For centuries, the Medicine Wheel in the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming has been used for prayer and vision quests by the Crow Tribe and other Native people.
Visitors come from all over the world to hike up Medicine Mountain to the wheel, a National Historical Site managed by the Bighorn National Forest with guidance from the Medicine Wheel Alliance.
On the Summer Solstice, June 20, many people are expected to arrive early to view the sun as it lines up with one of the seven cairns at the wheel.
Who made it?
The Medicine Wheel’s origins are uncertain.
Many believe it was built by the Sheepeaters, a Shoshone band whose name is derived from their expertise at hunting mountain sheep.
The most common Crow story is about how Burnt Face, a handsome young Crow, fell into the fire while entering his mother’s tepee. Embarrassed of his severely burned face, he left his people to live in the mountains, where he built the Medicine Wheel based on instructions he received in a vision from the Sun.
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Red Plume, a Crow chief during the time of Lewis and Clark, found great spiritual power at the Medicine Wheel.
At 9,462 feet elevation, on a clear day the Medicine Wheel provides a view of the Teton Mountains more than 100 miles away. It sits halfway between Lovell and Sheridan, just a dozen miles from the Montana border.
The Crow people believe morning is the most powerful time, Crow tribal member Patrick Hill said. That’s why so many travel to see the sun rise at the Medicine Wheel.
“They smoke and face the sun and thank the creator for the day and what it brings,” Hill said.
Scott Bear Don’t Walk, a member of the Crow Tribe who grew up in Billings, Montana, said his father took the family on pilgrimages to the wheel.
“The Medicine Wheel is a powerful place. We would ask my father, ‘Who made this?’ He would say, ‘The ancient ones,’” Bear Don’t Walk said.
“Ancient ones” in the Crow language translates to ancestors.
Some visitors leave trinkets, locks of hair, tobacco, hand-written prayers or cloth prayer flags, but the Crow way is to leave only prayers, said Timothy McCleary, a historian at Little Big Horn College in southern Montana.
Because the Medicine Wheel is on public land, anyone can view it, but only tribal members are allowed to hold ceremonies inside the rope fence. Dave McKee, archaeologist for Bighorn National Forest, said he receives 35 to 90 requests for ceremonies at the wheel every year.
“Some people can elect for a temporary closure so their ceremony can be private,” McKee said, adding the ceremonies can run anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour.
Crow tribal member Charles Yarlott worked as an interpretive ranger at the Medicine Wheel from 2012 to 2014. Budget cuts eliminated his paid position, but Yarlott said he was proud to represent his tribe during his time there.
“Knowing my ancestors went up there to pray and fast makes it a special place for me,” Yarlott said.
‘Whole world is
free to come’
Linwood Tall Bull, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, is president of the Medicine Wheel Alliance. He said Crow elders have instructed him to leave prayer offerings at the wheel for four days and then bury them.
“The whole world is free to come to it,” Tall Bull said.
His father, William Tall Bull, spent his life fighting for the preservation of the Medicine Wheel so that it could be a spiritual place for all people. William’s name and the names of other tribal members who helped preserve the wheel are on the four benches that visitors pass on the one-mile walk from the parking lot to the wheel.
Linwood encourages visitors to stop at each of the benches during the one-mile hike from the parking lot to the wheel as a way of honoring tribal elders.
Even though the Medicine Wheel is open just a few months a year because of snow — June 20 through Labor Day in September — it receives 11,000 visitors a year.
This summer, as the caretakers of Medicine Mountain dismantle the fraying rope fence around the wheel, they will look to the members of the Native Alliance for guidance on properly disposing of the prayer offerings and other items.
‘Sacred landscape’
McKee said caretakers work with tribal members to keep inappropriate objects including metal and plastic away from the wheel.
“The landscape is sacred, but the religious uses and meaning are personal, tied through generations through clans,” McKee said.
Bear Don’t Walk points out that every time he visits the Medicine Wheel, he meets international visitors. He said he is grateful that people appreciate the significance of this spiritual place, and he likes to see them be respectful of it.
“Sometimes it takes the French tourist or the British tourist to say, ‘This is important stuff,’ ” Bear Don’t Walk said.
McCleary said research suggests the center cairn of the wheel is at least 800 years old, but that the outside spokes were made around 1760. The stones that make up the 80-foot wheel and its 28 spokes were gathered from the area and are mostly bread loaf-sized limestone.
One theory the wheel has 28 spokes is that’s the number of ribs a bison has. McCleary said 28 is the number of rafters on the Hidatsa’s Sacred Lodge. It also represents the number of days in a lunar cycle.
“The stars and constellations used to judge the passage of time rise every 28 days,” McCleary said. “That is one way the Crow used it — to tell the passage of time. The foundations of the Crow philosophy were based on the stars and constellations. We are now so disconnected from nature.”
The original cairn at the site was likely made by the Shoshone Tribe as a sacred site marker, McCleary said. When the Crow came into the area, they took over the Shoshone sacred sites. Burnt Face went to the site to fast and because he was instructed on how to construct a sacred lodge, he made the wheel in the same pattern.
“If you look at the wheel, it is not a circle,” McCleary said. “There is a flat side on the southwest, and there is a cairn outside the wheel on the flat side. That is where you have to sit to see the sunrise on solstice. It was the floor plan of a Hidatsa sacred lodge. You could tell what time of year it was at the Medicine Wheel.”
McCleary suggests that Burnt Face had been trained as a sacred priest of the Sacred Lodge in North Dakota and there is evidence that Burnt Face also built two other smaller medicine wheels on Crow tribal land in Montana.
The first written description of the wheel was in 1902 when anthropologist Charles Simms wrote about it for the Field Museum in Chicago, showing the fasting beds, which had wooden covers on them.
There are five fasting beds at the Medicine Wheel, all of them large enough for a man to lie down in. Fasts would last for four days when men would not take food or water. They fasted to have a vision.
There are more than 100 known medicine wheels in the Northwest, and the Bighorn Medicine Wheel is the most accessible among them. It has been promoted for decades by the Sheridan Chamber of Commerce.
Visitors get nervous driving up the narrow gravel road with steep dropoffs, but witnessing the symbolism and spiritual power behind the Medicine Wheel make it worth the effort.