High in the Big Horn National Forest lies the Big Horn Medicine Wheel. It is used even today for Native American ceremonies. According to oral history, the people of the Crow tribe first described the structure to early fur trappers. Located at an elevation of more than nine thousand feet, it is an unusual design.
The Medicine Wheel is a roughly circular stone pattern about 82 feet in diameter. In the middle is a cairn of stone. There are stone spokes and 5 smaller cairns on the periphery of the wheel. Some estimate that the Big Horn Medicine Wheel could be as many as 3,000 years old.
Jay Ransom hypothesized that Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin was the original homeland for the Toltecs and Aztecs. He was convinced there were parallels between the design of the Medicine Wheel and the 25-ton Aztec calendar stone which was unburied in Mexico in 1790. Ransom spent nearly 60 years of his career accumulating data that supported his theory.
Learn more in the George C. Frison papers at UW’s American Heritage Center.