The blue wall of the Bighorn Mountains rising above rolling grassland and clumps of trees under heavy clouds
Montanabw / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Wyoming · Region

Sheridan, Buffalo & the Bighorns

Red Cloud's War on the Bozeman Trail and the forts burned in 1868, the Cheyenne village destroyed on the Red Fork, and the cattlemen's invasion of Johnson County.

5 places to explore

The Powder River country below the east face of the Bighorns was the hunting ground the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho fought hardest to keep. In 1866 the Army built forts along the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields, Fort Phil Kearny near present-day Story among them. On December 21 of that year warriors sent a few decoys toward the fort, and Captain William Fetterman led a command of 81 men over the ridge after them; none came back. Under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie the Army closed the trail and abandoned its three forts that August, and Cheyenne warriors burned Fort Phil Kearny soon after the soldiers marched out.

The peace held until the war of 1876. On November 25 that year Colonel Ranald Mackenzie's cavalry and several hundred Indian scouts struck the winter village of Morning Star, whom the Lakota called Dull Knife, and Little Wolf on the Red Fork of the Powder River, west of present-day Kaycee. The soldiers burned about 173 lodges with everything in them and drove off the horse herd, and the Cheyenne walked north through the cold to Crazy Horse's camp. In the spring Morning Star's people surrendered.

In April 1892 the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, the big cattle outfits, sent about fifty armed men, nearly half of them hired Texans, north from Casper with a list of small ranchers they called rustlers. At the KC Ranch they killed Nate Champion and Nick Ray, then rode on toward Buffalo, where Sheriff William Angus had raised a posse of hundreds. The invaders holed up at the TA Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek until, on April 13, the Sixth Cavalry from Fort McKinney arrived on the president's order and took them into custody. None of them was ever tried.

What to See in Sheridan, Buffalo & the Bighorns

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Historic Sites

Connor Battlefield State Historic Site

Ranchester

In 1865 General Connor's troops attacked Black Bear's Arapaho village here while many of its men were away; women and children died with the warriors.

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The reconstructed log stockade and gate at Fort Phil Kearny, a path running along the pointed palisade with grassy hills behind

Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site

Story

A Bozeman Trail fort whose wood trains were attacked for two years, and the wagon-box corral where its woodcutters held out behind new breech-loaders in 1867.

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Architecture

The long wooden bar of the Occidental Hotel saloon in Buffalo, its back bar lined with bottles under a stained-glass lamp and mounted heads on the walls

Occidental Hotel

Buffalo

Buffalo's 1880 grand hotel, its 1908 saloon ceiling still pocked with bullet holes, won once in a poker game and nearly torn down in the 1990s.

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A black-and-white survey photograph of the Sheridan Inn, a long porch-wrapped building with a row of gabled dormers, shaded by big cottonwoods

Sheridan Inn

Sheridan

A hunting-lodge hotel with sixty-nine gables, where Buffalo Bill is said to have auditioned Wild West acts from the porch.

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Trail End, the Kendrick mansion in Sheridan, a brick house with curving Flemish gables and a pillared porch behind a round lawn

Trail End State Historic Site

Sheridan

A Texas trail hand's Flemish Revival mansion, five years in the building, that he barely lived in once Wyoming sent him to the governor's office and the Senate.

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Stories from Sheridan, Buffalo & the Bighorns

Culture

Polo at the Foot of the Bighorns

British ranchers brought polo to Big Horn in the 1890s, then sold Wyoming horses to the British Army by the tens of thousands. On summer Sundays the game is still played under the Bighorn Mountains, free to watch.

4 min read

Sheridan, Buffalo & the Bighorns rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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