Dead Indian Hill Summit

The bronze never says how the hill got its name, and the accounts disagree. One holds that a Nez Perce man was killed near the pass during the 1877 flight. The other, given by Northwest College, whose field station stands near the top of the hill, places it a year later: after Colonel Nelson Miles's troops struck a Bannock party on Clarks Fork near Bennett Creek, a wounded Bannock who escaped was killed by Crow scouts and left where he fell. The name then spread from the hill to the pass, creek, gulch and peak.

What the plaque says

Dead Indian Hill Summit Altitude 8,000 Feet This pass is the summit of Dead Indian Hill, through this portal great herds of wild game seasonally migrated from the mountains to the plains. This high pass was the gate way for countless Indian hunting and war parties, and through this portal Chief Joseph, in 1877, led his Nez Perce Indians in a strategic and defensive retreat, persued by U.S. Army soldiers. Over this one and only opening of the valleys to the west traveled a vast army of miners to seek the wealth of Cooke City, and down this steep hill the early settlers of Sunlight Basin braved its dangers. The first road improvement was made possible in 1909 by dwellers of Sunlight Valley whose names are here inscribed. Adolphus J. Beam Wm. V Campbell Siras J. Davis Wade W. McClung Augustus A. LaFond Oliver Whitney Hervey G. Marvin Samuel Thompson John R. Painter Evelyn T. Painter Mary E. Painter Wm. T. Painter Marguerite M. Painter John K. Rollinson Willard D. Ruscher This historical marker dedicated 1940

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beartooth Highway — 21 mi
  A road over the top of the world, built because a coal town's mines closed and it needed tourists instead.
• Old Trail Town — 21 mi
  Bob Edgar's rescued log buildings, outlaw cabins and an Apsáalooke scout's home among them, rebuilt on the ground where Cody City was first laid out.
• Buffalo Bill Center of the West — 21 mi
  A memorial begun the year Buffalo Bill died that grew, wing by stone-walled wing, into five museums and a library under one roof.
• Heart Mountain Interpretive Center — 22 mi
  The incarcerated cleared and watered the land; when the camp closed it went to veterans to homestead, and the barracks sold for a dollar each.

More markers nearby

• Nez Perce Trail — 17 mi
• Shoshone Canyon — 20 mi
• Colter's Hell — 21 mi
• Wyoming Vietnam Veterans Memorial — 23 mi