Johanna Wickman

Johanna Wickman lives in Casper, Wyoming, where she is president of Wickman Historical Consultants, providing historical research, and exhibit design and collection services to museums and historians. She published her master's thesis in 2016 as Lost Forts of Casper, and published her biography of Kansas Senator Preston B. Plumb, The Forgotten Senator: The Life and Character of Preston B. Plumb in 2023. She was interviewed as an expert on the 11th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry for the award-winning documentary The Battle of Red Buttes in 2022.

The 11th Kansas Cavalry—in Kansas and the West

For Kansans, the Civil War began early. The era—Bleeding Kansas it was called—made the Civil War intensely personal when its Free Staters became Union soldiers. But when the Civil War ended, war wasn’t over for them. An Indian war waited for them along the North Platte River, far to the West.

Preston B. Plumb: Senator of the West

Preston Plumb of Ohio, Kansas and, briefly, Wyoming was forthright, honest, tireless and fair. He founded an abolitionist newspaper. He smuggled rifles into Bleeding Kansas. As an army officer he served on the Kansas border and the Wyoming frontier. And as a U.S. senator, with great skill and persistence, he championed the interests of the West.

Touring the Reservations: the 1913 American Indian Citizenship Expedition

In 1913, department-store tycoon Rodman Wanamaker and photographer Joseph Dixon hatched the idea of a statue of an American Indian in New York harbor higher than the Statue of Liberty—as a memorial to what they saw as a “vanishing race.” Dixon subsequently toured and photographed 89 Indian reservations—including Wyoming’s Shoshone Reservation—leaving a valuable record.