Sheridan: Cowboys, Earls, and Buffalo Bill's Front Porch
Near Sheridan, Wyoming
Sheridan, Wyoming sits at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in the valley of Goose Creek, and it has been, from its earliest days, a town that attracted people who believed they were somewhere important. They were right, though the reasons kept shifting.
John D. Loucks founded the town in eighteen eighty-two, naming it for Civil War General Philip Sheridan. For its first decade it was modest enough, a few hundred people farming the benchlands. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad arrived in eighteen ninety-two and changed everything. Within two decades the population had grown from a few hundred to more than eight thousand, and the county was shipping coal, timber, and cattle by the trainload.
The railroad also brought the Sheridan Inn, which opened in eighteen ninety-three and was immediately promoted as the finest hotel between Chicago and San Francisco. Its sixty-four rooms featured the first bathtubs and first electric lights in the region. The architect supposedly modeled the building on a Scottish hunting lodge, and the clientele matched the ambition. Buffalo Bill Cody managed the hotel for the railroad from eighteen ninety-four to eighteen ninety-six, auditioning talent for his Wild West Show from the broad front porch. Local cowboys who passed his auditions went on to perform before the crowned heads of Europe.
The aristocratic connection was not merely decorative. English and Scottish landed gentry arrived in the eighteen-eighties to raise horses and Hereford cattle in the Goose Creek valley, and they brought polo with them. The Big Horn area south of town became one of the premier polo communities in North America, a tradition that persisted for more than a century. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip stopped in Sheridan in October of nineteen eighty-four specifically to buy polo ponies from local breeders.
The town that John Loucks platted on the Wyoming grasslands managed the unusual trick of being genuinely Western and genuinely cosmopolitan at the same time, and it still pulls it off today.
