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( or ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Wyoming and the county seat of Laramie County. It is the principal city of the Cheyenne, Wyoming Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses all of Laramie County. The population was 53,011 at the 2000 census.
On July 4, 1867, General Grenville M. Dodge and his survey crew platted the site now known as Cheyenne in Dakota Territory (later Wyoming Territory). This site was chosen as the point at which the Union Pacific Railroad crossed Crow Creek, a tributary of the South Platte River. The city was not named by Dodge, as his memoirs state, but rather by friends who accompanied him to the area Dodge called "Crow Creek Crossing." It was named for the Native American Cheyenne nation ("Shay-an"), one of the most famous and prominent Great Plains tribes closely allied with the Arapaho.
There were many from a hundred miles around who felt the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad through the area would bring them prosperity. By the time the first track was built into Cheyenne November 13, 1867, over four thousand people had migrated into the new city. Because Cheyenne sprang up like magic, according to newspaper editors visiting from the East, it became known as "Magic City of the Plains" .
Those who did not leave with the westward construction of the railroad were joined by gamblers, saloon owners, thieves, opportunists, prostitutes, displaced cowboys, miners, transient railroad gangs, proper business men, soldiers from "Camp Cheyenne," (later named Fort D.A. Russell, now F.E. Warren Air Force Base), and men from Camp Carlin, a supply camp for fifteen northern army posts on the frontier.
As the capital of the Wyoming Territory and the only city of any consequence, as well as being the seat of the stockyards where cattle were loaded on the Union Pacific Railroad, the city's Cheyenne Club was the natural meeting place for the organization of the large well-capitalized ranches called the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. (See Johnson County War of 1892, the largest of the "range wars" of early Wyoming history).