Celebrating America 250 isn’t just about what happened in Philadelphia

While a new nation was being born in the East, another world existed in the Big Horn and Shoshone River valleys

For people in Philadelphia, Boston and New York City, the summer of 1776 was dominated by the Revolutionary War. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were in Philadelphia helping shape a new nation, George Washington commanded the Continental Army near New York City. Paul Revere and John Paul Jones were in Boston.

City streets were lined with brick houses, shops, taverns and workshops. Merchants sold cloth, books, tools, furniture, food and imported goods. Horses pulled wagons through streets crowded with pedestrians. Church bells rang above the cities. Taverns filled with conversation, argument and political gossip.

Printers turned out newspapers, pamphlets and broadsides. Ships crowded the rivers and waterfronts.

More than 1,500 miles to the west, none of it mattered to anyone. The Big Horn Basin was living in another world. There was no Wyoming. There was no Cody, Powell, Lovell, Greybull, Basin, Worland or Thermopolis.

There were no newspapers. No stores. No taverns. No streets. No courthouses. No farms. But there were people. Hundreds, maybe thousands.

Native people had lived, hunted and traveled through the Big Horn Basin and its surrounding mountains for thousands of years. In 1776, Crow and Shoshone people were among those who knew this country.

And unlike Philadelphia, much of their 1776 world is still standing in front of us.

Heart Mountain would look much the same. The Bighorn Mountains would still dominate the eastern horizon. The Absarokas would still rise abruptly to the west. The Pryors would still stand over the northern Basin.

The Shoshone River would still come roaring out of the mountains. The Greybull would still flow north and east from the Absarokas. The Big Horn would still carry their water north toward the magnificent canyon.

The Native people endured much the same weather we do today: bone-chilling winters, with wind-driven snow finding its way into their shelters, and summers so hot and dry that shade and water could mean the difference between comfort and possible death.

Even the sagebrush would be familiar.

In some places, particularly high in the mountains, it might be possible to stand today and imagine that you had somehow stepped backward exactly 250 years.

At first, nothing might seem different. Then look more carefully.

In 1776 there were no old fence posts leaning into the sagebrush. No discarded wire wrapped around a tree. No two-track road disappearing over a ridge. No distant power line.

Then listen. No airplane crosses overhead. No truck groans up a mountain road. No four-wheeler buzzes somewhere in the distance. No chainsaw. No rifle shot. No faint highway noise carried unexpectedly far on a still morning.

Perhaps that would be the greatest difference of all.

The country would not be silent. We’d just be listening to different sounds.

Wind moving through cottonwoods. Water tumbling over rocks. Geese overhead. Ravens calling from a carcass. Coyotes. Wolves. Elk. The slap of a beaver’s tail against the water.

And animals would be everywhere.

Bison traveled through the Basin. Pronghorn crossed the open country. Mule deer occupied the river bottoms and foothills. Elk ranged through mountains and valleys. Bighorn sheep climbed the surrounding cliffs.

There were grizzly bears. There were wolves. There were mountain lions.

And there were beavers in numbers that would eventually attract the first wave of Euro-American trappers into the Rocky Mountain West.

The beavers themselves helped shape the country.

Their dams backed water across small streams, creating ponds, marshes and wet meadows. Willows flourished around them. Waterfowl gathered there. Sediment accumulated and groundwater spread outward.

The streams of 1776 were not simply today’s streams without bridges. In many places they may have been wetter, wider and more complicated because beavers were continually rebuilding them.

Bison changed the land as well.

They grazed grasses, carried seeds, fertilized the soil and wore trails between water, grazing areas and mountain passes. They rolled in dusty wallows that generations of animals could enlarge.

There were no fences to stop them.

A herd of bison could move across what today might be dozens of ranches without encountering a strand of barbed wire. Pronghorn could travel across the Basin without crossing a highway. Wolves could follow elk for miles without encountering a subdivision, vehicle or fence.

The rivers were equally free.

There were no dams near Cody, no Boysen Reservoir and no Sunshine Reservoir to tame the rivers. In spring, melting mountain snow could turn quiet streams into raging torrents, spilling miles beyond their banks, tearing out trees, cutting new channels and reshaping the valley floor. By late August, the opposite could be true. With no reservoirs holding spring runoff for later in the year, rivers and creeks could shrink dramatically under the hot, dry summer sun.

And through all of this country moved people.

European explorers brought horses that would eventually transform Native life across the West. But they also brought diseases, including smallpox, that spread far beyond European settlements and devastated Native communities.

Still, the Big Horn Basin of 1776 was not an untouched wilderness. Native people had known this country for generations. They knew where to find water and game, which passes crossed the mountains, where plants and stone for tools could be found, and where to shelter during harsh winters.

This was not an empty country waiting to be discovered. It was a landscape Native people had traveled, hunted and understood for generations.

There were trails through the Basin long before there were roads. Some had been traveled for generations.

People hunted bison, elk, deer, pronghorn and bighorn sheep. They gathered plants and berries. They made tools, clothing and shelters from the resources around them.

By 1776, horses had transformed life for many Native people of the region. A family with horses could travel farther, carry more possessions and hunt bison more effectively than earlier generations.

There were no roads in the Big Horn Basin, at least not roads as we would recognize them. But there were well-established trails. One of the most important was the Bad Pass Trail, an ancient route through the rugged country along Bighorn Canyon. For generations, Native people had followed these trails between hunting grounds, camps and trading networks that stretched far beyond the Basin.

The Basin was not necessarily crowded.

A person could probably travel great distances without seeing another human being. Then, around a river crossing, hunting area or seasonal camp, dozens or perhaps hundreds of people might gather.

There were no property lines in the modern sense. Different peoples hunted, traveled through and sometimes fought over the same country. Crow and Shoshone people both had deep connections to the region, and the balance of power changed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

High above the Basin were still more remote places.

Mountain Shoshone people, later often called Sheep Eaters, lived and hunted in portions of the rugged country surrounding what is now Yellowstone and the Big Horn Basin.

There, the illusion of traveling back 250 years becomes even easier.

Walk far enough from a road today and find a high mountain meadow beneath the Absarokas. Look toward a ridge of stone that has stood there for thousands of years. A creek tumbles through the meadow. Spruce and fir climb the slopes. An eagle circles overhead.

For a moment, 1776 does not seem very far away. The mountains don’t know that anything happened.

They do not know about the Declaration of Independence. They do not know that Philadelphia grew into a city of millions, that railroads eventually crossed Wyoming or that men walked on the moon. They simply remain.

That summer, while ink dried on the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, the Shoshone River continued running out of the mountains.

The mountains, rivers and rocks of the Big Horn Basin knew nothing of independence. They had been here for millions of years before anyone wrote the word on parchment.

The Native people living in the Basin never have heard about all the commotion in Philadelphia that summer. The Declaration of Independence meant to their daily lives, and it would be generations before the new nation growing in the East would dramatically change their world.

But the mountains, rivers and rocks are still here.  

Just as the events in Philadelphia 250 years ago can inspire us to defend liberty and remember the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the people living in the Big Horn Basin that summer can inspire us as well.

Their world demanded resilience, hard work and an intimate understanding of the land around them. They learned to live with brutal winters, summer heat and wild animals, while depending on a landscape that could provide nearly everything they needed but could also be unforgiving. Their way of life depended on using that land without exhausting the resources that their children and grandchildren would need. 

The two worlds of 1776 could hardly have been more different. One was fighting to create a new nation. The other was working to preserve ways of life, traditions and communities that had endured for generations.

Yet 250 years later, we have much to learn from both groups of our ancestors. Their experiences, their struggles and their hopes helped shape the place we call home today. Both are important parts of our history, and both are stories worth remembering.