People living in the "Union Pacific" towns had access to fresh oysters in season as well as a wider variety of canned meats and vegetables. Every town of any size had a bakery and a restaurant. The railroad stops had modern hotels, most with quality restaurants on the bottom floors.

Even though there was a higher incidence of women in the railroad towns than away from the tracks, the society was geared toward men. In 1870,  men outnumbered women by a ratio of six to one. Many women stayed home caring for children although there were a number who operated businesses such as dress shops and curio stores. Prostitution was common in most towns in the territorial period although, by the 1880s when the "railroad towns" were maturing, brothels no longer operated in the main business districts. Few made any effort to ban prostitution, but in 1884, the legislation passed a law making those "keeping a bawdy house" subject to a misdemeanor. The effect was move houses of prostitution to an edge of town or into a "red-light" district so that "respectable women" would not have to encounter the denizens of the "demimonde."

Gambling went along with drinking in most Wyoming towns. "Casinos" provided a vast array of games of chance. Just as with alcohol, the territorial legislature passed laws to regulate gambling. One law made it illegal to play three-card monte on transcontinental trains passing through the territory.

Theatrical entertainment featured some of the most famous acts of the day because traveling thespians often passed through on the transcontinental train. Some reasoned that since they had to stay overnight somewhere on the continental trip, why not make extra money by performing in the town? Consequently, all of the towns along the Union Pacific built "opera houses."  Despite the name, vaudeville acts were more common than operas.

The more popular acts also were popular in the East. In essence, people recreated the culture from where they had come. Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth played Hamlet on stage at the Cheyenne Opera House in 1887. Sarah Bernhardt appeared their later the same year. P. T. Barnum’s circus played at several Wyoming towns en route to the West Coast in 1870. In July 1880, Barnum’s circus returned, again following the Union Pacific Railroad route with performances in several towns. Legendary beauty Lily Langtry performed at the Cheyenne Opera House in 1884, but she was in town primarily to visit her friend Moreton Frewen. Oscar Wilde made a brief appearance in Cheyenne  in 1882. The Fourth of July was the most universally celebrated holiday, but schools were the focal point for commemorating other occasions.

For the average worker, Wyoming was a very unstable place to live. The primary industries were mining, ranching, and the railroad. All three were subject to fluctuations of a "boom-and-bust" economy. Workers in all three industries were subject to dangers that could be life-threatening at worst or career-ending at best. Highest paid were machinists and other skilled workers employed at the various Union Pacific Railroad roundhouses and machine shops. Train engineers and conductors also earned good wages. Track repairmen and freight loaders—the unskilled workmen—fared much worse.

Similar pay scales separated ranch foremen from the itinerant cowboys who occupied the bottom rungs of the social and economic ladder.  With little money and poor educational backgrounds, cowboys were considered wage workers who were expected to provide hard physical labor in seeing that cattle were cared for. Work was irregular. Sometimes, workers were at a premium, but most of the time, many were forced to "ride the grub line"—move from ranch to ranch, ostensibly seeking work, but arriving in time for a free meal before returning to the road.

The job was hardly romantic and probably few considered themselves romantic Western figures or "independent" men on horseback. It was an existence and, for most of them, the only life they knew. In Wyoming, many cowboys came from agricultural backgrounds—sons of small farmers in the Midwest and border states. In the 1870s and 1880s, a number were Mexican-American or African-American.  Many communities disliked having cowboys in town because they were thought to be particularly violent, rough, and often drunk. Nonetheless, in territorial times, many of the "main street shoot-outs" were perpetrated by railroaders in the "Union Pacific towns."

Some of the more stable jobs were in government—federal, territorial or county. Every town tried to gain designation as county seat, location of a federal land office, or home to a territorial institution. Jobs in those facilities paid well and rarely went to anyone outside of the community. Because they were subject to federal government appointment, post office and land office appointees retained their jobs as long as the President who appointed them remained in office. These and other

"patronage jobs" went to party loyalists who knew their very jobs depended on helping elect fellow party candidates. Newspaper publishers were highly partisan, knowing that the chief source of revenue came, not from store advertising, but from the "legal advertising" that was awarded by local politicians to the paper working for the incumbent party.

The territorial House and Council were non-paying positions, beginning a still-existing tradition in Wyoming of a "citizen legislature." The territorial legislative sessions were authorized for 60 days every two years, but most sessions lasted fewer than 40 days. The lack of remuneration (except for per diem expenses) meant that few Wyoming working people could afford to take time off from work to serve. Even in territorial days, most legislators were ranchers, lawyers, or self-employed businessmen. There was a high turnover with only a handful of men serving more than one or two terms. Two Albany County legislators were exceptions—W. H. Holliday, a Democratic furniture/lumberyard owner, and Republican lawyer Stephen W. Downey. Holliday served one term in the House and five terms in the Council; Downey, three in the Council and two terms in the House.

Wyoming voters had a say in selecting only one territory-wide officer—the Delegate to Congress. Even that position had little stability with only the final delegate before statehood, Joseph M. Carey, serving more than two terms. (Carey had been the first territorial attorney and, later, an appointee to the Territorial Supreme Court). The first three men elected to the position each left the territory at the expiration of his term, one to Utah; the second, back home to Indiana; and the third, to Deadwood, S. D.

Local officials were elected by the population, but territorial officers were appointed in Washington. Consequently, few officials gained much trust or allegiance from local citizens who saw them as political hacks, appointed to pay off political favors and who had no regard for working in the interest of the territory.  Most of the territorial governors had not been to the territory prior to their appointments. Some had never before been West. Local people resented being governed by individuals they believed had no understanding of the west or Wyoming.

In 1885, Francis E. Warren, a mercantile store owner and former mayor of Cheyenne, became the first locally appointed territorial governor. He and the territorial delegate elected the following year,  Joseph M. Carey, became the two most powerful figures in Wyoming’s political history. They were to dominate the political stage at the beginning of statehood and determine the state’s political fortunes into the first 30 years of the state’s existence.  Both men were members of an organization that gained substantial power in the territorial period—the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association. Only the Union Pacific Railroad exercised similar influence over the territory’s politics.

Laramie women made history in March of 1870 when five of them became the first women in the world to serve on a jury. The first name drawn for jury duty that spring, less than six months after Wyoming’s first territorial legislature granted women equal political rights, was Eliza Stewart, a Laramie schoolteacher.

While her "first" makes her noteworthy in history, her many other accomplishments seem lost to contemporary historians. Born Sept. 8, 1833, in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, Stewart was the eldest of eight children. Her maternal grandparents came from Scotland about 1797, settling in Pennsylvania. Her father was Scots Irish. Her mother died soon after the birth of the last child. Stewart took on the role of raising her seven younger siblings.

Despite the hardships involved in this endeavor, she continued to attend school—and excel. She graduated in 1861 from Washington Female Seminary in Washington, Pa., as class valedictorian. Her valedictory address, ten typed pages of rhymed verse titled "Entering Service," was published in the newspaper in Meadville, Pa.

For the next eight years, she taught school in her native Crawford County. For all appearances, she seemed likely to remain a single schoolteacher, close to her hometown. However, in December 1868, she decided to move West, arriving in Laramie just as the town was about to open its first public school. When it was learned she was a veteran teacher, she was hired—the first teacher in the Laramie public schools. First classes began in February 1869.

Later that summer, in August, 1869, the Rev. F. L. Arnold came to Laramie to organize the Presbyterian Church. Eliza Stewart was one of the charter members.

Shortly after that, she met Stephen Boyd, a machinist in the Union Pacific car repair shops who had come to Laramie before the first train arrived in 1868. Boyd, born in Canada, came to the United States and settled along the South Platte River near Denver before hiring on to the Union Pacific. They married in July 1870 in Cheyenne.

Before her marriage, however, Stewart received the call to serve on the jury. The jury apparently did a credible job and Stewart’s unique position as the first woman selected gained some local fame. Nonetheless, when jury service ended, Stewart returned to teaching.

She and her new husband moved to a house on Third Street, between Grand and Garfield where, in the backyard, a "good well" provided water for them and their neighbors.

Two months after her marriage, Eliza was named to the organizing committee for the Wyoming Literary and Library Association. She helped draft the constitution and became a charter member of the organization, one of the first in Wyoming to promote libraries and the arts. She also continued to write poetry.

She wrote one poem, titled "The Snow, the Beautiful Snow," during one of the hardest winters in early Laramie history—1871-72. In verse, it tells the story of how trains were snowbound for weeks and Christmas gifts did not arrive until March of

the following year. Pioneer stockman Ora Haley had to postpone his wedding because his bride could not get through to Laramie from Omaha because of the snowdrifts on the UP tracks. (The poem is held, along with other Boyd materials, in the collections of the Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne).

In August 1873, Eliza became the first woman in Wyoming (and probably the entire United States) to be nominated to run for the Territorial legislature. For unknown reasons, she declined nomination, withdrawing her name from the ballot. (Some 37 years later, Laramie resident Mary Bellamy became the first woman elected to the Wyoming legislature, none having served in that body during the territorial period).

Eliza Stewart Boyd retained an active interest in politics, however. Part of her interest came in her support for prohibition of liquor. In November 1883, she was a charter member of the newly organized Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Laramie, serving for many years as the organization’s secretary. In the Prohibition Party’s state convention in February 1888, she was selected as one of two Wyoming delegates to the party’s national convention, held that June in Indianapolis.

Meanwhile, her husband Stephen Boyd opened a "notions" shop and shoe store in downtown Laramie. Even though he is listed as owner, according to advertisements in the Laramie newspapers for the period, Eliza evidently managed the shop while Stephen apparently continued to work for the railroad. Among the items sold in the shop were "boots, shoes, and sewing machines."

She continued to play an active role in Laramie’s "society." In the winter of 1912, she read a paper at ceremonies opening Whiting School in Laramie, in honor of Miss Whiting, a long-time teacher and administrator. Three weeks later, Eliza Stewart Boyd slipped in a patch of ice in front of her home and broke her hip. Within a week, the 79-year-old pioneer died. She was survived by two of her three children (one died at the age of two months) and her husband who lived until 1917. One daughter, Bertha, never married. The other daughter Lillian Condit had one son, Elwyn Boyd Condit.

Eliza Stewart Boyd’s obituary noted her service as Laramie’s first schoolteacher and her service as the first woman on a jury in America. But it also listed her service in promoting women’s rights and Prohibition as well as her pioneering work in promoting literature and the arts in Laramie. Largely forgotten today except for her jury service, her life and career are examples of how women brought to Wyoming—and Laramie—not only lessons in moral rectitude, but an appreciation for the arts, books, and the humanities on the high plains of the frontier West.

Eliza Stewart Boyd is among the many women memorialized in the Women in the West Center, located on South Second Street, Laramie, just a couple of blocks from where Boyd spent much of her life.

"Wyoming stands at the front, she stands upon the summit of this pinnacle, in the progress of women. For 20 years the women of this territory have taken part with the men of the territory in its government and have exercised this right of suffrage equl with them, of the results of which we are all proud. No man has ever dared to say in the territory of Wyoming that woman suffrage is a failure. Ther has been no disturbance of the domestic relations, there has been no diminution of the social order, there has been no diminuation of the dignity which characterizes the exercise of the elective franchise; there has been on the contrary an improvement of the social order, better laws, better officials, a higher and better civilization. We stand today proud, proud of this great experiment….