When Al Simpson walked into the Wyoming State Capitol on Jan. 12, 1965 as a newly elected Park County representative, he began a political run that carried him into the halls of national power and the immortality of the history books. On Thursday, he entered the statehouse for the final time. A six-soldier honor guard, sidestepping and shuffling with military precision, carried his flag-draped casket as they navigated the challenging right angles of the building’s north entrance.  After Thursday morning’s ceremony attended by family, dignitaries and well wishers, Simpson’s casket was left to receive visitors under the Capitol’s rotunda. Though the casket remained closed, military ritual dictates that the stars of the American flag are draped over the senator’s left shoulder, meaning his visage, beneath the lid, faced upward at the ornate stained glass of the rotunda ceiling high above him.  Keeping Simpson company through the night from their alcoves on the Capitol’s third floor were The Four Sisters, bronze allegories sculpted for the building’s renovation, completed in 2019. The four figures are named Courage, Hope, Truth and Justice.  “It is fitting they should stand watch over Sen. Simpson,” Wyoming Supreme Court Chief Justice Kate Fox told mourners Thursday morning, “as he dedicated his life to those four virtues.”  Truth, Justice and Courage are sculpted with faces pointed downward, gaze fixed toward his coffin. Truth held a lantern out over Simpson, and Courage raised her hand in greeting. Hope did not look down on the senator: She was sculpted with her face thrust upward.  The Wyoming Capitol rotunda. (Mike Vanata/WyoFile) Simpson, who died March 14 at age 93, lay under mortal supervision as well. Throughout the roughly 30 hours he lay in state, from around 9 a.m. Thursday until his scheduled removal at 2 p.m. Friday, Simpson rested under the watch of the military honor guard, composed of representatives of different branches of the armed forces. Unmovable and unresponsive, a soldier stayed in a fixed position at Simpson’s head, rotating out every 15 minutes.  Simpson is the first person to lay in state in the Capitol since 2012, when former Wyoming Secretary of State Joseph Meyer occupied the rotunda for a day that October. Before Meyer was Gov. Stanley Hathaway, in 2005.  The state offered the honor to Sen. Mike Enzi’s family when he died following a bicycle accident in July 2021, but the family declined, Gov. Mark Gordon’s spokesperson Michael Pearlman told WyoFile. Known for spunky good humor, affability and approachability, Simpson might have been taken aback by the stiff formality around his coffin. He would have been cheered, however, by his children and grandchildren, who drew the gathered mourners into a moment of familial intimacy when they gathered around the coffin during the ceremony and sang a few bars of the children’s song “The More We Get Together.” The family sang the song at meals and gatherings, son Colin Simpson told reporters after the ceremony, and at his father’s bedside in his last days.  He would have been glad, too, to see the slow trickle of visitors who paid their respects throughout the day. Those visits included one from 85-year-old Foy Jolley, a military veteran and former police officer who guarded the statehouse when Simpson served in it and later remembered meeting his grandchildren as babies.  “I gave him a salute,” Jolley said. “I put my hand on the casket and I said, ‘I’ll see you soon, Al.’”  Then there was Gayle and Brett Baugh, who spent a quiet moment with the casket as the room cleared of politicians and state officials, both current and past.  Approached by a few lingering reporters, Gayle Baugh, an elderly woman dressed in a distinguished purple coat, bent her head and held her husband’s hand as she took a long moment to compose her reason for paying homage to Simpson, who she had not known personally.  “These days, positive public servants with the best interests of all in mind are rare,” she said finally, “and this man epitomized that.”  She and her husband were also veterans, she said. “As we served in our careers, those were the people we tried to emulate.” Gayle and Bret Baugh pay their respects to former United States Senator Alan Simpson at the State Capitol on Thursday, March 27, 2025. (Milo Gladstein/Wyoming Tribune Eagle) Outside the Capitol, the Wyoming flag hung at half mast, waiting for the Wyoming wind, respectfully subdued for the morning’s procession, to rise back up and wave it. The flag returns to full mast on Monday, after Simpson’s burial.  After the ceremony, the senator was left with the honor guard and a few state employees serving as guides to the public.   There was no great crush of people to pay homage to the politician during the time a WyoFile reporter spent in the rotunda.But Simpson was rarely without a visitor for long.   There was a Cheyenne resident who declined to give her name but said she came to remember a man who impressed her in 1994, when she chaperoned a group of Bighorn Basin middle school students to the nation’s capital. Wyoming’s representative didn’t have time for the schoolchildren, she recalled, though they waited at her office for nearly an hour.  The senator did.  He met with them on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He warmed up the intimidated young Wyomingites by telling them his shoe size — a whopping size 14, she remembered.  He “made the kids feel at ease.” They all took a photograph together, she said. At around 10:45 a.m., Wyoming columnist, political maverick and prodigious speaker outer Rod Miller slipped out of a stairwell to stand for a moment by the coffin with his cowboy hat in his hands.  “I miss Al,” Miller told a reporter. “He was a funny son of a bitch.”  Miller wrote a column for this publication honoring Simpson’s legacy. In it, he wrote that there will doubtlessly soon be a drive for statues and plagues and naming places after the political giant.  But, Miller wrote, “if we could seek Al Simpson’s wise counsel one last time, he might tell us to forget all that fancy stuff. I think he’d tell us, very lovingly, to just be careful whom we choose to stand in the gap he left. He’d tell us to choose a good neighbor.” RELATED Towering Wyoming statesman Alan Simpson dies at 93 With Al Simpson’s passing, another tall tree gone Slowly, quietly, Simpson’s visitors came through. Staff from the governor’s and legislative service office took a moment to pause by the casket and read the citation accompanying the Presidential Medal of Freedom that lay on a table behind Simpson’s honor guard. President Joe Biden awarded Simpson for being “never afraid to stand up for what he felt was right” and searching for common ground even as the nation’s body politic slid into online acrimony and harsh partisanship.  Snippets of conversation drifted out of an office room and across the rotunda.  “He was a good guy…”  “He always worked across the aisle…” “He was just that kind of guy…”  Ann and Amy Legg — a mother and daughter duo originally from Worland — got a visit from Simpson’s daughter Sue as they paid their respects. Did you know my father, she asked. Everybody in Wyoming kind of knew Simpson, Ann Legg answered. She recalled him attending a high school graduation on a “hot, horrible day” in Worland. “He needed a hat, and my husband loaned him one,” she said.  Later, a grandfather gathered his wife and two grandchildren for a photograph in front of the coffin, gently waving his young grandson out of a two-thumbs up pose and into something more befitting the occasion.  James and Vicki Medina had brought their grandchildren up from Colorado Springs, where they now live, to visit with Simpson. Medina worked for Simpson, heading his field office in Rock Springs. He showed a reporter a picture on his phone of the senator with Medina’s two sons. They were just little boys at the time, as Medina’s grandchildren are today, and Simpson sat with one on each knee. A decade ago, they received a letter from Simpson. He had seen their sons, all grown up, in the crowd at a UW basketball game, and the retired senator wrote to tell them about it.  In the missive, Simpson was “just kicking himself for not going down and giving them a big hug,” Vicki Medina said.  The Simpson family is hosting a celebration of life for the senator at the University of Wyoming’s Arena Auditorium at 11 a.m. Saturday. The event is open to the public. The post In Sen. Al Simpson’s final visit to the Wyoming Capitol, mourners find their own ways to say goodbye appeared first on WyoFile . ...read more read less