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The State of Wyoming is a sparsely populated state in the western region of the United States of America. The majority of the state is dominated by the mountain ranges and rangelands of the Rocky Mountain West, while the easternmost section of the state is a high altitude prairie region known as the High Plains.
The region may have acquired the name Wyoming as early as 1865, when Representative J. M. Ashley of Ohio introduced a bill to Congress to provide a "temporary government for the territory of Wyoming." The name Wyoming derives from the Munsee, meaning "at the big river flat," originally applied to the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, made famous by the 1809 poem Gertrude of Wyoming by Thomas Campbell.
After the Union Pacific Railroad reached the town of Cheyenne in 1867, the region's population began to grow steadily, and the Federal government established the Wyoming Territory on July 25, 1868. Unlike Colorado to the south, Wyoming enjoyed no significant discovery of such celebrated minerals as gold and silver - nor Colorado's consequent boom in population - although some areas of Wyoming produced copper.
The events have since become a highly mythologized and symbolic story of the Wild West, and over the years variations of the storyline have come to include some of the west's most famous historical figures and gunslingers. The storyline and its variations have served as the basis for numerous popular novels, films, and television shows.
