“Some cowboys getting drunk downstairs started shooting around and shot upwards, and shot a lady in this room,” says Hauck as he leads me through the hotel guest floors. “So, a lot of people say they’ve seen the lady’s ghost walking around in that room.” Cody’s world-class Buffalo Bill Center of the West, which actually includes five museums, showcases Buffalo Bill’s life in the military and his series of early 20th-century Wild West shows that captivated audiences all over the country and Europe. Yet the shows included actual Native Americans as actors as skirmishes continued as a result of westward expansion. The Center’s Buffalo Bill Museum plays looping grainy film clips from some of those shows, including cowboys marching in New York City, skits of Indians attacking a stage coach and Custer’s Last Stand, shooting matches and trained horses demonstrations. In fact, Sioux warrior Sitting Bull, who defeated General Custer at the infamous Battle of Little Big Horn, joined the show years later. “In my opinion, Buffalo Bill was really the first national celebrity in America,” asserts Jeremy Johnston, the Tate Endowed Chair of Western History and Curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum, explaining how his shows helped shape the way the Wild West is portrayed in movies and on TV. “He was able to combine elements of authenticity with dramatic presentations that have not been replicated by any performer before or since his time.”
Along with his Remington rifle and Bowie knife, one display case has Cody’s flamboyant buffalo hide coat with fur trim and tassels which he wore on stage. Another showcases his 1872 Congressional Medal of Honor received after fighting a Sioux Indian attack against the Third Cavalry he once guided. There’s also a saddle used by Pres. Teddy Roosevelt, and Wild Bill Hickok’s holster and Colt pistol. Gun and history enthusiasts will enjoy the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s Cody Firearms Museum, the most comprehensive such museum in the country, with more than 4,000 well-preserved pistols and rifles. The Center’s other museums include the Plains Indian Museum, with such artifacts as Sitting Bull’s tomahawk that he surrendered in 1881, two years before relocation to the Sioux Reservation. Western landscapes and the dramatic 1899 wall-size painting of Custer’s Last Stand caught my eye in the Whitney Western Art Museum. And the kids will enjoy the exhibits of stuffed bears, elk, and other wildlife at the Draper Museum of Natural History, with an additional focus on the ecosystems of Yellowstone National Park.
Portraits of Buffalo Bill at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.
The Irma Hotel’s cherrywood bar which was gifted to Buffalo Bill by England’s Queen Victoria.
Buffalo Bill’s buffalo hide coat in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.
YELLOWSTONE AND BEYOND
COAST TO COAST MAGAZINE SPRING 2023 | 13
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