History of the Wyoming State Flag: The Story Behind the Bucking Horse and Rider

Most state flags follow a predictable pattern — a coat of arms or seal floating on a solid-color field. Wyoming state flag does something entirely different, and it's been doing it since 1917. A white bison silhouette dominates the center of a deep navy field, and on the bison's body sits the Wyoming state seal — a deliberate nod to the western tradition of cattle branding. It's a design that immediately tells you exactly where you are. This is its story.

Wyoming Territory: The Foundation of a Future Flag

To understand the Wyoming state flag, you have to start with what made Wyoming different from every other territory in the country — and with a single decision made in 1869 that would define the state's identity for the next 150 years.

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On December 10, 1869, the Wyoming territorial legislature granted women the right to vote. It was the first government in the United States — and one of the first in the world — to do so. The following year, Wyoming seated the first female jury in U.S. history. In 1870, Esther Hobart Morris became the first female justice of the peace in the country. When Wyoming applied for statehood in 1890, it came with a declaration that has since become famous: Wyoming would remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without women's suffrage.

Congress admitted Wyoming as the 44th state on July 10, 1890. The nickname followed almost immediately: the Equality State. That word — equality — would eventually appear on the state seal, and through the seal, on the flag itself. It wasn't marketing. It was a statement of what Wyoming had actually done.

1916: The Design Competition That Created the Flag

Wyoming became a state in 1890 but went without an official state flag for more than two decades. That changed in 1916, when the Wyoming chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution organized a public design competition. Thirty-seven entries were submitted from across the state.

The winning design came from Verna Keays of Buffalo, Wyoming — an artist who had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago. Her concept was immediately distinctive: a deep navy blue field bordered by a thin white stripe and a wider red stripe on the outside, with the Wyoming state seal placed on a white bison silhouette at the center. No other state flag had done anything quite like it. Rather than floating the seal directly on the flag's field as most states do, Keays put it on an animal — specifically, on the animal that had once defined the Great Plains.

The Wyoming legislature officially adopted the flag on January 31, 1917, when Governor Robert D. Carey signed the bill into law. There was one detail to resolve first. In Keays's original design, the bison faced the fly — away from the flag's staff. Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard, state regent for the DAR at the time, felt strongly the bison should face the hoist. The first flags were printed facing the staff, and while the Wyoming legislature never formally approved this change in statute, all Wyoming flags have been printed that way since.

Wyoming State Flag: A Timeline

The Bison: Why It Dominates the Flag

The American bison was once the most abundant large land animal in North America, with herds numbering in the tens of millions across the Great Plains. By the late 1800s, commercial hunting had reduced that population to fewer than 1,000 animals — one of the most dramatic wildlife collapses in recorded history. The bison on the Wyoming flag carries this full weight of meaning: it represents the Great Plains as they once were, and Wyoming's role in protecting what remained.

Yellowstone National Park — established in 1872 and largely within Wyoming's borders — provided critical protected habitat for one of the last wild bison herds in the country. The Yellowstone bison herd today is descended directly from those survivors, making Wyoming's bison symbol not just historically meaningful but ecologically significant.

The 1919 state pamphlet distributed to Wyoming schoolchildren put it plainly: the bison was once "monarch of the plains," and the seal sits on it to represent the western custom of branding. It's a design idea that works on multiple levels simultaneously — civic identity carried on natural heritage, the legal and the wild unified in a single image. That's why the Wyoming flag looks unlike any other state flag, and why it has endured without modification for more than a century.

The Wyoming State Seal: What Every Element Means

The state seal placed on the bison is dense with symbolism. Each element was chosen to represent a different facet of Wyoming's identity, history, and values. The seal was originally adopted in 1893 and revised in 1921.

The Colors of the Wyoming Flag and What They Mean

The official meaning of the flag's colors was documented in the 1919 state pamphlet — making it one of the more thoroughly explained state flag color schemes in the country. The colors also deliberately match the red, white, and blue of the U.S. national flag.

Verna Keays: The Woman Who Designed an Enduring Flag

It's worth pausing on the designer herself. Verna Keays was a young artist from Buffalo, Wyoming who had trained at the Art Institute of Chicago. She entered the DAR competition in 1916 alongside 36 other Wyomingites and won with a design that has now outlasted every person who voted to adopt it.

Her central creative decision — putting the state seal on a bison rather than directly on the flag's field — was not the obvious choice. Most state flags of the era simply placed a seal or coat of arms on a colored background. Keays chose to make the bison itself the canvas, creating a layered image that worked visually at a distance (a bold white silhouette on navy) and rewarded closer inspection (the full detail of the state seal on the bison's body).

There's an irony worth noting: Keays designed a flag celebrated for its boldness, then lost a small dispute about which way the bison should face. She had always intended it to face away from the staff — symbolizing, as she saw it, the bison's historical freedom to roam the plains. Grace Raymond Hebard overruled her. The legislature never formally voted on it. Every Wyoming flag printed since 1917 has had the bison facing the staff — a detail the original designer never agreed with, and one the state statutes still do not formally specify.

How the Wyoming Flag Is Regarded Today

The Wyoming state flag is consistently regarded as one of the stronger state flag designs in America. In the 2001 North American Vexillological Association survey of U.S. and Canadian flags, Wyoming ranked 23rd out of 72 — respectable, though flag enthusiasts frequently argue the design deserves higher recognition for its genuine originality.

Flag design professionals frequently cite Wyoming's flag for the quality of its central concept: a bold, recognizable silhouette that reads clearly at a distance, carrying a seal that rewards closer examination. It avoids the most common state flag failure — an overcrowded seal crammed onto a plain colored field — and replaces it with something that has actual visual logic. The bison isn't decorative. It's doing work.

For Wyoming residents, the flag carries meaning beyond aesthetics. It tells the story of a state that did something no government in the country had done before — and put that achievement directly on the seal that sits at the center of the flag. The Equality State flag doesn't just represent Wyoming. It makes an argument about what Wyoming is.

Wyoming State Flag History FAQ