Wyoming's flag puts a white bison on a dark blue field inside white and red borders, and stamps the state seal on the animal's side like a brand on a steer. The design was the work of a 21-year-old art school graduate, chosen from a 37-entry contest with a 20 dollar prize, and it survives essentially unchanged from 1917. It also carries a quiet editorial dispute: the designer drew her bison walking toward the open fly of the flag, free on the plains, and the formidable woman who ran the contest turned it around to face the flagpole. The pole won.
A twenty dollar contest
The push for a Wyoming flag came from Grace Raymond Hebard, a woman with several careers running at once: cartographer, former deputy state engineer, University of Wyoming professor and trustee, and in 1916 the state regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution. That year the DAR announced an open competition for a state flag design, advertised in newspapers across Wyoming, with a prize of 20 dollars and a deadline of September 30, 1916.
Thirty-seven entries came in. The winner was Verna Keays of Buffalo, daughter of a local civic leader, who had returned home that July as Wyoming's first graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was not an amateur; she had already won a competition for the interior design of a Pullman dining car. Keays later said the flag design arrived complete when she woke suddenly one night, and she described it as close to divine inspiration. Her concept had a clean central idea: the bison of the northern plains, in white silhouette, carrying the Great Seal of Wyoming on its flank the way range cattle carry a brand.
Turning the bison around
Keays drew her bison facing the fly end of the flag, headed away from the staff, and she meant something by it: the animal looked out over the mountains and prairies of Wyoming, an emblem of the freedom with which the herds had once roamed. Hebard saw the drawing and objected. Her note on the design read, "not like this, head also wrong way," and she later remarked she would have had "forty-seven fits" if the bison had flown facing away from the staff. In heraldic convention, animals face the hoist; a beast facing the fly appears to be walking away from its own flag.
Hebard had the first flags manufactured with the bison reversed. Keays, recalling the episode in 1949, was matter-of-fact about the outcome: "When the first flags were made Dr. Hebard insisted the bison be turned toward the staff. It was Dr. Hebard's wish and it was done." The statute adopted in 1917 describes the bison but is silent on its direction, so the hoist-facing bison is pure custom, unbroken for over a century. Hebard also did the political work, circulating the design to educators and legislators, drafting the technical description for the bill, and buying flags to present to officials.
Adoption, to the minute
Senator William W. Daley of Carbon County carried the bill, and by his later account the Senate debate included each party proposing a different animal in place of the bison. The bison held. Governor John B. Kendrick signed the act on January 31, 1917, at 1:27 in the afternoon, a timestamp preserved in the record with unusual care. Wyoming became one of the wave of western states acquiring flags in the 1910s, and paid more attention than most to who had made it happen: the flag is a DAR project from start to finish, conceived, judged, revised, and lobbied into law by women, in the state that called itself the Equality State.
Reading the flag
An explanation of the design, published in a 1919 pamphlet distributed to Wyoming schoolchildren, assigns each element its meaning. The red border is for the Native peoples who lived on the land first, and for the blood of the pioneers who settled it. White is purity and uprightness; the blue of the field is the blue of Wyoming's skies and distant mountains, and stands for fidelity, justice, and virility. Together the three colors repeat the palette of the national flag. The bison is the monarch of the plains, and the seal on its side is the ranching West's mark of ownership, the custom of branding rendered in heraldry.
The seal itself is a dense little tableau. A draped woman stands on a pedestal holding a banner lettered "Equal Rights," commemorating Wyoming Territory's 1869 grant of women's suffrage, the first in the nation. Flanking her are two male figures representing the livestock and mining industries, and behind them two pillars topped by burning lamps for the light of knowledge. The flag's proportions are fixed by statute at 7:10, with the red border one twentieth of the flag's length, the white stripe one fortieth, the bison half the length of the blue field, and the seal one fifth the length of the flag. Design critics tend to split on the result: the bison silhouette is strong enough to read from a distance, while the seal on its flank dissolves into a smudge at flagpole range. Keays's original instinct, a bison and nothing else, was the bolder flag.
References
[1] "The Wyoming State Flag and the Women Who Made It Fly," WyoHistory.org, Wyoming State Historical Society. https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyoming-state-flag-and-women-who-made-it-fly
[2] "Flag of Wyoming," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Wyoming
[3] "100 Years Ago Today: Wyoming Flag Adopted," Wyoming State Library (2017). https://library.wyo.gov/100-years-ago-today-wyoming-flag-adopted/
[4] Wyoming Statutes § 8-3-102, state flag description.