USGS photo.ĭuring his first year in Laramie, Nye took a position with J.H. īill Nye arrived in Laramie in 1876 to find an industrial town with a steel mill, stockyards, slaughterhouse, glass-blowing plant, plaster mill, brewery and, shown here, the roundhouse and machine shops of the Union Pacific Railroad. Hayford in Laramie, where Nye stepped off the train in late spring 1876 with 35 cents in his pocket. Nonetheless, a freelance article he wrote for the Chicago Times led a family friend to recommend him to a Cheyenne businessman who in turn referred him to J.H. He tried newspapering as well but could only find temporary work. Successful at neither, he tried the law-“Every boy who wore a big hat and got tired easily with manual toil,” he said, “was set aside for the ministry or the law”-but he never passed the bar in Wisconsin. Instead, he tried working as a miller, then as a schoolteacher. He enjoyed writing plays, instigating pranks and playing hooky from school, but he disliked farming. The soil was rocky, Nye later explained, and the farms so upright and steep “they could be cultivated on both sides.” Nye accompanied his family two years later to what would become Hudson, Wis., where as he grew up they led a rural, humble life. Nye was born in 1850 in Maine, where his parents found farming difficult. “Ideas rose from his mind like bubbles from champagne,” Nye’s son Frank later observed, but Wisconsin was too conservative for Nye. As he later said, “I can write up things that never occurred with a masterly and graphic hand.” But when he first arrived in Laramie from Wisconsin, his talents were neither well developed nor well known, although that soon changed. Its editor could be found by coming “up the stairs,” Nye said, “or you could twist the tail of the iron gray mule and take the elevator.” Originally housed in a shoe store, the paper soon moved to the more expansive loft of a livery stable. Indeed, the mule and the paper were in close association early on. “His mule, his mine, his newspaper, his book, all bore the trademark.” He named the paper for his mule because of what he described as the “eccentricity of his orbit.” As Nye’s son Frank said, something about the word “boomerang” piqued Nye’s imagination. Frontispiece from his book, Baled Hay.īill Nye, more formally known as Edgar Wilson Nye, was the first editor of the Laramie Boomerang. īill Nye established a reputation for an exceptionally bald head and an understated, self-deprecating sense of humor while editing the Laramie Boomerang in the early 1880s. In fact, the newspaper and its name were established by a man who resided in the state less than seven years but was, at one time, considered “Wyoming’s most celebrated citizen” and remains one of the state’s most famous historical figures. Go to the newspaper’s home page on the web, and you will find: “ Laramie Boomerang: Laramie’s Voice Since 1881.” But the page provides little else about the paper’s origins or those of its name. ![]() Few Wyoming newspapers have names as arresting as Laramie’s.
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