Buffalo Bill Dam and Shoshone Canyon
Near Cody, Wyoming
West of town the road plunges into Shoshone Canyon and crosses one of the great engineering feats of its age. The Buffalo Bill Dam, first called the Shoshone Dam, is a concrete arch dam wedged into a narrow granite gorge on the Shoshone River. Designed by the engineer Daniel Webster Cole and built between nineteen oh five and nineteen ten, it rose to a height of three hundred and twenty five feet.
When it was finished, it was the tallest dam in the world, surpassing New York's Croton Dam. It was also one of the first concrete arch dams built in the United States and among the first to be designed with a mathematical method for analyzing the stresses inside it, a technique that pointed toward the methods engineers still use. The work was brutal and dangerous.
Seven construction workers were killed on the project. When the final bucket of concrete was poured on January fifteenth, nineteen ten, the thermometer read fifteen degrees below zero. In nineteen ninety three a twenty five foot extension was added to raise the reservoir.
Today a visitor center clings to the canyon rim, and the water it holds is the reason the fields around Cody are green.
