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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Laramie newspaper man and humorist.
Edgar Wilson “Bill Nye” (1850-1896) was editor of the Boomerang for two short years and might have continued longer had it not been for a nearly fatal bout with spinal meningitis. The 1883 illness required him to recuperate elsewhere than the Gem City, and left him with a “delicate” constitution, as those who knew him remarked.
William Henry Root and his wife Helen “Lizzy” Elizabeth “Sissy” (Burns) Root, well known Laramie business family
“Colonel” Billy Root was a Laramie businessman who dealt in farm equipment, exported wild animals to varous collectors and opened an “opera house.”
Bill Nye: humor writer is beloved nationally Laramie and a mule named “Boomerang”—his road to fame
One of America’s celebrated humorists of the 19th century gathered enough material from his seven-year stay in Laramie that his “paragraphing” (as he called it) provided enough fodder for a lifetime. Edgar Wilson Nye (1850-1896), who wrote under the pen name “Bill Nye,” might have remained obscure but for Laramie and a mule named “Boomerang.”
Laramie’s Most Cantankerous Civic Booster
In a 1902 eulogy for the 75-year old Hayford, rival newspaper editor, E.A. Slack of the Cheyenne Daily Leader, wrote “We never knew a newspaper man …more a master of ridicule or sarcasm…[but] the longer we knew him the more we appreciated his fearless advocacy of what he believed to be right.”