About Cheyenne

In his 1876 book, J. H. Triggs documented early Cheyenne: “Other towns of the West have been built and populated with marvelous rapidity, but it has remained with Cheyenne to spring, full-fledged, into existence, as it were, in a single night.”

Wrote the Chicago Times on November 15, 1867, “It’s a city that sprang into existence in a night, in obedience to the waving of a magician’s wand over a patch of wild buffalo grass. The magician was American enterprise; this wand resembled a bar of railroad iron a thousand miles long.”

Charles V. Arnold, an early resident, told the Omaha Weekly Herald, “the eye could hardly keep pace with the growth of the town from one day to another. Buildings sprang up as if by magic.”  So, in 1867, Cheyenne earned the moniker, “The Magic City - Queen of the Plains” and has been with us since.

Cheyenne is in the southeast corner of the state, in Laramie County. Its name is most commonly attributed to the Native Americans in the area whose name was given them by the Sioux. It was originally pronounced "Shay-an-nah" and is thought to mean "people of a different tongue.”  Fort Laramie to the north, Laramie City to the west, and Laramie County were named after an early French fur trapper who roamed the region, Jacques La Ramie.

Wyoming was the Indian name of a popular city in Pennsylvania and though a hotly debated issue, it won as the territorial name over Lincoln. The detractors contended no state had ever been named after a president. While there was a great deal of sympathy for our recently lost President, politics won out and the name Wyoming held and in 1890, become the U.S.A.’s 44th state.