We pulled onto the shoulder of a county road outside Sheridan and about a hundred and twenty-five horses came past us at a walk. Eight riders were working them. The herd had wintered out east of town and had been three days on the trail, and it crossed the pavement, spilled into the fields alongside, came back onto the road, and eventually went straight through the middle of Sheridan to the ranch that had been waiting for it since fall.
A hundred and twenty years before that, this same town sold more than twenty thousand horses to the British Army and shipped them to a war in South Africa. Almost everything we did in Sheridan turned out to be a piece of that story, including the art museum and the saddles.
The Eatons’ Horse Drive
We had no idea this was happening when we planned the stop. It is simply what Sheridan does in May, and if you are in town for it, you go.
Eatons’ Ranch keeps well over two hundred horses. They do not spend the winter at the ranch. They spend it on open pasture far to the east, out toward Echeta, and every spring the ranch brings them home on foot. The 2022 drive ran May 20 through 22 — Echeta to Leiter the first day, roughly thirty miles; Leiter to the corrals at Wyarno the second; and on the third day through Sheridan and out to the ranch on Wolf Creek.
We caught them just outside town. For long stretches they were on the pavement, and then they would drift off into the borrow ditch and the fields and come back again, which is more or less how a hundred and twenty-five loose horses handle a road. Eight wranglers rode with them. A few of the older horses finish the last leg in a trailer, which seems fair after eighty-odd miles.
What struck me was how little ceremony there was to it. This is not a parade with a permit and a grand marshal. It is a ranch moving its working stock from winter pasture to summer pasture, on the only road that goes there, and the town turns out because the town has always turned out. In Sheridan the herd comes down Fifth Street past the old Sheridan Inn, which is about as compact a piece of Wyoming as you are going to get in one block.
The Ranch That Invented the Dude Ranch
Here is the part that connected straight back to where we had been two weeks earlier. In 1879, three brothers — Howard, Willis and Alden Eaton — started a horse and cattle outfit called the Custer Trail Ranch near Medora, North Dakota. That is the same stretch of Little Missouri badlands where the Marquis de Morès and Theodore Roosevelt would both arrive four years later, and where we had stood in a windstorm looking at the ruins of a beef plant.
The Eatons had a problem Roosevelt never had. Their eastern friends kept visiting, and kept staying, and kept not paying. One guest finally suggested they start charging for room and board so that folks could stay as long as they liked without feeling like a burden. That suggestion is the origin of the American dude ranch. They took it, and the guest business gradually became the actual business.
By 1904 the operation had outgrown the badlands and wanted better country, and the Eatons moved the whole thing to Wolf Creek at the foot of the Bighorns, where it sits today on about seven thousand acres. It is still owned by the family — the fourth and fifth generations are running it now — and it is generally recognized as the oldest dude ranch in the United States. The horses we watched go by were the working end of a business that has been continuously in the same family since Rutherford B. Hayes was president.
The Town That Sold Twenty Thousand Horses
The Eatons were not the only people in this valley who understood horses. In 1899 two Scots named William and Malcolm Moncreiffe, sons of Sir Thomas Moncreiffe of Perthshire, went into partnership with an Englishman named Oliver Wallop and a man named Robert Walsh, and contracted with the British government to supply cavalry mounts for the Second Boer War.
They bought across ten western states. Horses picked up within a hundred miles of Sheridan were trailed overland; everything else came in by Burlington stock car. At first it was chaos, with ranchers simply hauling animals into town, and eventually the whole operation moved out to the Moncreiffe ranch at Big Horn for breaking and inspection. By the summer of 1901 British officers were inspecting horses there nearly every day.
The numbers are what stop you. Ordinary ranch stock in this country had been worth about four dollars a head. The British Army paid forty for a broken horse, and by 1902 the Sheridan Enterprise carried a sale at a hundred. All told the partnership sold at least twenty thousand horses to the British — on the order of eight hundred thousand dollars at the standard rate, before expenses, in a county that had been a coal and cattle town with eight thousand people in it. One local remembered that nearly everyone in the country and in the town was getting Moncreiffe money.
Oliver Wallop is worth following. He was born in Devon in 1861, the third son of an earl, which in the English system means you inherit nothing and go somewhere else. He went west in 1884, tried Montana, and settled at Big Horn around 1890. He took American citizenship in 1904 and sat in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1908 to 1916 as plain O. H. Wallop. Then his older brothers died without sons, and in 1925 he inherited the earldom of Portsmouth. To take his seat in the House of Lords he had to renounce the American citizenship he had gone to the trouble of acquiring. He died in Colorado Springs in 1943.
His grandson Malcolm Wallop represented Wyoming in the United States Senate from 1977 to 1995. And in October 1984, Malcolm and his sister Jean — whose husband, Lord Porchester, managed Queen Elizabeth’s racing stable — hosted the Queen herself at Canyon Ranch near Big Horn for three days. About three hundred people met the plane at the Sheridan airport. She shopped at King’s Saddlery downtown, toured the Brinton, and at the Maverick Supper Club ordered from a menu for the first time in her life. She asked for the queen-sized filet.
The Brinton Museum
Which brings us to the museum, because the Brinton is the Moncreiffe ranch.
William Moncreiffe established the Quarter Circle A here in 1892 and ran it for three decades — the same ranch, the same ground, where the British Army was inspecting cavalry horses in 1901. In 1923 a Chicago industrialist named Bradford Brinton bought the six hundred and twenty acre place and filled the house with Charles M. Russell, Frederic Remington and Edward Borein, along with American Indian beadwork, textiles and pottery.
Brinton died in 1936. His sister Helen inherited the ranch and set up the Bradford Brinton Memorial so the collection could be seen by the public; after her own death in 1960 the ranch opened formally as a museum in 1961. The building we spent most of our time in is much newer — the Forrest E. Mars, Jr. Building, twenty-four thousand square feet of galleries and collection storage, opened in 2015 and set into the hillside so that it barely announces itself from the drive.
Spirits of the West
We caught the tail end of a retrospective called Spirits of the West, and the artist behind it is a good story on his own. He was born Billy Ray Reid in Temple, Texas, in 1941. He spent four years in the Air Force, then drove a truck. In 1979 he started carving pictures into wood panels with a pocket knife, and at some point his wife Kitty handed him a set of paints. He had no training at all.
What came out of it were hold-ups and saloons, cow camps, horses at the water hole and West Texas windmills — scenes assembled out of a lifetime of looking rather than a lifetime of study. The Brinton hung the retrospective from April 1 through May 30 of 2022, so we walked in with about a week to spare and had no idea we had nearly missed it.
The American Indian Collection
The Brinton holds one of the stronger collections of American Indian material in this part of the country, much of it Plains work, and the beadwork rewards standing close. The museum is deliberate about presenting the art on its own terms rather than as a set of props for the Western paintings in the next room, and the difference in how it feels is noticeable.
Sheridan-Style Leather
Then there were the saddles, and these stopped both of us cold.
I did not know at the time that I was looking at a regional style with a name. Sheridan has been a leather-carving center for more than a century. Otto F. Ernst ran a saddle shop in town from 1902 until 1975, and his precise, dense floral carving became the foundation of what is now called simply the Sheridan style.
Don King carried it the rest of the way. Born in Douglas, Wyoming in 1923, he came to Sheridan in 1946, apprenticed under a saddler named Rudy Mudra, opened King’s Saddlery in 1947 and went at saddlemaking full time a decade after that. The Sheridan saddle he essentially defined has short square skirts, a low cantle with a broad Cheyenne roll, big swells and a pronounced horn, and it is covered in his signature wild rose, stamped deep enough that the petals stand up off the leather when the light rakes across them. He received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991. He built saddles for working cowboys, for Ronald Reagan, for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and for Queen Elizabeth II.
The style has traveled further than that. Carvers in Japan work in Sheridan style and know it by that name, which means a floral pattern developed in a saddle shop in a town of nineteen thousand people is now a recognized international vocabulary. Standing in front of a case of it with no idea of any of this, all I registered was that somebody had spent an enormous number of hours on the underside of a stirrup leather that almost nobody would ever look at.
Lunch and the Grounds
We had lunch in the cafe in the Mars building and split a glass of wine looking out at the mountains, which is not a bad way to spend an hour. The grounds are open to walk — nature trails, historic ranch buildings, a greenhouse, and gardens that were well into tulip season while there was still snow above us. Admission was free. Our friend Lorraine works here, which is how we ended up giving the place a proper afternoon instead of an hour; she is an acrylic painter, and she and her husband Carl moved to Sheridan from San Diego, where we knew them. If you want to see what convinced them, stand on the terrace at the Brinton and look west.
Sheridan, Wyoming
Sheridan sits at about 3,740 feet at the eastern foot of the Bighorns, forty miles south of Montana, with roughly nineteen thousand people. It began in 1882 when a Civil War veteran named John D. Loucks bought forty acres on Goose Creek, sketched a town plan, and named it for Philip Sheridan, the general he had served under. He became its first postmaster and, when it incorporated in 1884, its first mayor.
The Burlington and Missouri Railroad arrived in 1892 and changed everything. Coal mines opened north of town at Dietz, Monarch and Acme, and the population went from 1,559 in 1900 to 8,408 in 1910. The labor came from everywhere — among them dozens of families from the highland villages around Istebna in southern Poland, who came to dig Wyoming coal and stayed. It is not a detail you would guess from the main street, and it is part of why Sheridan does not feel like a town that was assembled for visitors.
Kendrick Park
Four blocks off the main drag, the city keeps a small herd of bison and elk in a fenced pasture beside Kendrick Park. It is a strange and cheerful thing to drive past. Spring is the time to see it, because that is when the calves are on the ground.
We have spent this whole leg of the trip running into animals that were put back — bighorn sheep trucked into the Badlands from Colorado, bison hauled into Theodore Roosevelt National Park from Nebraska, moose moved into the Bighorns from Jackson Hole. Sheridan’s bison are a different case, a city herd behind a fence rather than a restored population, and honestly they read more like a civic ornament than a conservation project. But they are four blocks from a coffee shop, which counts for something.
Kendrick Golf Course
We had lunch at Kendrick Golf Course, the city’s municipal course, where our friend Carl works. It plays in a links style across open ground with the whole wall of the Bighorns standing up behind it, and I regretted not having a day to play it. If you are traveling with clubs, this is an easy and cheap round with a view that costs four times as much most other places.
Both the park and the course carry the name of John B. Kendrick, and his story is the other half of 1879. He was born in Cherokee County, Texas in 1857 and orphaned by the age of six — his father drowned, his mother died of fever — and he was raised by an assortment of relatives with almost no schooling. At twenty-two he signed on with the Snyder and Wulfjen brothers’ outfit and spent five months on the trail driving three thousand cattle from Texas to Wyoming.
He stayed. He worked up to foreman, and in January 1897 bought controlling interest in the Converse Cattle Company for thirty-eight thousand dollars, eventually running an operation of two hundred and ten thousand acres across Wyoming and Montana. He married Eula Wulfjen, the daughter of the man who had hired him for that first drive. On July 28, 1913 — his fifty-sixth birthday — the family moved into Trail End, the mansion on the hill above town. The next year he was elected governor of Wyoming, and in 1916 he went to the United States Senate, where he served seventeen years and died in office in 1933.
So: 1879. Three brothers open a ranch in the Dakota badlands that turns by accident into the dude ranch business and eventually lands at the foot of these mountains. A twenty-two-year-old orphan walks three thousand cattle north out of Texas and ends up a United States senator with his name on the park and the golf course. Same year, same country, and we spent one afternoon on each without realizing they were connected.
The Bighorn Mountains
The range runs about two hundred miles north out of central Wyoming into Montana, sitting well east of the main spine of the Rockies with open plains on both sides, which is why it looks the way it does from Sheridan — a wall, with nothing in front of it.
It went up roughly seventy million years ago in the Laramide orogeny, which shoved more than nine thousand feet of sedimentary rock skyward and then let erosion strip it off the crest. What is exposed underneath is Precambrian granite about 3.25 billion years old, some of the oldest rock anywhere on the planet. Bighorn National Forest covers about 1,120,000 acres of it, with the 189,000-acre Cloud Peak Wilderness in the middle. Cloud Peak tops out at 13,171 feet and carries the last active glacier in the range on its east face.
The old line about the Bighorns is that extensive mining exploration never turned up anything worth having, which kept the range empty. That is broadly true and it is why the country looks like this — mostly national forest and BLM, very few back roads, almost no houses. The llamas above belong to somebody’s place on the way up.
But the search was not for lack of trying. In 1892 the Fortunatus Mining Company bought a block of claims at the head of the Little Horn River and Porcupine Creek and built Bald Mountain City at about nine thousand feet, sixty miles from Sheridan near Medicine Mountain. Fifty buildings went up — saloon, hotel, blacksmith, general store, drug store — and the company hauled machinery up those grades and sank something like half a million dollars into the ground. The gold was real. A reporter watched a day’s sluicing produce thirty-one dollars and fifty cents worth. It was also too fine to recover at scale, and in late 1896 a mining engineer from the University of Montana published an assessment that called the claims exaggerated. The town emptied out. Nothing is up there now.
Red Grade Road
We drove Red Grade Road up out of Big Horn and then kept going onto the forest roads until the snow stopped us, which it did.
It took an hour to get the truck out. We carry a shovel and chains for exactly this, and I grew up in Colorado and have dug more than a few vehicles out of more than a few snowbanks, but the back end of an F-150 is light and it does not want to stay where you put it. If we had been in the Jeep it would not have been a conversation. Afterward we went and found a car wash.
It was worth it. We did not pass another vehicle for hours.
Wildflowers and Wildlife in Late May
Down low, lupine was up and blooming along the road. Higher, where the snow had only just gone off, pasque flowers were coming through the dead grass — the same purple, fur-covered flower we had been finding all the way from the Dakotas, and one of the first things to bloom anywhere in this country. It flowers before it fully leafs out, which is how it beats everything else to the light.
The Bighorns hold black bear, mountain lion, elk and mule deer, and we saw a good many moose in two days, including one browsing through falling snow. Those moose are not native. Every one of them descends from twenty-nine animals Wyoming Game and Fish trucked in from Jackson Hole between 1948 and 1987, which is a story we told properly from the other side of the range in Buffalo. It was the third week of May and we were driving through a snowstorm to look at them.
Where We Stayed: Peter D’s RV Park
We had 50-amp service, good water pressure, sewer, and wifi fast enough to stream, which is not a given out here. We had stayed at Peter D’s once before, on the 2018 trip through Sheridan and Little Bighorn. The interstate runs close by, but the park sits below grade and we could barely hear it.
The trade-off is that every site is a pull-through and there is no view to speak of — you look at the rigs beside you and behind you. For a town stop with a horse drive, a museum and a golf course on the list, that was the right trade. You cannot have everything every time.
The dog park is genuinely large, and Jake made full use of it.
And the sunsets more than made up for the lack of a view in the other direction.
What We Missed
King’s Saddlery. This is the one that stings now that I know what I was looking at in the museum cases. King’s is still open on Main Street, still making rope and leather, and the Don King Museum behind the shop holds a large collection of historic saddles. Queen Elizabeth shopped there in 1984 and the photographs are still on the wall. We walked past it.
The 1892 ranch house at the Brinton. The original Quarter Circle A home — Moncreiffe’s, then Bradford Brinton’s, left largely as he had it — was not open when we were there. That is the actual heart of the place and we saw the galleries instead. Next time we call ahead.
The high country from this side. Red Grade shut us down well short of the ridge, and we never got onto the crest of the range from the Sheridan end of it. We did cross the Bighorns westbound on US 14 through Shell Canyon on the way to Cody, which is the other half of this range and worth the drive on its own. But the high country above Sheridan stayed out of reach. That is the price of coming through in May, and we would make the same choice again for empty roads and moose.
Practical Tips for Visiting Sheridan
Check the date of the Eatons’ horse drive before you set your dates. It runs in late May, usually finishing on a Sunday morning, and the herd comes down Fifth Street past the Sheridan Inn. The ranch and the county tourism office both post the date a few weeks ahead. If you can shape a travel week around one event in northern Wyoming, make it this one.
Watch it from outside town if you can. The crowds are downtown. We pulled over on a county road well short of Sheridan and had a hundred and twenty-five horses go by at conversational distance with nobody else there.
Give the Brinton a half day, not an hour. Admission was free when we visited, the cafe is good, and the grounds are worth walking. Call ahead if you want the historic ranch house, which keeps its own schedule.
Red Grade Road is a real road. It climbs hard out of Big Horn and turns to dirt and forest road quickly. High clearance, four-wheel drive, a shovel and recovery gear if there is any chance of snow, and do not assume that because the bottom is dry the top is.
Late May is a trade. You get the horse drive, wildflowers at the lower elevations, wildlife out in the open and roads to yourself. You do not get the passes over the top of the Bighorns, and you may get snowed on. June through September is the season for the high country.
Sheridan is worth a base, not a night. Between the Brinton, Kendrick Park, the historic downtown, Story just up the road and Little Bighorn an hour north, there is easily four days here.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is the Eatons’ horse drive? Late May, on a weekend, with the herd arriving in Sheridan on the final morning. The 2022 drive ran May 20 to 22 and brought about a hundred and twenty-five horses in three stages from winter pasture near Echeta by way of Leiter and Wyarno. Dates are announced a few weeks out by the ranch and by Sheridan County tourism.
What is the oldest dude ranch in the United States? Eatons’ Ranch, founded by Howard, Willis and Alden Eaton near Medora, North Dakota in 1879 and moved to Wolf Creek near Sheridan, Wyoming in 1904. It is still run by the Eaton family, now in its fourth and fifth generations, on about seven thousand acres.
Is The Brinton Museum worth visiting? Yes. It holds Russell, Remington and Borein alongside a substantial American Indian collection, sits on the historic Quarter Circle A Ranch established in 1892, and the Forrest E. Mars, Jr. Building that opened in 2015 is a serious piece of architecture in its own right. There is a cafe, gardens and nature trails, and admission was free when we visited.
What is Sheridan-style leather carving? A dense, precise floral tooling style developed in Sheridan, Wyoming — Otto F. Ernst laid the groundwork in his shop between 1902 and 1975, and Don King made it famous after opening King’s Saddlery in 1947. King received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1991, and the style is now practiced and taught internationally, including in Japan.
Did Queen Elizabeth II really visit Sheridan, Wyoming? She did, from October 12 to 14, 1984, staying at Canyon Ranch near Big Horn as a guest of Senator Malcolm Wallop and his sister Jean. She toured the Brinton, shopped at King’s Saddlery and ate at the Maverick Supper Club. The Wallop family connection runs back to Oliver Wallop, who ranched at Big Horn from about 1890 and later became the eighth Earl of Portsmouth.
Can you see bison and elk in Sheridan? Yes. The city keeps a small herd of both in a fenced pasture next to Kendrick Park, a few blocks from downtown. Spring is the best time, when the calves are out.
Is Red Grade Road passable? It depends entirely on the season. The road climbs steeply from Big Horn into the Bighorn National Forest and becomes dirt and forest road quickly. In late May we were turned back by deep snow and needed an hour to dig the truck out. In summer it is a straightforward high-clearance drive to beautiful country.
How high are the Bighorn Mountains? Cloud Peak, the high point, is 13,171 feet. The range runs about two hundred miles and holds 1,120,000 acres of national forest and the 189,000-acre Cloud Peak Wilderness. The exposed granite core is about 3.25 billion years old.
Was there ever mining in the Bighorns? There was, and it failed. The Fortunatus Mining Company built Bald Mountain City at nine thousand feet in 1892 and spent roughly half a million dollars chasing gold that proved too fine to recover. A University of Montana engineer called the claims exaggerated in 1896 and the town was abandoned. The absence of profitable minerals is the main reason the range is as undeveloped as it is.
Next Stop
From Sheridan we headed west across the top of Wyoming toward Cody and the eastern door of Yellowstone — and into a season in that park that nobody saw coming.
