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Abstract
Development thinking, also known as boosterism, was a driving force of Western industrial and environmental development from the mid-nineteenth until late twentieth century. In Wyoming, development in the fields of irrigated agriculture, coal mining, and oil extraction has been strong since the region’s territorial age. From 1862 until 1979, boosterism promoting the state’s land and mineral energy resources motivated a closer relationship between Wyoming politicians and business owners and prioritized the promotion of industrial development over social development. When it comes to irrigation and land sale promotion, acts such as the Homestead Act (1862), the Carey Act (1892), and the Newlands Reclamation Act (1902) tasked westward immigrating Americans to settle into farming communities; however, promotional material failed to explain these community focused goals, and the promises made by booster pamphlets often led to distrust of federal government projects and failures of those experiments. Coal mining communities, on the other hand, created diverse and thriving social spaces without much influence from the federal government’s social and environmental development acts. Support from the Socialist Labor Movement in the late nineteenth century was especially helpful in this change. With the early twentieth century international transition to prioritizing petroleum products, Wyoming’s oil fields became a priority for national security. Legislation and promotional material geared toward investing in oil production transformed boosterism to include means by which to support ideas of American patriotism and strong foreign policy. Wyoming’s story of boosterism and industrial development provides a lens through which to view development in the West.
