A mysterious relic in the Big Horn Mountains west of Sheridan, Wyoming, in Shoshoni country, is an elaborate circular pattern traced out in stone on a flat shoulder near the top of a 10,000 foot remote peak. The Medicine Wheel has a circumference of two hundred forty-five feet, with twenty-eight spokes and six stone cairns spaced unevenly around its rim, and a seventh about fifteen feet from the wheel. These shelters are very low with a slab of rock across the top. Two of the cairns zero in on the rising sun of the first day of summer— summer solstice—when the sun reaches its northernmost rising point on the horizon. Two of the cairns zero in on the summer solstice sunset. Alignments of others point to the rising points of three bright stars, Alde-baran, Rigel, and Sirius. West of Armstead, Montana, now Hap Hawkins’ Lake, near U.S. 91, south of Dillon, Montana, is another wheel-shaped pattern of stones. These undoubtedly predate the Shoshoni nation as we know it.
Montana, A State Guide Book, compiled and written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA for the State of Montana. New York: The Viking Press, 1939, pp. 32, 292.
JOHN A. EDDY, “Probing the Mystery of the Medicine Wheels,” National Geographic, 151 (January, 1977), p. 140.