Buffalo Bill Dam
Near Cody, Wyoming
Seven miles west of Cody, the Shoshone River runs through a sheer-walled canyon of volcanic rock, and wedged into that canyon is a structure that, for a brief moment in history, was the highest dam on earth.
When Buffalo Bill Dam was completed in nineteen ten, it stood three hundred twenty-five feet tall from its base to its crest, surpassing New York's Croton Dam and claiming the world record for dam height. It was also one of the first concrete arch dams ever built in the United States, a form that relies not on sheer mass but on the geometry of the arch, transferring the water's force outward into the canyon walls. Engineers from the newly created United States Reclamation Service chose the form because the canyon walls here were solid enough to bear the load. They were right.
The dam's origins go back to William F. Cody himself. Buffalo Bill and a group of investors had formed the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company in the eighteen nineties, founded the town of Cody, and acquired water rights from the Shoshone River with ambitions of irrigating sixty thousand acres of the arid Bighorn Basin. When the scale of the project outpaced private capital, Cody transferred his water rights to the federal government in nineteen oh four. That July, the Reclamation Service began drilling. Construction ran from nineteen oh five to nineteen ten.
The result was the Shoshone Project, a network of canals, tunnels, and diversion structures that eventually brought water to more than ninety-three thousand acres of what had been desert. Farmers raised beans, alfalfa, oats, barley, and sugar beets where there had been nothing. The town of Cody became the gateway to Yellowstone and the commercial hub of a newly irrigated valley.
The dam was renamed Buffalo Bill Dam in nineteen forty-six, on the centennial of Cody's birth. A visitor center now perches on the canyon rim above it. The reservoir behind the dam stretches back toward the Absaroka Range, blue and cold in the high Wyoming sun.
