The Highway in the Sky

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July 6th 2011

Published: March 29th 2012

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Bradford Brinton Museum

The Bradford Brinton Museum, located in ranch land at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. The main ranch house, now the museum, is on the right.

Bradford Brinton Ranch

My first sight for today was a very special ranch.

In the 1920s, one Bradford Brinton fell in love with the west.

He had made a fortune in Illinois, and spent it on a ranch in 1927 which he filled with western art.

On his death in 1963, he donated it to the state of Wyoming for a museum.

The place initially feels like other house museums like Reynolda (see Pigs and Tobacco), but with an important difference.

Brinton lived with his artwork, knew the artists personally, and bought much of it directly from them.

To reach the ranch, I had to drive into the rangeland in front of the Bighorn Mountains.

The view was unbelievably huge.

The road crossed pretty streams that must be seen to be believed.

Eventually, I reached an old ranch building in a vast open field near the foot of the mountains.

The collection is spread through the rooms of the ranch.

Many Charles Russell prints show up, along with a number of bronzes by Fredric Remington.

Edwards skipped the large scale canvases by the likes of Alfred Bierstadt

George Armstrong Custer artifacts

Personal items once owned by George Armstrong Custer.

to favor smaller landscapes by artists that I’ve never heard of.

The entrance hall used to contain Native American rugs, but they had to be moved due to sun damage.

The work fits the rooms pretty well.

The museum has added a building for temporary shows.

The one while I was there was work by Allen Mardon.

He creates highly symbolic canvases on western themes.

His use of unusual color combinations to create a mood reminded me quite a bit of the German Expressionists in the Blue Rider Group (see Arch Madness).

Most unusually, the artist himself was in the gallery, painting.

He has a residency during the show.

I enjoyed talking about the work a while.

He designs his history paintings very thoroughly based on historian accounts, while other subjects are done by instinct so the spirit of the painting comes out.

Custer's Last Stand

My next site was over the border in Montana.

The Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn to those from outside the region) may be the most romanticized military defeat in United States history.

It was here along the Little Bighorn River that

Last Stand Hill

The hill where George Armstrong Custer's army was destroyed. Aside from the monument and visitors, it looks remarkably like it did a hundred and fifty years ago.

the combined forces of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne Indians, under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, completely wiped out the Seventh Calvary under George Armstrong Custer. (see Tourists in a Sacred Land)

Most people know it as “Custer’s Last Stand”.

I couldn't pass through this region without a visit.

It starts with a museum.

The displays describe the background of the conflict, and the tactics of both sides.

The US Calvary lost basically because they were not well trained and Custer was reckless.

He attacked the Native American camp with his forces because he believed that if he waited for backup, the Native Americans would retreat.

The museum also discusses archeology of the site.

A huge grass fire twenty five years ago gave historians the chance to do excavations, which produced tons of spent cartridges and other artifacts.

The layout of these items on the field showed where people fought and fell.

Finally, the museum has a large collection of Custer’s personal items.

They were held by his widow, who gave them to the US government on her death.

The battlefield looks remarkably similar to

Native American memorial

Memorial to Native Americans who died at Little Bighorn. Inside the earthen and stone hoop are pannels listing the dead from each tribe.

how it did a hundred and fifty years ago.

It’s still covered in long grass and the occasional bush.

The most important portion is a hill near the museum.

This is the location where Custer’s troops were pinned down.

Bullets and arrows rained down on them until nobody was left alive.

It got so deadly Custer ordered his troops to kill their own horses and use the corpses as a barricade.

A monument now occupies the center of the hill, listing the names of the fallen.

In addition to Custer, it includes two of his brothers and his son-in-law.

Unlike the mythic version, no record exists of how long Custer himself lasted.

Scattered around the battlefields are graves marked “US Calvary Officer”.

These mark the spots where bodies were quickly buried after the Native Americans left the site.

This is one of the few battlefields where the spots that people died are specifically marked.

The graves are mostly found in pairs.

Current historians believe this is due to a placement mistake.

The soldiers who buried the bodies did so by scooping soil from either side.

Later soldiers

Last Gasp of the Great Plains

North central Wyoming seen from a pullout on the Medicine Wheel Passage Scenic Byway.

who placed the headstones saw two trenches and assumed there were two burials.

The park service is trying to balance things out by also marking where Native Americans died.

This process is slow and ongoing, because they need to be located through accounts of the battle.

Those which are known are marked with red headstones.

A number of them circle the hills around the last stand hill.

These graves mark the suicide boys, whose job was to charge the cavalry line and panic the horses.

They gave the Native Americans a decisive advantage early in the battle.

The final part worth mentioning is the Native American memorial, located across from last stand hill.

The memorial is in the shape of a circle, the sacred hoop of multiple tribes.

Inside are panels listing the members of various tribes that participated.

Some of them served as scouts for Custer, because they belonged to tribes that were the traditional enemies of the Sioux and Cheyenne.

The panels were originally temporary until the tribes could agree on a final design.

After a decade they are still there.

A world in white

The Big Horn Mountains above treeline along the Medicine Wheel Passage Scenic Byway.

One of them has a replica of a famous buffalo hide showing the battle from the Lakota point of view.

I found the whole site haunting.

While Custer gets the publicity in the romantic version, it was really the last stand of the plains Indians and their nomadic way of life.

In contrast to the popular stories, the real battle was desperate, violent, and not noble at all.

Popular memory works in some strange ways.

Medicine Wheel Passage Scenic Byway

After the battlefield, I finally entered the Rockies.

Three main roads cross the Bighorn Mountains, and all of them are exceedingly pretty.

They are also really steep.

I chose the most dramatic of them all, the Medicine Wheel Passage Scenic Byway, US 14A

The highway starts by climbing into a valley.

It then switchbacks up the side to the headwall.

The vegetation changes from scrub to oak trees to pines.

Many of the curves give incredible views of the western plains, and the road has pullouts to look at them.

At the top of the valley headwall, the road enters the mountains for real.

Medicine Wheel Pass

View of the Bighorn Mountains, the Bighorn Basin beyond, and the Absaroka Mountains beyond, from Medicine Wheel Pass.

The next dozen miles are rolling hills surrounded by distant snow covered peaks.

The road passes several lakes surrounded by pine trees, and a pretty river.

All of this is very nice, but I saw it before in the Black Hills.

Then, the road climbs again to reveal something new.

It follows a stream through a mountain meadow.

The meadow is covered in wildflowers.

Near the end of the valley, snow banks appear near the road.

The road leaves the valley and continues to climb.

Large patches of snow now cover the mountainsides.

Finally, the road enters territory rarely reached by car, tree line.

All the bushes disappear.

At the end of the valley, the road reaches a high pass at over 9000 feet.

The pass has a parking lot with a humongous view covering the entire area of this part of the Bighorns.

To the west, the Bighorn Basin stretches over a hundred miles to the Absaroka Mountains in front of Yellowstone.

To the east, the view stretches over peaks to the Tongue River Valley.

Sign of Adventure

When something like this appears on the side of the road, do what it says!

After the pass, the road rolls over hills above tree line.

Mountains with snow banks and exposed rocks stretch into the distance.

Wildflowers cover the side of the road.

Clumps of bushes appear in places.

I’ve never seen anything like it from a car.

(I’ve been above tree line hiking, which is a very different experience).

Eventually, the road drops into a shallow valley between two peaks.

One of them holds the actual Medicine Wheel, a sacred Native American artifact.

I could not reach it because it was covered in snow.

The road ends with a nasty surprise for many drivers.

The first hint is the valley itself.

It drops slowly into a view that stretches for hundreds of miles.

Clearly, something steep had to be coming up.

The second hint is the area for heavy vehicles (including RVs) to stop and check brakes.

Finally, the sign appears.

It is famous enough to have appeared in postcards.

The sign details the next eighteen miles of descent, at 10%!g(MISSING)rade, along with the runaway ramps and pull-over spots.

A 10%!d(MISSING)rop is one of the steepest

Bighorn wildflowers

Wildflowers along the Medicine Wheel Passage Scenic Byway. I took this in a pullout along the drop.

allowed on a state sanctioned road, and this one is long.

The road routinely destroys brakes and burns out transmissions, usually of RV drivers not prepared for the descent.

I passed one on the roadside on the way down.

After the sign, the adventure begins.

The first stretch leaves the valley and switchbacks down the mountainside.

Snow and wildflowers are everywhere.

At three separate points, waterfalls flowed directly next to the road.

The downhill grade is clearly visible, like no other road.

For those still coherent enough to look around, the Bighorn Basin stretches for a hundred miles beyond.

The road eventually reaches a plateau, at which point it enters a narrow ravine.

The walls are steep and yellow.

The brutal downgrade continues.

The road bursts out of the ravine into yet another set of switchbacks down yet another mountainside.

This time, the wildflowers are gone and yellow rocky buttes tower above.

Finally, it hits the bottom of the buttes and the descent ends.

By this point, the final 8% drop to the bottom of the valley feels like a relief.

The drop

A typical stretch of this part of the Medicine Wheel Passage Scenic Byway. I did it all in low gear. Care for some brake flambe?

I’m used to driving in mountains by this point (see Sacred Peaks), so I found it all rather fun.

The Bighorn Basin itself is a huge flat ranching area.

It contains very few trees.

It resembled north-central Wyoming from a day earlier except for the mountains all around.

For me the mountains made the drive tolerable.

I eventually reached the town of Cody.

Cody is named for Buffalo Bill Cody, western scout and showman.

The investors who set up the town in 1895 figured getting him involved would bring them settlers, and they were right.

Buffalo Bill built a hotel downtown in 1902, which he named for his daughter Irma.

The Irma Hotel contains a restaurant which is straight out of the Victorian frontier.

It is best known for an elaborate carved wooden bar.

The bar was a gift to Buffalo Bill from Queen Victoria after a performance in 1887.

Bill paid more to have the bar shipped to Cody than the cost of the rest of the hotel!

I had dinner here tonight.

As expected, meat and game made up most of the menu.

The