Wyoming Fun Facts and Trivia

Wyoming Fun Facts & Trivia

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The Ames Pyramid is A sixty foot tall, stone-block monolith, called the Ames Pyramid, stands on the otherwise empty plains just east of Laramie.

Using a firearm to fish in Wyoming is strictly forbidden by law.

Wyoming boasts the first national forest, Shoshone National Forest, declared in 1891 by an Act signed by President Benjamin Harrison. Wyoming now has nine national forests.

The J.C. Penney stores were started in Kemmerer.

Ames Monument, photo courtesy James Blog

Tom Horn, lawman turned outlaw, was hanged in Cheyenne for shooting 14 year old Willie Nickell in 1903.

The Red Desert in south central Wyoming drains neither to the east nor to the west. The continental divide splits and goes around the desert on all sides leaving the basin without normal drainage.

Any new commercial buildings constructed at a cost of more than $100,000 are required to spend a minimum of 1% of those funds on artwork for the building.

In 1925 Mrs. Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first woman governor in the United States.

Wyoming has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation. Strangely, it also has one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the nation.

Yellowstone National Park has more geysers than any other geyser field in the world.

An ordinance in Newcastle, Wyoming , specifically bans couples from having sex while standing inside a store's walk-in meat freezer.

Wyoming prohibits “fat” people, defined as 100 pounds overweight, using playground or park equipment.

At the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, are the remains of an outlaw by the name of George Manuse who was more familiarly called “Big Nose George.” However, one doesn’t see a skeleton here, but rather a pair of shoes that a local doctor made from the dead man's skin and the top of his skull, that was used as both a doorstop and an ashtray. The doctor, John Osborne, would later wear the shoes when he became the Governor of Wyoming .

South Pass City is allegedly haunted by the resident spirit of Polly Bartlett, who is said to have been a greedy, murderous, young woman.

If you are found to be drunk in a mine in Wyoming , you could be sentenced to up to a year in jail.

The world’s largest elk horn arch is in Afton, Wyoming .

In Cheyenne, it is illegal to spit on the steps of a school.

Seven miles east of Medicine Bow is the Dinosaur Bone House made up of 26,000 fossils.

Vintage South Pass City, courtesy Library of Congress.

Devils Tower was designated as the first National Monument in 1906.

An old law on the Wyoming books makes it illegal for women to stand within five feet of a bar while drinking.

The only known monument in the United States built in honor of a prostitute is located south of Lusk, Wyoming . Called the Old Mother FeatherLegs Shepard Monument, it was erected in 1964.

Skiing under the influence of alcohol is against the law.

The Jackalope, thought by many to be a mystical creature, is actually said to exist in Wyoming . One of the rarest animals in the world, it is a cross between a now extinct pygmy-deer and a species of killer-rabbit.

One of the newest mammals known to man was recently discovered in a Wyoming petrified tree stump. Living some 65 million years ago, the shrew like mammal is the smallest recorded to date, weighing 1.3 grams.

The town of Kemmerer is known as the Fossil Fish Capital of the World. Kemmerer is home to over 100 Pronghorn Antelope, about 3,000 people, and over 100,000 fish fossils.

Wild Bill Hickok married Agnes Lake Thatcher in the First United Methodist Church in Cheyenne in 1874.

October, 2005

Thought to be a myth by many, the jackalope is said

to actually exists in remote areas of Wyoming.

Also See: Quirky Wyoming

The Death Ship of the Platte River

Jackalopes in Wyoming - Myth or Reality?

Little People of Wyoming & the Pedro Mountain Mummy

Monument to a Prostitute in Lusk

Outlaw Big Nose George Becomes a Pair of Shoes

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