[4] The cultural history of the Bighorn Mountains, home to the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, dates back over ten thousand years.

[10] Oral history from several indigenous nations sets the Big Horn Medicine Wheel as already existing, having been built by "ancient ancestors" or "people without iron.

In winter, when the modern asphalt road is covered in snow and closed for the season, one can still make one's way by foot up the old trail from Five Springs Campground.

Stephen C. Simms of the Chicago Field Museum, upon examining the Wheel in 1903, surmised that the travois trail (road) must have been well-traveled for long periods in the past to acquire its deeply cut edges.

A detailed account of ceremonial use of the Bighorn Medicine Wheel by the Arapaho was related in 1993 by Paul Moss in a landmark of Native American oral tradition.

[13] Tom Yellowtail (Crow) told the story of Burnt Face building a medicine wheel in the Bighorn Mountains and receiving help from the Little People.

These astronomical wheels mirror the north ecliptic polar region of the sky and are useful as celestial grids to track changes over millennial time periods.

Further, he found that cairn pairs FO, FA, and FB correspond to the rising points of the stars Sirius, Aldebaran, and Rigel, respectively.

[15] A carbon date for the Bighorn Medicine Wheel comes from a piece of wood found in cairn F, corresponding to an age of no more than 220 years, roughly in the middle of the 18th century.

Stated by Don Grey in his, "Summary Report," page 317 of the 1958 Wyoming Archaeology Society's excavation of the Wheel, "In the large cairn on the northwest side of the structure was found a piece of wood pinned down between the courses of stone in the wall.