Innovation in Wyoming goes back to the Native Americans perfecting the art of flintknapping rock and making practical things out of buffalo bones and hide.
The creativity of Wyoming and the people who live here has continued, with the Cowboy State responsible more than 4,000 patents filed by more than 3,000 inventors.
Those ideas have spanned the spectrum from building a new type of automobile to an automatic garage door opener to the Julian gallows, an innovative execution method that basically forced a subject to hang himself.
Those and other notable inventions make Wyoming an active state for invention and innovation, said Kylie McCormick, a historian at the Converse County Library.
Wyoming even has invented its own mythical creature, the jackalope.
Using the Wyoming State Library’s data base, McCormick dug into the various patents that have been filed in Wyoming. She found more than 4,000 them filed by more than 3,000 people.
“Filing for a patent is a really expensive process, and in most states less than a quarter of their patents are filed by individuals, they have an assignee with them, basically a company,” McCormick said.
As the assignee, the company pays for the patent and keeps it.
However, in Wyoming more than half of the patents have been filed by individual people, 55%, she said. McCormick said many of the Wyoming-based patents carry some great stories behind them.
The Ammo Belt
For example, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Anson Mills at Fort Bridger, then part of Utah Territory and later Wyoming, spent time thinking about how he and his men could better carry their ammunition.
It was 1867 and soldiers were equipped with cartridge boxes as part of their gear. He came up with the idea of the cartridge belt with individual and properly sized “cylindrical receptacles” — versions of which are still in use today.
“My metallic cartridge belt made as described is lighter than ordinary cartridge boxes in use, but the weight of the cartridges therein is equally distributed on all sides of the body, instead of being concentrated at a single point. By its pliability it yields and conforms also to every movement of body, so that there is no jar or concussion therefrom under any circumstances,” Mills wrote in his patent application.
The belt would be adopted by the U.S. Army.
Mills, a native of Texas, would go on to find investors and manufacture the belts. By the turn of the century and thanks to big contracts with Britain to supply troops for the Boer War, he became a wealthy man.
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Anson Mills was at Fort Bridger when he came up with the idea for a cartridge belt for soldiers to better carry ammunition. (Cowboy State Daily Staff) 
The first patent application from Wyoming was for a cartridge belt while innovator and officer Lt. Col. Anson Mills was stationed at Fort Bridger. (Wyoming State Library) 
The Juilian Gallows was invented in Wyoming and has been called one of the most brutal execution methods. (Cowboy State Daily Staff) 
Tom Horn stands in his jail cell. He was hanged in 1903 using the hydraulic gallows. (Wyoming State Archives) 
The body of Tom Horn is placed in a hearse following his hanging using the hydraulic gallows. (Wyoming State Archives)
Hydraulic Gallows
Another innovator McCormick points to is James P. Julian and his creation — the hydraulic or Julian Gallows.
Julian (also spelled Julien in some accounts) was a Cheyenne architect who was awarded the contract to build an addition to the U.S. penitentiary in Laramie, according to the Cheyenne Daily Leader on Aug. 3, 1887. His name can be found associated with other projects as well.
“When you look at the first person who hung on those gallows, it was a 15-year-old who murdered two people who were riding the rails, they were tramps on the railroad,” McCormick said.
The Cheyenne Daily Leader on Dec. 9, 1890, reported that Charlie Miller shot Ross Fishbough and Waldo Emerson in September that year in a box car near Sidney, Nebraska.
Before his hanging in April 1892, Miller escaped from the Laramie County Jail twice. On his second attempt with a Black ex-cavalry man and another prisoner charged with theft, they bound and gagged a deputy sheriff and walked out on a cold February day.
During the flight Miller suffered frostbite on his toes. Once Miller was captured, a doctor had to cut off all the toes off Miller’s right foot.
McCormick said the boy, then 16, had a lot of sympathy around him, so no one really wanted to trigger the trap door to hang him. Enter Julian’s innovation.
The Julian Gallows uses a bucket of water technique that would be emptied to spring the trap door.
When the person being hung stepped onto the trap door, his weight triggered a lever that would pull the plug from a water barrel.
That water would then fill a bucked attached to a block holding the trap door up. Once the bucket filled enough, its weight would pull out the block and trigger the trap door.
In essence, the person being hung was his own executioner by stepping onto the trap door.
“And so nobody is playing executioner. It really lifts that burden of guilt,” McCormick said about how it took the potential misgivings of the hangman from the equation.
The same device and technique were used in 1903 to kill infamous gunman Tom Horn and later nine other convicts at the Wyoming Frontier Prison in Rawlins until a gas chamber replaced it.
Gallows And Tom Horn
An article in the Wyoming Tribune on Nov. 19, 1903, described how the technique worked during Horn’s hanging.
The gallows had two upright posts and a crossbeam from which a rope was suspended, the newspaper reported.
The platform on which Horn stood consisted of two doors “hinged at the side and supported by a jointed timber, a weight and bucket of water balanced on a beam underneath.”
When Horn stepped on the trap, his weight caused a mechanism to pull the plug as make his hanging inevitable.
“Horn’s pinioned body dropped through the opening,” the reporter wrote.
Laramie’s Elmer Lovejoy made his own horseless carriage and would go on to patent garage door openers and associated trackage. (American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming) 
A drawing of a man pulling into his garage and the door opening device accompanies Elmer Lovejoy’s patent application. (Wyoming State Library) 
The electric garage door opener is a Wyoming invention. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily)
Car And Garage Door Opener
As wheeled technology replaced horses, a Wyoming bicycle mechanic, Elmer Lovejoy, designed a vehicle powered by a one-cylinder, two-cycle marine engine using chains to drive both rear wheels. He drove it around Laramie in 1898.
McCormick said he invented a new steering knuckle device in 1905, but did not have the $350 to patent it. So, he sold the rights for $800 and a car to the Locomobile Co.
Lovejoy would go on to develop practical ways to get vehicles in a garage by patenting an electric door opener in 1918 and then in 1921 patent a track method for ceiling-type doors with openers. Most garage doors today still use an overhead track.
“The object of my invention is to provide a novel track and door opener attachment for opening any door from vertical to horizontal, operating the door by power one way and gravity the other, and in which the power used to open the door may be manual or mechanical,” he wrote.
The drawing accompanying the patent application shows a man approaching a garage in a car.
Guns And Ammo
The state’s most prolific inventor was Jackson-based John D. Pedersen, who worked for Remington Arms, McCormick said. He obtained 69 patents.
Among his patents was one in 1910 intended to provide “an improved left-hand slide-action firearm, which is particularly adapted to high power ammunition.”
There were also patents on shells, safety devices and sights.
McCormick said she also found that rural innovation can be more than devices, they can be mythical creatures. She cites the famous Wyoming jackalope. She said the creature was first created in 1934 by Ralph and Doug Herrick, who as teens were studying taxidermy.
“While it has never held a patent, it’s held seven different trademarks, most of them by the Douglas Chamber of Commerce naming Douglas as the home of the Jackalope,” McCormick said.
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
