible route
north. Exactly. That meant blazing the Bozeman
Trail directly through the Powder River country.
Which were the exact prime hunting grounds the
United States had explicitly promised to the
tribes in that 1851 treaty. The influx of gold
seekers completely ignored the legal boundaries.
This encroachment forced the tribes to defend
their recognized territory, leading to severe
clashes. Like the first Powder River expedition
in 1865, right? Yes. Ordered by Major General
Grenville M. Dodge. It ended in a battle against
the Arapaho and directly escalated into Red Clouds
War, which was the first major military conflict
between the U .S. and Wyoming Indian tribes.
And the text points out that the U .S. actually
conceded that conflict. The Second Treaty of
Fort Laramie in 1868 ended Red Clouds War by
agreeing to abandon the forts along the Bozeman
Trail and closing the Powder River Country to
whites. But again, gold changes the math. Less
than a decade later, miners blatantly violated
that second treaty by pushing into the Black
Hills looking for gold, which ignited the Black
Hills War in 1876. So the wagon trails and the
gold rushes paved the way for massive disruption,
but they were ultimately temporary. People were
still mostly moving through. Right. What changed
the permanent trajectory of Wyoming was the arrival
of an industrial juggernaut. The Iron Horse,
the Union Pacific Railroad. This completely transformed
Wyoming from a seasonal transit route into what
was essentially a massive corporate company town.
Yeah, Wyoming actually became a formal U .S.
territory in 1868 directly because the railroad
needed a legal framework to operate within as
it laid tracks westward. And the way this railroad
was funded is wild. It wasn't just a few wealthy
guys buying steel. Far from it. The Union Pacific
Railroad companies were funded by massive federal
land grants. The government gave the railroad
alternating sections of land along the tracks.
And then the railroad used the promise of those
future land sales as collateral, right, to back
huge borrowings from major financial centers
in New York and London. Exactly. They were a
global financial monopoly operating in the middle
of the plains. Let's dig into how that business
model actually worked, because it reminds me
of a modern mega corporation building its own
closed loop tech city. To pay off those massive
London and New York bonds, the railroad needed
to sell that granted land to settlers as quickly
as possible. Right, because those new settlers
would farm and raise cattle, which they would
have to ship out on the company's trains. And
those same settlers would use the company's trains
to bring in their manufactured goods. The Union
Pacific didn't just build the tracks, they actively
built the towns. Cheyenne, Laramie, Evanston,
Rock Springs. These places were constructed from
the dirt, up to service the railroad. They built
the dining halls for passengers, the repair shops,
the housing for the train crews. They engineered
the entire local economy just to keep their own
operations profitable. This raises an important
question about how corporate monopolies influence
demographics and social stability. A railroad
requires a massive constant labor force to build
and maintain. And that need for labor drove incredibly
rapid demographic diversity. Yes. By 1870, roughly
three eighths of Wyoming's total population was
foreign born. Almost 40 percent. The text notes
they were mostly coming from Ireland, Germany
and England. But laying track was only half the
equation. The railroad had an insatiable need
for fuel, which meant they needed coal. And huge
quantities of coal were discovered in the southwestern
part of the territory, especially around Rock
Springs. So the Union Pacific simply set up their
own subsidiary coal companies to mine it. When
a single corporate entity controls the jobs,
the housing, the land, and the resources, the
power imbalance is staggering. It creates a pressure
cooker. And it inevitably boils over. The sources
document a very dark outcome of this monopoly
control in 1885, known as the Rock Springs Massacre.
Oh, this part was rough to read. It was. The
Union Pacific Coal Company had hired Chinese
miners often to bypass strikes or lower labor
costs. This pitted desperate groups of laborers
against each other. And the white miners violently
rioted, murdering and driving out the Chinese
miners in what became one of the largest race
riots in U .S. history. Right. When resources
and survival are completely controlled by a monopoly,
it historically fuels devastating class and racial
violence. So you have the railroad maintaining
an iron grip on the southern transit lines and
the coal fields. But while they were doing that,
a totally different kind of corporate power took
over the open plains to the north. The cattle
syndicates. Yeah. The cattle industry in Wyoming
has a fascinating origin. It actually started
with a massive, incredibly risky drive. In 1866,
a man named Nelson Story Senior drove roughly
a thousand head of Texas Longhorns all the way
up the Bozeman Trail straight through Wyoming
to get to Montana. Wait, pause. He walked a thousand
cows from Texas to Montana. How long does that
even take? Months. And more importantly, how
many people do you need to guard a thousand cows
from outlaws, predators, and the Native American
tribes who are actively defending that exact
territory? It was a massive, heavily armed, logistical
undertaking. They had to fight their way through.
But that rugged individualistic model didn't
last long. Because the massive profits attracted
wealthy investors from the East Coast and Europe.
Right. They formed syndicates, essentially groups
of wealthy investors pooling their money to monopolize
an industry and act like a cartel. The text specifically
mentions the Wyoming Stock Growers Association,
created in 1873. They started out claiming they
just wanted to standardize the industry, but
they grew so wealthy and powerful that they wielded
massive political influence across the entire
western United States. The text literally refers
to this cattle syndicate as the de facto territorial
government of Wyoming. That's insane. And their
absolute control set the stage for the 1892 Johnson
County War. also known as the War on Powder River.
And the mechanism of this conflict is crucial
to understand. Most of the land in Wyoming at
the time was public domain, technically open
for any citizen to homestead and graze their
animals. But as individuals, smaller ranchers
and farmers began moving in. They started fencing
off water sources and claiming land. Which put
them directly at odds with the massive cattle
syndicates who felt they owned the open range
by right of prior use. And this wasn't a dispute
settled with lawyers in a civilized courtroom.
It was flat out class warfare. Yeah, you had
these wealthy syndicate cattlemen actively hiring
a band of mercenaries from Texas to travel to
Wyoming and assassinate the small settling ranchers.
They branded them as wrestlers. Exactly. It culminated
in a massive lengthy shootout involving the local
homesteaders, the hired guns and a sheriff's
posse. The violence got so out of control that
President Benjamin Harrison actually had to order
the United States cavalry to march in and stop
it. The Johnson County War is arguably the most
important of for understanding the cultural legacy
of the state. I mean, it was fundamentally a
brutal economic dispute over land and water rights
between wealthy monopolies and working -class
homesteaders. But it was aggressively repackaged.
The irony here for you as the listener is incredible.
We idolized the solitary, independent, rule -breaking
cowboy fighting for freedom. Right. But the source
text reviews that the territory was actually
run by organized corporate cattle syndicates
who were using hired guns to crush the independent
guys. and popular novels, early films, and television
shows took that messy corporate class warfare
and sanitized it. They turned it into the symbolic
Wild West narrative we consume today, complete
with honorable gunslingers and... clear -cut
heroes. And when you have massive corporate syndicates
violently hoarding the land and the railroads
controlling the towns, it creates a massive underclass
of disenfranchised people. Yeah. And historically,
what happens when young men are locked out of
the legal economy? They turn to the illegal one,
enter the outlaw. The text mentions that notorious
figures like Butch Cassidy and Harry Longaball,
the Sundance kid, both started their careers
and spent time incarcerated in Wyoming as young
men. There was a remote area in Johnson County
called the Hole in the Wall, right? Which was
a naturally fortified canyon that served as a
well -known hideout for outlaw gangs from the
1860s through the early 20th century. So we have
a territory dominated by corporate railroads,
powerful cattle cartels, hired assassins, and
literal outlaw gangs hiding in canyons. It is
a harsh, rugged, violently contested place. It
really is. Here's where it gets really interesting,
though. Because despite all of that violence
and corporate control, or maybe because of it,
this rugged territory inexplicably became the
world's leading laboratory for progressive rights
and environmental conservation. Yeah, the pivot
is pretty jarring. But before we even get to
the laws, we have to look at the name of the
state itself. The name Wyoming isn't even native
to the region. No, it was introduced to Congress
by a representative from Ohio who just needed
a temporary name for the new government territory.
It is actually derived from a Delaware Native
American word, specifically the Munsee language,
meaning at the big river flat. But it originally
applied to the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania.
Wait, really? Pennsylvania? Yes. It was popularized
by an 1809 poem by a Scottish poet named Thomas
Campbell called Gertrude of Wyoming. They literally
imported a name from a poem about Pennsylvania
to brand this violent new Western territory.
That's hilarious. But once they had their territory
officially named in 1868, they started making
global history almost immediately. Right. On
December 10th, 1869, the Wyoming Territory became
the first future U .S. state to grant women the
right to vote. 50 years before the 19th Amendment
granted national suffrage. And it wasn't just
a symbolic gesture on paper. It started a massive
cascade of practical firsts. The very next year,
1870, Wyoming had the first female court bailiff,
Mary Atkinson, and the first time women served
on a jury, both happening in Laramie. And that
same year, Esther Hobart Morris became the country's
first female justice of the peace in South Pass
City. Decades later, Wyoming proved it wasn't
a fluke by becoming the first state in the union
to elect a female governor, Nellie Taylor Ross,
who took office in 1924. Alongside this incredible
social progress, they were pioneering environmental
preservation. Remember those tall tales from
Colcher and Bridger about the boiling mud and
geysers in Yellowstone that the East Coast laughed
at? Right, the ones everyone thought were fake.
Well, in 1871, Ferdinand Van Vier Hayton led
a formal, scientifically rigorous geological
survey that finally confirmed the stories with
photographs and paintings. And the very next
year, 1872, Congress was convinced to set aside
the region, creating Yellowstone as the world's
first national park. Conservation milestones
just kept coming. Wyoming became home to the
nation's first national monument, Devil's Tower,
created in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt, and the
very first national forest, the Shoshone National
Forest, established in 1891. They even took a
radically progressive approach to basic natural
resources. When they adopted their state constitution
upon achieving statehood on July 10th, 1890,
it included an article that uniquely claimed
all water in Wyoming as the property of the state.
Which is fascinating. If you're a modern listener,
especially if you lean politically right, hearing
that a rugged, individualistic western state
essentially socialized its entire water supply
sounds completely backwards. If we connect this
to the bigger picture, it sounds backwards until
you look at the the underlying mechanism driving
all of these decisions. Because none of this
progressive legislation was an accident, right?
No. And it wasn't necessarily born out of high
-minded utopian ideals. The territory had one
massive existential obstacle, a very low population.
Unlike Colorado to the south, Wyoming never experienced
a massive sustained population boom from a permanent
gold or silver rush. Exactly. And to achieve
statehood and gain political power in Washington,
you need a minimum number of citizens. So how
does granting women the right to vote solve that
problem? Because female suffrage specifically
attracts families. It signals safety, legal standing,
and civilization to women in the East. It shifts
the demographic away from transient single male
miners and cowboys toward permanent, reproducing
communities. Achieving statehood required radical
pragmatism. Exactly. Socializing water rights
in an arid desert is the same thing. In that
environment, water isn't a commodity you can
let a monopoly hoard its life and death for the
entire economy. These were brilliant practical
survival strategies designed to attract and sustain
settlers in an incredibly unforgiving environment.
That completely reframes how you view the state's
progressivism. It wasn't just idealism, it was
pure survival. And as we pull back and look at
the entire sweep of this deep dive, the contrast
between the beginning of the timeline and the
end is just staggering. We started this journey
looking at ancient inhabitants trading ceremonial
obsidian blades thousands of miles across a prehistoric
continent. And by the late 1800s and early 1900s,
Wyoming's Ferris Haggerty mine in Carbon County
was supplied the copper that would literally
wire and electrify the modern world. They went
from stone tools to global electrification on
the exact same footprint of land. It is an incredible
arc of resource extraction, human adaptation,
and global connection. But there is one final
piece of this source text that really demands
attention, and it has to do with how we, in the
modern day, remember all of this history we just
discussed. Oh, the curation of the historical
memory. Yes. The text details how, after achieving
statehood in 1890, the state actively began curating
a nostalgia story of itself. They leaned heavily
into the frontier West myth we talked about at
the beginning. Pageants parades and school courses
pushed this specific, sanitized narrative of
the solitary cowboy. But it goes much deeper
than local parades. In the 1940s, a Wyoming millionaire
named William R. Coe made incredibly large financial
contributions to the American Studies programs
at Yale University and at the University of Wyoming.
And he didn't fund those academic programs just
because he was a fan of objective history. Not
at all. The text states his explicit motivation.
He wished to celebrate the specific values of
the Western United States to directly meet the
ideological threat of communism. The Wild West
narrative that rugged individualism, the solitary
hero taming the frontier, was literally financially
weaponized as a cultural defense mechanism during
the Cold War. The history was funded to serve
a modern political purpose. Which leaves you
with a pretty profound question to mull over
long after you finished listening to this deep
dive. The next time you picture that solitary
cowboy riding across the sagebrush or you watch
a movie about the frontier, well how much of
the history you know is just an organic recounting
of facts and how much of it is a deliberately
funded narrative designed to shape your modern
politics?