On November 4, 1924, voters in Wyoming elected Nellie Tayloe Ross as governor, making her the first woman ever chosen to lead a state in the United States, a full four years before any other state would send a woman to the same post.
Her husband, William Ross, had been governor until he died of appendicitis earlier that year, and the Democratic Party asked her to run to keep his seat, a request she took up though she had never held office and had spoken little in public before the campaign began.
The state had a record. Wyoming had granted women the vote back in 1869, decades before the nation did, and that habit of treating women as full voters made the result less of a jolt there than it would have been almost anywhere else in the country.
She won on her own terms. Ross campaigned as a steady hand on banks and schools, and she drew support from miners and farmers who knew the Ross name and trusted the widow to hold the line on the issues her husband had backed before his sudden death.
The term was hard. Falling prices hit Wyoming's cattle and coal, and she vetoed a sales tax and pushed aid for the poor, choices that drew fire from lawmakers who thought a governor should spend less and talk less in a stretch when the rural West was hurting.
She lost the bid for a second term in 1926, yet her mark stood, and years later she ran the U.S. Mint, the first woman to hold that job, a post she kept through two presidents and used to press the same plain view of sound money she had preached on the campaign trail.
Wyoming led again. The lesson outlived the loss, and the name Nellie Tayloe Ross entered the record as proof that a western state could put a woman in the chair and watch the government run.