Laramie’s Living History — People
A series of stories prepared for the Albany County Museum Coalition, an alliance of institutions that promote Laramie’s historic and cultural resources. This series originally appeared in the Laramie Boomerang.
The people who comprise the Albany County community come from several social strata, ethnicities, and races.
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Bill Nye: humor writer is beloved nationally Laramie and a mule named “Boomerang”—his road to fame
One of America’s celebrated humorists of the 19th century gathered enough material from his seven-year stay in Laramie that his “paragraphing” (as he called it) provided enough fodder for a lifetime. Edgar Wilson Nye (1850-1896), who wrote under the pen name “Bill Nye,” might have remained obscure but for Laramie and a mule named “Boomerang.”
Laramie’s Most Cantankerous Civic Booster
In a 1902 eulogy for the 75-year old Hayford, rival newspaper editor, E.A. Slack of the Cheyenne Daily Leader, wrote “We never knew a newspaper man …more a master of ridicule or sarcasm…[but] the longer we knew him the more we appreciated his fearless advocacy of what he believed to be right.”