University of Wyoming: The Equality State's Only University

The University of Wyoming was born before Wyoming was even a state. In February of eighteen eighty-six, the Wyoming Territorial Legislature passed an act creating the university, and in September of eighteen eighty-seven, forty-two students and five faculty members walked through the doors of Old Main, the single building that housed classrooms, the library, and the administration all at once. From that very first day, both students and faculty included women, a reflection of Wyoming's self-styled identity as the Equality State, the first territory in the nation to grant women the right to vote.

The university is a land-grant institution, which meant federal lands were set aside to fund it. Those lands turned out to be extraordinarily valuable. The Big Muddy Oilfield near Glenrock came in with the so-called University Well in nineteen sixteen, and the royalties have flowed to the school ever since, a geologic windfall that has underwritten research and scholarship across the decades.

The campus sits here at seventy-two hundred feet in Laramie, the only four-year university in Wyoming, serving the state's sprawling population from one location. That centrality gives it an outsize role: it trains the doctors, engineers, lawyers, and teachers for a state with fewer than six hundred thousand people spread across a land mass larger than the United Kingdom.

Among its alumni are figures who shaped American power at the highest levels. Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush and as Vice President under the second, came to the university after an earlier stretch at Yale did not work out, and he earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees there. Senator Clifford Hansen served Wyoming for years after graduating here. The Wyoming Cowboys athletic program competes in the Mountain West Conference, and the football team plays at War Memorial Stadium, opened in nineteen fifty, named for the Wyoming men and women lost in the two world wars.

For a remote outpost on the high plains, the university has punched well above its weight, shaped as much by the landscape around it as by any deliberate design.