1850–1896 · American humorist, lecturer & founding editor of the Laramie Boomerang
Edgar Wilson Nye, who wrote as Bill Nye, was one of the best-known American humorists of the 1880s and 1890s — a Wyoming justice of the peace and postmaster who founded the Laramie Boomerang, then made a national name with Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States and the lecture circuit he shared with the poet James Whitcomb Riley. He died in February 1896, aged 45. He was exactly the kind of famous frontier wit a stray mining joke would drift toward — but the one credit that names him was printed eight years after his funeral, and the historian who went looking could not find the line anywhere in Nye’s own writing.