1931 - 1940

1931

Dora McGrath, Hot Springs County, is seated as Wyoming's first woman State Senator.
Governor Frank C. Emerson dies in office.
Passenger and mail service between Sheridan and Casper is launched by the Wyoming Air Service.

About 71 percent of the voters in Wyoming vote in general election for repeal of the prohibition law.

Casper-Alcova Reclamation Project is allocated $22,700,000.
Nellie Tayloe Ross is appointed Director of the U.S.Mint. The first woman to have this honor, she serves as director twenty years.
New Federal Building is completed in Cheyenne
Senator John B. Kendrick, age seventy-six,dies in office. His successor is Joseph C. O'Mahoney, assistant U.S. Postmaster General.
By proclamation, November 13, Governor Leslie A. Miller calls the Twenty-second State Legislature in Special Session, December 4-23, to consider a US Constitutional amendment repealing prohibition. By December, three-fourths of the states have ratified the Twenty-first Amendment.

Senator O'Mahoney is elected to full term in the U.S.Senate and serves from 1934-41.
Wyoming Air Service begins airmail route between Billings, Montana, and Cheyenne.
Taylor Grazing Act, allowing federal leasing of grazing land, ends the homestead era and establishes grazing districts for the sixteen million acres of federally owned land in Wyoming.
In landslide, Democrats win every state elective office and majority of seats in State Legislature.
Wyoming has nineteen Civilian Conservation Camps (C.C.C.) camps during the depression years of the 1930s.
Nellie Scott, whose mother was an unidentified foundling on the battlefield, begins her first elected term on the Arapaho Tribal Council. Mrs. Scott, the second woman to serve on a tribal council at Wind River, has the distinction of having appeared on both tribal rolls. She was dropped from the Shoshone because of a technicality and placed on the Arapaho by Chief Yellow Calf.

On February 19, Wyoming Day is designated as December 10 in recognition of the action of Wyoming Territorial Governor John A. Campbell, December 10, 1869, in approving the first law found any wherein legislative history which extends the right of suffrage to women.
A legislative act, February 18, enables the State of Wyoming to comply with the Taylor Grazing Act.
Wyoming has 2 percent sales tax.
State Highway Patrol is established.
Regulations relating to commercial motor vehicle traffic on Wyoming state highways are approved by legislature and enforced, March 1.
Lethal gas is made official method of capital punishment in Wyoming.
Department of Public Welfare is established.
Sixty-day divorce law is enacted.
State Planning Board is created to recommend and initiate orderly planned development, improvement,and extension of public and private works, including soil and water conservation,mineral resources, propagation and protection of game and fish,education, health and social services,improvement of transportation and recreational centers.
State Liquor Commission is created.
December 10, the state observes its first Wyoming Day.

Legislature appropriates $7,500 for oil portraits of Francis E. Warren, Joseph M. Carey, John B. Kendrick, Robert D. Carey and Clarence D. Clark, to hang in the State Capitol Building.
Aeronautics Commission is created.
Legislature makes Columbus Day, October 12, a public holiday.
Former Senator Robert D. Carey dies.
Justice Willis Van Devanter resigns from U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court and Library Building is completed and dedicated.
Social Security and Unemployment Insurance laws are enacted.
Old Fort Laramie is purchased by the Wyoming Landmark Commission.
University of Wyoming holds Semi-Centennial Celebration.
Communities over the state start providing trailer parks and special facilities for tourists with trailers.

Republicans regain political control of the state.
Fort Laramie becomes 74th National Monument.
Alcova Dam is completed.
A final judgment of $86,364,677, less offsets, is reached in the Eastern Shoshone case against the government for lands on which the Northern Arapahos settled sixty years ago. After cost of the suit and the government's non-treaty expenditures are deducted, the balance paid to the Shoshones is about four million dollars.The case clears title to the lands which the Arapahoes have occupied on a "temporary basis" since 1878, and the Arapahoes become co-owners of the Wind River Reservation.
Arapaho Chief Yellow Calf (George Caldwell) dies, December 15, at age seventy-six.

Wyoming's population is 250,742.
Wyoming celebrates Fiftieth Anniversary,and a commemorative stamp is issued. It displays a picture of the Great Seal of the State of Wyoming.
First radio station in Cheyenne, KYAN, begins broadcasting in October. It becomes defunct the following year.
KFBC radio station starts operation in Cheyenne, in December.