State of Wyoming

Wyoming is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America, occupying a high, dry and almost rectangular block of the northern Rocky Mountains and the western Great Plains. Cheyenne is the capital. Its population of approximately 590,000 is the smallest of any polity in the Realm, spread across the ninth largest area, which gives it a density comparable to the emptier parts of northern Scandinavia.

Two things about it are known everywhere. The first is that in 1869, as a territory of nine thousand settlers, Wyoming became the first government anywhere in the world to give women the vote, and twenty-one years later declined to enter the Realm without them. The second is that it is presently in court against the Crown.

State of Wyoming v Royal Parks Service; Reference re Greater Yellowstone Wildlife Migration Compact is before the Royal American Supreme Court with judgment reserved. Wyoming alone among the three Yellowstone polities challenges the compact as a whole, and the question it asks is a large one: how far does a national trust follow an animal after the animal has crossed a surveyed line?

Between those two facts sits an ordinary polity of ranches, coal towns, gas fields, wind farms, two national parks and one reservation shared uneasily by two nations. Wyoming produces more coal and more wind power than almost anywhere in the Realm, frequently from the same counties, and is watching one of those industries end while the other arrives without arriving in the same places or at the same wage.

History

Before contact

The high plains and the mountain basins were the country of the Eastern Shoshone, the Northern Arapaho, the Crow, the Cheyenne, the Lakota, the Bannock, the Ute and the Blackfeet, and had been for a very long time before any surveyor reached them. Archaeological occupation of the Bighorn and Wind River basins runs back more than eleven thousand years, and the Medicine Wheel in the Bighorns remains an active ceremonial site rather than a ruin.

The country was rich. The Bighorn and Wind River basins carried some of the best game on the continent, the bison herds moved seasonally between the high summer range and the sheltered winter basins, and the mountain passes were in regular use for trade running from the Missouri to the Columbia and the Great Basin. The routes that later became famous under other names were established long before they were surveyed, and the South Pass, a broad and gentle saddle over the Continental Divide that wagons could cross, was known and used for centuries before it was written down.

The introduction of the horse in the seventeenth century reorganised the plains economy and the political geography with it, and the century before sustained European contact was one of substantial movement, displacement and realignment among the nations themselves. Wyoming’s public history has come, comparatively recently, to teach this period as history rather than as prelude.

The fur trade and the trails

European and American presence began as trade rather than settlement. Trappers worked the mountain streams from the 1820s, and the annual rendezvous on the Green River drew hundreds of trappers and thousands of Indigenous people to a temporary market that was among the largest commercial gatherings in the interior of the continent.

By the 1840s the fur trade had collapsed and the traffic had changed character. The overland trails to Oregon, California and the Great Basin ran the length of southern Wyoming, following the North Platte and the Sweetwater to the South Pass and over the Divide. Several hundred thousand people crossed the territory between 1841 and 1869 and almost none of them stopped. Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger grew as supply and treaty posts.

The traffic had consequences the travellers did not intend. It cut the bison range in two, brought cholera and other epidemics, consumed grass and timber along a corridor hundreds of miles long, and made the treaty conferences necessary. The Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868 were negotiated in this context, and the second of them, together with the Treaty of Fort Bridger of 1868, established the reservations from which the modern arrangement descends.

The Territory and 1869

The Territory of Wyoming was organised in 1868, chiefly because the Union Pacific railway had just been driven across the southern tier and the settlements strung along the line, Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, Green River and Evanston, needed a government. The territory’s population at organisation was about nine thousand, most of it male, most of it recently arrived, and much of it employed by the railway.

On 10 December 1869 the first territorial legislature passed an act giving women the vote and the right to hold office. It was the first such law anywhere in the world. It preceded every national franchise by decades, preceded the first European grants by more than twenty years, and was passed by a legislature of twenty-one men in a territory whose entire population would not have filled a small town.

Wyoming has never been modest about this and there is no reason it should be. Women voted in Wyoming in 1870, sat on juries in Wyoming in 1870, and held judicial and municipal office within the year. Esther Hobart Morris became a justice of the peace at South Pass City in February 1870 and is the first woman known to have held judicial office anywhere in the world. Women served on the Laramie grand jury the following month, an event reported across two continents and illustrated in the London press. In 1925 Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first woman to head a polity government in the Realm.

Historians have argued for a century about the motives of the men who passed the act. The arguments are various: publicity for an empty territory that badly needed settlers and had nothing else to advertise; a calculation about the composition of a future electorate; a legislature amusing itself at the expense of a governor it expected to veto the bill; and genuine conviction among some of those present, of whom several had campaigned for it before arriving. The debate is real and the evidence is thin, because the territorial legislature kept almost no record of its proceedings.

Wyoming’s own answer to this is carved on the wall of the Assembly chamber and is difficult to improve on: the motives of 1869 are a matter for historians, and the vote was a matter for women, who had it.

Admission and the franchise fight

The admission settlement of 1890 is the part that ended the argument.

Wyoming applied with a population well below the customary threshold and a constitution that carried the franchise forward without qualification. It was told, in terms, that the franchise would have to go before the polity could be admitted, on the reasoning that no other polity had it, that it would create anomalies in federal elections, and that the question could be revisited later.

The territorial convention refused. The telegram it sent has been quoted in Wyoming ever since, and its operative sentence is that the territory would remain outside the Union for a hundred years rather than come in without its women. The Realm admitted it with them, in July 1890, and the anomaly it had worried about resolved itself over the following decades as every other polity followed.

The constitution of 1890 entrenched the franchise provisions more heavily than the rest of the document, requiring a three-quarters majority of the Assembly in addition to the ordinary amendment procedure. That entrenchment has never been tested and no proposal to alter it has ever been introduced.

Cattle, sheep and the range

The economy of the late nineteenth century was cattle, and the cattle economy was violent.

Large operations, much of their capital British and eastern, ran stock on open range they did not own and organised through associations to exclude smallholders, control roundups and determine which brands were recognised. The winter of 1886 to 1887, the hardest in the record, killed a very large share of the herds and destroyed a great many of the large operations along with the assumption that open range could carry unlimited stock.

What followed was a decade of conflict over the range that remained. Disputes over water, fencing, stray stock and homestead claims were settled by the courts where courts existed and otherwise by other means. The Johnson County intervention of 1892, in which an association of large owners imported armed men to kill a list of named smaller ones and was rescued from the consequences by federal cavalry after the county had surrounded them, is the episode Wyoming schools use to teach that the frontier was not lawless so much as governed by whoever could afford it. No one was convicted.

Sheep arrived in numbers in the 1890s and produced a second round of conflict, since sheep and cattle competed for the same grass and the cattle interest regarded the newcomers as trespassers on a range it did not own either. Several dozen people were killed in the sheep and cattle disputes between 1890 and 1912, and the practice of driving flocks over cliffs was common enough to have a name.

Homesteading, dry farming, irrigation and the railway filled in the rest, unevenly and with a great many failures. The homestead acts were written for country that received twice Wyoming’s rainfall, and the abandoned claims of the 1910s and 1920s are still visible from the air.

Coal, rail and the company towns

Coal was mined from the railway’s arrival, because the railway needed fuel and the seams were beside the line. The southern coalfields at Rock Springs, Hanna, Kemmerer and Superior were worked by companies that also owned the housing, the stores and frequently the local government, and were staffed by an immigrant workforce recruited from a dozen countries and housed by nationality.

The Rock Springs massacre of 1885, in which white miners killed at least twenty-eight Chinese miners and drove several hundred more out of the town, arose directly from that arrangement: the company had recruited Chinese labour partly to break a strike, and the violence that followed was directed at the recruited rather than the recruiter. Federal troops escorted the survivors back to work. No one was convicted. The episode is recorded in the polity’s own museums without qualification, and the Chinese community of southern Wyoming, which had been substantial, did not recover.

Mining disasters were frequent and severe. The Hanna explosions of 1903 and 1908 killed more than two hundred men between them. The union settlement that followed was slower and more contested in Wyoming than in the eastern coalfields, and the company towns survived into the middle of the twentieth century.

The Second Great War and Heart Mountain

Wyoming’s war was mostly ordinary: enlistment, agriculture, coal and the movement of material by rail. One part of it was not.

During the Second Great War the Realm confined Japanese-American families in camps, and one of the largest stood at Heart Mountain, between Cody and Powell, holding about ten thousand people behind wire in tar-paper barracks on land taken from an irrigation project.

Wyoming’s public history states what the Realm’s own does. The confinement was a violation of the Rights Act. The administrative competence that made it possible, the planners who selected layouts, the engineers who advised on water and sanitation, the architects who standardised the buildings, cannot be separated from the legal wrong by describing it as neutral support. Some officials objected and documented conditions; the institutions did not collectively resist. Postwar accounts that concentrated on individual acts of kindness obscured what was actually done.

The site is preserved. Its interpretation is controlled by survivors and their descendants rather than by the polity, and Wyoming’s role is to fund and to be told.

Booms and busts since

The postwar decades were a sequence of booms and the busts that followed them: uranium in the 1950s, oil in the 1970s, coal through the whole period at increasing scale, coal-bed methane in the 1990s and 2000s, gas after it, and wind since.

Each boom brought population, wages, construction and municipal optimism. Each bust removed them. Towns doubled and halved within a decade. The polity built schools for children who left before finishing them, and public buildings whose maintenance outlived the tax base that raised them.

Wyoming’s political culture is shaped far more by the busts than the booms, and the resulting caution about federal promises, distant capital, and enthusiasms that arrive from elsewhere is directly relevant to the litigation the polity is now conducting.

Geography

The rectangle

Wyoming is a rectangle, or near enough: four straight lines of latitude and longitude enclosing 253,600 square kilometres with almost no regard for what is inside them. It is the ninth largest polity, the emptiest, and one of only two whose boundaries are drawn entirely without reference to a river, a mountain or a coast.

The land is high. The mean elevation is above 2,000 metres, second only to the March of Arizona’s high country, and the lowest point in the polity, where the Belle Fourche leaves for the Dakotas, is higher than the highest point of several polities altogether.

Mountains

The ranges run in a broken arc through the west and north. The Teton Range rises abruptly and without foothills above Jackson Hole, the youngest range in the Rockies and the most photographed. The Wind River Range is the longest and holds the largest glaciers in the American Rockies along with Gannett Peak, the polity’s highest point at 4,207 metres. The Bighorns stand alone in the north-centre, ringed by basin on every side. The Absarokas form the eastern wall of the Yellowstone plateau. The Medicine Bow and Snowy Range carry the southern forests, and the Black Hills enter briefly in the north-east corner.

Basins and the Great Divide

Between the ranges lie the basins, and the basins are where the people and almost all the mineral wealth are: the Bighorn, the Wind River, the Green River, the Powder River, the Laramie and the Shirley. They are dry, sagebrush-covered, cold in winter and hot in summer, and they hold the coal, the oil, the gas, the trona and the uranium.

The Continental Divide crosses diagonally and does something unusual in the middle of the polity: it splits, encircling the Great Divide Basin, an area of about ten thousand square kilometres of interior drainage where water reaching the ground leaves only by evaporation. It belongs to neither ocean.

Rivers and the four watersheds

Wyoming sits at the head of four major watersheds and is therefore upstream of a very large fraction of the continent.

The Missouri system takes the Yellowstone, the Bighorn, the Powder, the Belle Fourche, the North Platte and the Sweetwater, and carries most of the polity’s water east. The Colorado system takes the Green, which rises in the Wind River Range and is the Colorado’s largest tributary. The Columbia system takes the Snake, which rises in Yellowstone and leaves through Jackson Hole. And the Great Basin takes the Bear, briefly, in the south-west corner.

No polity in the Realm is upstream of more people.

Climate

The climate is semi-arid, continental and windy. Most of the polity receives between 250 and 400 millimetres of precipitation a year, much of it as snow, and the mountains receive several times that. Summers are hot in the basins and short everywhere; winters are long, and temperatures below minus thirty are unremarkable in the mountain valleys.

The wind is a geographic fact rather than a weather condition. Wyoming sits where the westerlies come off the Rockies into open country, and mean speeds across the southern and central corridors are among the highest measured anywhere on the continent. Ground blizzards close the interstate routinely, snow fences run for miles along the highways, and the same resource that makes winter driving dangerous is the basis of the polity’s newest industry.

Wildlife

Wyoming holds the largest and most intact assemblages of large mammals in the Realm outside Alaska: bison, elk, mule deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, moose, grizzly bears, black bears, wolves and mountain lions. The pronghorn population exceeds the human one.

Two features make this politically consequential. The animals migrate, in some cases over distances of two hundred kilometres and more, along corridors that have been used continuously for millennia and that cross private ranchland, federal grazing allotments, three polities and every kind of fence and road. And a large part of the assemblage is protected, or partly protected, by a federal trust attached to two national parks whose boundaries the animals do not observe.

That is the physical fact underneath the litigation.

Constitutional system

Wyoming is a constituent parliamentary State, one of the smaller category of polities that hold neither a crown of their own nor the older commonwealth or provincial forms.

The Crown and the Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed by the King on advice and non-partisan by convention. The Governor gives assent, commissions the Premier, receives the ministry’s advice, and holds the reserve powers that in ordinary times are never used. The incumbent is Marguerite Tilden.

The office is deliberately quiet. Wyoming’s constitutional practice treats a Governor who is noticed as a Governor who has made a mistake, and the polity has never had a reserve-power episode of the kind that other polities record.

The Premier and the ministry

Government is carried on by a Premier commanding the confidence of the Assembly, with a cabinet of eight. The incumbent is Caleb Mercer, of the Conservative and Crown Union, who has led the polity since 2024 and who is conducting the Yellowstone litigation.

The ministry is small in absolute terms, which has consequences. Wyoming’s civil service numbers a few thousand, ministers hold several portfolios each, and the polity relies more heavily than most on shared federal services, contracted expertise and cooperation with neighbouring polities.

The Assembly

The Assembly of Wyoming is unicameral, with sixty-two members elected from single-member districts for four-year terms.

The polity considered a second chamber at each of its constitutional revisions and rejected it every time, on a consistent argument: that a legislature representing 590,000 people cannot staff an internal check that a polity of that size cannot fill with distinct people, and that a Senate of counties would in practice be the same men meeting twice. The counter-argument, that a unicameral house concentrates power and passes bad law quickly, is made at each revision and has never carried.

Assembly service is part-time. The house sits in general session for forty working days in odd years and twenty in even ones, with committee work between, and members hold ordinary employment. This is defended on the ground that a legislature of ranchers, teachers, contractors and small-town lawyers legislates for a polity of ranchers, teachers, contractors and small-town lawyers, and criticised on the ground that a part-time house cannot scrutinise a full-time executive or a mineral industry with permanent professional representation in Cheyenne.

The entrenched franchise

The franchise provisions of 1869 and 1890 are separately and more heavily entrenched than the rest of the constitution, requiring a three-quarters Assembly majority in addition to the ordinary procedure of a two-thirds vote and a referendum.

The entrenchment has never been tested and no amendment touching it has ever been introduced. Wyoming constitutional lawyers observe periodically that its practical effect is unknown, since a provision that nobody has ever attempted to change has never had to demonstrate that it could not be changed.

Courts

The Supreme Court of Wyoming sits at Cheyenne with five justices, above district courts in nine judicial districts and circuit courts below them. Judges are appointed by the Governor on the advice of a judicial nominating commission and stand at periodic retention votes.

Wyoming’s courts hear a heavy load of water, mineral and land litigation relative to the polity’s population, and the bar is correspondingly specialised. Criminal and family work is spread thin across large districts, and the polity relies on circuit-riding to a degree unusual in the Realm.

Wyoming in the federation

Wyoming sends three members to the Commons at New Westminster, the minimum any polity holds, and its representation in the Lords follows the general pattern for a polity of its size.

Its federal posture is consistent across parties and has been for a century: suspicious of federal land authority, dependent on federal land. Roughly half the polity’s surface and a larger share of its minerals are in federal hands, the parks and forests are federal, the grazing allotments are federal, and the revenue-sharing arrangements that fund a great deal of Wyoming government come from federal mineral leasing. The polity argues continuously with a landlord it cannot do without, and is entirely aware of this.

Counties and local government

The twenty-three

The polity is divided into twenty-three counties, several with fewer than three thousand residents. Niobrara County has fewer than two and a half thousand people in an area larger than several European principalities.

County government is correspondingly personal. A county commissioner in Wyoming is likely to be known by name to a substantial fraction of the people governed, a county sheriff to nearly all of them, and the distinction between public office and private acquaintance is maintained by convention rather than by anonymity.

Counties run roads, sheriffs, assessment, planning, elections, public health and much else, and in the emptier parts of the polity the county is the only government most residents deal with.

Mineral valuation and the disparity

Counties draw the great majority of their revenue from the assessed valuation of minerals produced within them, and this produces disparities of an unusual kind.

A county with a producing coal mine, gas field or trona works may be among the best-funded local governments in the Realm, with new schools, a well-equipped hospital and a road budget that would embarrass a small country. A neighbouring county with the same population and no minerals may struggle to keep a school open, run a library on volunteers, and defer road maintenance for a decade.

The disparity is not correlated with need, with population or with anything else a policy could aim at. It is correlated with geology.

The equalisation fund

The polity operates an equalisation fund that redistributes a portion of mineral revenue toward the counties and school districts that have none, and the argument about its adequacy is the oldest continuing argument in Wyoming politics.

Mineral counties argue that they carry the costs of the industry, the roads, the housing pressure, the emergency services and the eventual clean-up, and that a share of the revenue is compensation rather than good fortune. Non-mineral counties argue that the minerals belong to the polity as a whole under its own constitution, and that an accident of geology should not determine whether a child has a science laboratory.

A court decision in the 1990s required equalisation between school districts and settled that part of the question. The rest is reopened at every budget.

Special districts

Below the counties sit several hundred special districts for water, irrigation, fire, cemeteries, weed and pest control, hospitals, conservation and improvement. They are separately elected, separately funded, frequently uncontested, and in aggregate they levy a substantial share of local taxation.

Wyoming has more units of local government per head than any other polity in the Realm, which is a consequence of a small population spread across a large area rather than of any theory about government.

Wind River

The Wind River reservation covers 8,900 square kilometres of the Wind River basin, is the third largest in the Realm, and is home to two nations that did not choose to share it.

Two nations, one reservation

The Eastern Shoshone were established there by the Treaty of Fort Bridger in 1868, under Chief Washakie, in a negotiation the Shoshone entered with more leverage than most nations retained by that date and from which they secured a homeland in country they had asked for rather than country assigned to them.

The Northern Arapaho were placed there in 1878, in what federal authorities described as a temporary arrangement pending a reservation of their own. No such reservation was ever provided.

The two nations had been enemies. They have now shared one territory for a hundred and fifty years. They maintain separate governments, separate business councils, separate membership and separate ceremonial life, meet jointly where joint decisions are required, and have built a functioning arrangement out of an imposition neither consented to. Neither describes it as a success of federal policy, and both are careful to say that the arrangement works because they made it work.

Government

Each nation is governed by an elected business council. A joint council sits for matters affecting both, and its procedures have been renegotiated several times as the relationship has developed. Judicial functions are exercised through tribal courts with jurisdiction defined by federal law and by agreements with the polity.

The nations exercise substantial authority over land use, membership, natural resources, education, policing in part, and the regulation of activity on trust land. Jurisdiction is complicated by the checkerboarding produced by allotment: within the reservation boundary, trust land, fee land held by nations or members, and fee land held by non-members are interleaved parcel by parcel, and which government has authority over a given acre can require litigation to establish.

The cessions

The reservation has been reduced repeatedly.

Cessions in 1896 and 1904 removed substantial areas, the second under the general allotment policy and on terms that later inquiry found were neither fully explained to the nations nor fairly compensated. Land passed out of Indigenous hands within the boundary through allotment and subsequent sale. The hot springs at Thermopolis were ceded in 1896 in a transaction whose terms the Shoshone have disputed since.

Wyoming’s public history now teaches this. It did not always.

Water

Water rights on the Wind River were litigated for the better part of a century and produced a decree recognising substantial senior tribal rights, quantified for reserved purposes and dating from the reservation’s establishment, which places them ahead of nearly every other right in the basin.

The polity then spent a further generation litigating the application of that decree: whether the water could be used for instream flows as well as irrigation, who administered it, and how it interacted with downstream users. The nations regard that campaign as an attempt to win by administration what had been lost in court. The polity regards it as ordinary clarification. Both continue.

Economy and language

The reservation economy rests on oil and gas, grazing and agriculture, tribal enterprises, gaming, and federal and tribal employment. Poverty and unemployment are substantially higher than in the polity at large, health outcomes are worse, and both nations regard the underlying cause as the same cessions and allotments that removed the productive land.

Both nations run language programmes. Shoshone and Arapaho are each spoken by a small and elderly population of first-language speakers with a growing number of younger second-language speakers, and both nations treat revitalisation as governmental work rather than cultural decoration.

Wind River and the litigation

Both nations hold seats on the Greater Yellowstone Intertribal Governing Council, and the council’s chair, Dr Renee Hill, is Eastern Shoshone.

Wyoming is therefore litigating against a body which its own Indigenous citizens help to lead. The polity’s pleadings are careful to say that its objection is to the compact’s legal method rather than to the council’s standing or to the relationships the council asserts, and Premier Mercer has repeated that in terms.

Not everyone at Wind River accepts the distinction, and the criticism made there is pointed: that a polity which spent a century litigating tribal water rights and is now litigating a tribal wildlife compact may be consistent in its constitutional principles and is also consistent in who it litigates against.

The polity’s answer is that a constitutional argument about consent is not improved by declining to make it, and that a State which believed federal power had exceeded its bounds would be failing its own citizens by staying quiet, including the citizens who disagree.

The relationship is not reducible to the litigation. Wind River and the polity cooperate continuously on roads, schools, emergency services, health and law enforcement, the nations are substantial employers and landholders in a basin that has little else, and the two governments meet on a standing basis for reasons that have nothing to do with bison.

Cities and population

Wyoming has no large city, and no polity in the Realm is more affected by that fact.

Cheyenne, the capital, holds about seventy thousand people in the extreme south-east corner, nearer to the Colorado line than to most of the polity it governs. It is a railway town that became a capital, retains the rail yards and a substantial military airbase, and is the only place in Wyoming with the administrative apparatus of a capital city.

Casper is comparable in size and sits in the centre, on the North Platte where the trails crossed it. It is the oil town, the polity’s commercial and medical centre for the whole interior, and regards itself with some justice as the place where Wyoming actually does business.

Laramie is the university town, the youngest and most educated population in the polity, and politically unlike everywhere else in it.

Gillette, in the north-east, is the coal capital and the clearest single illustration of the polity’s economic problem. It grew from four thousand people to more than thirty thousand on the Powder River Basin mines, built accordingly, and is now managing a decline it did not choose.

Rock Springs and Green River in the south-west are the trona and rail towns, with the polity’s most ethnically varied history and the memory of 1885 in it.

Sheridan and Cody face the Bighorns and Yellowstone respectively and live substantially on the traffic between the two.

Riverton and Lander sit on and beside the Wind River reservation and are where the polity’s two societies meet daily, with all the friction and cooperation that implies.

Jackson deserves separate mention because it is the clearest instance of the polity’s central strain. It is by a wide margin the wealthiest community in Wyoming; its wealth derives from the two national parks and from the people who arrived because of them; and the workers who staff its hotels, restaurants and hospital largely cannot afford to live in it and commute daily over a mountain pass from another polity. Jackson’s median house price is a multiple of Cheyenne’s. Its politics are unlike anything else in Wyoming and its economy is a preview of what tourism does to a small community that succeeds at it.

The polity is urban by the technical definition and rural by every other one. Distances are long, services are consolidated, and a great deal of ordinary life involves driving two hours to do a thing that in another polity would be done in the next street. Depopulation of the smallest communities is continuous and is the background condition against which every economic argument in Wyoming is conducted.

Economy

Wyoming’s economy is extraction and always has been, and its politics are the politics of a place that has been rich and poor several times in living memory for reasons decided elsewhere.

Coal

Wyoming produces more coal than anywhere else in the Realm and has done for half a century. The Powder River Basin seams are enormous, shallow, and low in sulphur, and are worked open-cast on a scale that has to be seen to be credited: single mines moving tens of millions of tonnes a year with draglines the size of buildings.

The industry is declining and the decline is not in dispute by anybody, including the industry. Demand has fallen with the retirement of coal generation across the Realm and abroad, and no Wyoming policy affects that. Production is less than half its peak. Employment has fallen further than production, because what remains is the most mechanised part.

The consequences are geographically concentrated. Campbell County and its neighbours built schools, hospitals, roads, water systems and pension expectations on a mineral valuation that is now falling, and the equalisation fund was designed to move money toward counties that never had any rather than to catch a rich county on the way down. Reclamation liabilities, bonded and unbonded, are a live and unresolved question about who pays to put the ground back.

Oil and gas

Oil has been produced since the 1880s and remains substantial; Teapot Dome, north of Casper, gave its name to a scandal in another country’s history and produced oil in this one. Natural gas, conventional and from coal beds, expanded enormously from the 1990s.

Both are more cyclical than coal and less geographically concentrated, and their workforces are more mobile, much of it moving between Wyoming, the Dakotas and Texas as prices dictate. This cushions the polity’s revenue and does considerably less for its communities, since a workforce that arrives in a downturn’s aftermath and leaves in the next one does not build schools or join volunteer fire departments.

Wind

Wyoming’s wind resource is among the best on the continent, and its development has been very large, very fast and very concentrated in the southern corridor.

Transmission is the constraint rather than wind. The power is generated where almost nobody lives and consumed where a great many people do, which requires lines across several polities and the consents that go with them, and the largest projects have waited longer for transmission approval than for construction.

The transition is genuinely happening and it is genuinely not a replacement. Wind construction employs many people for two years and few thereafter; coal employed fewer people for forty years at higher wages with pensions and union representation. The counties are frequently the same and the households are not. The standard Wyoming complaint about energy transition is not that it is unnecessary, and Wyoming is not, on the whole, arguing that it should be stopped. The complaint is that it is being described by people who will not be present for the part that hurts.

There is a second complaint, quieter and increasingly common: that Wyoming has spent a century being the place other polities take energy from, and that the wind is the same arrangement with better emissions.

Ranching

Ranching employs a small share of the workforce, occupies a very large share of the land, and carries a share of the polity’s self-understanding out of all proportion to either.

Wyoming ranches are large, thin and marginal. They depend on federal and polity grazing leases to make the deeded acres viable, which is one reason the polity’s relationship with federal land is more complicated than its rhetoric. They are vulnerable to drought, to price, to the cost of hay in a bad winter, and to predation. Many are held by families in the third or fourth generation and are worth a great deal on paper while generating very little in cash, which makes succession the industry’s central private problem.

The predation question is where ranching meets the litigation. Wolves and grizzlies restored around Yellowstone kill livestock outside it. Bison carry disease risk to cattle. Elk on winter range compete for forage and concentrate disease. The compact addresses all three with compensation and easements, and the rancher coalition led by Ruth Dawes supports that machinery while the polity challenges the instrument containing it.

Wyoming’s ranchers are therefore not united behind their own government’s case, and the ones who are not are the ones who have lost stock.

Trona, uranium and the rest

Wyoming holds the world’s largest deposit of trona, the natural source of soda ash, mined near Green River and exported globally for glass, detergents and chemicals. It is the polity’s steadiest industry, the least discussed, and the one whose employment has changed least in fifty years.

The polity produces uranium, has substantial rare earth prospects under development in the Bear Lodge and elsewhere, and quarries bentonite, gypsum and construction aggregate. Collectively these are significant and individually none is large enough to replace coal.

Tourism

Yellowstone and Grand Teton bring several million visitors a year, overwhelmingly between June and September, overwhelmingly to the north-west corner.

The revenue is real. The employment is seasonal, low-paid and increasingly staffed by workers who cannot find housing within an hour of it. The polity’s relationship with its parks is accordingly complicated: they are its most valuable single asset, they are administered by a federal service it is currently suing, and a large share of the benefit accrues to people who are not Wyoming residents and to gateway communities in other polities.

The revenue problem

Wyoming levies no personal income tax and no corporate income tax, and has not for its entire history as a polity. Its government is funded by mineral severance taxes, federal mineral royalties, property tax dominated by mineral valuation, and sales tax.

This has been comfortable for a century and is becoming less so. The revenue base is tied to a declining industry, the alternatives are politically difficult in a polity where the absence of income tax is treated as constitutional in everything but form, and the permanent mineral trust fund built up during the booms now supplies a growing share of ordinary spending, which is the thing sovereign funds are specifically designed not to do.

Nobody in Wyoming politics has a full answer and most acknowledge it privately.

Water

Wyoming’s position at the head of four watersheds is its most durable source of leverage and its most durable source of obligation.

Its entitlements under the interpolity compacts governing the Colorado, the North Platte, the Green, the Snake and the Bear are senior and substantial, and they are being reduced in practice by drought and by the arithmetic of instruments drafted when the rivers carried more water than they now do. The Colorado compact in particular allocated a river that has not since delivered the volume assumed.

Within the polity, irrigation, municipal supply, coal-bed methane discharge, industrial use, the senior tribal rights on the Wind River, and the ecological flows the parks require all compete for the same shrinking quantity. Irrigation is by far the largest user and the least able to absorb reduction without changing what is grown.

Wyoming has litigated water against Nebraska, against Colorado, against Montana and against its own tribal governments, has won and lost, and expects to continue. Its standing position is that upstream is a legal status rather than a moral one, and its neighbours’ standing position is the reverse.

Transport

Distance is the polity’s defining logistical fact.

Two interstate routes cross it, one east to west along the southern tier and one north to south, and they carry a very large volume of through freight that stops only for fuel. Closures are routine: ground blizzards and high winds shut long sections for days at a time, high-profile vehicles are prohibited before the road closes entirely, and Wyoming’s winter road management is studied by other polities.

Rail remains central and is mostly freight, dominated by unit coal trains out of the Powder River Basin, whose declining number is visible from any overbridge in the north-east.

Air service is thin, subsidised on most routes, and consists largely of connections to Denver and Salt Lake. Jackson has the busiest airport in the polity and is the only one whose traffic is driven by people arriving rather than leaving.

Welfare, health and education

Wyoming’s public services are shaped by the same fact as everything else: a small population spread across an enormous area, funded by revenue that rises and falls without reference to need.

Health

The Realm’s guarantees apply here as everywhere, and the National Health Service of America delivers through polity structures. In Wyoming that means a small number of hospitals, a large number of critical-access facilities in towns of a few thousand, and very long journeys.

Air ambulance is ordinary infrastructure rather than a luxury service, and the polity’s per-head expenditure on emergency transport is the highest in the Realm. Recruiting and retaining specialists is a permanent difficulty: a town of four thousand cannot support a cardiologist, and a cardiologist cannot easily be persuaded to live two hours from a supermarket.

Mental health provision and substance treatment are thin and are acknowledged to be so, and the polity’s suicide rate is among the highest of any polity, which is a well-documented pattern in sparsely populated high-altitude places with high firearm ownership and is not treated in Wyoming as a mystery.

Schools

Public schooling is well funded by national comparison and expensive to deliver. Mineral revenue has historically been generous, and a court decision in the 1990s required equalisation between rich and poor districts, which the polity implemented rather than resisted.

The cost driver is the smallest schools, serving communities that would otherwise have none, where the per-pupil figure can be several times the polity average. Wyoming has consistently decided to pay it, on the reasoning that closing the school closes the town.

The University

The University of Wyoming at Laramie is the polity’s only university and occupies a place in its public life that surprises visitors: it is the research institution, the teacher-training college, the agricultural extension service, the law school, the medical pipeline and the main cultural venue, all at once.

Its energy, geology, hydrology and rangeland programmes are strong for the obvious reasons, and its graduates staff a large share of the polity’s professional class. It is also, being in Laramie, the single most politically distinct institution in Wyoming, and the relationship between the university and the Assembly is periodically difficult in the way such relationships usually are.

Society, faith and culture

Self-image

Wyoming is culturally western, socially conservative, personally libertarian and institutionally cooperative, and the combination confuses outsiders who expect the first three to predict the absence of the fourth.

The polity has an unusually strong tradition of mutual assistance: volunteer fire and ambulance services, neighbours who pull each other out of ditches as a matter of course, ranch families who brand together, and a general assumption that in a place this empty the person who does not help will need help shortly. It has an equally strong objection to being told what to do by anybody at a distance, and does not experience these as contradictory. The formulation usually offered is that obligation is owed to people you know and resented from people you do not.

Rodeo

The rodeo is the polity’s characteristic public gathering, and its function is social rather than sporting. Cheyenne Frontier Days in July is the largest and is a genuine institution; the calendar of county rodeos, fairs, brandings and high-school circuits is the ordinary social architecture of rural Wyoming, and the same people appear at all of them.

The bucking horse and rider is the polity’s registered emblem, appears on its licence plates and in its official material, and is the most recognisable thing Wyoming has produced besides the parks.

Hunting and fishing

Hunting and fishing are ordinary rather than elite activities, practised by a large share of the population, licensed by the polity and central to a great many household economies and calendars.

This is directly relevant to the litigation. The external hunting rules the compact touches are not an abstraction to Wyoming residents; they concern seasons, quotas and areas that a substantial fraction of the polity’s families plan their autumn around. It is also relevant to the polity’s conservation politics, which are more complicated than outsiders assume: hunters fund wildlife management through licences and have a direct material interest in abundant game, and the same people can be found opposing federal wildlife authority and supporting the populations it protects.

Faith

Religious practice is mixed and moderate. Protestant denominations predominate, there is a substantial Catholic population from the mining immigration, a significant Latter-day Saint presence in the south-west continuous with Deseret across the border, and the ceremonial and religious life of the two nations at Wind River, including the Native American Church, the Sun Dance and Christian congregations of long standing.

Writing, art and food

Wyoming has produced writers and painters out of proportion to its size, concerned almost entirely with the same two subjects: the landscape and what people do to survive in it. The polity’s literature is unusually preoccupied with failure, which is a reasonable response to its economic history.

Food is plain, meat-heavy and portioned for people who work outdoors. The polity’s genuine culinary distinctiveness is in game and in the immigrant survivals of the mining towns, where the descendants of Finnish, Slovenian, Italian, Chinese and Japanese communities keep dishes that have disappeared elsewhere.

Media

The polity supports a handful of daily newspapers, a large number of weeklies that remain genuinely central to their communities, public broadcasting reaching most of the polity by relay, and the ABC’s regional service. Local weekly journalism is stronger in Wyoming than in most of the Realm for the simple reason that nothing else covers a county of three thousand people.

The 2028 Yellowstone litigation

This is the central political fact of Wyoming and the article does not resolve it, because the Royal American Supreme Court has not.

What is being challenged

The Greater Yellowstone Wildlife Migration Compact is an agreement among the Royal Parks Service, the Greater Yellowstone Intertribal Governing Council and participating governments and landholders, covering bison, wolves, elk, migration corridors, conservation easements, disease control, livestock compensation and hunting outside Yellowstone National Park.

It exists because a single ecological population moves across three polities with three sets of rules. Montana supports it. Idaho has intervened narrowly on land-use authority and the financing of compensation. Wyoming alone challenges it as a whole.

Wyoming’s case

Premier Caleb Mercer accepts wildlife migration as a policy objective. His government’s argument is about method and consent.

Wyoming contends that the Crown trust governs registered park resources and cannot generate regulatory power over land and animals once they leave the boundary; that the Service may manage animals inside Yellowstone and negotiate voluntary measures outside it, but that the trust does not follow wildlife in a way that creates compulsory federal authority over external land use and hunting; that constitutional allocation would become uncertain if an agency could regulate any external activity with a measurable effect on a park, since water, fire, air, traffic and development all cross boundaries; and that binding external obligations require an enumerated competence, a valid polity compact or voluntary purchase rather than an implication drawn from trusteeship.

It further questions whether an intertribal instrument can bind polity powers without the polity’s valid assent, and it challenges the compact as a whole rather than any single order, on the ground that the disputed external obligations are central and cannot be severed without producing a different agreement.

The answers

The Royal Parks Service, under Director-General Dr Naomi Chen, replies that the trust would be defeated if authorities had to protect a population up to a surveyed line while permitting its planned destruction immediately beyond it; that the compact concerns identified park populations and the migration necessary to their survival rather than any activity with a measurable effect; and that the external measures include compensation rather than an uncompensated transfer of land-use authority. She has not claimed unlimited external zoning power and has been careful to say so.

The intertribal council, chaired by Dr Renee Hill, argues separately that the affiliated nations’ relationships with bison, elk and wolves do not derive from the park boundary and never did, and that federal promises recognising those relationships would be incomplete if they could be honoured only on the portion of the homeland entered in the park register. The council does not claim identical title or hunting rights for every affiliated nation in every external parcel.

Inside Wyoming

Support for the polity’s case is real, is substantial, and is not unanimous.

It runs strongest among ranchers outside the compensation coalition, among mineral counties suspicious of federal land authority on general principle, among hunters who regard external hunting rules as a direct intrusion into an annual practice, and among the large part of the polity for whom this is the latest instance of a very old argument about who decides what happens in Wyoming.

It runs weakest at Wind River, where both nations sit on the council the polity is opposing; in the Dawes coalition of ranchers who want the compact’s enforceable compensation and fear that winning would remove it; in the gateway communities, whose economies depend entirely on the parks; and among a conservation constituency that is smaller in Wyoming than outside it but is neither absent nor quiet.

The polity’s position is that a State which believed a federal instrument had exceeded constitutional limits would be failing its citizens by declining to test it, and that a favourable judgment would not prevent Wyoming from agreeing to every substantive measure in the compact by consent afterwards. Its opponents reply that this is precisely what nobody expects to happen, and that a constitutional victory would be followed by ten years of negotiation during which the animals would continue not to observe the boundary.

What the Court is deciding

Ernest V referred the constitutional question in his American trust capacity, and the reference was consolidated with Wyoming’s challenge because both turn on the relationship among the park trust, Indigenous compacts and polity authority. The King paused irreversible culling and permanent corridor construction pending judgment; testing, voluntary easements, compensation and emergency relocation continue.

The Court has not determined severability and has reserved its decision. It may uphold the compact, strike it entirely, sever the external obligations, or decline part of the reference while deciding Wyoming’s claim.

Nobody in Cheyenne, New Westminster or Fort Washakie claims to know which, and the article records the argument rather than predicting the outcome.

Assessment

Wyoming is easy to summarise wrongly. It is the emptiest polity, the most extractive, among the most consistently conservative in its voting, and the one currently suing the Crown’s own conservation service. It is also the polity that gave women the vote before any government on earth and refused admission rather than give it up.

Those facts are not in tension and Wyoming does not experience them as tension. The thread running through both is a settled conviction that the people who live in a place should decide what happens in it, which produced an extraordinary franchise in 1869 and produces a constitutional lawsuit.

It sits uncomfortably beside a third fact, which the polity’s own historians now put plainly: that the people who lived in the place longest were not consulted about very much at all, that the reservation was reduced by instruments they did not fully understand, and that the same principle Wyoming is asserting against the federation was not extended by Wyoming to Wind River.

The polity’s future turns on an industry that is ending, a resource that is arriving without the same wages, a revenue system built for the first and unsuited to the second, and a judgment it cannot control. It has been in that position before, several times, and its characteristic response has been to argue about jurisdiction while waiting for the price to change.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag is a white bison on a blue field, within a white and red border, in the proportion 2:3.

The bison is the polity’s emblem and has been since before admission. What the flag does not carry is the polity seal, which was borne on the bison’s flank for most of the twentieth century and was removed in a redesign on the reasoning that a flag is a thing seen at distance and in motion, a seal is a thing read at arm’s length, and putting the second on the first produces an object that fails at both. The redesign was contested at the time and is now universally accepted, which is the usual history of such things.

The colours carry the ordinary attributions: blue for the sky and the mountains, red for the Indigenous nations of the country and for the blood of those who defended it, white for purity and uprightness. Wyoming’s own official material notes that the second of these was adopted in 1917 without consulting anybody it referred to.

The bucking horse and rider is the polity’s registered emblem and appears on licence plates, uniforms and official material. It is more widely recognised than the flag.

The motto is Equal Rights. Statehood Day is 10 July; Suffrage Day, 10 December, marks 1869 and is the more widely observed of the two.

Trivia

See also

• The Royal American Parks System, the constitutional trust Wyoming is challenging, and the fuller account of the litigation
• The State of the Dakotas, the Realm’s other plains State, with its own river crisis
• The State of Deseret, across the south-western border
• Elections and constituencies, for Wyoming’s three Commons seats
• The National Health Service of America, delivering through polity structures across very long distances
• The Second Great War, during which about ten thousand people were confined at Heart Mountain
• The United Kingdom of America, the Realm

Wyoming · State · Great Plains · Rocky Mountains · Polities · Unresolved Questions