Cody, Wyoming: the Town, its Founding and the Bighorn Basin Around It
Published
- Founded
- 1896
- County
- Park
- Elevation
- 5,016 ft
- Named for
- W.F. Cody
Cody, Wyoming was not a settlement that grew. It was a proposition: a town laid out in 1896 by investors who had identified a position and intended to sell it.
Why here
The location does the arguing. Cody sits at the western edge of the Bighorn Basin where the flat country meets the Absaroka front, at the mouth of the Shoshone canyon, on the natural line of approach to the national park that had been established a generation earlier.
That is the whole thesis: a town placed to catch everyone traveling to Yellowstone from the east. It worked, and it is still working.
Buffalo Bill’s part
William F. Cody lent his name, his celebrity and a good deal of his own money. He promoted irrigation in the basin, and in 1902 he built the Irma Hotel on the main street and named it for his daughter: a permanent stone building in a town of timber, which was the point.
The town that was nearly two miles west
The site was not obvious even to the people choosing it. The Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company was put together in 1895 by Cody, George T. Beck, the Wild West show partner Nate Salsbury and a handful of eastern investors, and the first town site they laid out was near the DeMaris hot springs, roughly two miles west of where the town actually stands. Beck did not like it. Much of the ground was already owned by Charles DeMaris, who had no interest in selling, so the plan moved east to open land and the town was platted there instead.
It is a small piece of history with a visible consequence: the reason Cody sits where the basin meets the canyon mouth, and not a little further into the hills, is a land negotiation that did not come off.
The dry side of the mountains
The other thing that decided the place is rainfall, or its absence. The Bighorn Basin sits in the rain shadow of the Yellowstone Plateau, and the basin floor takes something in the order of six to ten inches of precipitation a year. Desert numbers. That is why the sagebrush starts at the edge of town, why the irrigation company was the point of the whole enterprise, and why the green strips visible from the road are all following water that was put there deliberately.
The town today
Cody is the seat of Park County and sits at just over five thousand feet. The center is compact and walkable along Sheridan Avenue; everything else spreads along the roads out. It carries a museum complex far larger than its population would suggest, a rodeo every night of the summer, and a steady flow of traffic heading west.
Cody is a working county town that happens to sit on the best road into Yellowstone.
The layout
Cody’s street grid is unusually regular for a town of its age in this country, which is a consequence of being planned, not accumulated. Sheridan Avenue runs as a broad main street through the center, wide enough to have been laid out for wagons and now wide enough to park along on both sides without difficulty.
The result is a center that is genuinely walkable: hotel, museum complex, restaurants and shops within a few blocks of each other, surrounded by development that is not. Almost everything a visitor wants is either in those few blocks or a drive away, with very little in between.
The name has done a great deal of work since. A town called after a showman inherits the showman’s problem: telling the real history from the version he sold.
Common questions
When was Cody, Wyoming founded?
In 1896, by a group of investors including William F. Cody. It was named for him and he remained closely associated with it, building the Irma Hotel there in 1902.
Why is Cody, Wyoming famous?
For Buffalo Bill, for the nightly summer rodeo, for the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and for being the eastern gateway to Yellowstone.
What county is Cody in?
Park County, Wyoming, of which it is the county seat.
Is Cody, Wyoming walkable?
The center is. Cody was planned rather than accumulated, so the grid is regular and Sheridan Avenue runs broad enough through the middle to park along both sides. Hotel, museum complex, restaurants and shops sit within a walk of one another. The dam, the trailheads and the valleys do not.