“Frances E. Warren” is a part of the Capitol Avenue Bronze public art collection . . donated to the City of Cheyenne by private individuals, organizations or companies.
The ubiquity of his name has obscured the fact that Francis Emroy Warren was perhaps Wyoming’s greatest statesman. The name Warren has been given to a U.S. Air Force Base in Cheyenne, the highest peak in the Wind River Mountains, and streets throughout the state. The historic livestock operation he founded 140 years ago still bears his name.
Like many of the American West’s great men, he was born, in 1884, on the east coast, in Hinsdale, Massachusetts. He enlisted as a young man in the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry at the outset of the Civil War, serving as a private and earning the nation’s highest award, the Congressional Medal of Honor, for “gallantry on the battlefield.”
Ambition and natural ability brought him west to the boomtown of Cheyenne, where his business and political careers flourished, often in tandem, in the open spaces and unsettled political and commercial environment of the Dakota and Wyoming Territories.
His first wife, Helen Smith, was active in Cheyenne cultural, church, and charitable circles. One of their children, Frances, would marry General of the Armies John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, American commander on western front during World War I. When Helen died, Warren married Clara LeNaron Morgan, a descendent of a Welsh pilgrim on the Mayflower.
He was a man known for hard work and shrewd bargaining. An old joke is that if you shook his hand, you check your fingers to see if you still had five. He was a railroad laborer and worked as a furniture salesman as a young man. He rose rapidly to be co-owner of the Cheyenne and Northern Railroad and the Brusch-Swan Electric. In 1883, he founded what would become Warren Livestock, perhaps the state’s most important livestock operation, at some 150,000 deeded acres. 140 years later, the operation still exists.
He held most municipal, state, and federal offices of consequence, including service on the Cheyenne City Council where he advocated lighting public streets and, for a brief time, as mayor. He was the longtime governor of the Wyoming Territory and first governor of the State of Wyoming, an office he soon left when the state legislature elected him to the United States Senate in 1890. After a two-year gap, when he returned to tend to his business interests, he returned to the Senate in 1895 where he served until he died in 1929, the first senator to reach more than 36 years of service in that body. His funeral service was held in the Senate chamber.
He is remembered as a lion of the Senate, who entertained U.S. presidents at his house in Cheyenne, a true westerner, and also a Yankee, appointing the first woman to head the staff of a Senate Committee and the first African American to serve as a committee clerk.
Francis E. Warren is buried at Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne.
To learn more about the Capitol Avenue Bronze Project, visit this link . For more information about each artist, sponsoring a bronze, or becoming a donor/supporter at any level, please contact Harvey Deselms at Deselms Fine Art, located at 303 E. 17th Street Cheyenne. Email is deslemsart@aol.com or call at 307 432 0606
