Laramie: Hell on Wheels, the First Women Jurors, and Butch Cassidy's Front Door

The city of Laramie was born in a single violent week in the spring of eighteen sixty-eight, and it nearly died just as fast.

The Union Pacific Railroad reached this treeless plain between the Laramie and Medicine Bow ranges on May fourth, eighteen sixty-eight. Within two weeks, four hundred town lots had sold, two thousand people had arrived, and a tent-and-shanty community of gamblers, saloon keepers, and railroad laborers was in full operation. Laramie was the latest edition of what the press called Hell on Wheels, the lawless boomtown that leapfrogged westward behind the end-of-tracks grading crews. Violence was constant. A vigilante committee hanged several men within the first months. The territorial governor had to send soldiers to restore order.

Yet this chaotic place also produced one of the most consequential legal acts in American history. Wyoming Territory granted women the right to vote and hold office in December of eighteen sixty-nine, the first government in the world to do so. On March seventh, eighteen seventy, in the Laramie courthouse, six women took seats alongside ten men on a formal jury, the first women in world history to serve on a legal tribunal. One of those jurors, Eliza Stewart, became so renowned for her legal reasoning during the session that the judge praised her from the bench. The following September, Louisa Swain walked to the polls in Laramie and became the first woman in the world to cast an electoral ballot under full civil equality. Wyoming's nickname, the Equality State, began right here.

The Wyoming Territorial Prison, built in Laramie in eighteen seventy-two, was the only federal prison between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast. It held a remarkable roster. In eighteen ninety-four, a twenty-eight-year-old horse thief named Robert LeRoy Parker walked through the gates, convicted of grand larceny. He served eighteen months. When he walked out he changed his name to Butch Cassidy, reorganized a loosely affiliated band of outlaws into the Wild Bunch, and became the most celebrated outlaw of the American West. The University of Wyoming, founded here in eighteen eighty-six, eventually took over the old prison buildings and converted them into a stock farm. Today the restored prison is a state historic site, and the Equality State's founding moment is commemorated on the Laramie courthouse lawn.