‘The City of Broken Hearts’: How a bustling Bighorns mining settlement became a ghost town

SHERIDAN — In the 1890s, the Bighorns were a vast, rugged territory with few roads beyond wagon pathways. While horses and oxen could make the trek, dense snows during winter made higher peaks simply impassable. Its remoteness deterred settlers and kept towns in lower valleys.

But then someone struck gold.

Judy Slack, a local historian and the vice president of the Big Horn City Historical Society, said building a city on the top of Bald Mountain — a peak more than 9,000 feet in the air — was ridiculous. But the risk became worth the reward in 1890, when three men arrived in Sheridan with small flakes of gold worth $200. They claimed to find this gold at Porcupine Falls, a site just north of Bald Mountain and today close to the Medicine Wheel Passage scenic byway.

Creating a remote mini