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The Diocese of Cheyenne and the State of Wyoming

The Diocese of Cheyenne is coterminous with the State of Wyoming. The official bull of Leo XIII that erected the diocese of Cheyenne, defined the limits of the diocese “ad orientem Status Dakota et Nebraska, ad occidentem Status Utah et Idaho, ad meridiem Status Colorado et Utah, ad septentrionalem Status Montana.” In area, the diocese covers close to a hundred thousand square miles, about the size of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Of course, if one were to measure land by surface, a state with at least seven major mountain ranges, flattened out, would be very much larger. In contrast to size, the population of a hard, cold, windy, dry land, has struggled for more than a century to be numbered at almost half a million souls. The official census of 1990 gave as the population of the state of Wyoming ***; the Official Catholic Directory of 1997 gave ***as the number of Catholics in the diocese.

The diocese and state cover lands astonishing, boring, big, remote, largely untouched and unknown, even now, and sparsely populated, where seven, or ten great mountain ranges leap like rams, their peaks forcing the incessant west wind to shower down the rivers that clap their hands, rushing down gorges and through timber and meadows to the dry, weary sage brush plains, without water, that surround them like the vast ocean out of which they once rose anew, an empty and cleansed Atlantis.

Remote, it seems to me, best describes the area of the diocese of Cheyenne, remote from the world, towns within remote from each other. The experience of such a remoteness may expand the heights, and deeps, length, and breadth of feeling in the inner self and evoke tranquillity in the heart of a soul when one views alone a landscape in Wyoming. And remote, indeed, were those statesmen who made a history for Wyoming and ended by created a uniquely square state. The straight line boundaries of Wyoming attests to the circumstances of its creation in history by statesmen deliberating in palaces and drawing rooms many thousands of miles away, across the Ocean and over five centuries, who had never seen nor intended to see the country, but whose task it was to make the unexplored far western territories into definable states of manageable size. In the end, it appears that Wyoming was founded because the surrounding territories were too big, or perhaps that the peculiar nature of the top of the triple watershed might warrant a separate territory of its own. Though these straight line boundaries lack the wonderful precision that centuries of experience in the Old World produced such nicely drawn ecological-political units, still the boundaries of Wyoming make sense because they enclose that part of the Sierra Madre where the range spreads out and provides both the only watered pass through the Rockies and the remotest headwaters of three great rivers of the West, the Missouri, the Colorado, and the Columbia. One might observe that in the end, the straight line boundary is not too obtrusive, except perhaps where it goes right through the middle of the Black Hills.

Even the name, “Wyoming,” came from a place as remote as Pennsylvania, from a language that had nothing to do with any language spoken here. It is said that the word referred to a country that produces water, and meant, “Old little waters,” a fitting name for a state that the historian Bancroft suggested should have been named, “Fontana.”

The Territory of Wyoming, organized 1868 by the U.S. Congress, with its capital in Cheyenne immediately became famous in the world because the first territorial legislature in 1869 established legal equality for women, giving women the right to vote and hold office in Wyoming. This right was embodied in the state constitution upon the admission of Wyoming to the Union in 1890. Hence, the title “Equality State.” It has always seemed to me providential that almost the last political state to be established as a new state in the world would be the first to give women legal equality. A second event that became famous was the establishment of the first national park in 1872, Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone was followed by the establishment of Grand Teton National Park in ***.

The region of Wyoming was so remote that although it was included in ecclesiastical and royal legislation from 1493, no known European ever got to it until the eighteenth century. After the call of “Manifest Destiny” which started the great westward migration along the Oregon Trail to the Pacific country, Wyoming was a place to get through as quick as you could. For the Oregon Trail emigrants during the years 1840 to 1867, the key to a safe trip through the Rockies was to get over South Pass before the snow came; all knew the story of the Donner party which got over too late. Normally travelers should spend less than four weeks traversing Wyoming, leaving little “besides ruts, names-and dates on trailside cliffs, a few place names and some graves.” Some fifty thousand people who crossed Wyoming in search of new homes and opportunities in Oregon, California and Utah were not tempted to establish homes here. The wind alone kept them going or kept them out, for as the poem goes, “in Wyoming, when it blows, it blows, and blows, and blows.”