Homestead Families

Lorna Whisler tells the fascinating story of a small corner of northeastern Wyoming, centered on Rozet in the decades after cattle trails and railroads first reached the area at the end of the 1800s.  This is the story of the settler families and the communities they founded in a challenging landscape.  Life was not easy in Campbell County a hundred and more years ago.  Drought, blizzards, poverty, illness, and isolation took their toll, compounded by the local impacts of global events such as the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.  Despite everything, rural Campbell County’s communities persisted and prospered thanks to the stubborn strength, creative ingenuity, and hard work of its settler families.  Whisler’s book gives a fine-grained example of how the American West changed following the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the 1862 Homestead Act.  The U.S. government’s promise of free land—emptied of its aboriginal population—drew people from the eastern U.S. and far across the Atlantic with the promise of opportunity.  Some settlers found opportunity, others moved on, and Rozet remains a reminder and testament of how today’s rural Wyoming arose in the early 1900s.

This book will deepen your knowledge whether you live in Campbell County or it’s simply a place that holds some of your family’s past.  Whisler presents histories of a long list of family names that will be familiar if you have roots in Campbell County.  On one hand, many place names in the county commemorate its settlers, real people who shaped Wyoming’s landscape and society.  On the other hand, Rozet’s early families had to work, learn, play, and worship together to succeed.  Names your family might recognize today may be recognizable because of threshing bees, marriages, business ventures, or roundups that happened decades past.  Learning about Rozet’s past can teach you about your family’s past—as well as the broad processes of change that brought modern, rural Wyoming into being over a century ago.

– Chris Duvall