Sheridan, Wyoming

Sheridan sits at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in a landscape that has been contested, settled, mined, grazed, and reimagined more times than most Wyoming towns its size. The population hovers around eighteen thousand, making it one of the larger cities in the northeastern corner of the state. The elevation is thirty-seven hundred feet, enough to give the summers some coolness and the winters genuine bite.

The town's story moves in layers. First the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne, who knew the Powder River Basin and the Bighorn foothills as their home ground. Then the Bozeman Trail, cutting through the Lakota and Cheyenne territory toward the Montana goldfields, and the wars that followed. Then the Burlington Railroad in eighteen ninety-two and the coal mines that fed it. Then the ranching culture, both working cattle operations and the dude ranch industry that turned the mountains into a destination for Eastern visitors.

What survived the twentieth century's commodity swings is something more durable than any single industry: the physical place itself, and the culture that grew from it. Sheridan has the Sheridan Inn still standing on Fifth Street. It has the WYO Theater still running on Main. It has polo matches on summer weekends in Big Horn that you can watch for free. It has the Bighorn Mountains visible from the end of nearly every street, their escarpment going from green foothills to gray rock to snow-capped peaks in a few thousand vertical feet.

The Powder River Basin east of town contains some of the largest surface coal reserves in North America, and the coal trains still run through Sheridan. The town has not turned its back on that either. It holds the working history and the scenic history in the same hands, which is perhaps the most Wyoming thing about it.