Historical Marker
The Pryor Mountains
Carbon County · Montana
The wild horse range the panel names only as a boundary had to be fought for. In the mid-1960s the Bureau of Land Management planned to remove the last Pryor herd; residents of Lovell, Wyoming, and the Tillett ranching families resisted, the Humane Society won a court order against destroying the horses, and on September 11, 1968, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall set aside the nation's first public wild horse range, three years before the 1971 wild horse act. Genetic testing has since tied the herd to the colonial Spanish horse.
What the plaque says
The Pryor Mountains The Pryor Mountains to the east cover roughly 300,000 acres. Once entirely Crow Indian territory, now only the north end of the range is on the Crow Reservation. The south end is in the Custer National Forest. The range is bound on the east by Bighorn Reservoir and on the south by the Pryor Mountain National Wild Horse Range. The mountains came by their name indirectly from Pryor Creek, which Captain William Clark named for Lewis and Clark Expedition member Sergeant Nathaniel Pryor. The Pryors hold many intriguing features, including ice caves, sinks, and caverns, and archeological finds, such as Clovis Points indicating human occupation as long as 10,000 years ago. In the south end of the range, remains of log and frame houses and barns attest to the homesteads staked after passage of the Forest Homestead Act in 1906. Most of the settlers came from this area. Though they cultivated some crops, for many homesteading was a pretense for mountain grazing on adjacent forest and reservation ranges. One forest ranger observed that some claimants had applied for places where it would be impossible to winter over, though to hear them talk "one would think that Pryor Mountain contained the biggest part of the Banana Belt and that pineapples grew wild."
Where it stands
45.33799, -108.91622 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Smith Mine — 18 miRusting buildings beside the highway, all that is left of the mine where Montana's worst coal disaster emptied a valley.
- Chief Plenty Coups State Park — 19 miThe log house of the last traditional chief of the Apsáalooke, given in 1928 as a park for Crow and white people together.