Grace Raymond Hebard

SALLY ANN SHURMUR

307-266-0520, sallyann.shurmur@trib.com

Modern-day life is filled with sentiments extolling the multi-tasking prowess of women as nurturers, caregivers, professionals, meal fixers and most recently — home-school-teaching overseers.

Grace Raymond Hebard (1861-1936) was a Wyoming pioneer, especially in terms of multi-tasking.

She came to Wyoming in 1882 as a brand-new college graduate from the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she was the only woman studying engineering and a member of Pi Beta Phi Fraternity. Her engineering studies focused on surveying and mechanical drawing.

Along with her mother and siblings, the family settled in Cheyenne, where Hebard had been o ered a job working for the United States Surveyor General’s o ce, which then was surveying and mapping the Wyoming Territory.

She worked in the o ce for $100 a month and took correspondence courses from her alma mater to earn a master of arts degree in 1885.

Through acquaintances with political influencers Edward C. David and Joseph M. Carey, Hebard, then 30, received an appointment to the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees in January 1891. That appointment was the beginning of a 45-year employment at UW, which lasted until her death.

Although she was not the first woman appointed to the board, she soon began to acquire power and influence, according to historians, when she was made the board’s paid secretary. With six of nine board members living outside Laramie (and before the now-normal Zoom meetings), she and the two other Laramie board members made up the executive committee and had oversight of day-to-day operations at the school.

In 1898, the trustees considered hiring Hebard as UW president, but she declined. That same year, she took and passed the Wyoming State Bar exam, and although she never practiced law, she was the first woman in Wyoming admitted to the bar.

Hebard again took correspondence courses and received a doctorate in political economy from Illinois Wesleyan University. In 1894, Hebard started the first library at the University of Wyoming with a sack of books she found in

A Wyoming Renaissance WOMAN

Grace Hebard was engineer, teacher, lawyer and historian

COURTESY, AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING Grace Raymond Hebard was a multi-tasking pioneer Wyoming woman, taking on education administration, engineering, passing the bar, writing five history books and marking pioneer trails.

a small, locked room at the university. In 1908, she was appointed the university’s first librarian, a post she held until 1919. The cataloged collection had grown to 42,000 volumes by the end of her tenure.

She began her formal teaching career when she received an appointment in 1906 as the university’s head of the Department of Political Economy.

In addition to the administrative, library and teaching duties, Hebard would write five volumes of Western history through the years, and it was as an author that she would receive the most criticism, especially in the decades following her death.

Her five books included “The Government of Wyoming,” (1904); “The Pathbreakers from River to Ocean,” (1911); “The Bozeman Trail,” (1922), co-authored with E.A. Brinninstool; “Washakie,” (1930), and “Sacajawea,” (1933).

It is the last work that has caused the most eyebrow-raising in the seven decades since Hebard’s passing.

Historians note that Hebard was a tireless researcher, but the trouble was that the facts she uncovered often did not match her romanticized or pre-determined versions of history.

Hebard insisted in her writings that Sacajawea lived to about 100 and was buried on the Wind River Reservation. Most scholars agree that there is much stronger documentation to show that the young Shoshone interpreter for Lewis and Clark died in 1812 at Fort Manuel Lisa in what is now North Dakota.

Another posthumous problem for Hebard’s credibility is of the role Esther Hobart Morris played in Wyoming’s su rage movement. Hebard subscribed to the story that Morris and two candidates for the territorial legislature met, with Morris obtaining a promise that whichever of the men was elected to the legislature, he would introduce a bill supporting su rage for women in Wyoming.

Hebard described Morris as “The Mother of Woman Su rage” and found a South Pass City resident (where Morris was justice of the peace) to corroborate her story. Historians say at no time in her life did Morris ever claim to have anything to do with the introduction or passage of the su rage bill duction or passage of the su rage bill in Wyoming. in Wyoming.

Hebard never married, although some describe her longtime roommate and UW professor Agnes Wergeland as her partner. Hebard died in Laramie in October 1936. A campus-wide memorial service was held for her on December 7, 1936, with speakers including U.S. Senator Robert Carey, university president A.G. Crane and author Agnes Wright Spring, among others.

Her research on the history of Wyoming, the West, emigrant trails and Native Americans became the nucleus for what is known today as the American Heritage Center on the University of Wyoming campus. O cially established in 1945, the center now holds over 90,000 cubic feet of historic documents and artifacts in more than 3,500 collections — making the AHC among the largest non-governmental archives in the nation.

Hebard’s papers currently reside in the Coe Library addition, completed in 2009.

Hebard was an engineer, administrator, librarian, professor, lawyer, researcher, su ragette and historian. While not a native, she is just one of more than a century of women whose curiosity was spurred by a deep romanticism for this wild, untamed place called Wyoming.

(This story is based on information from WyoHistory.org, Mike Mackey, University of Wyoming American Heritage Center and Wikipedia. The writer thanks them for help with this project.)