The First Newspaper on the Plains

Three months after the Union Pacific surveyed the Cheyenne townsite, a man named Nathan Addison Baker published the first edition of The Cheyenne Leader on September nineteenth, eighteen sixty-seven. The city was barely twelve weeks old. Baker's paper arrived before the railroad's first train.

That founding date makes the Cheyenne Leader one of the earliest continuously operating newspaper lineages in the Mountain West. A competing paper, The Wyoming Tribune, launched in eighteen sixty-nine as the territory found its political footing and its editors found their opinions. The two papers coexisted, competed, and occasionally took sharply opposed positions on the events of the next century: the cattle wars, the suffrage question, the missile buildup, the rodeo.

In January of nineteen ninety-four, after more than a century of parallel publication, the two papers merged to create what is now the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. It is Wyoming's second-largest newspaper by circulation, behind only the Casper Star Tribune, and it continues to publish daily from Cheyenne.

The paper's history contains a less flattering chapter as well. It was the Cheyenne Daily Sun, a predecessor publication, that ran the accounts portraying Ellen Watson as a prostitute and cattle rustler after she was lynched in eighteen eighty-nine, accounts that served the interests of the men who killed her and helped ensure that no jury was ever convened.

Newspapers on the frontier were not neutral observers. They were participants.