WYOMING – With folks still buzzing about the total solar eclipse of 2017, it might be interesting to look back even further than two days ago. Wyoming was lucky enough to host three total eclipse events within a 40-year span from 1878 to 1918. And they are very well documented.

Billy Owen was a teenager when he saw TSE 1878. (American Heritage Center)

Buckrail stumbled across a wonderful and exhaustive collection of total eclipse memories from Wyoming including events in 1878, 1889, and 1918. They are featured in Wyoming State Historical Society annals. The eyewitness accounts included this from Billy Owen.

In the summer of 1878, Owen was working with a surveying crew high in the Medicine Bow Mountains, about 36 miles west of Laramie, Wyoming Territory.

“Over that vast forest,” he later wrote, “the moon’s shadow was advancing with a speed and rush that almost took one’s breath.” This was the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878. “It was terrifying, appalling, and yet possessed a majestic grandeur and fascination that only one who has seen it can appreciate.”

We couldn’t agree more. The event still holds a powerful aura.

Edward Emerson Barnard, whom Isaac Asimov described as ‘perhaps the keenest-eyed astronomer in history,’ took this photo of the sun’s corona from near Green River, Wyo., on June 8, 1918. The largest of the solar flares seen here is about 47,000 miles in length. (The Monthly Evening Sky Map, September 1918)