The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> Travel >> The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)

Today's Question
Where should I camp in Switzerland with my kids? answer

What's the best volcano to hike up in North America? answer

How can I plan a trip around riding the biggest, fastest roller coasters? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Online

Page:

The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)


	Bullet-riddled Dinwoody petroglyphs. (Keith Carter)

AFTER DINWOODY CANYON, where I had begun to feel like an intruder in a private world, I headed toward a much more accessible and public site, one that is central to the Plains Indians religion. From the Wind River Reservation I drove three hours across the former inland sea that is now the Bighorn Basin to the Medicine Wheel Scenic Passage, a two-lane Wyoming highway that was so steep I had to shift the truck into low range. In the typical manner of high peaks, Medicine Mountain makes its own weather. At 5,000 feet the sun was shining. At 7,000 it began to snow. After I parked the Bronco in order to climb the last mile and a half on foot, it started to rain. Just as I crossed timberline and reached the top of the ridge, a sudden wind stripped away the wrapper of clouds at the summit, revealing staggering vistas of the basin spread out on one side, and the wooded lower slopes of the Bighorns on the other.

The Medicine Wheel was built by unknown hands from cobbles of pale-yellow limestone arranged without mortar. Twenty-eight spokes emerge from a central cairn measuring seven by twelve feet to a circle 80 feet in diameter and 245 feet in circumference, around which six smaller cairns are assembled. Indians have made pilgrimages to the wheel for centuries, to seek visions, to make

"Everybody knows that the POWER LIVES UP ON TOP OF MOUNTAIN," says Blackfeet elder Cury Bear Wagner, "and these spirts always want to be honored."

offerings, to commune with the dead, to plead for the sick, and to purify themselves in sweat lodges. No one's sure what this architecture means. It might have been an astronomical device marking the movement of the stars. Or maybe it was a blueprint for the proper construction of a tepee or a medicine lodge, or the site of the first Crow Sun Dance.

At first glance the Medicine Wheel made no sense to me, rocks piled this way and that, fenced with three strands of rope stretched between thick pine posts. But as I walked around its perimeter the pattern began to emerge, the rim, the spokes, the cairns. Tied to the ropes and strewn among the stones were hundreds of things left by the faithful—deer horns, seashells, beads, animal bones, pouches of tobacco, braids of sweetgrass, small, mysterious bundles wrapped in rawhide. A sign bearing a photograph of the wheel held the words of an elder named Old Mouse, from the Arikara tribe of North Dakota: "Eventually one gets to the Medicine Wheel to fulfill one's life."

After a while I began to feel pulled by the undeniable aura of the site. Part of it was due to the physical and spiritual remove of all wild places. And there was something else here as well, that even I could feel: the humility you can't deny when you sense the scores of generations of the faithful who have stood in this very spot.

What was not apparent were the political storms that have raged here for a century. Because the mountain lies just inside the Bighorn National Forest, established in 1897, it's managed by the Forest Service. That means the fate of the Medicine Wheel has been at the mercy of the agency's policy of "multiple use," which theoretically ensures that everybody gets some. In 1970 the Medicine Wheel was declared a national historic landmark, giving it some protection from government monkey business. But as visits increased, by tourists and the faithful, the smell of money was soon wafting through the scrubbed mountain air. In 1988 the Forest Service, at the urging of businesspeople 30 miles west in Lovell, Wyoming, proposed commercial exploitation of the site that would include erecting a gigantic steel platform above the Medicine Wheel so its structure would be instantly apparent, as well as building latrines, a 200-vehicle parking lot with slots for RVs, and huts for cross-country skiers and snowmobilers.

People on the nearby reservations went ballistic—the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne just over the Montana border, the Shoshone and Arapaho farther south in Wyoming, the Lakota in South Dakota. They formed a pressure group called the Medicine Wheel Coalition and besieged the Forest Service with letters. (Remarkably, before passage of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the first Americans could have been prosecuted for worshiping at the Medicine Wheel.) The debate finally ended in 1996 with the signing of the Historic Property Plan, which requires federal land managers to consult with Indians about proposed uses of sacred sites.

As I circled the wheel, a pair of newlyweds rode up on mountain bikes, laughing and talking. But as soon as they felt what I had felt after recognizing the pattern of the stones and the gravity of the place, they fell silent.

"Wow," the guy said.

I nodded. "Exactly."

In the wind, clacking against a post, was a carved wooden feather bearing a poem. "Beauty before me. Beauty behind me. Beauty around me. Wherever I go I walk in beauty." As I headed down the mountain I passed a young Indian couple on their way up. The man was pushing a stroller. When I said hello to them, the baby smiled, lighting up the world.

Page: