On summer Sunday afternoons in Big Horn, a crossroads about ten miles south of Sheridan, people pull up along the edge of a polo field with the Bighorn Mountains filling the sky behind it and watch a game that has been played here since the 1890s. It came with a handful of Scottish and English ranchers, and it lasted because of a war in South Africa and the cowboys who broke horses for it.
The British ranchers
In the 1880s and 1890s the Big Horn country along the old Bozeman Trail, taken from the Lakota and Cheyenne after the wars of the 1870s, drew a small set of well-connected ranchers from Britain. William and Malcolm Moncreiffe, sons of a Perthshire baronet, ran sheep, cattle and horses on Little Goose Creek. Their neighbor and partner, Oliver Henry Wallop, was a younger son of the Earl of Portsmouth. Horsemen with British army and polo connections brought the game, and by the 1890s the Moncreiffes, the Wallops, their neighbors and their cowboys were playing it together. Malcolm Moncreiffe sold Wyoming-raised polo ponies in England through Tattersalls, the London auction house, and British buyers came to believe that horses raised at this altitude had unusual wind and stamina.
Horses for the Boer War
That reputation paid when Britain went to war in South Africa in 1899. The Moncreiffes contracted with the British government to supply remounts and sent buyers through ten western states. In 1900 and 1901 Sheridan's streets filled with horse sellers and bronc riders, and at the end of most days the horses were trailed out to the Moncreiffe ranch to be broken and passed by army inspectors. Floyd Bard, one of the wranglers, remembered that nearly everyone in the country was getting Moncreiffe money. The army paid about $40 a head for broken horses, ten times what ordinary ranch stock had brought a few years before, and the Moncreiffes and their partners, Wallop and Robert Walsh, sold at least 20,000. One account holds that the brothers built their polo field so buyers could put horses through their paces, then taught their cowhands to play on it. The same firm sold thousands more horses to the British and French in the First World War.
Polo ever since
Wallop left in 1925, when the deaths of his older brothers made him the seventh Earl of Portsmouth and he had to give up his American citizenship to take the title. His son ran the ranch, and his grandson, Malcolm Wallop, later represented Wyoming in the U.S. Senate. Polo at Big Horn has lapsed and come back more than once since the Moncreiffes' day, through the cowboy polo of the First World War, a pause in the 1950s and a revival in the 1960s. The old field on the Moncreiffe polo ranch was sold in the early 1980s, and players built the Big Horn Equestrian Center, where the Big Horn Polo Club, which calls itself the oldest west of the Mississippi, still plays, with the Flying H club beside it.
William Moncreiffe's 1892 ranch house up Little Goose Creek became the home of a Chicago businessman, Bradford Brinton, in the 1920s, and is now the Brinton Museum, with its collection of western art. The polo matches down the road are free to watch.