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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William and Harvey Shipman tragedies: Deaths of father and son: 1870 – 1877
In mid-July 1870, 22-year-old Harvey Shipman was living in the Laramie valley near Sherman. Listed as a gold miner in the census, he boarded with teamster James Sherrod in the vicinity of ranchers Philip Mandell and Thomas Alsop. A week earlier, Harvey’s father William Shipman had been killed in North Park, Colorado, in a gruesome manner. Within the year, Harvey himself would be incarcerated at Ft. Sanders, awaiting trial in Laramie for killing a man with a shovel.
Charismatic lawman N.K. Boswell; He brought law and order to Laramie
New Hampshire native Nathaniel Kimball Boswell (1836-1921) was in the right place at the right time to make a name for himself in the raw frontier of Wyoming Territory in 1867.
First Resident of the Laramie Plains—Phillip Mandel
The man who may have been the first permanent European resident of the Laramie Plains, Phillip Mandel (1835-1917), arrived at a date not well documented, but he could have been here 10 years prior to the 1868 founding of Laramie.