About Wyoming

Wyoming takes its name from the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, the site of a 1778 massacre during the Revolutionary War in which British-allied Loyalists and Seneca warriors killed more than 200 American settlers. The Wyoming Valley's name comes from the Delaware (Lenape) words "maughwauwama," meaning "large plains" or "at the big river flat." The name became well known through a 1809 poem about the massacre called "Gertrude of Wyoming" by Thomas Campbell, which romanticized the valley and made "Wyoming" a familiar word across the country. When Congress organized the Wyoming Territory in 1869, it borrowed the name from the Pennsylvania valley rather than from any local feature or indigenous people. Wyoming became a state in 1890 and was a pioneer in women's suffrage: it granted women the right to vote in 1869, becoming the first territory or state in the nation to do so.

Wyoming is the least populated state in the United States and, in some ways, the most American. It is the state that gave women the right to vote before the rest of the country thought it possible, the state that invented the national park, and the state whose vast energy reserves powered the nation's growth for a century. Roughly the size of the United Kingdom but home to fewer than 600,000 people, Wyoming is a place where the scale of the landscape dwarfs the human presence in a way that few places in the lower 48 can match.

The western third of Wyoming is defined by mountains and parks: the Teton Range, the Wind River Mountains, and Yellowstone's volcanic plateau. The central region is ranching and energy country, the Bighorn Basin and the high plains that have supported cattle, sheep, oil wells, and natural gas fields for more than a century. The northeast is the Powder River Basin, the coal heartland that makes Wyoming the nation's leading coal producer by an enormous margin. And the southeast, anchored by Cheyenne and Laramie, is the seat of government, education, and military power.

Wyoming is navigating a transformation as consequential as any in its history. The coal industry that funded the state for generations is in long-term decline. The energy revenues that allowed Wyoming to operate without a personal income tax are increasingly volatile. The outdoor recreation and resort economy centered on Yellowstone and Jackson Hole is booming but benefiting a narrow slice of the population. How Wyoming charts its path through this transition, while holding onto the independence, the open spaces, and the identity that define it, is the story of the state in the 2020s.