There were no moose in the Bighorn Mountains. In 1948 the Wyoming Game and Fish Department baited eight of them into a trap in Jackson Hole and drove them across the state on trucks. Eight more followed in 1950, thirteen more in 1974 and 1987, and that is the whole founding population. Twenty-nine animals. Every moose in this range came out of the back of a truck.
The town below them has a comparable history. Buffalo sits at the foot of the Bighorns where the United States fought a war against the Lakota and lost it outright, and then, twenty-four years later, came within a morning of a second one between its own citizens.
The Bighorn Mountains
They are stunning, and they are the reason to stop. The range runs roughly two hundred miles north out of central Wyoming, holds more than a million acres of national forest, and tops out at Cloud Peak at 13,171 feet. It was late May when we came through and there was still a great deal of snow up high, though the locals told us there should have been more that year. Three designated scenic byways cross the range — U.S. 14, 14A and 16 — and almost nobody is on any of them, because most traffic is aimed at the Tetons and Yellowstone three hours further west.
Older Than Almost Anything
The Bighorns went up during the Laramide orogeny beginning about seventy million years ago, the same mountain-building episode that raised most of the Rockies. What came up with them is the remarkable part. The Precambrian core of this range is about 3.25 billion years old — among the oldest exposed rock anywhere on the planet, from a time when the atmosphere had no oxygen in it worth mentioning and nothing on earth was more complicated than a bacterial mat.
Which makes an accidental pattern out of the last month of driving. The Badlands are half a million years old. The Medora badlands are sixty million. The limestone walls of Spearfish Canyon are about 340 million, and the granite of the Black Hills is 1.7 billion. Every stop has been older than the one before it, and this is the end of that line. There is older rock on earth, but not a great deal of it, and very little you can drive to.
The high country was carved by ice rather than water. The Cloud Peak Wilderness covers about 189,000 acres of cirques, U-shaped valleys and glacial lakes, nearly all of it above the trees, and exactly one working glacier is left on the east face of Cloud Peak itself. It is a roadless block, which is why the byways go around the range rather than over its middle.
Wildflowers, and the Pasque Flowers Again
The wildflowers were only just starting. That low mat of pink is spreading phlox, which grows in a tight cushion against the ground because that is how a plant survives wind at this elevation — the cushion holds a pocket of still, warmer air around itself, the same trick the pasque flower plays with its hairs.
And there they are again. Pasque flowers are the first thing up in an open meadow out here, often while snow is still lying in the draws, and this is the third stop in a row where they have turned up — Medora had them, and they are the state flower of South Dakota, which we had crossed the week before. The whole plant is covered in fine hairs that trap a layer of warm air, and the cup of the flower tracks the sun and focuses heat into its own center, which is worth a degree or two to any insect looking for a place to sit in a cold spring.
Twenty-nine Moose
We drove up U.S. 16 and turned onto Hunter Creek Road, which is dirt and runs through exactly the kind of country moose want: willow and alder in the creek bottoms with timber above. I was flat on the ground photographing the pasque flowers when I looked up.
A couple of moose came up out of the creek bed into the open grass. We gave them a great deal of room and they seemed entirely untroubled by being photographed from a distance, which is the correct arrangement with an animal this size.
These are Shiras moose, the smallest of the moose subspecies and the one that lives in the northern Rockies — a bull runs up to about a thousand pounds and stands five and a half feet at the shoulder, which is small only by the standards of Alaskan moose. They are also, as above, imports. Wyoming Game and Fish trapped eight in Jackson Hole in 1948 and trucked them over the state to a range where moose had never occurred, added eight more in 1950, and topped the herd up with thirteen more in 1974 and 1987.
We have been running into this for a month. The bison at Medora came up from Nebraska on a truck in 1956; the bighorn in Custer State Park descend from twenty-two sheep hauled out of Colorado in 1964; every wild turkey in the Black Hills descends from twenty-nine birds shipped from New Mexico between 1948 and 1951; and every trout in those hills came out of the hatchery at Spearfish. Now the moose. Twenty-nine animals in 1948 and twenty-nine turkeys in the same years, two hundred miles apart, and neither population knows it is a project.
Buffalo, Wyoming
Buffalo sits at 4,646 feet where Interstate 25 runs into Interstate 90, which makes it the natural halt between the Black Hills and Yellowstone and is exactly why we keep stopping here. Fewer than 5,000 people live in it. The main street has more than a dozen historic buildings on it and the mountains start immediately behind the town. We had been through once before and wrote about it in 2018, along with Crazy Woman Canyon, which is a single-lane dirt road through the Bighorns and worth its own afternoon.
What we did not write about then is that a remarkable amount of American history happened in the twenty miles around this town, and almost none of it is what people come for.
Before the Town: the Bozeman Trail and Red Cloud’s War
The Bozeman Trail was a shortcut. It ran north-west from the Oregon Trail up along the east face of the Bighorns to the Montana goldfields, and it went straight through the Powder River country, which was the best hunting ground the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho had. In 1866 the Army built three forts to protect it: Fort Reno to the south, Fort Phil Kearny between present-day Buffalo and Sheridan, and Fort C.F. Smith up in Montana.
Red Cloud’s War followed immediately. On December 21, 1866, a decoy party drew Captain William Fetterman and eighty men over a ridge north of Fort Phil Kearny, and inside half an hour every one of them was dead — the Army’s worst defeat on the plains until the Little Bighorn ten years later. The following August, at the Wagon Box Fight, thirty-two soldiers and woodcutters with new breech-loading Springfields held off a far larger force and lost four men; Native casualties were reported at anywhere from six to fifteen hundred, which tells you roughly how much either figure is worth.
What matters is how it ended. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 gave the Lakota the country from the Bighorns east to the Missouri, the Army marched out of all three forts, and Cheyenne warriors burned Fort Phil Kearny behind the departing column. That is not a sentence anyone writes often about the United States Army in the nineteenth century. It is the same treaty that guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota — the treaty broken eight years later when Custer’s expedition found gold, which led to the Little Bighorn sixty-five miles north of here. Buffalo sits at the start of that chain rather than the end of it.
Fort McKinney, and Why There Is a Town at All
After the Little Bighorn the Army came back. Cantonment Reno on the Powder River was renamed Fort McKinney in 1876, for a lieutenant killed by Cheyenne that November, and in July 1878 the whole post was moved to a terrace above Clear Fork just west of here, because the original site had nothing worth having. Barracks for seven companies went up, a town grew at the gate to sell things to soldiers, and Buffalo was founded in 1879. The fort closed in 1894. The Veterans’ Home of Wyoming moved onto the site in 1903 and is still there, and two of the original buildings — the hospital and the dairy — are still standing.
The Johnson County War
This is the one. By the late 1880s the big cattle outfits, organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, had decided that the homesteaders and small operators filling up Johnson County were rustling their stock. Some were. Most were simply competing. Either way the Association could not get convictions from Johnson County juries, because Johnson County juries were made of the neighbors of the accused.
So on April 5, 1892, fifty-two men left Cheyenne on a private train heading north — cattlemen, their foremen, and twenty-three hired gunmen brought up from Texas. They carried a list of about seventy names. It was, in the plainest terms, a private army raised by an industry to kill its competitors, and it was organized by people who expected no consequences and were substantially correct.
Their first stop was the KC Ranch near present-day Kaycee, where they surrounded a small operator named Nate Champion. He held fifty men off alone for most of a day, wounding three, and kept a running note of it on a scrap of paper while he did. It was found on his body. Near the end of it he wrote, “Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone here with me so we could watch all sides at once.” The last line is, “The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.” They burned him out and shot him as he ran.
Then the whole thing turned around. Word reached Buffalo, a meeting in the saloon of the Occidental Hotel raised a posse, and the posse kept growing until it was somewhere over four hundred men. It caught the invaders at the TA Ranch south of town and pinned them in the barn for three days. On the third morning the Buffalo men were pushing a homemade rolling breastwork of logs toward the buildings, loaded with dynamite they had captured from the invaders’ own supply wagons, and were perhaps an hour from ending the matter.
The governor had been wiring Washington. On April 13, 1892, cavalry from Fort McKinney arrived and took the invaders into custody — which is to say the United States Army rode in and rescued the men who had come to commit fifty murders. They were taken to Cheyenne, where the charges were eventually dropped in their entirety, partly because no jury could be seated and partly because Johnson County ran out of money to prosecute. Not one man was convicted of anything.
Wyoming settled it at the ballot box instead. The 1892 elections went heavily against the party the cattlemen had backed, a sitting U.S. senator lost his seat over his part in fetching the cavalry, and in 1893 the Stock Growers Association opened its membership to the small operators it had spent a decade trying to drive out. It is one of the few episodes in the settlement of the West where the people who lost the fight won the argument.
What We Missed
Three things, and we did not know about the first two until afterward. Fort Phil Kearny is a state historic site signed off U.S. 87 between here and Sheridan, with the Fetterman Fight monument and the Wagon Box site nearby. The Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum is in Buffalo itself and holds the Bozeman Trail and Johnson County War collections. And the Hole-in-the-Wall, the red-rock hideout used by Butch Cassidy’s outfit among others, is about an hour south near Kaycee. All three are on the list for next time, which is becoming a familiar sentence.
Staying in Buffalo
Buffalo KOA
A pull-through site with 50-amp service, good water pressure, sewer and wifi fast enough to stream. It snowed a couple of days while we were there and we had to disconnect the water so the hose would not freeze, in late May, which is the Bighorns telling you what they are.
Mountain Meadow Wool
We took the full tour at Mountain Meadow Wool and it was one of the best hours of the trip. They had a couple of sheep in the building, which is not something most factories can say. Raw fleece goes in one end and finished yarn comes out the other — scouring, carding, spinning, dyeing and winding all under one roof, which almost no mill in the country still does at this scale.
The point of the place is the supply chain. Wyoming had a large wool industry through the twentieth century and then prices collapsed, and by the early 2000s ranchers here were selling fleece for less than it cost to shear. Karen Hostetler opened the mill in 2007 specifically to pay them properly for it. Everything they run is Wyoming wool — fine Merino, Rambouillet and Targhee off named local ranches — and every finished skein is traceable back to the ranch it came from. Their own description of how they buy it is “via hand-shakes, not contracts.” They now put through more than 60,000 pounds a year and recycle half the water they use. We came out with several of their finished products and no regrets about it.
Un’WINE’d
A genuine treat, and as far as we could tell the only wine bar between Buffalo and Sheridan. The owners are excellent company and we spent a couple of hours there with a good bottle of zinfandel and a charcuterie board, which is not what you expect to be doing in a Wyoming cow town of five thousand people.
The Occidental Hotel
The Occidental opened in 1880, the year after the town was founded, and the saloon is the reason to walk in. The back bar, the pressed-tin ceiling, the mounted grizzly and wolf, the bullet holes: it has the accumulated look of a room that has never once been gutted and restyled. Buffalo Bill Cody, Theodore Roosevelt, Calamity Jane, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are all recorded as having come through it. So, less romantically, did the town meeting that raised four hundred men in April 1892.
It is also said to be the hotel in The Virginian. Owen Wister traveled in Wyoming through the 1880s and 1890s, drew on the Johnson County War for the novel he published in 1902, and more or less invented the Western as a genre while doing it — the laconic cowboy hero, the showdown, all of it. The Occidental’s claim to be his model is repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere we could find, so treat it as the kind of story a good bar accumulates. The hotel restaurant is called the Virginian either way.
There was karaoke on while we were there, and I sang Carolina in the Pines. I picked it because I met Michael Martin Murphey once, decades ago, in a small Colorado mountain town, Conifer, long before any of this. We made friends at the bar, stayed for an early dinner and left much later than we meant to, which is what that room is for.
Planning a Visit to Buffalo and the Bighorns
Use Buffalo as a base, not a fuel stop. It is where I-25 meets I-90, which means almost everyone passes through and almost nobody stays. Three or four days gets you the mountains, the history sites and the town, at a fraction of what the same nights cost in Jackson or Cody.
Drive U.S. 16 west. It climbs over Powder River Pass at about 9,600 feet and is the southernmost of the three byways across the range. The forest roads off it — Hunter Creek among them — are where the wildlife is. Go at dawn or in the last hour of light and go slowly.
Late May is a gamble and usually a good one. We got snow, had to disconnect the water, and had the mountains almost entirely to ourselves with the wildflowers coming up and the moose out in the open. High passes may not be open until well into June; check before you commit to a route over the top.
Give the moose room. They are the largest animal in these mountains, they are faster than they look, and cows with calves in late spring are genuinely dangerous. Stay in or beside the vehicle and use a long lens. If it changes what it is doing because of you, you are too close.
Do the history properly, which we did not. Fort Phil Kearny off U.S. 87, the Gatchell Museum in town, the TA Ranch south of Buffalo, and Hole-in-the-Wall near Kaycee. That is a full day and it covers Red Cloud’s War and the Johnson County War on the ground where both happened.
Longmire Days takes over the town for several days each August — Craig Johnson’s novels are set in a fictional Durant in a fictional Absaroka County, both of which are Buffalo and Johnson County with the names changed. Book well ahead or avoid it, depending on what you are after.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Buffalo, Wyoming worth stopping in? Yes, and for more than a night. It has the Bighorn Mountains immediately west, a genuinely historic main street, the Occidental Hotel, a working wool mill you can tour, and two of the most significant conflicts in the settlement of the West within twenty miles.
Are there moose in the Bighorn Mountains? There are, and they are not native. Wyoming Game and Fish transplanted twenty-nine moose from Jackson Hole between 1948 and 1987 and the herd descends entirely from those animals. Look in willow bottoms along creeks off U.S. 16 early or late in the day.
What was the Johnson County War? In April 1892 fifty-two men hired by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association invaded Johnson County with a list of about seventy people to kill. They killed Nate Champion at the KC Ranch, were besieged in turn at the TA Ranch by a posse of more than four hundred local men, and were rescued by U.S. cavalry from Fort McKinney. No one was ever convicted.
How high are the Bighorn Mountains? Cloud Peak, the highest point, is 13,171 feet. The range holds over a million acres of national forest and the 189,000-acre Cloud Peak Wilderness, and snow lingers in the high country into June.
What is the Occidental Hotel known for? It opened in 1880 and its saloon is one of the best-preserved frontier barrooms in the West. Buffalo Bill Cody, Theodore Roosevelt, Calamity Jane and Butch Cassidy all passed through, the Johnson County War posse was raised in it, and it is traditionally said to be the hotel in Owen Wister’s The Virginian.
Can you tour Mountain Meadow Wool? Yes. The mill in Buffalo runs tours of the full process from raw fleece to finished yarn, sources only Wyoming wool from named ranches, and has a shop on site. Call ahead for tour times.
When is the best time to visit? June through September for the high country. We came in late May and got snow, empty roads, early wildflowers and moose in the open, which was a fair trade. Longmire Days fills the town in August.
Next Stop
From Buffalo we carried on north and west into the Bighorn Mountains and Sheridan — more of the same range from the other side, and the last of Wyoming before Yellowstone.
