How Wyoming Got Its Name From a Valley in Pennsylvania

Wyoming borrowed its name from a valley in Pennsylvania, and one 1890 history called it a “beautiful but misplaced name.” The word comes from the Delaware Indians, who used it for that valley back east. The territory out west that got it, as a 1918 history put it, “was never seen by a Delaware Indian.”

“Large plains”

The 1918 History of Wyoming, edited by I. S. Bartlett, says the word “is said to have been derived” from the Delaware Indian name “Waugh-mau-wa-ma,” meaning “large plains.” The Delawares used it for “the broad, beautiful valley they once inhabited in Pennsylvania.” Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of place names for the U.S. Geological Survey agrees on the meaning: “large plains” or “extensive meadows.” The Smithsonian’s Handbook of American Indians (1910) translates the Delaware word a little differently, as “upon the great plain,” and notes that the name “was long supposed to signify ‘field of blood.’”

And the book thinks the meaning fits. “In the ‘large plains’ sense,” it says, “the name is certainly applicable to the State of Wyoming.”

Ashley’s bill, and a two-year nap

In 1865, James M. Ashley, a congressman from Ohio, introduced a bill “to provide a temporary government for the Territory of Wyoming.” As far as the records show, the book says, that was the first time anyone suggested the name for a territory out there. If Ashley’s name rings a bell for you, it’s because the 1921 history Montana, Its Story and Biography credits the same James M. Ashley of Ohio with naming Montana. We tell that story in How Montana Got Its Name.

So did Ashley pick it himself? If you’re hoping for a clear answer, there isn’t one. The book’s writer, who isn’t named, says he couldn’t find out who first proposed it, or why. He guesses that Ashley, “who came from a state once claimed by the Delawares,” may have liked the “large plains” meaning, but he calls that “purely a matter of conjecture.” H. H. Bancroft, writing in 1890, didn’t know either: “Who it was first suggested this beautiful but misplaced name does not appear.” The Smithsonian handbook didn’t know either, but it took a guess: “probably some emigrant or emigrants” from one of the dozen or more other places called Wyoming.

The bill went to the House Committee on Territories, which never sent it back for a vote. It sat there for more than two years.

Lincoln? Cheyenne? Wyoming

In the fall of 1867, people in Cheyenne took matters into their own hands. At a meeting on September 27, they decided to hold an election, and on October 8 they chose J. S. Casement as their delegate to Congress. He wasn’t allowed a seat, because he didn’t represent an organized territory, but he did remind the committee about Ashley’s bill. Around the same time, a Dakota legislator, W. W. Brookings, got the Dakota legislature to ask Congress for a new territory called “Lincoln.” Then, early in 1868, a petition arrived signed “H. Latham, agent for the people of Wyoming.”

The bill passed the House. In the Senate, according to the 1918 history, there was “a spirited discussion” over the name, and a number of senators wanted “Cheyenne” instead. Bancroft says Cheyenne “came very near being the name chosen.” When a question came up about how to spell it, someone even appealed to the Librarian of Congress. Wyoming won anyway, and President Andrew Johnson signed the act on July 25, 1868.

Bancroft wasn’t happy about it. Said in three syllables, the way he said western Indians pronounced it, Cheyenne “is as beautiful a word as Wyoming, and should have been the name adopted,” he wrote in a footnote. Wyoming became a state with the act of July 10, 1890. And Cheyenne? It lost the name fight, but it ended up as the capital.

Sources & further reading

• I. S. Bartlett, ed., History of Wyoming, vol. 1 (1918). Ashley’s 1865 bill, the first suggestion of the name for such a territory, “Waugh-mau-wa-ma” (large plains), “never seen by a Delaware Indian,” the unnamed writer’s “purely a matter of conjecture,” the committee and the two-year wait (p. 164); the Cheyenne meeting of September 27, 1867, Casement’s election on October 8, the Brookings memorial for “Lincoln,” the Latham petition, the Senate debate with senators “favoring ‘Cheyenne,’” and approval by President Johnson on July 25, 1868 (pp. 164–165); “Cheyenne, the capital of the territory” (p. 189) and “Cheyenne, capital of the state” in 1892 (p. 217); the act of July 10, 1890, admitting Wyoming into the Union (p. 468).
• H. H. Bancroft, History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming (1890), pp. 739–740. Ashley’s 1865 bill; “Who it was first suggested this beautiful but misplaced name does not appear”; “Cheyenne came very near being the name chosen”; the footnote on the Librarian of Congress and the spelling of Cheyenne, its three-syllable pronunciation, and the view that it “should have been the name adopted.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 331. “State of the Union, and valley in Pennsylvania. A corruption of the Delaware Indian word meaning ‘large plains,’ ‘extensive meadows.’”
• Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, part 2 (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30, 1910), p. 978. The Delaware word as “upon the great plain,” the old belief that it meant “field of blood,” and the guess that the state’s name came from “some emigrant or emigrants.”
• Tom Stout, ed., Montana, Its Story and Biography, vol. 1 (1921), p. 314. “James M. Ashley, who gave Montana its name.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Wyoming’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779807).