William A. Richards
Chapters from a full biography of Richards will be posted as they are finished. His story emerged from contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, his diaries, and the hundreds of letters he saved from relatives and associates.
Below is a list of topics whose 8.5" x 11" PDF files will be linked when ready.
Chapters available now as PDF files
Homesteading in the Bighorn Basin
Richards arrives in Wyoming in 1884, treks to the east side of the Bighorn Basin. Locates tract for the first big irrigation project on the Bighorn River and his own homestead, Red Bank Ranch.
“It was two o’clock in the morning on October 4, 1884, when the train pulled in to Carbon, Wyoming Territory, a coal- and cow-town northwest of Laramie near the Medicine Bow Mountains. William A. Richards stepped down with his personal baggage and his surveying kit. As the caboose’s lights dimmed and disappeared, he may have looked around for a hotel. None in sight. No town, either. Under the full moon he would have seen only the coal office, coal cars, coal dust, and perhaps some sooty cattle chutes. But there was a depot, and the glow of an oil lamp told Will he was not alone in this carboniferous hellscape.
Getting started in Wyoming politics
Richards elected the first Johnson County commissioner from the Bighorn Basin, 1886.
His daughter’s recollections of ranch life after the family finally joins him in 1887.
Sporadic mail service and the Red Bank Post Office.
Johnson County Commissioner Richards and the issues faced.
Family and fate push Richards to high office
His appointment as U.S. surveyor general for Wyoming Territory in 1889.
Cheyenne in aftermath of the cattle industry’s collapse following the winter of 1886-87.
Richards and Territorial Engineer Elwood Mead.
Problems faced as surveyor general.
The Big Horn Ditch and Politics
Richards’s Big Horn Ditch and Democrats’ use of it to paint him as land-grabber and keep him from being elected governor. Has engravings of the Ditch tract before it was developed into the prime agricultural land it is today.
The Hanover Canal Company Takes Over Richards’s Ditch Tract—After Misadventures in the Bonanza Oil District
Chapters to be posted when ready
A new governor and new laws for a young state: Richards and the 1895 Wyoming legislature
Addressing all those needs with a tight budget and no tax revenue from coal or oil.
Promoting irrigation, saving the grasslands and forests. • Dealing with coal mine disasters and wolves. • New laws to conserve game and fish. • Free textbooks in schools • A veterans home • The state historical society • A state general library • and the embryos of the state museum and Hot Springs State Park.
A new game law was passed to help conserve the dwindling numbers of game animals. Settlers nearly went to war with the Bannock tribe until Richards defused the crisis. This led to a Supreme Court decision over the question of treaty rights vs. state laws, still disputed today.
Other highlights of Richards's administration were the Spanish-American War, the pardon of Butch Cassidy and its aftermath, and expositions to publicize the wonders of Wyoming.
Richards and Buffalo Bill
The governor and the girl governor: Media flap over the fake news promotion of his secretary while he was away.
Richards and the fight over the establishment of Big Horn County.
Richards and the pioneer journalists of the Bighorn Basin.
How W. A. Richards and DeForest Richards became governors of Wyoming and discovered their relationship.
Richards’s early days
Born into a Wisconsin pioneer family • Goes West to Omaha and gets into surveying • Marriage • Farming in Northern California, election as county surveyor • Tuberculosis forces him to start over in Colorado.
“Bear George” McClellan manages Red Bank ranch and eventually becomes Richards's partner.
Invasion and politics
The Johnson County invasion, Richards's views of it, and its effect on the election of 1892.
The debacle of the Second State Legislature.
With new Democratic administration Richards loses his job. Successor's juicy scandal.
Richards’s Big Horn Ditch project is taken over by the Hanover Canal Co. Its entertaining story includes its adventures in the oil boom town of Bonanza.
Richards to DC
His appointment as assistant commissioner of the General Land Office in 1899.
As assistant commissioner, Richards was in charge of the 1901 Oklahoma land opening. The unfair land rush system had been replaced with drawings by logs, and he ran it honestly. As acting commissioner he helped President Roosevelt create Tongass national forest in Alaska.
Richards’s appointment as commissioner of the Land Office and his contributions to Roosevelt’s conservation agenda, principally the Antiquities Act of 1906, which enabled presidents to create National Monuments.
Retirement from the Land Office and return to ranch
Appointment as Wyoming State Tax Commissioner
After the violent deaths of his daughter Edna and her husband, Thomas Jenkins, Richards leaves Wyoming for Australia at the invitation of Mead, who was in charge of water and irrigation development in Victoria province.
Death in 1912 in Melbourne. Mead was returning to the U.S., so he accompanied Richards's body back across the Pacific. After lying in state in the Wyoming state capitol and his funeral in Cheyenne, Richards was buried in Lakeview Cemetery after a military escort.