WYOMING COWBOY HALL OF FAME FINDS NEW HOME IN GILLETTE

There is a story we tell about Campbell County now. It is a story of coal seams and haul trucks, of energy that powers the country and a community that built itself alongside it.

But that is not where our story starts.

Before the mines, before the highways filled with trucks, before Gillette became what it is today, this land belonged to a different kind of work. It belonged to men and women horseback, gathering cattle across open country, working long days in wind and weather, tied to the land in a way that is hard to explain unless you have lived it.

That is the story the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame was created to honor.

Established to recognize individuals who shaped Wyoming’s cowboy and ranching heritage, the Hall of Fame is not about image or nostalgia. It is about a life lived in the saddle.

Inductees are nominated by those who know them best, and the bar is high. Many have spent 45 years or more working livestock on horseback, not as a hobby, but as a livelihood.

They are not selected because they wore the hat. They are selected because they did the work.

Nominations come from communities across the state and are reviewed by regional committees who understand that kind of life. It is a process rooted in local knowledge, in stories passed down, and in a shared understanding of what it means to be a cowboy in Wyoming.

And now, that story has a place here at home.

Opening April 27, the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame exhibit will become a permanent fixture at the Rockpile Museum, connecting our local history to a statewide legacy of grit, resilience, and quiet dedication.

For me, this one feels personal.

I come from that generation. Not the one that built the mines, but the one before it. The one that worked cattle, that measured time by seasons instead of schedules, that understood land not as a resource, but as something you belonged to just as much as it belonged to you.

Those stories do not always make it into history books. They live in families. In photographs tucked into boxes. In the way someone still says a name, or remembers a brand, or points out a stretch of land and says, “that’s where…”

What the Hall of Fame does is take those stories and say they matter. That this work, this life, this way of being, is worth remembering.

Because it is easy, especially in a place that has grown and changed as quickly as Campbell County, to forget what came before. But the truth is, everything we are today was built on the backs of those who came first.

Before the energy. Before the expansion.

There were cowboys.

And now, their stories have a home here too.

– Tara Stoneking , Business Manager | RMA

tara.stoneking@rockpileassociation.org