True west: from Cheyenne to Cody, the frontier's heart beats strong in Wyoming - includes related articles on Wyoming travel planner and Jackson Hole

Sunset, June, 1999 by Peter Fish

It is a fiercely rectangular state, as if mapmakers understood the wildness at its heart and sought to corral it.

It is outsize, but so sparsely populated the decades-old analysis of writer Struthers Butt rings true today: "Wyoming is more of a secret society than a state, where everyone knows everyone else, at least by reputation, and there is a special handshake and an implicit acknowledgment."

Historians will tell you that Wyoming has traditionally served as a thoroughfare, not a destination. Even today, too many travelers simply shoot along Interstate 80, never knowing what they are missing.

Its best-known attractions, Yellowstone National Park and Jackson Hole, are wedged far up in its northwest corner. But this story is mainly about the rest of Wyoming. These remaining square miles contain something special: high mountains and loping valleys. towns whose names - Cheyenne, Laramie, Cody - still echo with the frontier. In these places you can still discover something that is harder to find than we might want it to be. Call it a sense of spaciousness, of independence. Call it the soul of the West.

WRONG NUMBERS AND RODEO QUEENS Cheyenne, Laramie, Saratoga

The rodeo queens have paraded out on their palominos, spotlighted visions with sateen blouses and hot-curled hair. The announcer's baritone elbows through the air. "The bull riding is about to begin." The chute opens, the bull breaks loose - a ton or so of angry muscle with a cowboy temporarily attached.

Welcome to Cheyenne Frontier Days, the ridin' and ropin' extravaganza that proclaims itself the Daddy of 'Em All, rodeo-wise. Founded in 1897, Frontier Days is likely the only venue in the world where a bullrider can garner thousands of dollars while spectators tuck into turkey drumsticks bulky enough to satisfy Fred Flintstone.

Too soon the cowboy is bucked into the dust. "Well," the announcer says, "we've seen some bad luck today but also some good luck."

Cheyenne, too, has seen bad luck and good luck. It is Wyoming's capital, the state's oldest city and its largest. It began as a railroad town, and Capitol Avenue still reveals, baldly, a traditional axis of Western power: the state capitol building stands at one end, the Union Pacific depot at the other.

Walk Capitol and you encounter a city that has changed far less than Rocky Mountain boomtowns like Denver and Salt Lake City. "Really, what's most notable is what hasn't changed," says Al Wiederspahn, a lawyer active in restoring some of downtown's fine turn-of-the-century office buildings. "We still have a small-town feel."

True. For now. Cheyenne can look a couple of hours south and see what might be in store for it in the energetic sprawl of Colorado's Front Range. Some Wyoming residents yearn for that kind of growth. They've grown tired of articles in the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, articles that condemn Wyoming for being insular, not business-minded. Others just as fervently dread Cheyenne turning into Denver. "The greatest mystery is how Wyoming has managed to avoid the influx," says Wiederspahn. "I'm not sure why that is. Wyoming has a lot of wonderful places."

That it does. An hour to the west is one of them, Laramie, home to the University of Wyoming. There is an aura to Rocky Mountain college towns - to places like Missoula and Bozeman and this one - that is both exhilarating and comforting. On residential streets near campus, cottonwoods' thick roots buckle the sidewalks, and wide-porched mansions are turned over to fraternities. Life, these towns seem to promise, can be very good when you're 19. But Laramie has attractions uniquely its own - for one, the nation's most felicitously christened newspaper, the Laramie Daily Boomerang, which 19th-century humorist Bill Nye named for his mule.

The word boomerang is fitting: people have a way of spinning back to Laramie. A former Boomerang reporter, Elizabeth Jennings, now is an editor for the university's geology and geophysics department. She has considered other places to live, but here she remains. "The more I travel, the more I like Wyoming. This is a wonderful place for me to lay my head at night," she says.

From Laramie you could head west on I-80. You shouldn't. Instead, follow State 130 as it curves through the little town of Centennial and crosses the astoundingly beautiful Snowy Range Pass. Then follow the highway west down the mountains to Saratoga.

As its name hints, Saratoga possesses mineral hot springs and once harbored hopes of rivaling the New York spa. That didn't happen. But at the restored Saratoga Inn Resort, Hot Springs Spa, you can soak, play a round of golf, or plot a fly-fishing trip on the North Platte River. A couple of blocks away, the century-old Hotel Wolf has been nicely spruced up as well.

Across the West, similar combinations of history and scenery have proved to be both profitable and disruptive. In this area, too, ranches have been sold to wealthy newcomers; the Saratoga airport receives more Learjets than you would probably expect.