Wyoming

Settlement & growth (pre-1960)

Long before European contact, Wyoming was home to several Native American nations, including the Shoshone, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota, and Ute. These tribes followed the vast bison herds across the plains and through the mountain valleys, with seasonal camps near what are now Fort Washakie on the Wind River Reservation and Yellowstone National Park. The Shoshone and Arapaho were forcibly confined to the Wind River Indian Reservation in the 1870s, where their descendants remain today as the state's only federally recognized reservation, home to roughly 11,000 enrolled members.

The first non-Native presence in Wyoming was that of fur trappers and mountain men in the early 1800s, who established trading posts along the Green River and North Platte River. The Oregon Trail, Mormon Trail, and California Gold Rush brought the first major wave of American settlers through Wyoming in the 1840s and 1850s, though most were passing through to destinations farther west. Permanent settlement began in earnest with the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1867–1868, which created the towns of Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, and Evanston as railroad division points. These towns attracted a mix of Irish and Chinese railroad laborers, with the Chinese population—numbering several hundred—forming small enclaves in Cheyenne and Evanston before anti-Chinese sentiment drove most out by the 1880s.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the arrival of European immigrants drawn to coal mining, ranching, and farming. Rock Springs and Kemmerer became coal-mining boomtowns, attracting Welsh, English, Scottish, Italian, Finnish, and Slavic miners. Rock Springs in particular had a famously diverse early population, with dozens of nationalities represented in its mines. The Homestead Act and later the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 brought dryland farmers from the Great Plains and the Midwest, many of them of German and Scandinavian descent, to the eastern and central parts of the state. Towns like Torrington, Wheatland, and Powell were founded during this agricultural expansion, with Powell created specifically by the Bureau of Reclamation's Shoshone Project in the 1910s, which irrigated the Big Horn Basin and attracted farmers from across the country.

The oil booms of the 1910s through the 1950s brought another wave of domestic migrants to Wyoming, particularly to Casper, which became the state's oil capital, and to Gillette, which would later boom with coal and coal-bed methane. These workers were overwhelmingly white and native-born, drawn from the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s sent some displaced farmers from Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle into Wyoming, though in smaller numbers than to California. By 1960, Wyoming's population had reached 330,000, and the state was 97% white, with the largest minority group being Native Americans at roughly 2%.

Modern era (post-1965)

The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, which reshaped U.S. immigration nationwide, had a relatively muted effect on Wyoming compared to coastal states. The state's foreign-born population remains the lowest in the nation at just 2.0%, and the immigrant communities that have arrived since 1965 are small and dispersed. The most notable post-1965 immigrant group is Hispanic, primarily from Mexico and Central America, who came to work in the state's agricultural sector—especially sugar beet farming in the Big Horn Basin and cattle ranching statewide—and in the energy industry. Worland and Lovell in the Big Horn Basin have visible Hispanic communities, as does Jackson, where the resort economy has drawn a mix of seasonal workers from Latin America and, more recently, from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia on temporary work visas.

Domestic migration has been a more significant driver of demographic change than immigration. The energy booms of the 1970s and 2000s brought thousands of workers from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and the Upper Midwest to Gillette, Rock Springs, and Wright, creating boom-and-bust cycles that have made Wyoming's population growth volatile. The 1970s oil crisis triggered a population surge that pushed the state past 500,000 by 1980, followed by a bust in the mid-1980s that caused net out-migration. The coal-bed methane boom of the 2000s brought another wave to the Powder River Basin, with Gillette's population nearly doubling between 2000 and 2010 before the coal downturn of the 2010s slowed growth again.

Suburbanization in Wyoming has been limited by the state's low population and lack of major metropolitan areas. The largest urban corridor is the Front Range of Colorado, which has drawn some Wyoming residents to commute from Cheyenne to jobs in Fort Collins and Denver, making Cheyenne a de facto exurb of the Denver metro area. Teton County, home to Jackson and Grand Teton National Park, has seen an influx of wealthy out-of-state buyers and second-home owners, driving up housing prices and creating a stark economic divide between service workers and affluent newcomers. The Asian population (East and Southeast Asian) remains tiny at 0.6%, concentrated in university-related roles at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and in the hospitality workforce in Jackson. The Indian-subcontinent population is even smaller at 0.2%, with a handful of professionals in healthcare and technology in Cheyenne and Laramie. The Black population, at 0.8%, is largely tied to military and energy-industry families, with small clusters near F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne.