The Fertile Land Remembers

This mural is the first of two commissions that artist Louise Harrington Emerson Ronnebeck completed for the U.S. Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts during the New Deal era of the 1930s and early 40s.

The painting shows a 19th-century Wyoming pioneer family riding in a covered wagon drawn by oxen. The early 20th-century landscapes on either side of the wagon feature a barn and a large water tower, irrigated farmland, and oil wells. Spread across the sky is a cloud-like frieze of Native American men on horseback and a herd of bison.

According to Ronnebeck, the layering of different time periods in her mural was inspired by "the double exposure used in many motion pictures to show the past and the present merging into one dramatic unit."

The mural was created for and originally installed in U.S. Post Office in Worland, Wyoming, in 1938, and later moved to its present location in Casper, Wyoming, in 1970.