Bighorn National Forest Archives

Updated Last: September 20, 2026

In 1948 the Colorado National Guard posted soldiers on a grave. The grave was on Lookout Mountain above Golden, it already had tons of concrete poured over it, and the man in it had been dead for thirty-one years. The soldiers were there because an American Legion post in Wyoming had publicly offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who would go and get him.

Snow-capped peaks of the Absaroka Range west of Cody, Wyoming

Buffalo Bill Cody founded the town of Cody, Wyoming in 1896 and is not buried there, and a good many people in Cody have never entirely accepted it. We used the town as a base, and mostly what we did was drive — over the Bighorns on U.S. 14, up the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, and on toward a gate into Yellowstone that turned out to be shut.

[Read more…]

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 wrangler riding alongside the Eatons horse drive as the herd comes into Sheridan, Wyoming

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.

[Read more…]