Wild mustangs, nightly rodeos, and a river valley that earned every legend it carries

Buffalo Bill’s town still rides hard

Fifty-two miles from Yellowstone’s East Entrance, Cody, Wyoming sits in a valley carved by the Shoshone River with the Absaroka Mountains pushing up on every side.

About 10,000 people live here, but the town carries the weight of a much bigger legend. Buffalo Bill founded it in 1896, and the frontier identity he built into its bones never left.

Rodeos still run every night all summer. Wild mustangs still roam the high desert to the east.

The West didn’t fade here. It just kept going.

How Buffalo Bill turned a valley into a destination

William F. Cody first rode through the Bighorn Basin in the 1870s and saw something most people missed: mountains, wildlife, a river, and a back door into Yellowstone. By the mid-1890s, he had investors and a plan.

He founded the town in 1896, brought in irrigation to make the arid basin farmable, and in 1902 built the Irma Hotel as a staging point for Yellowstone-bound travelers, naming it after his daughter.

When he died in 1917, friends formed the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association. That group eventually grew into one of the most remarkable museum complexes in the American West.

Five museums packed under one roof

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is a Smithsonian Affiliate that covers seven acres and holds more than 50,000 artifacts across five separate museums.

The Buffalo Bill Museum walks you through the showman’s life and his Wild West show. The Plains Indian Museum covers the history and traditions of the Crow, Lakota, and Cheyenne.

The Whitney Western Art Museum hangs works by Frederic Remington and Thomas Moran. The Draper Natural History Museum covers the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Then there’s the Cody Firearms Museum, with over 7,000 guns, one of the most complete American firearms collections anywhere.

Butch Cassidy once hid in this cabin

Old Trail Town doesn’t try to recreate the frontier. It saved it.

Starting in 1967, historian Bob Edgar spent years carefully moving 26 original frontier structures from locations across Wyoming and Montana to this single site. Every building is the real thing, dating from 1879 to 1901.

Walk into the Hole-in-the-Wall Cabin, built in 1883, and you’re standing where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used to meet.

The Rivers Saloon, the oldest surviving saloon in northwest Wyoming, still has bullet holes in its door. The site also sits on the exact ground where Buffalo Bill first laid out his town.

Every single night, someone rides a bull

The Cody Nite Rodeo has run every summer evening since 1938, making it the longest-running nightly rodeo in the world.

From June through August, bull riding, saddle bronc, bareback riding, barrel racing, steer wrestling, and team roping all happen under the lights.

Before the show, you can meet the resident rodeo bull, Mongo, up close. If you come around the Fourth of July, the Cody Stampede Rodeo layers on top of all that.

That event has been running since 1919, which means this town has been hosting serious rodeo for over a hundred years without a single gap.

Queen Victoria’s bar is still pouring drinks

Buffalo Bill spent about $80,000 building the Irma Hotel in 1902, and the centerpiece of the whole place is a cherrywood back bar said to be a gift from Queen Victoria, sent in appreciation of his performances in England.

The bar was made in France and shipped to Cody during construction.

The hotel sits on the National Register of Historic Places, and you can still book a room, including Buffalo Bill’s own restored private suite.

On summer evenings from June through September, the Cody Gunfighters stage a free Wild West shootout on the front porch, Monday through Saturday.

Walk into the first national forest ever protected

Shoshone National Forest was established in 1891, making it the first federally protected national forest in the United States.

It covers nearly 2.5 million acres of terrain directly west of Cody, running right up to the Yellowstone border.

Grizzly bears, wolves, elk, moose, and bighorn sheep all live here, and the forest holds the largest bighorn sheep population in the lower 48 states.

Over 1,300 miles of hiking trails cut through alpine meadows and craggy peaks.

About 30 miles west of town, the Wapiti Ranger Station, built in 1903, was the first ranger station ever built at federal expense in the country.

The dam that was taller than anything else on Earth

Six miles west of Cody, the Buffalo Bill Dam sits in the tight throat of Shoshone Canyon. When it was completed in 1910, its 325-foot height made it the tallest dam in the world.

It’s a concrete arch-gravity structure on the Shoshone River, originally called the Shoshone Dam until it was renamed in 1946 to mark the 100th anniversary of Buffalo Bill’s birth.

It holds designations as both a National Register of Historic Places site and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

A free visitor center at the dam gives you canyon views and exhibit space, and the reservoir behind it feeds into Buffalo Bill State Park for boating and fishing.

Wild mustangs roam 109,000 acres east of town

About 20 miles east of Cody, the McCullough Peaks Wild Horse Management Area spreads across 109,000 acres of open high desert.

The mustangs that run here are descendants of horses brought to North America by Spanish explorers, and they’ve roamed this terrain for centuries.

The Bureau of Land Management oversees the area, and local outfitters run guided safari-style tours through it. The horses come in bay, black, grey, and pinto.

They roam freely across wide open country, so sightings aren’t guaranteed, but when you find a herd standing on a ridge in the early morning light, the distance you drove to get there stops mattering.

Theodore Roosevelt called this drive one of his favorites

The Buffalo Bill Cody Scenic Byway follows the North Fork of the Shoshone River from town straight to Yellowstone’s East Entrance. Theodore Roosevelt called this stretch part of “the most scenic 50 miles in the world.”

About 17 miles north of Cody, the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway climbs into the Absaroka Mountains through dramatic switchbacks and opens up into wide wilderness views.

At Dead Indian Summit, you look out over the Clarks Fork canyon and the surrounding backcountry. Elk, pronghorn, and bears turn up along both routes, especially in the early morning hours before traffic picks up.

Raft the canyon, ride into ghost town country

The Shoshone River runs straight through Cody, and the Red Canyon section draws rafters all summer. Guided trips run two to three hours and work well for families.

Anglers pull trout from the Shoshone and its tributaries.

If you want to push further out, local outfitters run horseback rides and ATV tours into the Absaroka backcountry, including full-day trips to Kirwin, an old mining ghost town sitting deep in the mountains.

The Shoshone National Forest hiking trails round out the options if you’d rather cover ground on foot.

The whole town walks the walk

Downtown Cody runs along a few walkable blocks anchored by the Irma Hotel, with Western shops and galleries filling in on both sides. The By Western Hands gallery focuses on Western functional art and design.

If you want the big picture fast, Cody Trolley Tours runs a narrated one-hour loop past the town’s major landmarks.

What holds it all together is the location: Yellowstone to the west, the Shoshone National Forest wrapping around it, the Bighorn Basin spreading out to the east, and a town in the middle that has never tried to be anything other than exactly what it is.

Visit Cody, Wyoming

You can reach Cody through Yellowstone Regional Airport, which serves the town with seasonal flights. The town sits 52 miles from Yellowstone’s East Entrance on the Buffalo Bill Cody Scenic Byway.

Summer runs from June through August, when the nightly rodeo, gunfight shows, museum complex, Old Trail Town, and scenic byways are all fully operating.

Check the official website for current hours and admission prices before you go, as some attractions have separate entry fees.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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