October 12, the 531st anniversary of the Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas — Indigenous People’s Day as well as Columbus’s Day — is a good day to remember how moved he was by the mildness and kindness of the people he encountered. And then to remember how the Tainos were separated from their hands, and the Plains tribes were separated from their lands. We might also remember what they were given in return, which were promises.

Florence Blake had grit, and she loved Wyoming. Not even the rigors of a November 1919 drive from Gillette to her prospective claim “through slick gumbo spots” daunted her.

Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier, by Nathan Ward.

People all over the state keep commenting—this is the greenest year anyone can remember. Even in late August, grass on the prairie shows hints of green, when usually by now Wyoming lies flattened under that opaque tan you get many years as early as the Fourth of July.

William Henry Jackson left Vermont in 1866 at age 23 to travel west as a bullwhacker. He had to endure a monotonous diet that eventually made him sick, watch oxen die of exhaustion and see one of his fellow teamsters killed by lightning near Independence Rock. This was the beginning of his long, active career centered on the American west.

Last week we attended the annual Native American Education Conference, held this year at Central Wyoming College in Riverton.

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” It’s an appealing idea, but if you want to know what really happened, you might have to prepare for some surprises. So it was with me and the tale that Father Pierre-Jean De Smet once approached a bison bull, laid his hand on its head—and wasn’t gored.

In arid, sparsely populated Wyoming, water law has evolved differently than in Colorado, California and Arizona. In her recent book on water rights in the west, Anne MacKinnon comments, “Wyoming is therefore ideal territory for documenting how western water law developed independent of the pressures of urban and industrial growth.”

Two Oregon Trail state-boundary monuments between Nebraska and Wyoming sit only a couple of hundred yards apart from one another with one placed on the shoulder of a Nebraska public road and the other on the state border sitting on private land.

Hollywood westerns were populated by many actors who could not ride a horse. Legitimate riders who earned their spurs the hard way worked as trainers, extras, stunt performers and in other ways to give an element of realism to Hollywood westerns. Many of these men and women had connections with Wyoming.