Flags of our mothers

Of the original six flags created for the State of Wyoming, two have hung in the Natrona County Library and Buffalo's Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum for more than 50 years.

But until this week, displaying those flags was illegal.

When Wyoming historian Kylie McCormick visited the county to give presentations on women's suffrage, she took a moment to discuss a particular bill from this year's legislative session. Thanks to her research, a single sentence has been added to a law from 1945 that makes it possible for the public to continue enjoying the original work of Verna Keays, the woman who designed Wyoming's state flag.

Designing the flag

Born in Buffalo, Keays went to a private high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and then attended the Art Institute of Chicago to earn a degree in design.

"She had just won a design contest for the railroad, designing the interior of one of their dining cars, when she returned home. Her father read in the newspaper that the Daughters of the American Revolution were hosting a contest to design the Wyoming state flag," McCormick says.

"That contest was the idea of a really incredible woman named Grace Raymond Hebard. She was a very patriotic woman, which is why she wanted Wyoming to have a state flag, and in all the records where she was saying why this was necessary, it was really that build-up to World War I. She wanted a little piece of home that the soldiers who were going to go fight in that war could carry with them."

Wyoming had at that point tried twice to claim its own flag.

"It's probably a good thing that those designs failed. They weren't too incredible," McCormick laughs.

The 27 entries to Hebard's contest were all anonymous. Keays' entry – the now-familiar bison and state seal – was chosen as the winner.

"What's really interesting was that the bison was designed to face away from the flagpole. If you look at a Wyoming state flag today, that bison is tethered to the flagpole, nose in the wind, but it was designed to face in the opposite direction," she says.

It was Hebard who preferred the bison facing the flagpole. When she ordered the first full-size flags for the men involved in establishing the state flag – Senator Daley of Carbon County, who introduced the bill, and Governor John Kendrick, who signed it into law – the bison faced in her preferred direction.

"Those are the earliest known flags that we have here in the state. The Daley flag is on display at the Carbon County Museum and the Kendrick flag I believe is in his collection at the American Heritage Center in Laramie," McCormick says.

Some of the flags Keays produced were particularly special, McCormick says. In 1925, Hebard wanted to produce one for the university, but it instead became a gift for Nellie Tayloe Ross, the nation's first female governor.

"She had Verna draw a state seal on it," she says. "She was very particular about it, she wanted all of the figures on it to look as attractive as possible."

Hebard felt that a "true artist" had never taken on the challenge of creating the Great Seal.

"Verna produced, in my opinion, one of the best-looking Great Seals that there are," McCormick says.

A gift for Keays

The flag was finished in January, 1926. The next year, Wyoming law was amended to say that the state historian was to purchase six flags to have on hand for government events and for the public to rent.

"Those original six flags purchased by the Wyoming state government from Verna have the seal that she drew in 1925 on them," McCormick says. "They remained state property until 1945. It's against the Wyoming Constitution to gift government property to private citizens so they couldn't just give her one of these flags," she says.

A bill was written to thank Keays for designing the flag and gift her one of the original six.

"During the ceremony, they actually gave her more than one, so we have two flags that have her Great Seal on them," she says.

Keays gave one of the flags to the Natrona County Library because Casper was where she spent most of her adult life and was where she drew the Great Seal. She gave the other to the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum in Buffalo, her place of birth and her home when she designed the flag.

But while her decision was both noble and understandable, "It was actually illegal," McCormick says.

"That original 1945 law was very explicit about the flag they had gifted her," she explains. "It was to remain in her home and her heirs' homes forever, never to be publicly displayed."

The reason for that decision is not clear.

"When I first read that, I was really, really surprised, because I thought I knew where these flags possibly were," she says. "I'm not sure why they did that, but it means that those flags have been illegally on display since the 1950s and 1970s."

Changing the law

Neither institution was interested in pursuing a change to the law for fear of losing the flags, she says, but McCormick felt it was important. She began asking around about the legalities and developed a relationship with Keays' granddaughter, who lives in Illinois.

"She was very generous with me and believes that the flags are where they belong, so we didn't need to worry about the heirs coming back and trying to sue," she says.

"Legal precedent really sides with institutions because of the preservation efforts they've done on those artifacts, but what could have happened was that it would revert back to being state property and those flags now technically would belong to the state museum and be in Cheyenne, a place Verna never lived, and where they also already have one of those original flags that they occasionally have on display."

The next step was achieved through a chain of personal connections. McCormick is the president of the Casper chapter of the League of Women Voters, through which she has become friends with long-time member Jim Brown, who happens to be in a coffee group with Senator Jim Anderson.

Soon enough, McCormick found herself sending information to the legislator. She watched anxiously to see what would happen and, "Was extremely pleased to see that 1945 law amended during this last budget session," she says.

McCormick is thrilled to see the law updated to reflect Keays' wishes, and also to honor a woman she believes should be one of Wyoming's most celebrated artists.

"I'm hopeful this will bring a little more awareness to Verna Keays and honor her," she says. "What an incredible gift: instead of keeping this piece of Wyoming history for herself and for her family, she gave back. I really admire her citizenship, that she was constantly giving back to our state."

A woman misunderstood

McCormick would also like to restore the reputation of Hebard, a woman she believes was an important part of Wyoming history and has been unfairly maligned.

"Sometimes, the people who know about her don't even really want to talk about her or celebrate her, but she really did quite a lot for our state. Her thumbprint is all over the State of Wyoming," she says.

"We don't have to agree with everything she did – we don't have to agree with her switching the direction of the bison on that flag – but we can really admire the fact she got it done."

Hebard's reasons for switching the bison's direction appear to have been aesthetic. The only record McCormick has that comes directly from Hebard herself is a letter to Keays that mentions she thinks it looks unbalanced and that she will have, "47 fits should it look as though the bison was going to wander off the plain of the flag."

"She was very strong, very opinionated, definitely," McCormick laughs. "We think that Verna accepted it because, at the time, the principal in Casper had also wanted to purchase a flag for his schools and he had requested that the bison face the pole because he wanted to hang it from the ceiling and he didn't want the bison's nose pointed down into the dirt."

A quirk of Wyoming's flag law allows the bison to face in either direction, so both women did get their way in the end.

It was while spending time researching at the Natrona County Library that McCormick came across the story of the flag and Hebard's decision to flip it around.

"I'd run into Hebard once before, when I was in graduate school and working on women office holders, and I really believed what the secondary sources were saying about her, in particular a man named T.A. Larson," she says.

Larson was the first man to serve as head of the history department at the University of Wyoming – before him, the position had been held exclusively by women. He took over from Hebard herself.

"He really launched quite a vitriolic campaign against Hebard and some of the history she had produced in Wyoming, particularly about Esther Morris," she says. Morris was the first woman Justice of the Peace in the United States, serving a nine-month term in South Pass City, Wyoming.

Larson – backed up by other historians – accused Hebard of being a suffragist and of shoe-horning Morris into that role, too. McCormick headed to the American Heritage Center in Laramie, which possesses a collection of more than 80 boxes of items belonging to Hebard.

"At this point, I have photographed all of her correspondence records and transcribed hundreds of her letters," she says. "I discovered exactly who this woman was, and she was right about more things than she was wrong in many regards."

It's controversial among Wyoming historians to claim that Hebard was right about suffrage, McCormick says, but she considers herself a serious historian who has not only put in the groundwork to understand her, but did so from a position of bias against her, thanks to Larson's influence.

"I let my opinion change based on the evidence, and that's what you should do as a responsible historian," she says.

We may never know what set Larson against Hebard, particularly as she passed away just a year after he arrived in Wyoming, in 1936. But from listening to interviews from the 1990s and reading his writings about her in the 1950s, McCormick thinks the answer might be simple.

"She was an unmarried woman, she did live with other women and likely had romantic relationships with them," she says.

For the context of his time, McCormick says Larson was a progressive man in his attitude to women.

"I really don't want to do to T.A. Larson what he did to Hebard, he wasn't this awful caricature of an evil man, but I do think he was sexist toward Hebard and, even more so than that, I think he was homophobic," she says. "In the 1990s, he talks a lot about the traditional home and traditional families and the danger of single women in particular. That, combined with his attitude toward Hebard, is what gives me that impression."

Larson labelled Hebard a "man-hater", but McCormick believes this is inaccurate. Hebard spoke to the legislature on behalf of the soldiers returning from World War I, advocating for them to have work, and personally thanked the men of Wyoming who saved women's suffrage in 1871.

"She promoted a lot of men, she worked alongside and had really good relationships with a lot of the prominent men of our state who we still celebrate to this day. She in no way or form, in any of her correspondence or in any of her speeches that I've read, is a man-hater," McCormick says.

"I think that's a stereotype that's put on lesbian women and that, unfortunately, a lot of people have bought into and believed about her."

Hebard appears to have been a woman far ahead of her time, promoting the contributions of women such as Morris and, in her book about Chief Washakie, was one of the first historians to have institutional support to write histories that centered Native American oral testimony, instead of relying on White secondary sources.

"We should definitely still be critical of her in many regards. She was a product of her time and had her own bias," McCormick says. "But I do think that it's time we start restoring her legacy. She should be taught in Wyoming, it's a shame I grew up here and didn't know anything about her until I was in graduate school in Lincoln, Nebraska."

McCormick hopes that, by sharing the stories of these women and uncovering forgotten history in her touring presentations and published research, she can help remind Wyoming why it became known as the Equality State and recapture the attitude that made that possible.