Today in 1890, Wyoming became the 44th state in the Union.
Wyoming’s license plates are fitting for a place sometimes called the Cowboy State: there’s a silhouette of a person, with cowboy hat in hand, riding a bucking horse.
And the story of which horse and which rider inspired that silhouette is a bit of a bumpy ride.
The image of the bucking bronco starts during World War I.
American officers held a design contest for regimental logos and emblems, and Staff Sgt. George Ostrom, a company bugler from Wyoming, won the contest with his image of a cowboy riding a bucking horse.
Ostrom based his drawing on his own horse, Redwing, which he had apparently smuggled from Wyoming to France during the war?!?
(Also, Ostrom would later carry around pieces of chalk so that he could draw the original bucking bronco for people who bought him a drink.)
A few years later, the University of Wyoming designed a bucking horse and rider for its team uniforms.
But that image was inspired by a then-well-known photo of a cowboy named Guy Holt riding the notoriously prickly (and therefore completely beloved) horse Steamboat.
The horse was so famous that newspapers wrote obituaries about him at the end of his life, so it wasn’t a surprise that Steamboat would inspire a logo.
In 1935, Wyoming’s Secretary of State approved a design for a license plate featuring – of course – a rider and a bucking bronco.
This image came from artist Allen True, and while he apparently wasn’t trying to draw a specific rider or horse, the Secretary claimed he had someone in mind when he approved the logo: stunt rider Albert Farlow, known as “Stub.”
He sometimes rode a horse called Deadman, so his name gets thrown into the story of the license plate sometimes, even if neither he nor Steamboat nor Redwing was the actual model for the logo.
But they’re all part of Wyoming’s story now, even if they didn’t inspire each other, and even if it was just a case of a bunch of great minds thinking alike.
Starting tomorrow, it’s the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix.
This is known as the biggest vintage street race in the US, with some very old school rides taking part in some very exciting races over the 10 days of the event.
And those races raise money for charity.
Wyoming’s Long-lived Bucking Horse (Wyoming History)
