The 1000-year-old mystery of the Bighorn Medicine Wheel
For most of the year, the Medicine Wheel at Bighorn Range in Wyoming is hidden away from the world. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that it has lasted for nearly a century of human history in such perfect condition, but on a deeply selfish level, there’s something sad about that.
Medicine Wheel is the name given to a gigantic circular rock formation 80 feet in diameter, studded with 28 spokes around the rim. It gets hidden because it’s at the very summit of Medicine Mountain, some 10,000 feet in the air. Thus, for most of the year, it is covered by several feet of snow. However, during the summer months, when the snow melts, we get a look into Native American customs from centuries past, showing the colonialism at the heart of all those jokes about America having no history.
Because, sure, the country is a quarter of a century old. There are public toilets in Europe that are the same age, we get it. However, that’s not American history. This is. The land colonised by the pilgrims is impossibly old, and people have been there the entire time, making things of such beauty and complexity that we didn’t fully understand them until centuries down the line. Things like the Medicine Wheel. Something people had no idea what the relevance of it was until Jack Eddy, an archaeoastronomer, made an incredible discovery in the 1970s.
Up until Eddy’s work, archaeologists had worked with the Native American Tribes of the area to have a basic understanding of the significance of the Medicine Wheel. After all, it was one of hundreds across America, so there had been several minds at work researching them.
What they did understand was its spiritual significance. This was a ceremonial site, one that tribes had used for vision quests and prayer hundreds of years ago. Any deeper understanding wasn’t made until Eddy studied the Wheel at night.
He found that the cairns that studded the Wheel’s rim matched exactly where the sun would rise and set during the summer solstice. It also showed the location of bright stars like Rigel and Sirius, the kind that can give an early tribe of humans a pretty exact date. The Medicine Wheel, among many other uses, was an early calendar.
However, a key mystery still remains. It’s a site of deep significance to surrounding Native American tribes, yet none of them, from Apsáalooke to Cheyenne to Lakota and anyone in between, claims the site as their own doing.
Each tribe that has ever set foot there and recorded their experiences has stated that the Medicine Wheel was there when they arrived. This may sound like a bittersweet note to end on, as if we may never know who was responsible for one of the great works of real American history.
However, the truth is something a little brighter. While the tribes can’t say they know which tribe is responsible, they’ve instead chosen to view the Medicine Wheel not as a singular tribe’s achievement, but a part of their own unified history and culture. One that spans millennia and will never be truly erased.
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