Flag of Wyoming

How to read it

The flag is set by Wyoming Statutes § 8-3-102. It is seven-tenths as high as it is long. The outer border is red, one-twentieth of the flag’s length wide, with a white stripe inside it one-fortieth of the length wide on all four sides. The rest is a blue field with a white silhouetted bison (the law says “buffalo”) half as long as the field, and on its ribs the great seal of Wyoming in blue, its diameter one-fifth of the flag’s length. A gold cord with gold tassels is attached, and the red, white and blue are those of the US flag. The State of Wyoming says the flag was designed by Verna Keays of Buffalo, later Mrs. A. C. Keyes of Casper, and adopted by the fourteenth legislature on 31 January 1917.

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Which way the bison faces

The law doesn’t say. WyoHistory.org, the Wyoming State Historical Society’s encyclopedia, says Keays drew her bison looking out, away from the pole, and that Grace Raymond Hebard, the Daughters of the American Revolution state regent who ran the 1916 competition, insisted it face the staff. Keays wrote in 1949: “When the first flags were made Dr. Hebard insisted the bison be turned toward the staff.” By the 1940s the bison facing the pole was the standard design.

The 1916 competition

The DAR offered a $20 prize, advertised from September 1916, and chose Keays’s design. Hebard wrote the technical description that became the statute, and Senator William W. Daley of Carbon County sponsored the bill. WyoHistory.org says Governor John B. Kendrick signed it at 1:27 p.m. on 31 January 1917, and that Hebard presented a flag to Governor Robert D. Carey on 15 February 1919. The Wyoming State Library’s centenary post names Carey as the governor who signed the bill; in WyoHistory.org’s account Carey is the governor who was given a flag two years later. The State Library gives the votes as 22 to 0 in the Senate and 53 to 1 in the House.

The seal on the bison

The great seal, § 8-3-101, shows a draped woman modelled on the Victory of the Louvre, with a broken chain at her wrists, holding a staff with a banner reading “Equal Rights”, now the state motto, which the law says suggests “the political position of woman in this state”. She stands on a pedestal bearing an eagle on a shield with a star and the number 44, Wyoming’s place in the order of statehood. Men either side stand for livestock and mining, and two pillars carry lamps for the light of knowledge, with scrolls reading Livestock and Grain, Mines and Oil. The dates 1869 and 1890 are the organization of the territory and statehood.