Lyman, Wyoming: An Apostle's Colony in the High Desert

Lyman, Wyoming sits in the Bridger Valley at about sixty-seven hundred feet, a place of short summers and long winters. In eighteen ninety-nine, a group of Latter-day Saint settlers established a farming colony here on the high desert floor. They named the town after Francis Marion Lyman, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Lyman was a prominent colonizer who helped direct Mormon settlement across the intermountain West. The Bridger Valley's cold-hardy farms took hold, and the community grew slowly. Today Lyman is a small Wyoming ranching town of about two thousand people, one of a string of LDS-founded settlements that trace a quiet line through Uinta County.