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Around Wyoming brings you news from around the state, keeping you informed with brief updates of stories you may have missed.

Wednesday, April 26

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.”

Ivy started as a science news intern in the summer of 2019 and has been hooked on broadcast ever since. Her internship was supported by the Wyoming EPSCoR Summer Science Journalism Internship program. In the spring of 2020, she virtually graduated from the University of Wyoming with a B.S. in biology with minors in journalism and business. When she’s not writing for WPR, she enjoys baking, reading, playing with her dog, and caring for her many plants.

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