We're headed to Cody, Wyoming. Founded by William F. Cody, Buffalo Bill. I'm not talking about that football team from western NY. I'm talking about the real Buffalo Bill, the original, an American icon, a legend. Time to breathe the same air Cody did.
We drove across southern Montana, skirted Billings and headed south down Route's 310, 72 and 120 into Wyoming and the driest valley I've ever seen. It looked right out of a John Ford movie. It was a brown hardscrabble landscape that stretched west to the vertical wall of the Rockies and east to a wall of bluffs. Sagebrush & tumbleweeds textured the ground that baked under the brilliant deep blue sky.
Late in the afternoon we crossed the Shoshone River gorge into Cody. Sheridan Ave is the main drag. It's an attractive street populated with buildings built between 1875 and 1949. Buffalo Bill formally founded Cody, Wyoming in 1895. In 1902, he built the Irma Hotel which is named for his daughter and which he called –"just the sweetest hotel that ever was."
Here's the Irma in 1908.
It was built from uncut boulders scoured from the surrounding area. The Irma Hotel is a living museum, it's a way to walk into the old west, today. It's a place to lay your footsteps over the paths Annie Oakley, Frederic Remington, Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill himself walked. The hotel is open for business and it's Grill & Silver Saddle Bar are popular with locals and tourists.
Here we are wandering the halls of the Irma Hotel.
At the end of Sheridan Street is the Buffalo Bill Historic Center. It's a treasure trove of the American West. Going through the Buffalo Bill Museum you can see this guy was something else. He must have been a force of nature. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody was an American Soldier, Scout, Buffalo Hunter, Entrepreneur and international showman extraordinaire with his Wild West Show. The original museum has grown over the years and is now five museums in one. The Buffalo Bill Museum, the Draper Museum of Natural History, the Cody Firearms Museum, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art and the Plains History Museum. We had time to see the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Gallery of Western Art and a literal "run through" of the Plains History Museum. I want to spend more time there. I'll be back.
We stayed at Cody Cowboy Village. This was a great find. It was a brand new development with a main lodge and an inner and outer group of modern spacious cabins. We stayed in the inside loop. Just outside our door was a small pool. Basically a large hot tub! Outside the "circled wagon" of cabins was a dry landscape of sage and tumbling tumbleweeds....and rabbits, lots of rabbits. We now have a tumbleweed from Cody on our mantle for a souvenir.
About a half mile from Cody Cowboy Village is the Cody Nite Rodeo Arena. The rodeo was my favorite Cody attraction. Cody calls itself the Rodeo Capital of the World and every night from June 1 to August 31 this dance between man & beast is held. Rodeo permeates the culture out here. Along with football and baseball they even offer rodeo as a high school sport. The bull riding was our favorite. It's by far the most dangerous. Watch the third rider in this video get his hand stuck on the bull. Yikes, his arm is about to get pulled right out of his shoulder socket!!
There were a lot of different events, roping, calf tying, barrel races and even a calf chasing event where the kids in the audience were invited to enter. My son Drew got his Cowboy Up! Watch this video. The rodeo clown was hysterical all night telling funny stories. Here he takes the kids though a warm up excercise before letting the calves loose. The goal here was to grab a ribbon off a calf to win one of two prizes.
One of the surprises of the trip were the number of Europeans on their own Wild West tours. We sat next to a family from Vienna, Austria at the rodeo. They were all decked out in cowboys hats with still and video cameras at the ready. There were French people everywhere we went on the whole trip and the Irma Hotel and Yellowstone lodges (as we'd soon find out) were heavily staffed by Russians and Eastern Europeans. The summer of '08 was before the global financial crisis hit and America was still a 1/2 price sale for anyone living off Euros. I expected cowboys, rednecks, truckers and god fearing folk but if I think about the real history of the west I guess the sound of European tongues has always been here as the peoples of the world migrated across America.... and there's definitely always been French. After all they owned the center of the continent until they sold it to Thomas Jefferson, and French fur traders traversed coast to coast helping to open up all of North America.
We walked back to Cody Cowboy Village after the rodeo really feeling like we'd found where the old west meets the 21st Century. The walk between the rodeo arena and our hotel was through open sage land. There were no lights. The silhouetted Rocky Mountains were at our back. Stars speckled the sky to the east where a faint red glow tipped the hills and ridges that pierced the flatlands. The smell of sage filled our noses and tumbleweeds blew across the path.
As we turned to head back to our cabin Molly & I spotted the lights of Cassie's Dance Hall.
Cassie Waters, a young widow, sportin' lady, Madam and respected businesswomen opened her establishment in 1922 and it's been a Cody favorite ever since.
Interior of Cassie's
We got the boys settled into the cabin and Molly pulled on her two-stepping cowboy boots. As the moon rose over Cody we gave the boots a workout accompanied by a little pedal steel, boogie-woogie piano, cold beer and a dance floor full of cowboy hats.
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