The Medicine Wheel - Was it Worth It?

Wyoming has not been the nicest place overall, sad to say. Actually, to be more explicit, Wyoming bars. Last night, I stopped in a bar/restaurant in the Big Horn Mountains, the only eating establishment for miles. There were about 25 men in there, mostly hunters touring the park on ATVs to hunt the free-roaming cattle. (How hard is it to hunt down a cow?)

I was greeted with obnoxiousness. “You’re on a bike?” one asked. “Are you a Democrat?”

I had said nothing to them prior, and just continued to the bathroom. As I shut the door, I heard, “Let’s hunt the Democrats! Democrats! Democrats!”

Seriously? This is the best they could come up with? Apparently, judging by this and the pink shirt incident, it’s hard to be different in this state.

I told the waitress where I was headed, the Medicine Wheel, an American Stonehenge constructed hundreds of years ago on a solitary mountain. “I hope it’s worth it,” I joked, as I had climbed thousands of feet in a never-ending uphill to get into the mountains, freezing at night in 10 degree high winds.

“It’s not,” she said flatly.

Ah.

But after trudging through tons of snow, I think it might have been. I got some awesome views, like this one of angry clouds coming to ruin my day:

It was hard to take a picture encompassing the whole wheel, as it’s 80 feet in diameter, and there was no way to get above it for an aerial shot. Also, t was half-covered in snow, as this mountain is very rarely free of it. But here’s the best I could do:

At 9,642 feet, the entire wheel is made of stones, with a large pile in the center, known as a cairn. From it emanate 28 spokes, some of which connect to six more cairns on the rim, which are large enough to sit in (not that I did).

If you stand or sit at one cairn looking towards another, you will be pointed to certain places on the distant horizon, where the sun rises or sets on summer solstices and where certain important stars rise. Supposedly, the dawn stars helped foretell when the sun ceremonial days would be coming. (No one really knows for sure, as it’s uncertain which tribe built the wheel and for what purpose.)

Here is the center cairn, decorated with the skull from the big-horned cattle, which I assume the mountains are named from:

Surprisingly there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to explain the significance of the Medicine Wheel. No signs, no pamphlets, no guides, nothing. It looks like there might have been a plaque, but this is the help it offers now:

Helpful, no?

Many American Indian tribes still frequent the Medicine Wheel for spiritual purposes, including prayer offerings, sweat lodges, and the gathering of medicinal herbs. As it was at Bear Lodge, there are prayer bundles lodged in the fence around the wheel, including wrapped sweet tobacco and herbs, leather satchels, dreamcatchers, and other gifts:

I even saw some Hindu flags and Christian crosses stuck to the ropes. I wonder if they were put there by Native Americans or well-meaning tourists. My favorite offering was this claw:

I stayed by the wheel for about an hour, completely alone. It’s not something that’s easy to get to, and obviously not something the many hunters were interested in visiting. The ATVs that buzzed past never stopped, and seemed to ignore the peace that the American Indians have tried to instill in the site. (A few years ago, there was a controversy when the Forest Service tried to put a parking lot near the wheel for tourist access. After some arguments, it was decided to put it more than a mile away, so the wheel can only be accessed by foot.)

As I was leaving, an American Indian man and his wife came up the path, carrying a small leather bag. As he approached the wheel, with his wife looking on, he pulled some red cloths from the bag and began to tie them to the fence, whispering chants and singing.

When he was finished, I asked him about what the wheel meant to him.

“There’s a lot of power in it,” he said. “It connects us to everyone who was here before. It’s one of the few things we have left of our ancestors.”

He asked who I was. I told him about me and my project, but that was where our conversation ended. He didn’t want to have anything about him publicized or answer any of my questions. “I have my reasons,” he said. Thus, I don’t know his name or his tribe, and took no photos of him.

I really want to know more. It’s sad that neither here or at Devil’s Tower was I able to meet American Indians who could discuss things with me. There’s a Medicine Wheel preservation society in Montana, and I’ll call them later, updating this with more interesting, personal reflection in a week or so.

Until then, here’s an awesome view: