CODY HISTORY

Cody has a unique setting at the convergence of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Bighorn Basin.

Cody sits in a special place at the western edge of the Bighorn Basin. The basin is a 150-mile wide depression that includes the tributaries of the Bighorn River. It is almost entirely surrounded by subranges of the Rocky Mountains, including the Absarokas, Beartooths, Pryors, Bridgers, and Bighorn Mountains. Elevations range from 3,500 to 11,000 feet. Here you can see almost every geologic period, from today back to 2.5 billion years in the past. 

Cody is fifty-three miles from the East entrance of Yellowstone National Park, where unusual geology can be seen every day, but the Basin holds just as many fascinating glimpses of the past. Four hundred-million-year-old Eurypterids lived in streams near an ancient coastline. Jurassic dinosaurs left their tracks behind 170 million years ago. An ash bed that moved over 100 miles per hour documents the explosion of Yellowstone 639,000 years ago, when ash covered much of the eastern United States. The Basin is a fascinating place to see our geologic past, from the more obvious Yellowstone Park to the more subtle ancient history of the Bighorn Basin. 

Cody sits on land used by people for thousands of years before Euro-American settlement.   

Archaeological evidence shows that American Indians lived in what is now Wyoming for at least the past 12,000 years. The earliest people in Wyoming hunted mammoths, other large game, and gathered plant foods. Working in small groups they ambushed prey with spears and later with a dart and spear thrower. About 1,500 years ago the bow and arrow came into use. With European contact, the horse was introduced. The people adapted and the horse culture of the Plains Indian was born. 

High altitude settlements in the Absarokas and Wind River mountain ranges indicate that local people thrived in the mountains every summer, gathering pine nuts and hunting sheep at high elevations. In winter, people migrated to lower elevations in the Bighorn Basin. Today’s site of DeMaris Hot Springs was once a popular gathering spot in winter. Tipi rings are still visible on the flatlands above the Shoshone River near Cody. Petroglyphs, or prehistoric rock art, can be found all over Wyoming. Near Cody, the best petroglyph site is in Oregon Basin, where ancient carvings can still be seen on a 100-foot-high sandstone cliff. 

The Eastern Shoshone, Mountain Shoshone, and Apsaalooke (Crow) lived in the Cody area before white settlement. 

The Crow or Apsaalooke Nation are a well-known Plains Indian tribe, but they were not always from the Plains. Before the 1400s the Crow lived a different lifestyle, hunting and farming in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin and possibly Manitoba. They were pushed further and further west as tribe after tribe was displaced like dominoes from the east as European and American settlement expanded. Arriving on the Plains, they hunted bison and adopted the dog travois to transport their belongings. Later when the horse came, by way of the Spanish, they became mounted bison hunters and famous horse breeders. 

The Apsaalooke lived a semi-nomadic way of life, hunting bison and living in some of the largest tipis in the West. They also hunted mountain sheep, pronghorn, deer, and many small mammals. Dried and ground bison was combined with fat and berries to make pemmican that could be stored for a long time. Ancestry was traced through the mothers’ side of the family. Newly married men moved to their wife’s mother’s home and women had significant roles in the tribe. 

Colter was likely the first Euro-American to walk through the area that would later become the City of Cody.   

John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery Expedition, received permission to leave the expedition to explore on his own. Colter first came through the Bighorn Basin area in 1807.  His reports of various geologic features including Heart Mountain and thermal hot spots were included on the map drawn by cartographer William Clark. This area came to be called “Colter’s Hell” for no one believed Colter’s stories.  Colter walked more than 400 miles through today's Park County, including the headwaters of the South Fork of the Shoshone, Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone, and Sunlight Basin. 

Wyoming became a territory in 1868. Ten years later the Bighorn Basin was opened to white settlement, though some early settlers, such as John Chapman and Pat O’Hara, came sooner. The Basin was the last area in what is called the “lower 48” states to be settled. Yellowstone National Park, designated in 1872, helped draw attention to the area as did the prospect of gold discovery which had been found in the Sunlight-Crandall area in the Beartooth Mountains north of present-day Cody. 

 The town of Cody was founded in 1896 by a group of business men/investors headed by William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. 

While visiting Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1894, Cody’s son-in-law Horace Boal pointed out this area from the top of the Big Horn Mountains, and suggested Cody join a group of Sheridan businessmen already interested in founding a town here.  Buffalo Bill saw the beauty of the region, its proximity to Yellowstone National Park, the abundance of game and fish, and the available land for ranching and farming -- all that was missing was sufficient water to enable ranchers and farmers to make a living in this high desert country. The Shoshone River did run through the area, however, which meant there was potential for bringing more water to the land. By 1895, the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company was formed, made up of George T. Beck, William F. Cody, Nate Salsbury, Harry Gerrans, Bronson Rumsey, Horace Alger, and George Bleistein.  In the fall of 1895 work began on the Cody Canal which would carry water from the Southfork of the Shoshone River east to the town. In May, 1896 Beck and surveyor Charles Hayden laid out the town at its present location.

The Governor, as the townspeople usually referred to him early on, invested a great deal of money in the birth of the town. 

George Beck was the town founder who lived here and oversaw its development. The Burlington railroad, headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, was interested in building a spur line to Cody from Toluca, Montana -- on the line running from Billings, Montana to southern Wyoming. In order to make sure that Cody became the terminus of the line, the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company sold the majority of the town lots to the railroad company, and dropped the “Land” from their company name.  The first edition of the Cody Enterprise was published in 1899 and is still publishing today. The town of Cody was incorporated in 1901, the same year that the Chicago, Burlington. & Quincy railroad arrived on the north side of the river. In 1909, Park County was separated from Big Horn County by the Wyoming State Legislature and Cody was named the county seat.