According to the Wyoming Almanac, Wyoming had the earliest organized healthcare cooperate in the country. Cowboys and cattlemen organized the “Fetterman Hospital Association” in what is now Converse County in 1885. They opened a hospital and brought in a doctor from Pennsylvania as the cooperative’s contract physician. They charged “subscribers” $1 per month for coverage. Eventually, it had to close because of the collapse of the cattle industry in the late 1880s.
The almanac also says that newspapers along the railroad often remarked on any unusual cargo on the trains. For example, the December 22, 1899 edition of the Laramie Boomerang reported that “a cargo of cats en route from Newark, New Jersey to Manila, goes west over the Union Pacific.” The cats were on their way to the Philippines to help protect government warehouses from rodents. The paper also wrote that “Frederick W. Butler of Newark, who is engineering the scheme, has 500 cats of all sizes, ages, colors, and pedigrees, which he is taking to the Philippines to wage war on the rats and mice there.”