The American Legion Hall was built in 1922 as the temporary home of the Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church. When the American Legion took possession of the building on June 4, 1935, it quickly became a meeting place for every fraternal group, social group, and professional organization in Greybull. It was used by the schools (the elementary and junior high schools were only a block north) to accommodate classes for which they had no space, most notably for band practice, music classes, and kindergarten. It was a polling place until at least 1955. 

Every organization in Greybull used the Legion Hall for meetings at some time during its period of significance. Due to its status as a gathering place for a variety of organizations and functions, the Legion Hall has served a prominent place in the social history of Greybull. It was home to a broad range of community activities that strove to serve not only the Veterans that were member of the Legion, but also the community as a whole.

The Bad Pass Trail, sometimes known as the Sioux Trail, is a foot trail marked by a line of stone cairns that may date from many thousands of years ago. Although the date of its earliest establishment is unknown, records do establish that the Trail was much traveled by many peoples from pre-Columbian times up to the middle 1830s. For the Native Americans who lived in the Bighorn Basin it was their access to the Grapevine area where the bison herds were more plentiful. 

During the height of the fur trade, the trail leading across Bad Pass was frequented by the mountain men. On three occasions, following the rendezvous of 1824, 1825, and 1833, the beaver packs were sent to St. Louis by way of Bad Pass and the Bighorn, Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers. Major Henry pioneered the route in 1824; in 1825 General Ashley packed pelts valued in the amount of $50,000 over the pass; and in 1833 three companies negotiated this route.

Bad Pass was also used by the trappers in their movements to and from the Bighorn Basin to the land of the Crow and Blackfeet. Much of the Bad Pass Trail has been obliterated, however, numerous cairns along its route still exist and may be seen in certain locations within the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area.

This thematic study includes twelve post offices owned and administered by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) throughout the State of Wyoming. These include the Basin, Greybull, Douglas, Lander, Torrington, Thermopolis, Buffalo, Kemmerer, Powell, Yellowstone, Evanston, and Newcastle Main Post Offices.

The buildings represent a continuum of federally constructed post offices allocated to the state between the turn of the century and 1941. The buildings exhibit a variety of styles and sizes but maintain a common demeanor representative of the federal presence. All of the buildings were constructed from standardized plans developed from guidelines provided by the Office of the Supervising Architect in the Treasury Department.

Variations in design styles reflect both the transition in the design philosophies of the Supervising Architect and the requirements developed in response to the Depression. These variations in design, as well as functions are also somewhat related to the communities in which they were placed and reflect the economic, political, and governmental context of those communities.

Located near the center of the town of Basin opposite the town's courthouse square, the Basin Republican-Rustler Building is a plain one story rectangular masonry and frame structure. Architecturally, the building is not unusually significant. At the time of its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, the Basin Republican-Rustler Building was important for its contents, an ensemble of antique printing machinery and equipment. It was also important for its association with the Rustler, a Wyoming newspaper that was, in 1889, the first to be published in the Big Horn Basin.

The building was also the home of the Republican which was begun in 1905 when the Rustler became democratic in its political affiliation. The weekly paper became the Basin Republican-Rustler in 1928. The relationship of the building to the newspaper industry is particularly important because both the Republican and the Rustler individually, and combined as one paper, played a role in the settlement and development of the Big Horn Basin.

The Bear Creek Ranch Medicine Wheel (48BH48) is a rather unique example of a small number of stone effigies which have been documented for the region. In the Northern Plains and central Rocky Mountains there are a sizable number of surviving examples of stone figures and alignments left by the Native American inhabitants of the region. By far the most numerous of these stone features are so-called tipi rings. These are circles of cobbles or stones that may occur singly or in groups, with each circle about three to seven meters in diameter.

The commonly accepted interpretation of these mid-sized circles is that they were stones which had been placed around the perimeter of portable or perishable structures, such as tipis or wickiups. When the structures were moved or disintegrated, the arrangement of stones remained.

Less common are medicine wheels, cairn lines and stone effigies. The Bear Creek Ranch Medicine Wheel roughly conforms to the conventional conception of a medicine wheel. It has a central cairn or circle, several ''spokes'' radiating out from this center, an outer ring, and several outlying figures. Some studies have suggested that many stone figures on the Northern Plains may be monuments or memorials to important persons and events. Many of the figures may be aligned with solar or celestial phenomena, or may be depictions of mythical or legendary figures.

The location of the medicine wheel on Bear Creek Ranch, commanding a spectacular view in all directions, may indicate its significance as an aboriginal vision quest site. Whatever interpretation is appropriate for the Bear Creek Ranch figures, this monument was a significant element in the lives and world view of its builders. It has also inspired the curiosity and imagination of subsequent visitors, possibly including groups of Native people who may have treated this monument as a locus of spiritual power.

The Big Horn Academy Historic District includes the Big Horn Academy constructed in 1916 of rusticated sandstone and the Cowley Gymnasium/Community Hall built in 1936 of lodgepole pine logs. The historic district is significant for its primary role in the development of education in Cowley and the Big Horn Basin. The Big Horn Academy was the first high school in the Big Horn Basin and in Cowley; the Gymnasium was the first constructed in Cowley.

The Mormon people came to the Big Horn Basin in 1900 in response to a call from their church president to colonize the west. An added incentive came from William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) who had acquired state permits to appropriate water along the Shoshone River. In 1907 the Mormons started construction in Cowley of a stone school house, a part of which was allocated to the use of a more advanced academic enterprise which they would call the Big Horn Academy. Its program was essentially that of a high school, although in the context of that time it was thought of almost as a college.

The Mormon church planned to rotate the Big Horn Academy every few years between the towns of Lovell, Byron, and Cowley where the program would be housed in available facilities. However, the school never made it to Byron and in 1913 the LDS authorities started planning the construction of a permanent building to house the Academy. The old stone school house was torn down and the new school building was completed in 1916 at a cost of $40,000.

The Academy was operated as a church school until 1924 when its physical facilities and responsibilities were transferred to School District No. 28 and the entity thereafter came to be known as the Cowley High School. In 1936 the Gymnasium and Community Hall was constructed adjacent to the Cowley High School as part of a Works Progress Administration project.

The Black Mountain Archaeological Site District demonstrates the potential to yield significant scientific information pertaining to virtually all periods of prehistoric cultural development in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming, and the Northwest Plains. Cultural components represented in the sites within this district span from early in the Paleoindian Period, perhaps as early as 11,500 years ago, up through the Late Prehistoric Periods, which spans from 1500 to 450 years ago.

No cultural components have been verified from the Early Plains Archaic or Protohistoric Periods. The district includes two large Phosphoria Formation chert quarry areas (48BH1126 and 1127), an open interfluve camp (48BH902), two canyon bottom campsites (48BH901 and 1069) and six rockshelters (48BH900, 1064, 1065, 1067, 1128, and 1129). The Black Mountain and East Spring Creek quarries are representatives of the high-grade Shell Creek Phosphoria sources. The chert from these sources is a fine grained, high quality chert with a distinctive blood red color.

National Register form is available upon request.

The forty bridges in this thematic study are the best of their types which were still in use on the state and county road systems in Wyoming when the study was completed in 1982. Selected from a statewide survey of all functional vehicular trusses and arches using a specific evaluation criteria and methodology, most represent superlatives of their generic engineering types (i.e. truss configuration and connection types) while typifying bridgebuilding and transportation trends in the state. All were built in the first three decades of the twentieth century (1905-1935).

Although bridges were put up during the earlier periods of overland wagon emigration, they had not begun to proliferate in the state of Wyoming until the early twentieth century with the emergence of the automobile as a principal form of transportation. All the listed bridges display a remarkable homogeneity of construction and operational histories. Generally, county-built trusses were contracted through competitive bidding among several Midwestern bridge erectors and built from standardized designs using prefabricated components. After creation of the Wyoming Highway Department in 1917,

 the role of the counties in truss bridge construction diminished. The later highway department bridges were typically designed from standard plans maintained by the department and built by local contractors from components fabricated in the same Midwestern foundries.

One feature that all steel truss bridges shared was their versatility. Quickly erected, they could also be dismantled and moved if necessary. Many county road bridges in Wyoming had begun service as railroad bridges, sold or given to the counties as obsolete structures. Similarly, early highway bridges which had become unsuitable to handle increasing volumes of traffic were sometimes replaced with new trusses, with the older bridges demoted to places along less traveled roads. After World War II, new trussbuilding was rare in Wyoming. Today trusses have been largely superseded by more sophisticated engineering designs and are seldom erected. The remaining highway and roadway truss bridges are remnants of past technologies, whose numbers are continually dwindling through attrition.

The forty bridges in this thematic study are the best of their types which were still in use on the state and county road systems in Wyoming when the study was completed in 1982. Selected from a statewide survey of all functional vehicular trusses and arches using a specific evaluation criteria and methodology, most represent superlatives of their generic engineering types (i.e. truss configuration and connection types) while typifying bridgebuilding and transportation trends in the state. All were built in the first three decades of the twentieth century (1905-1935).

Although bridges were put up during the earlier periods of overland wagon emigration, they had not begun to proliferate in the state of Wyoming until the early twentieth century with the emergence of the automobile as a principal form of transportation. All the listed bridges display a remarkable homogeneity of construction and operational histories. Generally, county-built trusses were contracted through competitive bidding among several Midwestern bridge erectors and built from standardized designs using prefabricated components. After creation of the Wyoming Highway Department in 1917, the role of the counties in truss bridge construction diminished. The later highway department bridges were typically designed from standard plans maintained by the department and built by local contractors from components fabricated in the same Midwestern foundries.

One feature that all steel truss bridges shared was their versatility. Quickly erected, they could also be dismantled and moved if necessary. Many county road bridges in Wyoming had begun service as railroad bridges, sold or given to the counties as obsolete structures. Similarly, early highway bridges which had become unsuitable to handle increasing volumes of traffic were sometimes replaced with new trusses, with the older bridges demoted to places along less traveled roads.

After World War II, new trussbuilding was rare in Wyoming. Today trusses have been largely superseded by more sophisticated engineering designs and are seldom erected. The remaining highway and roadway truss bridges are remnants of past technologies, whose numbers are continually dwindling through attrition.

The Bridger Road ran across the northwestern quadrant of Wyoming from near the present day city of Casper for a distance of about 225 miles into Montana, where it turned in a due westerly course leading up the Yellowstone River Valley continuing for another 200 miles to its destination at Bozeman.

It was a wagon road primarily formed by the shod hoofs of teams--oxen, mules or horses--and the imprints of iron-banded wheels rolling under heavy loads. The road was established by Jim Bridger in 1864 to reach the bustling gold fields of western Montana. The Dry Creek Crossing is 26 miles east and slightly south of Cody in the Bighorn Basin.

The forty bridges in this thematic study are the best of their types which were still in use on the state and county road systems in Wyoming when the study was completed in 1982. Selected from a statewide survey of all functional vehicular trusses and arches using a specific evaluation criteria and methodology, most represent superlatives of their generic engineering types (i.e. truss configuration and connection types) while typifying bridgebuilding and transportation trends in the state. All were built in the first three decades of the twentieth century (1905-1935).

Although bridges were put up during the earlier periods of overland wagon emigration, they had not begun to proliferate in the state of Wyoming until the early twentieth century with the emergence of the automobile as a principal form of transportation. All the listed bridges display a remarkable homogeneity of construction and operational histories. Generally, county-built trusses were contracted through competitive bidding among several Midwestern bridge erectors and built from standardized designs using prefabricated components. After creation of the Wyoming Highway Department in 1917, the role of the counties in truss bridge construction diminished. The later highway department bridges were typically designed from standard plans maintained by the department and built by local contractors from components fabricated in the same Midwestern foundries.

One feature that all steel truss bridges shared was their versatility. Quickly erected, they could also be dismantled and moved if necessary. Many county road bridges in Wyoming had begun service as railroad bridges, sold or given to the counties as obsolete structures. Similarly, early highway bridges which had become unsuitable to handle increasing volumes of traffic were sometimes replaced with new trusses, with the older bridges demoted to places along less traveled roads. After World War II, new trussbuilding was rare in Wyoming. Today trusses have been largely superseded by more sophisticated engineering designs and are seldom erected. The remaining highway and roadway truss bridges are remnants of past technologies, whose numbers are continually dwindling through attrition.

This thematic study includes twelve post offices owned and administered by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) throughout the State of Wyoming. These include the Basin, Greybull, Douglas, Lander, Torrington, Thermopolis, Buffalo, Kemmerer, Powell, Yellowstone, Evanston, and Newcastle Main Post Offices.

The buildings represent a continuum of federally constructed post offices allocated to the state between the turn of the century and 1941. The buildings exhibit a variety of styles and sizes but maintain a common demeanor representative of the federal presence. All of the buildings were constructed from standardized plans developed from guidelines provided by the Office of the Supervising Architect in the Treasury Department.

Variations in design styles reflect both the transition in the design philosophies of the Supervising Architect and the requirements developed in response to the Depression. These variations in design, as well as functions are also somewhat related to the communities in which they were placed and reflect the economic, political, and governmental context of those communities.

The Hyart Theatre is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion A as a rare example of an early 1950s movie theatre in Wyoming. Although many Wyoming towns have a movie theatre in the downtown area, few have a theatre like the Hyart. Constructed as a state-of-the-art theatre by Hyrum ''Hy'' Bischoff, the Hyart Theatre provided entertainment for people all over the Big Horn Basin during the 1950s through the 1980s.

The theater is also eligible under Criterion C as a state-of-the-art motion picture theatre that incorporated many of the best design practices of the period. The Hyart Theatre embodies those ideas from its smaller features like the popcorn machine to the very largest element, the neon sign that towers above the theatre. In spite of the building's fifty-seven years, both the interior and exterior still display remarkable integrity in terms of design, location, workmanship, feeling, association, materials, and setting.

The history of the Hyart Theatre is the also the story of the Bischoff family of Lovell. Big Horn Basin theatre entrepreneur Hy Bischoff constructed the theatre in 1950. Bischoff arrived in Lovell as a two-year old child in 1901. The Bischoff family had left Fountain Green, Utah as part of a group of Mormon families sent to colonize Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. Hy's father, Dan Bischoff (1870-1936) became a pioneer in the motion picture business when he bought a Lovell theatre, the Armada, in 1913. The Armada was constructed in 1908 and entertainment had consisted of nightly live shows that had attracted little business. Bischoff bought the theater with the intention of converting it to a movie theater.

When Dan Bischoff died in 1931, Hy took over his father's theatre businesses and continued to operate two Armada theatres. In 1949, Hy decided to build a new state-of-the art theatre. But first, accompanied by his wife Virga and daughter Loretta, he traveled throughout the region surveying movie theatres in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Utah. He particularly liked Salt Lake City's Villa Theatre, constructed in 1949 (and still standing), and modeled the Hyart's lobby after the Villa Theatre.

Architecture began to play a prominent role in the motion picture business. As movies became increasingly sophisticated during the teens and twenties, theatres designed specifically for the new art form began to be an important part of the entire moving-going experience. New considerations came into play for the first time: safety, sight lines, maximum capacity, heating, lighting, and ventilation. Movie palace architects worked in the revival styles so popular at the time and produced large-scale, opulent, and fanciful versions of Egyptian, Spanish Colonial, and Mediterranean styled buildings. The movie theatre took on its own identity as a special place.

Clearly a man of many talents, Hy designed and oversaw the construction of the Hyart Theatre. He also took on details of the construction himself such as mixing, pouring, and finishing the concrete for the auditorium. Because the Korean War had begun, no metal trusses were available so the trusses were made of steel rails salvaged from old mines at Bearcreek, Montana.

The two story Hyart Theatre is built on a concrete foundation with walls constructed of structural tile and sided with brick. The flat roof is covered with vinyl. The building is approximately two hundred and twenty-forty feet long and seventy feet wide. The building faces south on Main Street and is in the heart of Lovell’s downtown. The bottom twelve feet of the façade is sided with irregularly shaped rhyolite “bricks.” Rhyolite is actually a volcanic stone that was cut from a quarry in Idaho Falls, Idaho. The remainder of the building is sided with brick. Embedded in the rhyolite brick on the west side is a concrete plaque that reads “THEATRE BLDG. H. D. Bischoff 1950”. Above the façade’s rhyolite brick is the marquee which forms a canopy above the angled entrance. The top half of the façade is covered with pink sheet metal panels and has eight casement windows that allow light and ventilation into the apartment and office that occupy the second floor of the building. A striking feature of the façade is the large, turquoise-colored sheet metal lattice that stretches in front of the sheet metal panels. The most prominent feature of the façade is the sheet metal pylon that towers above the west side of the façade with a neon-lit artist’s palette topped with the name HYART, also lit with neon.

The auditorium is accessed by two carpeted ramps, one on either side of the lobby. All carpeting in the auditorium is original to the building. The walls of the auditorium are partially paneled with a painted scrollwork design above the paneling. The painting is original and was executed by a Denver artist. The auditorium is 103 feet long and 60 feet wide and contains the original red upholstered seats supplied by the American Seating Company. The theatre originally had 1,001 seats but now has 940. The two hundred-plus seat balcony is accessed by ramps on either side. A soundproof crying room and the projection room are just off the rear of the balcony.

Hy Bischoff ran the Hyart until 1960 when his daughter, Loretta, took over. Loretta had been involved in the theatre since she was ten years old and had worked as an usher and behind the candy counter. The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were good years for the Hyart, but business began to decline in the 1980s. Hy died in 1988 and Loretta closed the Hyart in 1992. It sat silent for thirteen years much to the dismay of the local community and the surrounding area.

In late 2004, a group of Lovell residents decided they would like to see the Hyart Theatre re-open in order to provide entertainment for the town. They formed a non-profit organization, the Hyart Redevelopment Committee, and began to raise the money needed to make the theatre operable again. The Hyart Theatre officially re-opened on November 13, 2004. Except for a paid manager and projectionist, the Hyart Theatre is run completely by volunteers who clean the theatre, operate the ticket booth and concession stand, and perform all the other jobs required to keep a theatre running. Various committees under the Redevelopment group include advertising, financial, fund raising, technical and facility construction committees. The theatre is open Friday and Saturday nights with a Saturday matinee. The weekend usually averages 350 people. No R-rated movies are shown, as the group wants to keep the Hyart family oriented. All tickets are four dollars. In addition to movies, the Hyart is home to a local talent show known as The Follies and school productions.

Much as it did in Hy's day, the Hyart is again functioning as a theatre and a de facto community center. The community as well as Loretta Bischoff is thrilled to have the theatre open once more and it is a tribute to the people of Lovell that they came together as a community to make it happen. Perhaps a community member expressed the feeling of the community best when she said: ''The Hyart is in the heart of anyone who has ever lived in this area. It is a jewel that must not be hidden; shine it up and let everyone view it!!''

The Lower Shell Schoolhouse is located in a rather desolate portion of the arid Big Horn Basin in northern Wyoming. The school, constructed in 1903, consists of only one room. It was one of the first non-log community buildings in the area and was constructed by unknown masons on land donated to the Odessa school district. Local homesteaders assisted in the construction and quarried rock from the surrounding hills.

Although the main use was that of a school, it functioned from the beginning as a Sunday school and church for traveling preachers, a hall for dances, holiday parties and a wide variety of organizational meetings. Use as a school ended in the mid 1950s, but until its final abandonment in the early 1970s, it was still in use as a meeting hall. The value of the school house is as a representative example of the vanishing one-room school house. The building's simple form epitomizes the austere life of the region's earliest pioneers.

The ML Ranch is significant in the area of agriculture for its association with the growth of the open range cattle ranching industry in Big Horn Basin during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The ranch is also significant for its association with Henry Clay Lovell, important for his contributions to Wyoming's early cattle ranching industry in the Big Horn Basin. Lovell established the ML Ranch site as a line camp in 1883.

The following year it became headquarters for ranch operations. It became the largest cattle ranch in the eastern part of Big Horn Basin. During the heyday of open range, the ranch ran 25,000 head of cattle. The ranch typifies many similar profitable unions in which the ''know-how'' of a cattleman was combined with the assets of a financial investor from the east, in this case Anthony L. Mason.

The ML Ranch remained in the Lovell family until 1909. It changed hands a number of times before it was purchased by the Bureau of Reclamation in the early 1960s. In 1966 the ML Ranch buildings and the small parcel of land on which they are sited were acquired by the National Park Service.

About five miles northeast of Hyattville is a prehistoric site where petroglyphs and pictographs may be seen, and where archaeological exploration has revealed a record of human habitation. The Medicine Lodge Creek site is located on the western slope of the Bighorn Mountains, near the confluence of the dry and running forks of Medicine Lodge Creek.

The campsite near Medicine Lodge Creek is in a very good location for habitation in the winter, at least. It is situated at the base of a sandstone bluff facing east. The bluff, which is 750 feet long and, in places thirty to forty feet high, served to protect the campsite from the wind while reflecting the sunlight. This prehistoric site has been recognized as an outstanding manifestation of Indian petroglyphs and pictographs which have been etched upon the walls of the sandstone bluff. Archaeologists began excavations at the site in the early 1970s.

The investigations revealed twelve levels of habitation recorded in 10.5 feet of deposits and extending to 23 feet below original datum. The earliest of these levels was radio carbon-dated at 8300 years old. Near the top of the stratified deposits were found small amounts of historic trade items such as glass beads. The site is a State Archaeological Site administered by the Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources.

The Medicine Wheel is located in the Bighorn National Forest on the western peak of Medicine Mountain at an elevation of 9642 feet in the Bighorn Range east of Lovell, Wyoming. The 75-foot diameter Medicine Wheel is a roughly circular alignment of rocks and associated cairns enclosing 28 radial rows of rock extending out from a central cairn. This feature is part of a much larger complex of interrelated archeological sites and traditional use areas that express 7000 years of Native American adaptation to and use of the alpine landscape that surrounds Medicine Mountain.

Numerous contemporary American Indian traditional use areas and features, including ceremonial staging areas, medicinal and ceremonial plant gathering areas, sweat lodge sites, altars, offering locales and fasting (vision quest) enclosures, can be found nearby. Ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archeological evidence demonstrates that the Medicine Wheel and the surrounding landscape constitute one of the most important and well preserved ancient Native American sacred site complexes in North America.

The Bighorn Medicine Wheel is considered the type site for medicine wheels in North America. Between 70 and 150 wheels have been identified in South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

The Paint Rock Canyon Archaeological Landscape, located on the western flanks of the Bighorn Mountains, consists of rockshelters and open camp sites. Archaeological investigations indicate that the cultural resources within the canyon consist of a set of locations representing occupation during all major prehistoric cultural periods of the region in a largely undisturbed natural setting. Diagnostic materials recovered from the surface indicate a temporal span from late Paleoindian (ca. 9000 B.P.) to Late Prehistoric periods.

National Register forms available upon request.

The forty bridges in this thematic study are the best of their types which were still in use on the state and county road systems in Wyoming when the study was completed in 1982. Selected from a statewide survey of all functional vehicular trusses and arches using a specific evaluation criteria and methodology, most represent superlatives of their generic engineering types (i.e. truss configuration and connection types) while typifying bridgebuilding and transportation trends in the state. All were built in the first three decades of the twentieth century (1905-1935).

Although bridges were put up during the earlier periods of overland wagon emigration, they had not begun to proliferate in the state of Wyoming until the early twentieth century with the emergence of the automobile as a principal form of transportation. All the listed bridges display a remarkable homogeneity of construction and operational histories. Generally, county-built trusses were contracted through competitive bidding among several Midwestern bridge erectors and built from standardized designs using prefabricated components. After creation of the Wyoming Highway Department in 1917, the role of the counties in truss bridge construction diminished. The later highway department bridges were typically designed from standard plans maintained by the department and built by local contractors from components fabricated in the same Midwestern foundries.

One feature that all steel truss bridges shared was their versatility. Quickly erected, they could also be dismantled and moved if necessary. Many county road bridges in Wyoming had begun service as railroad bridges, sold or given to the counties as obsolete structures. Similarly, early highway bridges which had become unsuitable to handle increasing volumes of traffic were sometimes replaced with new trusses, with the older bridges demoted to places along less traveled roads. After World War II, new trussbuilding was rare in Wyoming. Today trusses have been largely superseded by more sophisticated engineering designs and are seldom erected. The remaining highway and roadway truss bridges are remnants of past technologies, whose numbers are continually dwindling through attrition.

Southsider Shelter is a rockshelter in the eastern side of the Bighorn Basin. It contains a well-stratified record of occupation spanning the Early Paleoindian, Early Plains Archaic, Middle Plains Archaic, Late Plains Archaic, and Late Prehistoric periods.

The radiocarbon dates and diagnostic projectile points demonstrate that the site saw human occupation during all five of these cultural periods. Excavations have produced dozens of diagnostic projectile points as well as other chipped stone tools and groundstone. The lithic assemblage has refined our understanding of prehistoric raw material use in the area and local projectile point chronologies.

The site has also provided important information concerning Late Paleoindian and Early Plains Archaic subsistence strategies and use of foothill-mountain environments.

National Register form available upon request.