Women’s suffrage and pioneering civic leadership in Wyoming is not just the stuff of black-and-white textbooks.
A new book out March 10 month pairs that history with portraits of 25 of the Equality State’s most influential contemporary women, from Marilyn Kite, Wyoming’s first female Supreme Court Justice to Lynette St. Clair, an Eastern Shoshone linguist.
KHOL’s Sophia Boyd-Fliegel spoke with Jackson-based photographer and author Lindsay Linton Buk about her book, “Women Shaping the West: Stories from Wyoming.”
Linton Buk and several interview subjects will host a launch party in partnership with Jackson nonprofit Womentum at the National Wildlife Art Museum at 5:30 p.m. on March 11.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. – Ed.
Sophia Boyd-Fliegel: I wanted to start with your upbringing in Powell. In the book, you talk about that and cutting your teeth in New York as a photographer, then moving back. One of Wyoming’s biggest exports is our young people. Were you thinking about trying to challenge that narrative when you started the project?
Lindsay Linton Buk: Not exactly, but that pattern absolutely applied to me, too. Growing up in Powell, it’s a small farm town in the northwest part of the state. I have very deep roots there. My dad is from there. His family goes back to the Meeteetse, Bighorn-Basin-area five generations. I never thought I would come home. I could not wait to leave. My parents live in Jackson now, so I moved back after New York, really just as a transition, I did not think I would stay. I eventually kind of turned that on its head and thought, you know, why can’t I try to do my work here? I was working for a headshot photographer in New York City. I still had really big dreams. My dream when I went back to school for photography was to be a National Geographic photographer, because I love people, I love difference, I love variety, I love traveling, I love culture. So a lot of the reason I created the project was to give myself that bigger life experience in Wyoming and break out of the Jackson bubble and explore and see who was creating here, who was forging their own path here.
SBF: On those many worlds, you highlight 25 women and I wanted to start with someone who many people in Jackson are familiar with, Clarene Law, who died in 2022 but remains a mythic figure here as a devoted hotelier and lawmaker. In one way, I can see how it was an obvious choice to gravitate towards her, but what did you learn through interviewing her that made you confident that she was shaping the West?
LLB: Yeah, I think just how she embodied her whole being. It wasn’t just her business, it was through all of her community efforts. Anybody who had a chance to know her, they were essentially mentored by her, and she did the same for me. I kept a message she wrote to me when she was alive that just said: ‘You honor me by telling my story,’ when I was writing the book. Honestly, writing the books brought up a ton of fear for me
SBF: How so?
LLB: I’m actually making all of this work very permanent. The world we live in now is much different than when I created the project 10 years ago. It excavated fear that I had never really had. And I kept her card on my desk just as a reminder, that’s who I’m creating this project for. I’m creating this project to honor her, to honor these women who have come before me. Yes, they’ve broken ground and kind of paved the way for other women to embody themselves fully, whether that’s in politics or business or community efforts, but I think so much of what I want to promote is: it matters how you do things and not just what you do.
SBF: Yeah, I think that is a great example of the ‘how,’ not necessarily the ‘what.’ I was kind of amazed by the profile of Rita Watson. On first blush, I see a long-serving Cheyenne bureaucrat and I think, ‘What was compelling about this?’ But then you get into her backstory, what motivates her after growing up poor and Black in the Jim Crow South. And then becoming a pillar of the state’s public education system. Tell me about how you found her and why you knew you wanted to profile her.
LLB: I had someone reach out to me about her. You know, there has been quite a bit written about her because she’s quite legendary, too. If you call the [Wyoming] Department of Education, Rita Watson is going to be the first voice you hear, and that you have heard, for half a century. Rita’s entire being and essence is love for education. Education was such a huge part of her upbringing. What built her as a person …
SBF: Going to segregated schools, too.
LLB: Yeah, but her teachers, they really looked out for their students. So much of her story, when you talk to her, is centered in love. Love for people, love for community, love for lifting other people up. Again, that just goes back to why I want to uplift these women. It’s not just what they’ve done or the work that they’ve been committed to for years, but it’s how they do it. I think that matters.
SBF: I wanted to know if you ever found tension in your project, specifically because you’re using a unifying theme of women, but this topic of gender – from defining who is a woman in Wyoming to what rights do women have, let’s say for abortion access – I know it can be a partisan issue. I know it can be something not all women agree on. Did you ever encounter anyone who was reluctant to be in the project because of that theme, or did you think that it was, in fact, unifying?
LLB: I feel like it was unifying. [Through] my personal curiosity, I wanted to connect with my peers. I wanted to know how my peers, other women, were making an impact in the state that I had very deep roots in and always looked at as a more challenging place. And at the end of the day, we’re known as the Cowboy State, but our true motto is “equal rights.” Our suffrage history and the women who cut their teeth in Wyoming from [the nation’s] first Justice of the Peace Esther Hobart Morris to our first female governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross, but also the small town mayors and the game wardens. We passed that first law to enfranchise women, we took it one step further to recognize women’s right to vote.
SBF: You [write] about the all-female Jackson town council, too.
LLB: There could be 20 stories in every town. I have 20 historical vignettes in the book and there could be so many more. There could be an entire book. But I actually think that’s a unifying factor in Wyoming, regardless of your gender and political affiliation. So many people are inspired by that history because it is incredible and it’s amazing, it’s inspiring; that courage and resilience and that grit. And I think those qualities, they transcend whatever your identifying factors are. Ultimately, that is what these stories are about.
