Jackson: Petticoat Rulers and Twelve Thousand Elk

Jackson, Wyoming, is a town that has reinvented itself at least three times: as a frontier agricultural settlement, as the seat of one of the most unusual governments in American history, and as one of the wealthiest resort towns in the country. The valley it sits in, Jackson Hole, was one of the last places in the contiguous United States to see permanent settlers, partly because the winters here are brutal and partly because the surrounding mountain walls made access difficult before the automobile.

Early homesteaders arrived in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, filing claims on the flat valley floor and running cattle through the short summers. The town was formally incorporated on August seventh, nineteen fourteen. Then, on May eleventh, nineteen twenty, something happened that made Jackson briefly famous across the country: voters elected an entirely female town council. Grace Miller became mayor. The other four council seats went to women as well. It was the first all-female municipal government in the United States, and it happened in the same year that the Nineteenth Amendment finally granted women nationwide the right to vote.

The new administration set to work: collecting overdue taxes, grading roads, expanding the electrical system, and passing a littering ordinance. It was practical, determined governance of a frontier town that had been run carelessly.

The other great story of Jackson is the elk. For thousands of years, elk from the Yellowstone highlands migrated through Jackson Hole to winter ranges farther south. As settlement closed off those migration routes with fences and fields in the early nineteen hundreds, the elk starved in catastrophic numbers during three brutal winters between nineteen oh nine and nineteen eleven. A wildlife photographer named Stephen Leek documented the dying herds and toured his photographs nationally. Congress responded in nineteen twelve, appropriating forty-five thousand dollars to establish the National Elk Refuge on twenty-five thousand acres of valley floor north of town. Today roughly seven thousand five hundred elk winter on the refuge on average, one of the larger elk herds in North America, visible from the road every winter.