Polo Capital of the Rockies

Polo came to Sheridan because the English came to Sheridan. In the eighteen eighties and nineties, a wave of British aristocrats and younger sons arrived in the American West seeking the outdoor life and the chance to run cattle on cheap land. Wyoming attracted a disproportionate share of them. They brought their horses, their customs, and their sport.

By the early nineteen hundreds, ranchers around Sheridan were playing polo with enough regularity that organized clubs formed. Polo in Big Horn dates to eighteen ninety-eight, when Malcolm Moncreiffe built a field there, and the Big Horn Polo Club became the organizing center of the sport in the region. The Big Horn Valley south of Sheridan, with its flat bottom ground and access to high-quality horseflesh from the working ranches, was well-suited to the game.

What distinguished Sheridan's polo tradition from a passing fashionable phase was that it returned and persisted. The ranching families who played in the nineteen twenties had descendants who played in the nineteen fifties and again in the nineteen nineties. The Big Horn Polo Club still runs matches on summer weekends, with games open to the public at no charge. The tradition of passing the hat among spectators to pay the club's bills is as old as the sport here.

The game drew outside attention. Will Rogers attended matches here. The polo culture became part of what made Sheridan legible to Eastern visitors as a place where the West still operated on horseback. The dude ranch industry that developed alongside it was, in part, selling the same image: working knowledge of horses, wide open country, and a social world that had not yet been fully mechanized.

Sheridan bills itself today as the polo capital of the Rockies, a title with more accuracy than most promotional slogans. The horses are real, the riders are serious, and the matches on summer afternoons at Big Horn carry the weight of more than a century of play.