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National Geographic : 1977 Jan
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Probing the Mystery of the Medicine Wheels By JOHN A. EDDY, Ph.D. Photographs by THOMAS E. HOOPER E ARLY PROSPECTORS first found the strange structure on a remote peak high in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains: an elaborate pattern traced out in stone on a flat shoulder near the top of a 10,000-foot mountain. It resembled a large 28-spoke wheel, 80 feet across, with six rock piles, or cairns, spaced unevenly around its rim. The range, rich in game and tumbling streams, was a favorite summer hunting place for Indian tribes-Crow, Cheyenne, Sho shone, Arapaho-and so the medicine wheel, as it came to be known, was deemed the work of one or another of these. But no one really knew who made it, or when, or why. When archeologists came to see the site early in this century, they asked the local Crow tribesmen what they knew of the formation. The answers were enigmatic: "It was here when we came." "It was built by people who had no iron." "The sun built it to show us how to build a tepee." In time, legends grew. Fanciful explana tions attributed it to Aztecs, Hindus, errant Chinese, Phoenicians, even to pre-Columbian members of the Masonic lodge. To the Sho shone Indians it was the home of the "Little People," who supposedly lived in caverns beneath the wheel and survived on the meat of bighorn sheep. In 1922 ethnologist G. B. Grinnell offered a more reasonable explanation, noting that the pattern of the Bighorn Medicine Wheel resembled the floor plan of a Cheyenne med icine lodge-a temporary wooden structure built for the traditional sun-dance ceremony. 140
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