This river begins in the Absaroka Mountains ninety miles to the northwest, runs southeast, then swings north and flows through two mountain ranges before joining the Yellowstone River at Bighorn, Montana, one hundred eighty miles northeast of here, and its waters eventually reach the Gulf of Mexico through the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Early explorers in what is now Montana named it the Bighorn for the bighorn sheep found along it, while other explorers south of here called it the Wind River. In time, people recognized that these were two names for a single river, and to avoid confusion they decided that upstream from a place one-half mile to the south it would be called the Wind River and downstream it would be called the Bighorn. The canyon through the Owl Creek Mountains took the name Wind River Canyon, while the canyon in the Pryor Mountains on the Wyoming-Montana border about one hundred miles to the northeast kept the name Bighorn Canyon. The place where the river changes its name became known as the Wedding of the Waters, one of the few places where a river changes its name in midstream.