Creating the Cowboy State:
Culture and Underdevelopment in Wyoming Since 1867

Frieda Knobloch

Wyoming's enduring rural western image was created by cultural forces as longstanding and national in scale as the forces that left Wyoming economically underdeveloped. State promotion of Wyoming's traditional image in the interests of economic development is not nostalgic under these circumstances.

Wyoming residents' original dreams of a diversified economy, including both rural and urban development, were rapidly and consistently accompanied by cultural images of the state as "western." For insiders and outsiders alike, these images identified Wyoming with beautiful natural scenery and the world of the range cowboy--in short, as an undeveloped, even undevelopable place. The cultural forces that shaped Wyoming's state identity have been as powerful, longstanding, and national in scale as the economic forces that tapped Wyoming's resources but failed to plant large urban manufacturing centers there. Any successful effort to create new images of the state and to develop a viable economy must begin by understanding the national scope and resonance of Wyoming's cowboy image.	1
After a hundred years, Wyoming state officials were left holding the bag of anticipated progress that never materialized. Why did this happen? State economic planners have grappled with the question, but their answers have traditionally laid the blame on economic forces that were either beyond the state's control, or were misshapen by state tax and economic development policies.1 Contemporary state planners have focused on identifying what is structurally wrong with Wyoming's economy, emphasizing--for obvious reasons--what the state could do differently to promote business, to create new kinds of jobs (especially in telecommunications and information technologies), and to redistribute the tax burden from the minerals industry to other industries.2 State planners today quietly concede that, in addition to economic factors, the state's rural culture may be to blame for lack of development.3 In May 1998, the New York Times reported that state officials: "have to deal with Wyoming's standoffishness about change," a "stubborn streak . . . captured by the image of a cowboy on a bucking bronco," a mythical image belied by the "reality . . . that only 4 percent of residents work on ranches or farms."4 The state's economic policy makers have been criticized for clinging nostalgically and ineffectively to the state's "wild west" image in its quest for development. A "native" wrote anonymously in The Economist in 1998 that "Wyoming clings to the Hollywood version of its history," and maintains "old-West nostalgia as legitimate public policy."5	2
But images of promotional value that identify the state's rural culture represent what has been economically realized in Wyoming more accurately than nineteenth- and twentieth-century genuflection to urban, industrial progress ever could. Wyoming's "undeveloped" rural culture was in fact created, not by misguided Wyoming insiders, but by the same American industrial development that linked Wyoming's resources to commercial and industrial centers elsewhere. Romantic responses to American industrialism--originally from outside Wyoming and pronounced after 1890--created enduring cultural associations of Wyoming as rural. Wyoming's chronic underdevelopment and cowboyification happened simultaneously in the last decades of the nineteenth century.	. . .