Bighorn River

Course of the Bighorn River

The Bighorn River is a 742 km long tributary of the Yellowstone River in the U.S. states of Wyoming and Montana. Above the town of Thermopolis, Wyoming, he bears the name of Wind River.

Name

As Europeans reached the river in Montana, they named him after the occurring there bighorn sheep (English Bighorn Sheep). Explorers in today's Wyoming gave the river, however, the name of Wind River, later it was realized that it was one and the same body of water. To end the resulting confusion, it was decided that the river should be from an arbitrarily fixed point to change the name. This is at the root of the Wind River Canyon, about seven kilometers south of Thermopolis and is named Wedding of the Waters43.581111111111 - 108.21305555556. Here is one of the rare places where a river suddenly has a different name for no apparent reason.

Course

The Bighorn River rises as Wind River in the Owl Creek Mountains. First, it flows to the southeast, from Riverton he turns northward. Before the Wind River cuts through the Wind River Canyon, the Owl Creek Mountains, it is dammed to Boysen Reservoir. At the exit of the canyon, the river passes through the point and is called Wedding of the Waters from as Bighorn River. He then flows past the city Thermopolis and at Hot Springs State Park. The Yellowtail Dam to Bighorn Canyon dams on the river on Bighorn Lake, which intersects the boundary of the state of Montana and forms the core of the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Areas. Then it flows through the Crow Indian Reservation, before it reaches the Yellowstone River below Custer.

Bighorn Basin

The Bighorn River drains the named after him, Bighorn Basin, a plateau at an average of around 1325 m above sea level. It lies between the Big Horn Mountains in the east and the Absaroka Range to the west. The basin was originally inhabited by the Eastern Shoshone and Absarokee Indians (also known as Crow Indians known). The first white man in the area was John Colter, who discovered in 1807 Colter 's Hell, a region of volcanic activity on the Shoshone River. 1864 Jim Bridger explored the basin as a route for a route from the Oregon Trail to Montana, as the east parallel Bozeman Trail was not passable due to conflicts with the Lakota Indians. From pioneers of the river and Great Horn River or in French Le Corne was called ( for Horn ).

At the turn of the 20th century, the basin was slowly settled by ranchers. A leader was William Cody, who had become famous as Buffalo Bill and the marketing of its prominence from 1896 developed the place Cody. Butch Cassidy founded in the region in 1897 after a stay in prison his notorious gang, the Wild Bunch, and used the Hole in the Wall in the Big Horn Mountains as a hiding place.