> Heads up — this one's a legend. A little of it is solid; most of it isn't. But that little piece has kept people walking the Big Horns for a hundred and sixty years.
So picture it. Late fall, 1865. Seven Swedes leave the Black Hills and push west, up into the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. They cross over and come down to a creek — we call it Badwater Creek now — and there it is, gold, right in the gravel. Next day they find the vein it came from. Winter's closing in, so they throw up a cabin and start dreaming about how rich they're about to be.
It falls apart fast. They're attacked, picked off one by one, until only two are left — hurt, starving, surrounded. Somehow those two make the long walk out to Fort Reno on the Powder River. And here, is where the legend grabs hold of something real: they're said to have put about $7,000 in gold into the bank at Laramie. That gold is the whole hook — enough to send men looking, never enough to say where it came from.
A hundred and sixty years later, people are still out there — looking for a burned cabin and a glittering vein, somewhere along Badwater Creek or up in the Big Horns. Nobody's ever proven they found it. And that gap — between a real little pile of gold and a mine no one can find again — is exactly why the story won't die.