The Bozeman Trail

A journey on the historic route goes through the heart of traditional Lakota and Cheyenne hunting areas.

- CANDY MOULTON

Long before John Jacobs and John Bozeman rode across what is now Wyoming’s Powder River Basin toward Fort Laramie in 1863— finding a route that brought gold seekers to western Montana—native people lived in the area.

Bozeman and Jacobs traveled from western Montana, where gold had been discovered in Alder Gulch giving rise to Virginia City. After crossing the pass later named for him, Bozeman followed the Yellowstone River through Crow lands, and then turned to the southeast, skirting the flank of the Bighorn Mountains and across the Powder River Basin. Familiar with Fort Laramie, the major military post in the area, he knew people would want to get to the new gold strike in Virginia City as quickly as they could. By leading those seekers over his route, he could gain wealth for himself and give the new miners a better shot at riches for themselves.

Hunting Grounds 

The challenge of the new route lay not with the terrain, but rather with those people who already lived there, especially in the first couple of hundred miles from Fort Laramie to the north end of the Bighorn Mountains. Among the residents of the region were northern groups of the Lakota tribes, including Miniconjou, Oglala and Hunkpapa Lakota, as well as many Cheyennes.

Jacobs and Bozeman went right across the heart of the prime hunting lands for these tribes. The route the gold hunters would follow along the eastern Bighorn Mountains was a well-known Indian trail known as the Trail Going South.