WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Fifty years after Wyoming entered the Union, the men and women of its Writers’ Program produced a guide to mark the occasion. Wyoming: A Guide to Its History, Highways, and People appeared in 1941, a year of statehood celebrations, and Secretary of State Lester C. Hunt opened it with a foreword keyed to that anniversary. He invited the reader to review what he called the pageant of the West — from the days when the plains “swarmed with buffalo and antelope” and the only homes were the lodges of the Indians, through the coming of the beaver trapper on the Yellowstone, and after him the fur trader, the explorer, the gold hunter, the flock-master, and the homesteader. With them came the pony express and the covered wagon; then the railroad, the automobile, and at last the airlines — the three modern means, Hunt noted, that now let a traveler cross the State in safety and comfort.

The preface, signed by State Supervisor Agnes W. Spring, turns from ceremony to method. The Wyoming Guide is one volume in the American Guide Series, she explains, written by members of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration — a project designed first to give useful employment to writers and research workers, work that along the way kindled a wider appetite for the State’s history. Since April 1938 the staff had logged and rechecked every main highway, every important side road, and the trails of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, so that the latest data might reach the traveler. Following the pattern set for the series, the guide pairs essays on general subjects with detailed descriptions of all the important tours — a book meant for the fireside traveler as much as for the motorist on the road.

That double character shapes the volume’s plan. A first part, Wyoming: Past and Present, gathers essays on the contemporary scene, the natural setting, archeology and the Indians, history, industry, agriculture, and the arts; a second describes the cities of Casper, Cheyenne, Laramie, and Sheridan; and a third lays out thirteen numbered tours with their lettered branches, closing with a Grand Loop through Yellowstone National Park. Spring asks the reader’s patience for a pioneer work in a field with few predecessors, and acknowledges the sponsors who made it possible — the State Planning and Water Conservation Board and Secretary Hunt himself — along with the neighboring writers’ projects of Montana, Delaware, and Arizona, whose hands helped with the maps and the art work.

Because the book reached press before the 1940 returns were complete, its text reckons the State in 1930 figures, with the newer count set in the appendices. The result is a portrait of Wyoming caught between its frontier past and its motoring present. The trapper and the cowboy may have ridden over the hill, the foreword allows, but the sunset behind them “still flames over Wyoming in scarlet and gold” — and it is into that country, equal parts history and high open space, that the tours invite the reader to drive.