Pryor Mountains

The Pryor Mountains got their name from a theft. In July 1806, Sergeant Nathaniel Pryor of the Corps of Discovery was herding sixty-five horses down the Yellowstone when the Crow — masters of the horse raid — took the entire herd in two nighttime raids so quiet the soldiers never woke. Pryor's squad chased the raiders toward the mountains north of the Wyoming border and lost them. The mountains kept the sergeant's name; the Crow kept the horses.

The range is an island — a block of Madison limestone lifted out of the Bighorn Basin floor, dropping five thousand feet from subalpine meadows to red desert at its southern tip, riddled with caves including the Big Ice Cave, where the floor stays frozen through July. The Crow called the range Baahpuuo Isawaxaawatchuua, the Hitting Rock Mountains, and still use it for vision quests; the northern half lies on the reservation, closed to outsiders, holding sacred sites and ancestral burials the tribe protects by keeping them unlisted.

The wild horses are the famous residents — a herd of Spanish-descended mustangs that has run the range for centuries, blood-typed by the University of Kentucky to the old European Spanish type. When horse herds across the West were being rounded up and destroyed, this herd survived because the Pryors were too remote and too rough. In 1968 the range became the first wild horse range in the nation — protected before the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act even existed.

The Pryors hold all of it at once: the Crow's sacred mountain, the Corps of Discovery's stolen horses, ice that never melts, and mustangs whose ancestors arrived with the conquistadors — an island range that kept everything the rest of the West let go.