I'm just back from an assignment in Yellowstone National Park and have finally sorted all the gear, cleaned the tent, and caught up on (some) sleep. In organizing my immediate notes and preliminary research, I scrolled through historical photo databases for public domain materials: one search-friendly, one not-so-friendly.

Those were pretty distractions from what I needed, which was audio. The National Park Service has a sound library that also connects with a larger sonic atlas. 

The intersection of it all is a super cool project I came across from Wyoming Public Media called "Archives On The Air." Each minute-long segment highlights material from the University of Wyoming's American Heritage Center. That led me to episode 309 and the first female governor of any state in the U.S.

I remembered that western states had advanced equal voting rights because I'm a fan of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress years before the 19th Amendment. Montana sent Rankin to DC and had granted voting rights to everyone in 1914, but women in Wyoming had been voting for generations.

As a territory, Wyoming approved universal suffrage in 1869, and in 1890, it became the only state where women could vote. Nellie Tayloe Ross was elected as governor in 1924. Some of her digitized papers cover her term and her two-decade stint as director of the U.S. Mint, starting in 1933.

There's video in the archives! A moving snippet of one "little glorious life in the sun."