THE SETTING

Red Canyon. Courtesy Merrill J. Mattes Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

WYOMING IS A HIGH, cold, dry land, encompassing nearly ninety-eight thousand square miles—more than twice the size of Ohio or Pennsylvania. Agricultural lands occupy the state’s lowest elevations, but even those average some three to four thousand feet above sea level. More than one-third of the state has an elevation over seven thousand feet, and there are about fifty mountain peaks thirteen thousand feet or higher. Even in the lowest places, there are typically only about 125 frost-free days per year. In some parts of the state, people say the last snow is on June 30 and the first is on July 1. They’re only half-joking. Growing tomatoes in the backyard requires considerable thought and care.

Rain or snow amounts to about twelve to sixteen inches a year in the eastern part of the state (contrasting with forty inches or more in Ohio or Pennsylvania). Precipitation is lower still in some western Wyoming basins, but much higher in the mountains. Trees grow only on the mountains, right along the rivers, or in places where people have spent serious time nurturing them. The rest is sagebrush plains and some grasslands in the eastern part of the state.

The population has always been small. Ancestors of some native people lived there for thousands of years, and some native groups came there centuries before the 1870s, when white settlers and their armies launched the last assaults to take control of the land. In 1890, when territorial leaders made a bid for Wyoming to be recognized as an independent state in the US federal system, Wyoming had sixty thousand new settlers. That same year, Ohio had about 3.5 million people and Pennsylvania 5 million. By 2017, Wyoming’s population managed to grow to just ten times its 1890 size. Those people are in small towns and cities far from one another, and on ranches and farms. The largest city in the state today has a population just a little more than the 1890 population for the whole state—63,600 people. Statewide, native people are under 3 percent of the population.¹

Federal troops forced the native population onto a reservation in the wake of emigrant wagon trains and gold seekers. The settlers who came next went “against the grain” of a rapidly urbanizing nation, as one eminent historian of the state has put it.² They tried to create family farms and ranches in a difficult landscape, starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing well into the twentieth. One cow in Wyoming was said to require forty acres of grazing land; a herd of a hundred would require four thousand acres, or more than six square miles. Federal settlement laws took a long time to adjust to that reality. A combination of topography and federal policies has meant that people settled and acquired private ownership of lands either in the state’s eastern grasslands, or close to streams, or on a few private or (later) federal irrigation projects. Much of the rangelands, some of the grasslands, and nearly all the forested mountains are now permanently in federal hands, often leased out for grazing. Some 57 percent of Wyoming is federal, tribal, or state-owned land, while 43 percent is privately owned.

Mineral production—particularly for oil, and later, natural gas—took over from agriculture as a prime economic driver and employer as long ago as the 1920s; major coal production kicked in during the 1970s. Much of the mineral is federally owned and managed, but the state can tax the production. Even into the twenty-first century, the state has had no income tax because revenues from coal, oil, and gas production have paid much of the bill of a conservatively fashioned government budget. When cheap energy fuels national prosperity, that typically means a bust in Wyoming. Since the 1980s, Wyoming has been the nation’s largest coal producer, fueling power plants thousands of miles away. The national turn away from coal has put Wyoming in a quandary about its future. Tourism is the second largest industry, but nowhere near as big as energy production has been.³

The landscape is dominated by agriculture and by federal reserves of grazing, forest, and wilderness lands, punctuated by swaths of surface coal mines, oil, and gas development in pockets or major patches and some tentacles of suburban and second-home sprawl. Many ranch and farm operations (and certainly the most vocal) are still family run.

Water in Wyoming comes largely from snowfall on the mountains; of some 18.2 million acre-feet of water flowing in Wyoming streams each year, nearly 16.2 million acre-feet, mostly from snowpack, originate in the state. With its high-elevation lands and low population, Wyoming can’t consume much of that water. Some 15.4 million acre-feet flow out of the state—Wyoming is headwaters to the major US river systems of the Mississippi, the Columbia, and the Colorado. As in other western states, most of the water Wyoming people do use goes to agriculture. People have scoured and leveled land for irrigation, yet just over 3 percent of the land is irrigated. More land is classified “agricultural,” but only because it can be used for livestock grazing. On the irrigated land, the most common goal is to raise hay to sell or to feed livestock in winter. There are a few places that can raise sugar beets, oats, or even corn. Three-quarters of the state’s crop production, however, is some form of hay—in 2019, worth nearly $430 million.⁴

Because the water comes from snowpack, it is naturally delivered with the rush of snowmelt in the warming days of May and June. Since they first arrived, irrigators (plus a few private investors and eventually the federal and state governments) have been building reservoirs to catch that rush and make it possible to extend the water flow as much as possible through summer. In many places, irrigation by a gentle flood system from ditches in the fields is preferred to the more technically efficient and expensive sprinkler systems, which can’t always pay for themselves in the short seasons and with limited crops of high-elevation lands. The flood system has its peculiar benefits because flooded soils retain the water for a while and slowly let it back into a creek for the irrigator downstream to use—seen by some as a means of water storage for the end of the growing season. Aside from water flowing in the streams, some farms and towns use underground water, though statewide, groundwater use is dwarfed by surface water use. For agriculture, underground water is typically used in the occasional places where the crop is worth the cost of sprinklers tied to a well tapping groundwater that is handily nearby.⁵

More frequent drought, massive mountain forest fires, and smoky summer skies have appeared in some recent years, brought on by climate change. Climate change in turn has been fueled, in part, by the decades during which the nation demanded coal for power—often, Wyoming coal. Today’s challenges make it appropriate to look back, and then forward, in this book. Until lately, Wyoming summers were the most beautiful anywhere. Sleeveless days, cool nights, blue skies, the occasional brief and dramatic thunderstorm. All that was followed by the dazzling winter. Until the erratic climate of the last few years, gray days were rare, and cold sunny blue followed the frequent snowstorms. Winter seems the season the state is made for, with a pure color scheme of brown, white, and every shade of blue in the mountains and the shadows. The cities—most of them just towns, really—are small. People know each other, participate in a very homemade government, and find that they can sometimes genuinely shape what happens in their place. If Wyoming has spoken to you, it can be very hard to live anywhere else.