Stage Stop-Sawmill Divide Interpretive Site

Stage Stop-Sawmill Divide Interpretive Site is one of many interpretive sites on the forest.

Stage Stops

Three stage roads crossed the Bighorns carrying mail and passengers to settlements of the Big Horn Basin.

One route went southwest of Buffalo, past Klondike Ranch, and up steep switchbacks on Crazy Woman Hill to Tensleep.

Another used the Sheridan, Bald Mountain City and Big Horn Toll Road.  The third went by way of Big Horn up Red Grade and past Dome Lake and Black Butte.  Through the use of either road, one could reach Hyattville.

All these perilous stage routes were terminated by the coming of the railroad to Cody, Wyoming in 1901, and by the extension of the line south through the basin from Lovell in 1902 to 1911.

Mountain stage routes uses light wagons or the common “mud wagon” such as this, rather than the early and heavy Concord Stage of the 1860s transcontinental route.