Buckhorn Exchange

Just south of downtown sits the Buckhorn Exchange, Denver's oldest restaurant. It was founded by Henry H. Zietz, a scout known as Shorty Scout, a nickname given to him by Sitting Bull in recognition of his small frame and skills on horseback.

Zietz first met Buffalo Bill Cody in eighteen seventy-five, at age ten, and by twelve he was riding with Cody's band of scouts. He opened the restaurant on November seventeenth, eighteen ninety-three, originally calling it the Rio Grande Exchange. When Prohibition ended, Colorado authorities issued him Liquor License Number One, which still hangs on the wall.

Walk in today and you are surrounded by a five hundred piece collection of taxidermy: deer, moose, buffalo, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, and dozens of birds, along with a two-headed calf and a jackalope. A collection of about one hundred twenty-five historical firearms lines the upper walls. The menu leans into the frontier pantry: buffalo sausage, elk, venison, rattlesnake, pheasant, and Rocky Mountain oysters.

Four sitting presidents have dined here, including Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. In nineteen thirty-eight, a delegation of thirty Sioux presented Zietz with a saber said to have been taken from George Custer.