Family Travel,  West,  Wyoming

A Fun-Filled Afternoon in Cheyenne, Wyoming

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Our afternoon in Cheyenne, Wyoming started at the Wyoming State Museum, and then finished up with a walk around town hunting for cowboy boot sculptures.

Did you know that Wyoming has America’s first national park, national forest, and national monument?

Yellowstone National Park was the first National Park and opened in 1872. As a way to cater to tourism in the area, the Northern Pacific Railroad financed certain amenities such as wagons for transportation and sightseeing.

The Wyoming prairie makes up 20% of the state and is busy with wildlife. There are several varieties of wildlife on display including prairie dogs, grouse, pronghorn, jackrabbit, coyote and rattlesnake.

I was amazed to learn that there are almost as many pronghorns as people in Wyoming. Pronghorns can run up to 60 miles per hour and they migrate approximately 300 miles round trip throughout Wyoming. Only caribou has a longer migration route in the Western United States.

Fur trappers were one of the first European groups to explore Wyoming. Trapping is now regulated by the state and requires a license. You can see a bearskin coat from the late 1880s on display as well as a wolf pelt killed by a rancher near Laramie around 1900.

Bison can be found in Wyoming and are very large and bulky, averaging 5-6.5 feet at the shoulder and up to 2000 pounds, yet are quite speedy and can run up to 35 miles per hour. Grizzly bears and wolves are no match for bison.

Bison were very important to Native Americans. They used all parts of the bison for food, tools, supplies, etc. Native American tribes would follow the bison herds and by the late 1800s they were almost hunted to extinction due to European explorers joining in the hunt. By the 1890s less than 100 bison were left in the wild due. Through efforts started by Teddy Roosevelt in 1905, we now have approximately 500,000 bison in North America.

In 1884 the first sheep wagon was built in Wyoming so that shepherds could live in the wagon and easily follow their sheep.

Cullan’s favorite part of the Wyoming State Museum was the Japanese friendship doll. In 1926-27 a missionary lived in Japan and saw how important dolls were to Japanese culture. He arranged for 12,000+ American blue-eyed dolls to be sent to Japan. Japan wanted to return the favor so they arranged for their best doll makers to make 58 dolls in kimonos made of silk. The dolls were then sent to libraries and museums around the United States.

Lots of dinosaur bones and fossils have been found in Wyoming and there were even fossil discovery competitions in the 1800s. The kids enjoyed competing in their own fossil discovery competition.

When we entered the museum there was a photograph of an item in the museum that you were to try and find. If you found it you would get a prize. The tricky part was that the photograph on display was actually a part of a larger photograph that was zoomed in, so it made it pretty hard to figure out what item you were looking for. Right away the kids guessed they were looking for a skull, but it took them a while to find the right one.

Rob enjoys woodworking and antique furniture, so he found Thomas C. Molesworth’s furniture exhibit to be interesting. The pieces were made with hand-peeled fir logs and he built furniture for the governor’s mansion, the Rockefeller ranch, and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s home in Pennsylvania.

Throughout the museum there is a large collection of Native American artifacts including various hunting tools and a tally stick with notches indicating the number of kills made by the owner.

There is a Native American game called Hoop and Pole on display. Kids would learn hunting and weaponry skills by throwing arrows or darts at small moving hoops.

The girl’s favorite area was the kid’s area. There were lots of opportunities for hands-on exploring, including an outdoor campsite and a sand table showing different elevations with different colors. It was an area with activities for both Micah (8) and Hadassah (3) to enjoy.

After spending a few hours at the Wyoming State Museum we were ready to start our hunt for boots. Lucky for us there’s one right outside the museum, so we didn’t have to go far to spot our first one.

These boots are really cool and are part of the “These Boots are Made for Talking” project, which raised almost $100,000 for the Cheyenne Depot Museum. They are each 8 feet tall and hand-painted. You can pick up a map and go on a hunt to find 25 of them throughout the downtown Cheyenne area.

As you find each boot you can call a number and enter the corresponding boot number in order to hear the artist tell you the answer to the project theme – “if this boot could talk, what story would it tell?”

The boot outside the Wyoming State Museum is called “Licensed to Boot.” It was created by the Carey Junior High Art Club to highlight the changes in Wyoming license plates over the years. The top part is hand-painted while the bottom showcases pieces of actual license plates.

Behind the Cheyenne Depot Museum is the boot titled “Memories of the Old West.” The artist, Cody Hamil, is a 5th generation descendant of a Wyoming pioneer ranching family. He chose to depict the history of Cheyenne by painting a wagon trail that wraps around the boot and turns into the rails of the railroad which started the city of Cheyenne.

We didn’t have time to find all of the boots, but we had fun learning about the ones we found.

After wrapping up a fun-filled day in Cheyenne we started the 4 1/2 hour drive to Keystone, South Dakota. Next stop on our trip – Mount Rushmore!

For another look at our visit to Cheyenne check out our YouTube video below. You can also read about Day 1 of our trip and our visit to Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater and Casa Bonita, and Day 2 of our trip to Colorado Springs and our stops at the Garden of the Gods, the Manitou Cliff Dwellings Museum, the Manitou Springs Penny Arcade, the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, and Magic Town. You can also go back and read about Day 3 at the Western Museum of Mining and Industry, the Money Museum, the Colorado State Capitol, and the Molly Brown House Museum. Day 4 started with a stop at the Southeast Wyoming Welcome Center and a drive down Happy Jack Road to Curt Gowdy State Park before stopping at the Wyoming State Museum. This trip is the first trip of our “50 States Before Graduation Challenge” series.

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