A Bold Claim: The lines on a map that defined Wyoming

I’ll begin this story with a bold claim: the Big Horn Basin has been part of more geographic domains than any other place in American history.

Imagine sitting in a comfortable chair for the past 500 years on the banks of the Big Horn River, watching the world change around you. Without ever moving, you would have witnessed four countries, seven U.S. territories, nine counties, and two states take shape around you.

Yet even that span is brief compared to the deeper story of this place, where Native peoples have fished these rivers, hunted the plains, traded across vast distances, and traversed the rugged mountains for more than 12,000 years.

Those early inhabitants would have seen the North American cheetah sprinting past at over 60 miles an hour, the fastest land animal ever in the Western Hemisphere. Sadly, it disappeared soon after the first humans arrived, not because we hunted it directly, but because we hunted its favorite prey: the slower horses, camels (yes, really), and even some mammoths.

Today Greybull may look like any other small Wyoming town, but it sits at a crossroads of history. Long before any maps were drawn, Native peoples lived, hunted, and traveled through this valley, leaving behind tools, stories, and sacred places that remind us how deep our human roots run here.

And long before the first settlers arrived, kings, emperors, and presidents, men who never saw these rivers or mountains, sat in castles, palaces, and parliaments drawing crude lines across maps that cut directly through what would become our city.

Europeans, obsessed with land and the power it gave, set off a frenzy after Columbus’s voyage of 1492. Its reach first brushed our Big Horn River valley in 1541, when Hernando de Soto crossed the Mississippi near present-day Memphis, Tenn., and claimed for Spain “all lands draining into it.” He had no idea that meant thousands of miles of rivers and streams, including ours, 4,000 miles upstream, on waterways that wouldn’t even be named for another 300 years.

For the next 150 years, Spain claimed us on paper but never came near Wyoming. Their explorers reached into what’s now Arizona and California, perhaps touching southern Utah and Nevada, but our valleys and peaks were far beyond their reach.

When Jamestown was founded in 1607, the English crown quickly claimed everything it could. By 1609, Virginia’s charter stretched “from sea to sea,” Atlantic to Pacific. With a stroke of a quill pen in London, we went from being part of Spain to part of England.

Meanwhile, French explorers moved up the Mississippi River, settling near New Orleans and naming the vast basin État de Louisiane in honor of King Louis XIV. By 1682, France claimed all the same lands, and unknowingly we went from not paying taxes to Spain or England to not paying them to France.

From Monarchy to Revolution

For the next 120 years, French kings and queens claimed to rule us. In 1792 that rule came to a violent end when the monarchy lost its head, quite literally. I doubt Marie Antoinette’s last thoughts were of her far-off “subjects” in Greybull or our access to cake.

With the royal family gone, France plunged into chaos, and soon Napoleon Bonaparte rose from the turmoil to become, on paper at least, our emperor.

Napoleon had little interest in the Rocky Mountains or the wildlife we love. His eyes were fixed on Europe and conquest. In 1803, in search of quick cash to fund those ambitions, he turned to President Thomas Jefferson. The Louisiana Purchase, $15 million for a vast empire of land, made us Americans at last.

So, by 1803, without ever moving, we had already lived under Spain, England, France, and the United States.

From there, the pace of change only quickened. While Lewis and Clark pushed west through endless forests, sweeping plains, and rugged mountains, they never actually set foot in Wyoming, though they came close while returning east and floating down Montana’s Yellowstone River.

It was there, on July 24, 1806, that William Clark reached the confluence of the Yellowstone and the La rivière du Gros Corne, (The Big Horn River) just north of today’s Hardin, Montana. He wrote of “beautiful cottonwood groves” and “buffalo and elk abundant.” I like to think he sensed the dramatic changes his travels would set in motion, even if he couldn’t imagine our little town 200 miles upstream and 200 years into the future.

By 1812, when Louisiana entered the Union as a state, Congress renamed the remainder of the Louisiana Territory the Missouri Territory. Then in 1821, when Missouri itself became a state, mapmakers labeled what was left simply as “Unorganized Territory,” a name that hardly reflects the beauty we see here today. The pioneers of the 1840s, heading for Utah, California, and Oregon, were simply trying to cross that unorganized and unforgiving land as quickly as they could.

In 1854, most of Wyoming became part of the Nebraska Territory, then shifted repeatedly: Dakota Territory, to Idaho Territory, back to Dakota Territory, and finally to Wyoming Territory in 1868.

That makes seven territories in all: Louisiana, Missouri, Unorganized, Nebraska, Dakota (twice), Idaho, and Wyoming. Through it all, the Big Horn Basin remained the best-kept secret of our Native friends.

Wyoming Territory began with just five counties, all simple rectangles stretching north to south. One map even labeled the Big Horn Basin as an “unexplored area.” Still, lines were drawn, and we were placed in Carter County, which was quickly renamed Sweetwater.

When Otto Franc brought his first cattle down from Montana in 1878 to what is now Burlington, half the Basin lay in Sweetwater County and the other half in Pease County, divided by the river. Pease soon became Johnson County, and before long, we found ourselves folded into Fremont County.

From our quiet vantage point, we saw more and more settlers moving in, and fewer of our Native friends, as the Crow were pushed north and the Shoshone and Arapaho south onto difficult reservation lands. The newcomers brought wagons, families, guns, sheep, and cattle.

In 1880, the Big Horn Basin held only a few hundred people; by 1890, around 900; and by 1900, nearly 5,000.

Then came the railroad. It grew like two steel snakes, one from Worland and one from Billings, meeting near Frannie. By 1905, our corner of the Basin lay along the new line. Our beloved pronghorn antelope, once evolved to outrun the long-extinct North American cheetahs, were no longer the fastest thing we had ever seen.

With Wyoming’s rapid growth came constant reshuffling. County boundaries changed almost yearly, especially after statehood in 1890. Between 1875 and 1911, depending on where you stood, you might have found yourself in Carter, Sweetwater, Pease, Johnson, Fremont, and finally here in Greybull, Big Horn County.

By 1911, the Basin was divided once more as Park, Washakie, and Hot Springs Counties were created. Their jagged borders looked as if they’d been cut out by a two-year-old with a pair of scissors, and suddenly, the map was complete. Parts of the Big Horn Basin had now been in nine different counties.

When you add it all up, that’s four countries, seven territories, nine counties, two states (one French and one American), and countless centuries of Native tribal lands. 

The real lesson is this: while the wider world may be in turmoil and distant powers make their decisions from far away, here in our little valley we place our trust in the friends, family, and neighbors we keep close.