Pronghorn antelope all but outnumber people in wide-open WYOMING , the ninth largest but least populous state in the union, with just 460,000 residents. Above all, this is classic cowboy country - the inspiration behind Shane, The Virginian and countless other Western novels - where the days of the open range are evoked by rodeos, country-and-western dance halls and ranchwear stores. The state emblem, seen everywhere, is a hat-waving cowboy astride a bucking bronco.

Northern Wyoming is the prime tourist goal, with well over three million per year heading for the simmering geothermal landscape of Yellowstone National Park , and the craggy mountain vistas of the adjacent, and equally outstanding, Grand Teton National Park . Wedged in between Yellowstone and South Dakota to the east are the helter-skelter Bighorn Mountains , likeable Old West towns such as Buffalo , and the otherworldly outcrop of Devils Tower .

The meager supply of buffalo in early Wyoming caused fierce intertribal wars over hunting grounds and kept the Native American population down to around 10,000. However, Sioux, Cheyenne and Blackfoot combined to inflict notable defeats on the US Army before it could clear the way for pioneer settlement in the 1870s. The cattle ranchers and sheep-farming homesteaders who followed engaged in violent range wars over grazing rights to the wiry grasslands.

Unlikely as it may seem, this rowdy, heavily male-dominated state was the first to grant women the vote in 1869 - a full half-century before the rest of the country, on the grounds that the enfranchisement of women would attract settlers and increase the population, thereby hastening statehood. A year later Wyoming appointed the country's first women jurors, and the "Equality State" elected the first female US governor in 1924.

The absence of rivers to irrigate farmland has effectively put a lid on agricultural and population growth. These days, any weather-beaten, denim-clad stranger is more likely to be an oil roustabout than a genuine cowboy, fuel and mineral extraction having replaced livestock as the mainstay of the economy in the early part of the twentieth century