Pioneer Settlement
In January 1900, Wyoming Governor DeForrest Richards and his Secretary of State, Fennimore Chatterton, approached Church President Lorenzo Snow asking that a colony be sent to the state’s Big Horn Basin. Once the feasibility of the colonization effort had been decided, more than 100 Mormon pioneer families again loaded their wagons with the supplies they would need and headed north.
Arriving in the Big Horn Basin, the Latter-day Saints began work on a 37-mile canal project designed to facilitate farming in the area following the relinquishment of land and water rights from William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. As work continued, the communities of Byron, Cowley and Lovell were surveyed and established some 40 miles northeast of where Cody, established near five years prior, now sits.
The settlement in the Big Horn Basin was the last colonization effort of the church.