Wyoming Periodicals, Newspapers, and Manuscript Collections
This entry was originally written by Dwight A. Radford in Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources.
Periodicals
Two periodicals on Wyoming history are valuable to the genealogist. Bits and Pieces is a magazine of western history with special interest in Wyoming, the Black Hills area, and surrounding states. It is published monthly from Newcastle, Wyoming, and contains a wide variety of articles. The second periodical is Annals of Wyoming, published biannually by the Wyoming State Archives.
Newspapers
The first real newspaper established in Wyoming was the Cheyenne Leader, which began in 1867. The first permanent newspaper in Laramie was founded in 1869 and was named the Laramie Daily Sentinel.
Lola Homsher has compiled an inventory of all known Wyoming newspapers entitled Guide to Wyoming Newspapers, 1867'1967 (Cheyenne: Wyoming State Library, 1971). The Wyoming State Archives began collecting and microfilming the state's newspapers in 1953 and maintains the most complete collection in the state.
Manuscripts
The Wyoming State Archives has many collections, as well as county records, that are valuable to the researcher. Other holdings include the 'European Heritage Study Collection,' which contains administrative records for the Wyoming European Ethnic Project. The collection includes research collected by individual teams on Basque, British, Eastern Europeans, German-speaking Europeans, Greeks, and Italians. It has been subsequently published in Peopling the High Plains: Wyoming's European Heritage, described in Other Ethnic Groups (see page 765).
Another widely used collection is the 'Carter Collection,' which consists of the papers of William Alexander Carter, a settler and post trader at Fort Bridger, Wyoming (1857'81). His business dealings touched every phase of economic development of the Rocky Mountains, Great Basin, Missouri River, and the Pacific. Carter's papers were microfilmed in 1959 from the originals, which are deposited at the Western Americana Division, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. They consist of twelve rolls of microfilm and include correspondence, forty-five journals, ledgers, cashbooks, and other papers relating to Carter's business activities at Fort Bridger; diaries, genealogy, papers relating to Lot Smith's Company of Utah (Mormon) Militia, and Camps Floyd and Scott (Utah Territory); and legal documents from Carter's term as probate judge of Green River County, Utah.
