A bucking horse and rider will be featured on the Wyoming state quarter.
Gov. Dave Freudenthal made the decision May 12 after months of public input and discussions with the U.S. Mint.
Also included on the quarter will be an ?Equality State? motto to the right.
?Represented with this design are both our proud Western heritage and our historical role in establishing equal voting rights for women,? Freudenthal wrote to U.S. Mint Deputy Director David Lebryk. ?We will be very pleased to see this coin in circulation around the country.?
In late 2004, Freudenthal appointed 13 Wyoming historians and other experts to the Wyoming Coinage Advisory Committee. The group met initially in January 2005.
For the next three months, the group gathered narrative design submissions from the Wyoming public.
Some 3,200 responses were generated, and the group trimmed the field to five top designs, which were sent them on the U.S. Mint.
Mint artists returned renderings of five of the narrative concepts. The Wyoming committee selected one design for each of the narratives, which were then approved by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee and the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
Freudenthal then selected a final design from among those five.
U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow still has to approve the final choice.
?These quarters represent their respective states for generations to come, so I?m both delighted and humbled to have had the opportunity to select our design from among those that were most popular with Wyoming?s people,? the governor said.
Wyoming?s quarter is scheduled for release in the summer of 2007. The states are being honored in the order of their admission to the union. Wyoming was the 44th state, elevated from territorial status in 1890.
