Wyoming was the first state to allow women to vote and that's why the motto. I believe it had something to do with the scarcity of residents in the state, which is still our least populous. Wyoming was also the first state to have a woman governor.
Annie Proulx received an award that allowed her to spend time writing. She was able to choose what state she wanted to do the writing in. She chose Wyoming, and went to the Ucross Foundation, a ranch in the Big Horn Mountains that offers accommodations to writers. Of that experience came Close Range, Wyoming Stories and the rest, as they say, is history.
The irony of all this is that Wyoming, a state that values freedom of rights, individuality and privacy, is also a place where prejudice reigns sometimes. All that is changing, but much too slowly.
Another cruel irony is the tragic fact that Matthew Sheppard was beaten and left for dead, tied to a barbed wire fence, almost exactly a year after Brokeback Mountain was published, near Laramie, Wyoming, in a gay hate crime.