How times change, is illustrated by today’s #stampoftheday, which honors a state that was the first state where were first allowed to vote but now is so conservative that it gave Donald Trump his largest margin of victory in 2016.
The state is Wyoming and the stamp is a 3-cent stamp issued on July 10, 1940 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its statehood. Since the Idaho statehood stamp (issued just one week before) pictured that state’s capitol building, President Franklin Roosevelt (who was an avid stamp collector) suggested that the Wyoming stamp should picture something else. So it features the state seal, which consists of a female statue draped with a banner reading “Equal Rights,” along with two men and their respective banners that symbolize the state’s long history in livestock and mining.
Several Native American groups originally inhabited the region now known as Wyoming. French-Canadian trappers went into the state in the late 18th century, leaving French toponyms such as Téton and La Ramie. Most of Wyoming was purchased by the United States from the French in as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. What is now southwestern Wyoming was a part of the Spanish Empire and later Mexican territory of Alta California, until it was ceded to the United States in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War.
John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which was guided by French Canadian Toussaint Charbonneau and his young Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, first described the region in 1807. At the time, his reports of the Yellowstone area were considered to be fictional. In 1812, Robert Stuart and a party of five men discovered South Pass, which became the route followed by the people travelling the Oregon Trail. In 1850, Jim Bridger located what is now known as Bridger Pass, which the Union Pacific Railroad used in 1868-as did Interstate 80, 90 years later. Bridger also explored Yellowstone and filed reports on the region that also were largely regarded as tall tales at the time. But finally, enough people saw it and, with the support of the railroads, the federal government created Yellowstone National Park, which in 1872, became the world’s first national park.
The state’s name (which was specified in federal legislation in 1865) has nothing to do with its past. Rather, its comes from the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, which was made famous by “Gertrude of Wyoming,” an 1809 poem by Thomas Campbell that was based on a battle in the American Revolution., (The name ultimately derives from a Munsee word meaning “at the big river flat.”)
The area’s population grew steadily after the Union Pacific Railroad reached the town of Cheyenne in 1867, and the federal government established the Wyoming Territory on July 25, 1868. Unlike mineral-rich Colorado, Wyoming lacked significant deposits of gold and silver, as well as Colorado’s subsequent population boom. Wyoming’s mineral resources, especially gold, attracted many settlers even before the Indian fighting had ended.
The new territorial government was a leader in women’s rights On December 10, 1869, it became the first US territory to give women the right to vote. At about the same time, the territory gave women a host of other rights, including giving married women property rights separate from those of their husbands. When Wyoming applied for statehood in 1890, it insisted that it would only be admitted as long as the state’s women retained their right to vote, which made Wyoming the first state to allow women to vote. Continuing this pattern, in 1924, Wyoming voters made Nellie Tayloe Ross the first woman to be elected governor of a US state.
However, it’s not clear that the state’s embrace of women’s rights was totally altruistic. Rather, one of the driving forces behind these moves supposedly was to help the territory gain good publicity and convince more women to come the territory because, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, there were about six adult men for every adult woman in the state. While men now only slightly outnumber women in the state, Wyoming, which is the 10th largest state in terms of area, has fewer residents than any other state in the country. In fact, with about 579,000 residents in 2019, the state’s total population is less than the population of 31 separate cities in the country, including Washington, DC (whose residents are not represented in Congress).
About 84 percent of the Wyoming’s residents are non-Hispanic whites, which makes Wyoming’s the eight whitest state in the nation. (Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, and New Hampshire are more than 90 percent non-Hispanic white; other states ahead of Wyoming are Montana, Iowa, Kentucky, and North Dakota). Less than one percent of the population is non-Hispanic Black (Wyoming trails only Montana and Idaho on this metric) and less than one percent is Asian (Wyoming trails only Montana). About 10 percent of the residents are Hispanic, which places Wyoming in the middle of the pack among American states on this metric. The main drivers of Wyoming’s economy are mineral extraction-mostly coal, oil, natural gas, and trona (a main source of soda ash which is used in many manufacturing processes)-and (at least until the pandemic) tourism.
Given its demographics and its economy, it’s not surprising that Wyoming has been a politically conservative state since the 1950s. It has voted for every Republican presidential candidate since 1968. Donald Trump won it by 46 points in 2016, which was the best performance in the 21st century in that state and the best performance for Trump in any state. And no Democrat has represented the state in the US Senate or House since 1978.
But Wyoming apparently still looks favorably on women. Liz Cheney is the state’s only US Representative and is House Republican Conference Chair, the third highest position in the GOP’s House leadership. (Cheney’s father, former VP Dick Cheney also once represented Wyoming in the US House).
I don’t have anything else to say about Wyoming so I’ll give the last word to Jack Kerouac who wrote (in “On the Road”): “At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who’s lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.