Vintage 1960s-1970s Wyoming Highway Patrol 🦬 Special Police Tin Litho Toy Badge New Old Stock Original Card Made in Japan

Size: 4 x 2.25 inches ~ New Old Stock, still on its card. They vary a little one to the next.

🦬 A Bison on a Dime-Store Card

This is a round tin litho button, still pinned to its yellow card and sealed in its poly sleeve, the way it hung on the dime-store rack. It's a toy, made for kids, and a good-looking one - the kind of thing that made a kid stop at the counter. They seldom turn up for sale, carded or loose.

The card does its own share of the work. A cartoon motorcycle cop fills the left side of it: white peaked cap, big motorcycle goggles, gloved hands on the bars, a city skyline behind him, all under a red banner reading SPECIAL POLICE BADGE. JAPAN is printed small in the lower corner, which is where these were made.

🎨 The Button Itself

The button carries a white bison, walking, set on a blue disc in the center. Around it, on a black ring, WYOMING arches over the top and HIGHWAY PATROL runs along the bottom, both in yellow. A red rim and then a yellow one frame the whole thing. It's bold and simple, and it reads instantly from across a store shelf.

🤠 The Wyoming Highway Patrol

That bison isn't a made-up mascot - the real Wyoming Highway Patrol has worn one since its first year. The Patrol was created in 1933, after Wyoming's old Department of Law Enforcement, whose whole job had been enforcing Prohibition, was disbanded. On May 23, 1933, the Highway Commission put Captain George "Red" Smith in charge and gave him six newly trained patrolmen to cover the entire state: enforcing motor vehicle registration and licensing, the rules of the road, and, as the law put it, "all laws for the protection of the highways." Their training lasted three weeks, and the recruits paid their own expenses to get through it. The Legislature made the Patrol official in January 1935, and by the end of that year it was up to thirteen men. In 1954 troopers started experimenting with radar to clock speeders, and those first units only worked with the patrol car parked.

Those first troopers rode out in forest green military coats, oak brown breeches and caps, Sam Browne belts, and brown riding boots, with a buffalo and winged wheel worn on the sleeve. The buffalo stuck. It's still the Patrol's emblem today, right down to the 75th anniversary patch in 2008 and the 90th in 2023.

🗓️ When These Were Made

Nothing on this card carries a date, but the family it came from gives it away. The same card design turns up with an NYPD button copying the patch New York adopted in July 1971, and a San Francisco button copying the patch that department added around 1970 - so this whole line of cards was on the racks in the 1970s. The button itself runs about an inch and a half across.

🚔 Badges Weren't Just Toys

This kind of tin badge had real company. Sheriffs handed out tin badges just like it as prizes in their youth programs. Starting in the 1920s, police departments across the country backed school safety patrols too, putting real belts and real badges on schoolkids by the millions. A dime-store bison badge like this one rode that same wave - a kid who couldn't get the real thing could still buy this one with pocket change and pin it on.