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Wyoming (WY) Fast Facts
Location and Geography: Wyoming is a Mountain State located in the middle of the Rocky Mountain range, right between Colorado to the south and Montana to the north. It is famous for its naturally-occurring geysers, undisturbed ecosystems, and other phenomena.
Counties and Regions: Wyoming, which is one of only three states without natural landmark borders, is split into 23 large counties. Nearly half of the state’s land is owned and administered by the federal government. Here are just some of Wyoming’s many famous national parks, monuments, and historic sites:
- Bighorn Canyon
- Devil’s Tower
- Flaming Gorge
- Fort Laramie
- Fossil Butte
- Grand Teton
- Independence Rock
- Medicine Wheel
- National Elk Refuge
- Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge
- Yellowstone Park
Population: Wyoming’s population, at a little more than 560,000 people, is the lowest in the country. Its population density is behind every other state but Alaska. Like other Mountain States, it has seen more people arriving than leaving in recent years.
Major Cities: Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming, with a little more than 90,000 people found in its metropolitan area. Other relatively populous cities include Casper and Laramie.
Story Behind the Name: The state of Wyoming is in fact named after Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, whose name came from a local Native American term meaning “at the big river flat.”
History and Colonization: Present-day Wyoming was only nominally explored by whites until the onset of the nineteenth century. Its mountainous location, extreme weather, and distance from major metropolitan areas made it inaccessible to any but the several Native American tribes that lived there. Spanish explorers barely brushed by the area, and French Canadian fur trappers conducted trade with the natives but did not found any major settlements. Lewis and Clark passed through on their fabled journey, and brought back tales of the Yellowstone region in particular that people back in their home states thought could be nothing but fiction.
It was the development of the Trans-Continental Railroad that changed everything for Wyoming. Settlers had passed through in the early and mid-nineteenth century on their way to Oregon Country, but the railroad made real population growth possible. Wyoming never had the kind of precious metal finds that other states like Colorado did, but it was attractive to ranchers and farmers who wanted a challenge and a chance at cheap land prices. Tensions with the natives arose during this time, and they were eventually driven into reservations in the south of the state where their descendants remain to this day.
Wyoming was the first state to include women’s suffrage in its state constitution, and has since set many of the nation’s records for early female office-holders, including a woman state governor in 1924. The inclusion of women’s suffrage in the constitution, coupled with the low population of the state, made Wyoming’s admission into the United States a little controversial, eventually occurring in 1890. The exploration of the Yellowstone area of Wyoming yielded amazing natural discoveries, and the area was made into the first National Park in the history of the world in 1872.
Wyoming remains the least-populated state in the country, with fewer total people than reside in the national capital of Washington, D.C. Its history as a ranching and frontier state has created a rugged, independent-minded culture. Much of the state’s economy is either agricultural in nature or based on the tourist business that surrounds Yellowstone National Park. Because of Yellowstone and other natural phenomena, as well as issues over water rights, environmentalism is a major part of the state’s local politics.