Wyoming
Candy Moulton: Give Me A Homestead
“Any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed,” wrote Elenore Pruitt Stewart in 1913 of her effort to establish a Wyoming homestead for herself and her daughter.
Not only will such women succeed, Stewart wrote in one of her letters to a former employer in Denver on Jan. 23, 1913, but she “will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.”
Oh, and she will have calloused hands, dirt under her nails, and most likely freckles on her nose even if she wears a good sunbonnet or hat.
Homesteading was not for the faint at heart as Elenore and her young daughter Jerrine found out.
They had been living in Denver but left the city for the small southwestern Wyoming community of Burntfork in response to an ad placed in early 1909 by Clyde Stewart, whose wife had died.
Stewart wanted to hire a woman who could assist with housekeeping but he wasn’t seeking a mail order bride (at least not in an outright appeal for one!)
Working for Stewart, Elinore and Jerrine enjoyed Wyoming’s wide-open spaces. They went on camping trips and she wrote about some of those adventures in other letters that became her book Letters On An Elk Hunt.
Elinore was a pragmatic woman, who had every intention of filing on homestead land when she made the decision to take her daughter and leave Denver.
Aware of homestead laws, she knew she could qualify for a 160-acre section and that claiming land would give her more opportunity.
Determined to improve her lot in life, soon after she started working for Stewart she filed a homestead claim on land adjacent to his.
And while she may have craved independence, Elinore was also a practical woman. Because a house was a requirement to prove up on any homestead, she and Clyde joined efforts.
Instead of constructing a separate house that was one key component to proving up on a homestead, they built a 12 x 16-foot addition to his house. It straddled the property line of their two homesteads.
This meant it was a single house to maintain and they believed that the two adjacent living spaces fulfilled the requirements of the 1862 homestead law.
The house she and Clyde lived in became a sprawling structure that is now on the National Register of Historic Places.
Elinore wanted her own land, and her own house, but once she had set herself up for independence, she and Clyde Stewart got married!
This change in her domestic status put Elinore’s homestead claim at risk since married women could only claim jointly with their husbands.
Further, if a husband and wife filed on separate homesteads, as Elinore and Clyde had done, they needed to maintain separate residences.
Instead of adding on to his house they should have built a separate structure just feet from his home.
Now married and not willing to risk losing the land she had claimed, Elinore relinquished her claim to her new mother-in-law and in that way kept the land in the family.
While the land might not have remained in her name, almost certainly she still felt the attachment and opportunity it offered to her.
For years after she moved to Wyoming, Elinore wrote letters to her former employer in Denver, expressing her interest in and work developing the homestead.
The letters Elinor Pruitt Stewart wrote became a book Letters From a Woman Homesteader. Decades later the material became inspiration for the film “Heartland.”
Homesteading was a long-established practice in the West by the time Elinor Pruitt filed her claim.
When the Homestead Act went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, Daniel Freeman was in Brownville, Neb., to claim the ground he wanted along Cub Creek not far from the town of Beatrice, Neb. His claim was recorded as Certificate No. 1, Application No. 1, in the Brownville land office.
More than 400 other men also filed for homesteads that day in other land offices, but Freeman’s land claim is promoted as the first in the nation. His land near Beatrice, Neb., is now a part of Homestead National Monument of America.
The homestead law was open to anyone who met very basic and progressive requirements, including women, most (but not all) immigrants, and, beginning in 1868, African Americans. Eventually, homesteads were found in 30 states.
Because government regulations defined the head of household as the husband, women were forced to forestall marriage for five years if they wished their land titled to themselves, but this did not deter many women who were determined to strike out on their own.
Cases in point are the Chrisman sisters, who lived in Custer County, Nebraska, in the heart of the Sandhills near Broken Bow. Their father and brothers already had homesteads. Lizzie Chrisman was the first of the girls to file a homestead claim near her male relatives, doing so in 1887.
Sister Lutie Chrisman filed her claim the following year. Although both built homes, they took turns living with each other so they could fulfill the residence requirements without being alone.
Younger sisters, Hattie and Jennie Ruth, had to wait until they came of age to file and while Hattie did claim land, the nearby property was all taken before youngest sister Jennie could homestead.
The Chrisman sisters had claimed their own land, but it like the land Elinor Pruitt had claimed, became part of a larger family ranching operation.
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
Wyoming
Casper veteran David Giralt joins race for Wyoming U.S. House seat
Wyoming
Rivalries and Playoff Positioning Highlight Week 11 Wyoming Girls Basketball Slate
It’s Week 11 in the 2026 Wyoming prep girls’ basketball season. That means it’s the end of the regular season. 3A and 4A schools have their final game or games to determine seeding before the regional tournament, or if a team is locked into a position, one last chance to fine-tune before the postseason. Games are spread across four days.
WYOPREPS WEEK 11 GIRLS BASKETBALL SCHEDULE 2026
Every game on the slate is a conference matchup. Several rivalry contests are part of this week’s schedule, such as East against Central, Cody at Powell, Lyman hosting Mountain View, and Rock Springs at Green River, just to name a few. Here is the Week 11 schedule of varsity games WyoPreps has. All schedules are subject to change. If you see a game missing, please email david@wyopreps.com.
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Laramie 68 Cheyenne South 27 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: Lyman 40 Mountain View 26 (conference game)
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Evanston 41 Riverton 39 (conference game)
Final Score: Natrona County 42 Kelly Walsh 38 (conference game) – Peach Basket Classic
Final Score: #4 Thunder Basin 64 Campbell County 32 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: #1 Cody 77 Worland 33 (conference game) – 5 different Fillies with a 3, and Hays led the way with 34 points.
Final Score: #2 Lander 49 Lyman 34 (conference game)
Final Score: #4 Wheatland 51 Douglas 40 (conference game)
Final Score: #5 Powell 48 Lovell 42 (conference game)
Final Score: Burns 56 Torrington 43 (conference game)
Final Score: Glenrock 78 Newcastle 30 (conference game)
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CLASS 4A
Rock Springs at #2 Green River, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#4 Thunder Basin at #5 Sheridan, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cheyenne East at #3 Cheyenne Central, 6 p.m. (conference game)
Jackson at Star Valley, 6 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
#3 Pinedale at Mountain View, 4 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cody at #5 Powell, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
Buffalo at Glenrock, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Newcastle at Buffalo, 12:30 p.m. (conference game)
Glenrock at Rawlins, 3 p.m. (conference game)
Torrington at #4 Wheatland, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
Wyoming Boys 4A Swimming & Diving State Championships 2026
4A Boys State Swim Meet for 2026 in Cheyenne
Gallery Credit: David Settle, WyoPreps.com
Wyoming
Political storm in Wyoming as far-right activist caught handing checks to lawmakers
Controversy has engulfed Wyoming’s state legislature after a conservative activist was photographed handing checks to Republican lawmakers on the state house floor, in an incident that has highlighted intra-conservative divisions and the role of money in the Cowboy state’s politics.
The political storm started on 9 February, when Karlee Provenza, a Democratic lawmaker, took a photo showing Rebecca Bextel, a conservative activist and committeewoman for the Teton county Republican party, handing a check to Darin McCann, a Republican representative, on the legislative floor. Marlene Brady, another Republican representative, stands in the photo’s background, a similar piece of paper pinched between her fingers.
“You have a person from the richest county in the country coming down to Cheyenne to hand out checks on the house floor,” Provenza said. “I have never seen something so egregious.”
Questions around the checks were soon swirling, and answers weren’t forthcoming. When asked what Bextel gave to her, Brady told a reporter for local outlet WyoFile: “I can’t remember.”
Then Bextel herself addressed the incident. “I raised $400,000 in the last election cycle for conservative candidates, and I will be doubling that amount this year,” Bextel wrote on Facebook on 11 February. “There’s nothing wrong with delivering lawful campaign checks from Teton county donors when I am in Cheyenne.”
Since then, it has emerged that the checks came from Don Grasso, a wealthy Teton county donor, who told the Jackson Hole News and Guide that he wrote the checks for Bextel to deliver to 10 Freedom caucus-aligned politicians. Grasso said the checks were intended as campaign contributions, and were not tied to specific legislation. It is unclear how many checks were ultimately delivered, but two of four confirmed recipients include the speaker of the house, Chip Neiman, and John Bear, the former head of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus.
The Wyoming house has formed a legislative investigative committee, and the Laramie county sheriff’s office said they’d open a criminal investigation.
Bextel declined to answer questions from the Guardian. Brady, McCann and Bear did not respond to requests for comment.
Neiman said he considered the criticism a “wraparound smear campaign”. He said: “It never once crossed my mind that this was bribery.
“These legislators, myself included, are now guilty until we can prove that we’re innocent. How is that right in this country? Isn’t that a little bit backwards?”
The scandal has highlighted long-standing divisions in Wyoming’s Republican party, which in recent years has seen a growing divide between old school, more moderate conservatives and a harder-right Freedom Caucus.
Several former Republican lawmakers forcefully condemned their colleagues for accepting the checks, and a local Republican party branch called for the lawmakers’ resignations.
Ogden Driskill, a Wyoming Republican senator, told the Guardian he does not consider Bextel’s actions to be illegal, but that “just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should”.
Bextel has spent years pushing against housing mitigation fees in Wyoming, and Driskill noted that she distributed the house floor checks just days before a bill she had publicly supported was set to be heard. Bextel was registered as a member of the press, not as a lobbyist when she delivered the checks.
“Ethically and morally, it’s bankrupt to a massive degree,” Driskill said.
Neiman said that he and other legislators who received checks have supported similar bills in the past: “Bribery is paying somebody to do something they would not otherwise do.”
Nationally, the 2024 election cycle saw record-spending from the mega-wealthy, as well as dark money groups. Wyoming followed the trend, in a tense red-on-red primary season.
For those gearing up to campaign this year, Teton county, the richest in the US, and Bextel’s picturesque home turf, is an essential stop. Its extreme wealth gives it a foothold on the national level as well. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp and Donald Trump attended an annual Republican leadership fundraiser at Jackson Hole in 2024, and JD Vance attended the same one in 2025.
Bextel pulls dollars from Teton county into the Freedom Caucus side of Wyoming’s conservative split. She hosted no-press-allowed meet and greets earlier this year benefitting leading candidates for Wyoming’s governor and open US House seat.
In an interview with the Open Range Record, a media network she co-founded, Bextel said controversy around the checks was solely because she was making “even playing field” in Wyoming against the state’s more moderate Republicans, who she calls “George Soros” candidates. She said that she will be sure to keep raising money – just away from the legislative floor.
“I guess I’m gonna ask all the gentlemen and gentleladies to step outside the Capitol while I hand them a check,” Bextel said. “Let me be clear: I’m doubling down.”
But it’s not just wealthy local donors putting their weight behind the factions. Last election cycle, out of state groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on anonymous and often inaccurate mailers.
“These actors, especially from the far right, they like to push the bounds of the norms,” said Rosa Reyna Pugh, an organizing and advocacy consultant at Western States Center, an Oregon-based non-profit focused on democracy in the western United States. “They like to see what policies they can kind of push, and see where they can play a piece,” Reyna Pugh said.
While Neiman and Driskill fight politically, they do agree on one thing: summer will bring an expensive and brutal campaign season.
“You’re going to see more dark money than you’ve ever seen. We’ve done absolutely nothing to enforce it. Our secretary of state has not even made a slight attempt to deal with it,” Driskill said. “You’re going to see lots and lots of outside money and I think you’re seeing it on both sides.”
As national questions swirl around pay-to-play politics and profiteering in the Trump administration, Provenza wants better for the Cowboy State.
“We should not be aligning ourselves with how the federal government is conducting itself or how federal elections conduct themselves,” Provenza said. “We owe something far better and more honest to the people of Wyoming than that.”
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