Cloud Peak Archives - Traveling Huntleys

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.

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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.

A moose grazing below the snow-capped Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming

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.

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