A miracle on the Big Horns

Months ago, Tina Spragg emailed me about an age-old mystery. Dillon McKinnon, just 17 years old, had disappeared in a snowstorm while hunting in the Big Horn Mountains, and she’d heard his body had never been found.

She and Chuck had read the story on the Cowboy State Daily. She suggested that if I wanted to follow up, I should start with the 1932 volume of archived Greybull Standards.

When Rick and Sam brought me home from Laramie/Casper, I asked Rick, a history buff, if he wanted to look through the old papers, starting in January, as Tina suggested, to see what he could find on young Dillon’s disappearance. While he was turning the old yellowed pages, Sam got on her smartphone to do some researching as well.

Before long, other members of the family grew interested in the mystery. Joni, granddaughter Amanda, grandson Wyatt and friend Julie Craft were indispensable.

What we found was a fascinating chronicle of not only Dillon, but another teenager who disappeared 19 years later while hunting in the same area.

We found a major portion of Dillon’s story in the 1932 editions of the Greybull Standard. Some of it was a bit muddled, and it left us with questions. But it was the most detailed and authentic information we found.

Three months later, with the help of Julie and Greybull’s official historian, Tom Davis, we made contact with Dale McKinnon--Dillon’s only surviving sibling, his half-brother born just four months before Dillon’s disappearance.

Dale had grown up hearing about Dillon from their father. He learned minute details and grew to love Dillon through his father’s stories. He was a fountain of information and supplied us with most of our material about Dillon’s 17 years of life.

Without Dale’s help, most of our questions would have gone unanswered.

What started out as an investigation into what happened to a teenager, a young hunter lost in the Big Horns, led us on a different path entirely. It led us to the rest of the story--a true story about how Dillon’s death, though heartbreaking, proved a miracle to another 17-year-old hunter from Casper, who survived getting lost on the mountain because of Dillon.

We hope you enjoy this story of two teenagers connected through a miracle on the Big Horns.