On the Road;Cheyenne

September 12, 2009

Cheyenne

Cheyenne is the capital city of Wyoming and at one time, it was a pretty good sized city. gold was discovered there and the Pacific Railroad went through the city. The railroad went over the nearby mountain making that track the highest on the entire railroad line. The main street there is Lincoln Highway and Lincoln Highway is the oldest road to go East -West across the country. It is older than route 66. At one time Cheyenne was in the running to have the Intl airport but it lost out to Denver which has turned out to be a much bigger city. Our guide on our trolley sightseeing tour told us that at one time Cheyenne was the richest city in terms of per capita assets. There was a millionaire's row and one millionaire purchased a house and built 6 brick houses on the property, one for each of his daughters. None of the daughters ever lived in one. The money came from rr money and oil money.(They have oil here and we some oil jacks as we drove along the road).There was one escaped slave who opened a restaurant and got quite rich. The doctor and the lawyers and the architects did well also.

The shops downtown seem to close at 2p.m. on Saturday and after that it looks dead in the city. We visited a Museum of the West which had quit a number of old carriages. There is a statue outside on the road of an Esther something who was the first woman in the U.S. to cast a vote. Wyoming wasn't quite a state when the territory gave women the right to vote. Wyoming is one of 10 states to have gold on the dome of their capital building.

In July, Cheyenne hosts a big week long event called Pioneer Days.

The best museum that we got to see was the state museum. It had a dinosaur section because the first triceratops skeleton was discovered in Wyoming. It was discovered by some Yale professor who uncovered about 16 of them but he took them all out of Wyoming; and all Wyoming ever got back was a cast of a skull. They had a tortoise fossil of a giant tortoise that was some 40 million years old. There was a room of furnitue created by a Wyoming fellow--Tom something--in which he used burls from trees as will as straight logs for his furniture. He used Pioneer and Indian designs on the upholstery.

iAn intersting thing that I noticed was a case of Indian made artifacts that the Indians made in a way of copying the Pioneers that they met. They were woven neckties sitting in a stiff frame, lady's hanbags with Indian beading.



There was a lake here that was 20,000 miles wide. It evaporated and some chemical from the water seeped into the land and made some mineral called Trona. They have most of the Trona in the world and it is used the make baking soda, boric acid, detergents, etc. they also mine a lot of coal here--either because they have a whole lot or they allow it all to get mined.

There is no income tax in Wyoming and a 5% sales tax.