Wyoming State Fair

The Wyoming State Fair takes up 137 acres at Douglas, a town of about 5,000 on the North Platte River, 130 miles north of Cheyenne and 50 east of Casper. The Ford Grandstands seat 4,000 and face east over a 165-by-300-foot arena fitted with roughstock chutes, roping chutes and an elevated crow’s nest. The swine rings sit in the Wyoming Touchstone Energy CoOperative Show Center, right along the Platte. The Pepsi Equine Center holds 238 indoor stalls on concrete. Several exhibit halls carry the names of forts: Caspar, Fetterman, Reno, Steele, Laramie. The largest and oldest of the halls is Ag Hall, built in 1913, with high ceilings, large cathedral-style windows and hardwood floors.

The 2026 fair, which the printed schedule called “Wyoming’s 114th State Fair,” ran August 11 through 15. It rained. On the closing Saturday the carnival shut down and then reopened at 7 p.m. “with more rides opening as things continue to dry,” according to the fair’s own notice. A later post described the rodeo nights as “Rain, mud and a whole lot of rodeo action.” The 2027 fair is set for August 17 through 21.

Five nights at the Ford Grandstands

The week begins before the gates open. In 2026, Cowboy Church met at 11 a.m. on the Sunday before the fair in the Bible Reading Tent on the Midway. Tuesday began with a 7 a.m. exhibitor breakfast in the Beef Show Ring. The carnival, run by Carnival Midway Attractions, opened at five, with rides that ranged from the Skyfire to a Ferris wheel. At seven came the Wyoming Ranch Rodeo Finals, in which working ranch crews compete in ranch skills. Wednesday’s Breakaway Roping cost nothing beyond admission. The same evening the Wyoming Livestock Round-Up and Farm Credit hosted an Ag Appreciation Picnic in Riverside Park.

The professional rodeo takes Thursday and Friday. PRCA steer roping started at 9 a.m. on Thursday. That evening, Legacy Night, opened at six with World Champion Mutton Bustin’ for riders five to seven years old and under 65 pounds, and the PRCA performance followed at seven. On Friday, Future Night, Miss Rodeo Wyoming was crowned before the rodeo.

Saturday opened with the fair parade in downtown Douglas at 10 a.m. Sheep-shearing demonstrations in the Wool Pavilion and a bonsai demonstration in Lower Fort Reno filled the afternoon. The week closed with the Douglas Volunteer Fire Department Demolition Derby. In 2026, Kelli Swisher’s No. 9 took Overall Best in Show and the Patriotic Car Award. Matthew Chapman’s No. 19 won the Chain-Up Class and its Mad Dog prize. The carnival ran until midnight.

FFA members drive a free golf-cart service across the grounds called the Blue & Gold Taxi. Tips are welcome.

Barns, rings and the Food Court

For the 4-H and FFA members who fill the barns, the fair ends a year of work. “In Wyoming, we’re still on the system where competition at the county fair level feeds toward the State Fair competition in most cases and this is the finals, so to speak, for all those year-long projects,” fair director James Goodrich told Tri-State Livestock News at the time of the 100th fair. More than 500 youth stayed the whole week that year, and several hundred more came for day contests. The Champion of Champions class puts every county fair champion of a species into a single ring. The 2026 grand champions were Creedly Post with a market goat, McKrae Darr with a market hog, Ethan Bomberger with a market lamb and Granit Ready with a market steer.

The barns also hold a Texas Longhorn show, alpaca classes on the grass arenas, rabbit and poultry shows in the Event Tent, a 4-H cat show and a sheep lead contest. Everyday Ag, a program launched in 2023, includes a self-guided audio tour through the livestock barns that explains each species and what is happening in each barn. The Knowledge Barn offers hands-on agricultural lessons. The Sheepwagon Show sets out historic sheepwagons, which arrive the Friday before the fair. Goodrich had named a sheep wagon contest among the new competitions at the 100th fair.

Entries for the open classes come in through the weekend before. Needlework goes up in Upper Ag Hall, and the needlework and quilt judging is open to the public. In 2026 Cerrina Smith brought 42 entries across Visual Arts, Crafted Arts and Gardening and was named Visual Arts Premier Exhibitor. A King Arthur baking contest ran Friday in Fort Fetterman, and the Cowboy State Cake Showdown ran Saturday in McKibbon Hall. In the Food Court, fairgoers sampled each vendor’s Fair Food Flight item and voted. The 2026 People’s Choice went to Ranch Eats for Brisket Poutine Loaded Fries. On the free stages were Wyoming Singer-Songwriters, Marcus the Funny Man, a hypnotist and a magician.

Ten thousand dollars and a board fence

Tri-State Livestock News dates the fair’s unofficial beginning to 1886. That year the Board of Trustees of the Wyoming Fair Association held the “First Annual Wyoming Territorial Fair.” Wyoming became the 44th state in the summer of 1890. In 1901 a Wyoming Industrial Convention met in Laramie and then traveled around the state for three years. The 1904 session, Wyoming Department of Agriculture spokesman Derek Grant said, “ended with a resolution for the establishment of a permanent fair.”

A bill in the 1905 legislative session created the State Fair. Tri-State Livestock News puts the funding at about $10,000 for a two-year period. WyoHistory.org says the Legislature awarded the fair to Douglas and appropriated $10,000, “an enormous sum,” for land, buildings and other expenses. According to that account, preliminary work soon used up the money, and the citizens of Douglas raised the rest. The fair opened that same year and drew 2,500 visitors. The Clark Brothers were contracted to build:

• a roofed grandstand
• an exhibition hall
• two horse stables
• one cattle shed and one sheep shed
• a poultry house
• a race track of two-thirds to three-quarters of a mile, enclosed by a board fence

The early fairs relied on spectacle. A 1910 photograph shows Goldie St. Clair, world champion woman bronc rider, at the fair. In 1911 the 9th Cavalry returned. Its troopers gave riding exhibitions and ran a Roman Race, its band played concerts each evening in the Opera House, and a 9th Cavalry baseball team played the Cheyenne Indians, a professional club. The fair had also contracted through the McCurdy-Willard Aeroplane Company for James C. “Bud” Mars, a Curtiss daredevil reputed to be the most daring flyer in the country. Then a telegram arrived from Geo. Hamilton in New York: “Mars’ machine wrecked. We are trying to secure an aviator for your fair. It may be necessary to cancel contract.”

The 1912 fair, held September 24 through 27, got its aviator. Captain Roy Francis held the world altitude record, set in Nevada at more than 8,000 feet above sea level, and his Curtiss machine flew twice a day for 15 minutes each time. The same fair introduced the Alfalfa Palace, the largest agricultural exhibit. It measured 30 by 100 feet and held an estimated 100 tons of hay. In 1913 the 12th U.S. Cavalry came, and a new $20,000 Agricultural and Horticultural Building added exhibit space and a lunch counter.

The State Board of Charities and Reform ran the fair until 1923, when the Department of Agriculture took direct supervision. The fair was cancelled for the Depression in 1935 and 1936. It was cancelled again in 1937 for an outbreak of infantile paralysis, and during 1942 through 1945, when gasoline and tires were rationed. “Wyoming has not cancelled a State Fair since,” Grant said.

A skull in a show case

Pioneers began meeting in Douglas during the fair in 1905. At a meeting on December 18, 1925, led by Converse County pioneer Charles F. Maurer, they formed a permanent Wyoming Pioneer Association. In 1926, funds were approved for a log cabin on the fairgrounds where the association could hold its annual meetings. Around 1932 the Pleasant Valley Schoolhouse, built in 1884, was moved onto the grounds and set directly behind the cabin. The association still met on Thursday of fair week in 2026, with a luncheon at noon.

The association also ran a museum on the grounds, and in the late 1920s area ranchers gave it the remains of Black Kettle. He was an Oglala Lakota man, one of the leaders of a small band that met a sheriff’s posse on Lightning Creek, about 50 miles northeast of Douglas, in October 1903. Six Oglalas and two white men died in that fight. The surviving posse men said the Indians fired first. The Oglalas said they were ambushed from a gulch. Murder charges against nine Oglala men were later dropped.

About a year after the fight, sheep rancher Lou Cook collected Black Kettle’s bones and skull. The skull had been shot through. The ranchers handed the remains over “in a gunny sack,” according to L.C. Bishop, a civil engineer and the association’s secretary. “I did not like to have a sack of human bones in our collection,” Bishop later recalled, “so placed the skull with the bullet hole through it in a show case and made a box and buried it behind the Pioneer Cabin with a small headstone.” The stone reads “Indian Killed By John Owens 1903.” Johnnie Owens was a Weston County deputy sheriff who rode with the posse.

In the mid-1930s, men from the Pine Ridge Reservation visited the fair and recognized the skull by its bullet hole. They told Bishop that Black Kettle’s widow was still living and asked to take his bones home. Bishop, by then chairman of the Historical Sites Committee of the Wyoming State Historical Society, proposed a ceremonial reburial on the fairgrounds instead, and the Oglalas agreed. It took place on September 15, 1938, while the fair was in full swing. Douglas carpenter Rick Anthony built the scaffold for the coffin.

The Douglas Budget reported that the service would be conducted by “Black Elk, an Indian 89 years old.” Representatives of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations have since confirmed to the museum that he was the Oglala holy man whose 1931 autobiography with the poet John G. Neihardt was published as Black Elk Speaks. He was in fact 75.

The Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum was built on the fairgrounds in 1956. Fulton Construction Company of Douglas did the work for $100,000, and the museum was dedicated August 31. It passed to the Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources in 1999. Black Kettle’s shirt is on display there.