Westward Ho!

Feeling attached to Wyoming

It is not unreasonable to yearn to live in Wyoming, a place with sparkling clean air, no income taxes and a surfeit of elbow room. Some residents of neighboring Nebraska's western panhandle want to become Wyomingites, but they do not intend to move. They want to secede.

According to an informal newspaper poll, 85% of the region's 98,000 residents may favor an official switch of allegiance. They feel their chunk of Nebraska is misunderstood or ignored by the government in the state's capital back east in Lincoln. The rawboned ranching life in the panhandle, they argue, is kindred to the wild West of Wyoming.

There are sympathizers in the would-be adoptive state. Last week Wyoming State Representative Douglas Chamberlain introduced a bill supporting the secessionists. He got only 29 of the 40 necessary votes, but plans another try next year. "The general feeling," says Mary Paxson, of Torrington, Wyo., "is that it's never going to happen. We're nattered that they want us, but we really don't need them."

Yet to Nebraska Governor Charles Thone, whose wife is a panhandle native, the secessionist prospect, however farfetched, is troubling. For one thing, says he: "I'd hate to be married to a foreigner." qed

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