The Museum of the American West

Our stories:

From the Pleistocene to the present, are at once familiar and surprising.

Sacajawea and Calamity Jane called this area home, as did Esther Morris, who served as a justice of the peace in the South Pass gold fields and was the first woman in the U.S. to hold a political office.
Butch Cassidy and Wild Bill Hickman were frequent visitors and occasional residents; our local sheriff was the only lawman to put Butch in prison, and others welcomed him back in the 1920s and 30s as he searched for hidden loot.
The great chiefs, Crazy Horse, Black Coal, and Washakie, were mortal enemies and fought for their people’s survival on local battlefields.
Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, the western border of which was the skyline on the mountaintops above Lander.
Mountain men like Jed Smith and the Sublettes, followed by government explorers including Captain Raynolds, Lt. John C. Fremont and General F.W. Lander, explored our mountains and passes seeking the way West, and publicized South Pass as the route to the nation’s manifest destiny—and the future.
It fell to Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding to demonstrate the feasibility of what came to be known variously as the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails. They opened the way for the Great Migration and American growth to and influence across the Pacific Ocean.
Brigham Young led the Latter Day Saints through South Pass to Zion. The worst disaster in trail history nearly destroyed the Mormon Willie and Martin Handcart Companies near Devil’s Gate.
The history of the Wind River Indian Reservation is unique in the nation.
Our vast uranium deposits played crucial roles in the Cold War and development of the nation’s nuclear power industry.
Wyoming’s first oil wells were drilled here and western energy production, contrary to John D. Rockefeller’s predictions, became a major national industry.
This area also saw the first national park and national forest, and was home to some of the West’s earliest environmental and conservation organizations.
Conflict and compromise have always been a way of life at this crossroads on Uncle Sam’s Backbone (the pioneer nickname for the Continental Divide).