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Just Who Did This Woman Think She Was: In Praise of Grace Raymond Hebard

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“You are – I say it without a qualm – our star contributing editor. You have given us the most of any one on our list – and all good too.” When the editor of The Woman Citizen, Virginia Roderick, wrote this to University of Wyoming Professor Grace Raymond Hebard in 1922, she could only speculate on the treasure trove of what would become 87 boxes, or 44.3 cubic feet, of archival material—Hebard’s life work.

Grace Raymond Hebard with University of Wyoming’s “Old Main” in the background. When Hebard arrived in 1891, it was called the “University Building” because it housed most of UW’s functions at the time. Hebard immediately became a powerful figure at the University and remained so during her more than 40 years there. Photo File: Hebard, Grace Raymond, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

For the last several years I have been finding and sharing the stories I discover in Hebard’s collection in communities across Wyoming. In 1922, the same year Roderick reached out to thank Hebard, two Wyoming towns elected women to serve as mayor and on their town councils. As a historian wanting to know more about their stories, I can’t help but to feel the same gratitude Roderick expressed to Hebard. Hebard wrote to the elected women to both congratulate them and ask for their motivations in seeking office. The lively correspondence between Hebard and Cokeville’s mayor, Ethel Stoner, contains Stoner’s account of her arrest on a charge of assault and battery. Using Hebard’s collection at the AHC as my starting point, I was able to publish an article on Ethel Stoner in February 2023 in WyoHistory.org.

In June 1922, Ethel Stoner was elected mayor of Cokeville with a temperance agenda.
Photo courtesy the Wyoming State Archives.

In Hebard’s papers, you can find questions she sent to another female mayor, Gertrude Kirby, who served in Moorcroft, Wyoming. Hebard sent these questions at the end of Kirby’s year in office.

  1. Why did you and your two women Councilmen run for office?
  2. Did you have some special measure that you expected to put through?
  3. Had the social conditions in Moorcroft been such that you felt that a woman as Mayor might bring about desired results?
  4. Did you have much campaigning to do to be elected?
  5. What was your vote and what vote against you?
  6. How did the town of Moorcroft and the other members of your Council treat the idea of a woman being Mayor?
  7. Were you able to put across your desired projects?
  8. Why did you not run for a second term of office?

You can read some of Gertrude Kirby’s responses to Hebard’s questionnaire in Hebard’s file on Moorcroft, which the AHC has digitized.

Since her death in 1936, Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard has had her credentials questioned, her integrity as a historian tarnished, and unflattering egotism assigned to her motivations. As a result, one of the women who helped to shape the character and build the educational infrastructure of Wyoming from territorial days into statehood, is largely unknown and forgotten across the state. Having only read the caricaturized version of her found in the secondary sources and then learning she changed the original design of the Wyoming State Flag, I first approached her archival records with the question, “Just who did this woman think she was?”

Grace Raymond Hebard holds up a state flag in July 1930. The design featuring a bison was adopted by the State of Wyoming in 1917. The bison in this version faces the viewer’s left—implying that it would fly facing the flagpole. The flag’s designer, Verna Keyes, wrote in 1949 to Wyoming State Historian Ellen Crowley that Hebard demanded that the bison face that direction “and it was done, and few questioned or crossed her.”
Photo File: Hebard, Grace Raymond, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

It turns out, Wyoming wouldn’t have our state flag without the Grace Raymond Hebard I have encountered so far. She was both a deeply patriotic woman and the first historian to argue that woman “suffrage came to Wyoming as a by-product of the Civil War.” She invested her own money in the preservation and memorialization of history across the state. In letters with one of the last living soldiers of the Wagon Box Fight, Hebard agreed to send money for his unpublished manuscript of the fight, first explaining that she would be personally purchasing it and not the state. According to her letter, the state had set aside $500 for two years work and that summer alone she had spent more than that “from my own pocketbook.” Thanks to Hebard’s efforts to gather testimony and her willingness to personally finance the work, three different survivors of the fight came to Wyoming to help locate the original site, which was then marked by the state.

Hebard didn’t just gather testimony of western expansion and territorial days from former U.S. soldiers—she also gathered testimony from the Shoshone nation, and she kept a record of the activities of women and their accomplishments. Her efforts to gather and preserve the early stories of our state from multiple, often underrepresented perspectives make her archival collection at the AHC the treasure trove that it is. I say thank you, Dr. Hebard, for all that you have given us historians today!

Post contributed by Kylie McCormick, owner of KLM Wyoming Historian and Assistant Editor of WyoHistory.org, a program of the Wyoming Historical Society.

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