They Stole Buffalo Bill's House
Tracking the showman and his home from LeClaire, Iowa, to Golden, Colorado.
Categories: Renegade Roads
By: Scott M. Fisher 04/01/2008
Cody in Yellowstone Country
We head straight for Yellowstone country. If ever there was a city completely given over to the memory of one man, it is Cody, Wyoming. Located on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, Cody is less than an hour’s drive from Yellowstone and Teton National Parks.
First we stop in Sheridan though, to imbibe a drink at the Sheridan Inn bar, where Buffalo Bill helped lay out his plans for the town of Cody in the late 1890s. “It’s lovely country,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “The finest climate in the world, it’s to be my home now.” Cody loved the blue sky and towering mountains. He could relax hunting in the hills and fishing in the streams, smelling the aroma of the pines.
He financed the construction of large irrigation canals and purchased large tracts of land nearby, as well as lots in town. On one of them he built the Irma Hotel, named for his daughter, which his widowed daughter and sisters operated.
Excited about relocating to Cody, he wrote to Julia: “The new dining room will be a big café and will be run on the European plan. I am going to buy the very best furniture and bedsteads and mattresses, have fine oil paintings for office, parlors and dining room. I have got a mountain picked out big enough for us all to be buried on.” (This last statement would cause quite a controversy years later.) The grand opening of the hotel took place on November 18, 1902.
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