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and Maryland for good measure — but it is the thousand people lived in the entire territory. 5
least populous state in the Union; under six The coming of the railroad, which was supposed
hundred thousand people live there, fewer than to solve that population problem, temporarily
in Louisville, Kentucky. Its Muslim population is exacerbated it instead. “Hundreds of thousands Kathryn Schulz
correspondingly tiny — perhaps seven or eight of people had seen Wyoming from train
hundred people. windows,” the historian T.A. Larson Wrote,
Contrary to the claims of Stop Islam in “and were spreading the word that the territory
Gillette, however, the Muslims who established looked like a barren wasteland.”
the mosque are not new to the region. Together That was particularly true in northeastern
with some twenty percent of all Muslims in Wyoming. The rest of the state could be
Wyoming, they trace their presence back daunting, with its successive mountain chains
more than a hundred years, to 1909, when a rising like crests on a flash-frozen ocean. But at
young man named Zarif Khan immigrated least it had grandeur, and verdure. In the east,
to the American frontier. Born around 1887, by contrast, you could travel five hundred miles
Khan came from a little village called Bara, not and not see a tree. Precipitation was similarly
far from the Khyber Pass, in the borderlands scarce. The Homestead Act offered Western
between Afghanistan and Pakistan. His parents settlers a hundred and sixty acres — not enough,
were poor, and the region was politically in that landscape, to keep five cows alive. In
unstable. Khan’s childhood would have been winter, the mercury could plunge to fifty degrees
marked by privation and conflict — if he had any below zero. People froze to death in blizzards
childhood to speak of. Family legend has it that in May. Frontier Texas, the saying goes, was
he was just twelve when he left. paradise for men and dogs, hell on women and
What he did next nobody knows, but horses. Frontier Wyoming was hell on everyone.
by September 3, 1907, he had got himself a Perhaps because it so desperately needed
thousand miles south, to Bombay, where he people, Wyoming was, from the outset,
boarded a ship called the Peno. Eight weeks later, unusually egalitarian. Beginning in 1869,
on October 28th, he arrived in Seattle. From women in the territory could vote, serve on
there, he struck out for the interior, apparently juries, and, in some instances, enjoy a guarantee
living for a while in Deadwood, South Dakota, of equal pay for equal work — making it, Susan
and the nearby towns of Lead and Spearfish B. Anthony said, “the first place on God’s green
before crossing the border into Wyoming. Once earth which could consistently claim to be the
there, he settled in Sheridan, which is where he land of the free.” Despite resistance from the
made a name for himself, literally: as Hot Tamale U.S. Congress, Wyoming insisted on retaining
Louie — beloved Mexican-food vender, Afghan those rights when petitioning for statehood;
immigrant, and patriarch of Wyoming’s now in 1890, when it became the forty-fourth state
besieged Muslim population. in the Union, it also became the first where
When Khan arrived in Sheridan, he and 10 women could vote. On the spot, it acquired its
Wyoming were roughly the same age — the nickname: the Equality State.
man in his early twenties, the state nineteen. At statehood, Sheridan was a tiny settlement,
At the time, the idea that anyone at all would just across the line from Montana, just east
move to the region was a novelty. Although of the Big Horns, and otherwise very far from
Native Americans had lived there for millennia, much of anything. But two years later, following
Europeans didn’t visit until at least 1743, and rumors of coal (true) and gold (overblown),
they didn’t linger. As late as 1870, scarcely nine the population began to boom. By 1909, when
39
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