Wyoming History: 250 Years Ago, Pivotal Battle Was Fought On Roundtop Mountain

Roundtop Mountain is a popular hiking trail in Thermopolis, Wyoming. It is also the scene of an ancient battle that lives on in legends, faint memories and scattered artifacts.

The small mountain rises 600 feet above the town and is the prominent butte dominating the landscape to the north of Thermopolis. In 1917, Gen. George M. Sliney, one of the earliest pioneers of the region, described the view for the Thermopolis Record.

“To the south, the grand range of the Wind River Mountains, the spinal column of the American continent, stretched for nearly 200 miles, draped here and there with patches of perpetual snow,” Sliney said. “To the southeast lay the Rattlesnake Range (now Copper Mountain), facing north and east, you saw the Big Horn Range and Pryor Mountains.”

In 1986, Roundtop Mountain was donated by the family of the late Lewis Freudenthal, and a county park had been established there in his name.

In recent years, a 1-mile trail has been built with switchbacks and an easier climb to the summit from which a battle is believed to have once been fought. 

Hikers can reach the top of Roundtop Mountain and explore the large dolomite boulders surrounding the edges of the small mountain.

It is possible that these rocks overlooking the countryside were, at one time, used as a last line of defense against a tribal attack, according to early accounts by pioneers arriving in the late 1800s. 

Legends of the Shoshone tell of an encounter with strangers that most likely refer to this battle on the summit of Roundtop. 

The Legend

According to Sliney, the countryside that Roundtop overlooked was held by the Crows and Shoshones when he first arrived in 1877.  

“To retain it they had to fight with their powerful enemy, the Sioux, and in so doing sacrificed their best blood and treasure in the never-ending war,” Sliney said. “To these tribes and others, the Bighorn Basin, with its surrounding mountains was the most beautiful spot in America.”

He said it was the most famed area in Wyoming territory for game and fish and the natural home of elk, deer, antelope, mountain sheep and beaver. 

“The Indians say in their own language, ‘Beautifully the Great Spirit looks at the other countries in the summer, but he lives here all the year,’” Sliney said.

While Sliney was at Fort Washakie, he was told a legend about the Bighorn Region, most specifically the Owl Creek country that the butte was in. 

“There is a tradition among the Indians that many, many years ago, a strange people came from the south,” Sliney said. “They commenced to build homes in the solitudes of Wyoming, working among the rocks in the mountains.”

Sliney said he was told how the country yielded these strangers rich treasures, not only furs, but precious metals taken from the ground.

“The Indians broke out and destroyed the strangers in their new homes,” Sliney said. “By this means they became possessed of the first horses ever owned by Indians.”

Signs Of Battle

In the 1880s, as pioneers began making the region their home, they found evidence of a battle that the legend spoke of.

Edward Cusack first arrived in the Bighorn Basin on July 7, 1885, by coming over the Bridger Trail.

He claimed in his short biography, published in the Independent Record, to have found artifacts on his homestead and on Roundtop that collaborated Sliney’s story of previous inhabitants that were not natives to the area. 

Not only did Cusack find a rotted old cabin, rusty kitchen utensils with 100-year-old patterns and an antique ax on his property along Owl Creek, but he claimed to have stumbled upon the scene of an ancient battle. 

“Under the cedar ridge, between Thermopolis and Owl creek, I found where juniper trees had been piled together to form a barricade,” Cusack said. “The trees that had been cut showed evidence of white men’s work.”

When he climbed to the top of Roundtop, he found where the early pioneers had apparently met their fate.

“I believe that the breastworks on the top of Roundtop Butte were the work of white men,” Cusack said. “They were besieged there by some much stronger party, either redskins or white men. But their fate will perhaps never be known and forever remain a mystery.”

The breastworks Cusack described finding would have been an earthwork structure thrown up to breast or shoulder height to provide protection to defenders firing over it from a standing position. 

Spaniards were known for erecting fortifications against their enemies in the New World as they moved north in the 1770s so it would not be far-fetched to assume the hastily made structures Cusack had found would have been made by these conquistadors seeking new lands to claim.  

Evidence Of Spanish colonists

Andrew O’Donoghue in 1934 reported in the Casper Tribune-Herald that his efforts to discover who the settlers were failed.

“Not a speck of evidence has ever been discovered as to who the Owl Creek settlers were; when they came there; whence they came, or the slightest clue as to their disappearance,” said O’Donoghue. “The only thing of which there is any reasonable certainty is that they were white people and had located in the valley at least a century before Woodruff’s time (in 1870s).” 

One theory about the people that seems most plausible, according to artifacts found scattered about Wyoming, is that “the strange people from the south” from where the Shoshone first got their horses, were Spanish colonists.

In 1922, The Douglas Budget, reported that a mine and artifacts had been discovered in the Bighorn Mountains that predated the 1880 homesteads by at least 100 years. 

“In the deep gorge of Big Canyon Creek above the Daugherty ranch are the remains of ancient mine workings,” the 1922 reporter said. “A Worland party a few years ago discovered an old Mexican saddle near this spot. Who did the work? All they found, however, was the saddle, twisted and gnarley with age. This relic may be a sign of white men in the Big Horns previous to written history.”

Throughout Wyoming, old Spanish artifacts have been found, pointing to their attempts to homestead the region and to mine the riches of the land of both minerals and furs. 

As historians continue to ponder this mystery of Spanish artifacts and ancient battles, visitors can hike Roundtop Mountain and determine for themselves if, indeed, an ancient battle happened 250 years ago where the Shoshone Indians were victorious and the spoils were the then-strange creatures we call horses. 

Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.