Cody

On the Stinking Water

Cody stands on the Shoshone River in the Bighorn Basin of northwest Wyoming, on a river the Crow first called the “Stinking Water.”³ WyoHistory’s Park County entry traces the old name to the sulfurous smell of hot springs that flow into the river near Cody.² Sheridan Avenue, the main street, runs east to west toward Yellowstone National Park, about 53 miles by WyoHistory’s count and 52 miles to the east entrance by the city’s.^2,6 The city counts a population of over 10,000 and serves as the Park County seat, while WyoHistory’s town entry gives 9,500 year-round residents.^3,6 By WyoHistory’s account, tourism and oil and gas remain its mainstays.⁷

Cody City and Beck’s Townsite

Treaties of 1868 closed the Bighorn Basin to white settlement, and the restrictions were lifted ten years later.³ A marker in Cody credits the trail driver Pete McCulloch with bringing the first herd of cattle into the region in 1879, to stock a ranch for Judge William Carter.⁸ In 1894, while Buffalo Bill was visiting Sheridan, his son-in-law Horace Boal took him to the top of the Bighorn Mountains to look west over the basin.³ In 1895 Cody, George T. Beck, Nate Salsbury, Harry Gerrans, Bronson Rumsey, Horace Alger, and George Bleistein founded the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company, and the town took its name from one of the seven, Buffalo Bill.^2,3 A marker put up by the Park County Historical Society gives a different date, saying Buffalo Bill and his partners established the Shoshone Irrigation Co. in 1894.⁴ Work on the Cody Canal, which would carry water from the south fork of the Shoshone River to the town, began in the fall of 1895.³ A first town, Cody City, was surveyed near DeMaris Hot Springs on October 5, 1895, with its streets named for Civil War generals and a park named for Buffalo Bill’s daughter, Irma.^3,4 H.P. Arnold opened a general store there, a blacksmith shop went up, and before winter had passed a dozen businesses were open, two of them saloons.⁴ Beck disliked the site and found much of the land owned by Charles DeMaris, who would not sell, so in May 1896 Beck and the surveyor Charles Hayden laid out the present town.³ A marker says Buffalo Bill laid out the original townsite in 1895 on the ground that is now Old Trail Town, where the Western historian Bob Edgar and friends reassembled historic buildings moved from Wyoming and Montana.⁹

The Canal, the Burlington, and the Irma

Violent storms wrecked the canal in the summer of 1898, and the directors tried to sell out for $150,000, but no buyers came forward.¹⁰ In 1899 Buffalo Bill started the Cody Enterprise; he also owned the livery stable and the blacksmith shop, and as many as half of the 500 or so people in town depended on him.^2,10 To make sure the CB&Q built its line all the way to Cody, the company sold the majority of the town lots to the railroad, and the line opened on Nov. 11, 1901, the year the town incorporated.^3,5 The Irma Hotel, named for his daughter, opened with a grand reception on November 18, 1902; it was a stone building in a town of wooden ones and probably cost him $80,000.^3,10 As he fell into debt mining for gold in Arizona, he mortgaged the hotel and his home ranch, and he later deeded them to his wife, Louisa, to keep them from his creditors.¹⁰

The Dam, the Courthouse, and Oregon Basin Oil

In early 1904 Buffalo Bill gave up his water right to the Reclamation Service, and the federal government appropriated $2,250,000 to build the Shoshone Project.¹⁰ WyoHistory says the dam in the canyon west of Cody was then the highest concrete arch dam in the world, and in 1946 the dam and its lake were renamed for Buffalo Bill.¹⁰ In 1909 the Wyoming Legislature created Park County from Big Horn County and made Cody the county seat, though the State Historic Preservation Office dates Cody’s establishment as the seat to 1910.^3,5 After a bond issue passed in 1912, the county built a three-story courthouse and sheriff’s residence, and WyoHistory reports that the tower clock given by William Robertson Coe was still running when it wrote.² Oil was found in Oregon Basin southeast of town in 1912; the preservation office dates the discovery at Elk Basin to 1915, and WyoHistory’s county entry gives 1916.^2,3,5 In 1938 Glenn Nielson brought Husky Oil to a refinery near the depot north of town; WyoHistory’s town entry says he built it and its county entry says he bought it as the Park Refinery, and after it closed in the mid-1980s Marathon became the main oil company in town.^2,3

The East Entrance Road, the Stampede, and Sheridan Avenue

In 1915 a road was built between the town and Yellowstone’s east entrance.⁵ Buffalo Bill died on Jan. 10, 1917, and within six weeks five citizens had formed the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association; Mary Jester Allen and Caroline Lockhart engaged the New York sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to create a statue, which was dedicated on July 4, 1924.³ The Cody Stampede, a rodeo held each year over the Fourth of July weekend, began in 1920 with the novelist Caroline Lockhart as its first president.^3,11 The Downtown Cody Historic District covers a few blocks along Sheridan Avenue; most of its buildings date from 1900 to the 1930s, and some are built of locally quarried sandstone.⁵ Downtown street signs still carry the names of the founders Beck, Alger, Rumsey, Bleistein, and Salsbury.⁶ Remnants of wagon trails from Cody City are still visible on the prairie, and one of them is Lee Street, named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee.¹²