USA Guide
The Rockies
Wyoming
Pronghorn antelope all but outnumber people in wide-open Wyoming, the ninth largest but least populous state in the union, with just 515,000 residents. Above all, this is classic cowboy country – the inspiration behind Shane, The Virginian, and countless other Western novels – replete with open range, rodeos, and country-and-western dance halls. The state emblem, seen everywhere, is a hat-waving cowboy astride a bucking bronco.
Well over three million tourists per year head to the state's northwest corner for the simmering geothermal landscape of Yellowstone National Park, and the craggy mountain vistas of adjacent Grand Teton National Park. Between Yellowstone and South Dakota to the east are the helter-skelter Bighorn Mountains, likeable Old West towns such as Cody and Buffalo, and the otherworldly outcrop of Devils Tower.
The meager supply of buffalo in early Wyoming caused fierce intertribal wars and kept the Native American population down to around ten thousand. However, the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Blackfoot combined to inflict notable defeats on the US Army before it could clear the way for pioneer settlement in the 1870s. The cattle ranchers and sheep-farming homesteaders who followed engaged in violent range wars over grazing rights to the wiry grasslands.
Unlikely as it may seem, this rowdy state was the first to grant women the right to vote in 1869 – a full half-century before the rest of the country, on the grounds that the enfranchisement of women would attract settlers and increase the population, thereby hastening statehood. A year later Wyoming appointed the country's first women jurors, and the "Equality State" elected the first female US governor in 1924.
The absence of rivers to irrigate farmland has put a lid on agricultural growth. Any weather-beaten, denim-clad stranger is just as likely to be an oil roustabout as a genuine cowboy, with mineral extraction having replaced livestock as the mainstay of the state's economy in the early twentieth century; today, Wyoming's coffers overflow with profits from the booming coal, oil, and natural gas industries.
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